The Devil's Analyst (33 page)

As for Josh, he was pleased to have his afternoons free once again.

That was the first time
Josh’s experiments went too far, although at the time Josh didn’t think of it that way. In his opinion, every person controlled his own fate. While Josh might set in motion certain actions, it was up to the other individual to respond however he might. Josh certainly never lost any sleep over Clarence’s death.

Just like Josh never worried about the way parents died. As the years went on, Josh found Ma and Pa more and more troublesome. They were sitting atop all that life insurance, and he could use that money if they were to die since Josh’s attempted career in Hollywood was going nowhere. The charms he displayed in the small pond of Thread, Wisconsin didn’t work as well in a major city. He hadn’t counted on there being so many other people just like him. He also went a little crazy with playing up the gay thing. He blamed that on Thread. It had been so much fun in Thread to let a little mascara and flamboyance needle people, but in Hollywood, mere appearance didn’t have the same power.

As he floundered trying to find himself, he met a guy who had made a fortune flipping houses. Josh thought to himself that he could do the same. While his father might not have been very successful, Pa did succeed at drilling into Josh’s mind basic economic principles. All Josh needed to get started was a small grubstake.

So when on a summer visit to his parents Josh discovered that their chimney was clogged, he decided not to warn them. He figured Ma wouldn’t even think about such matters and that Pa, lazy as he was, would never get around to cleaning the chimney himself or calling someone out. Thinking of that untapped life insurance, Josh decided to wait and see what would happen when his Pa turned the furnace back on in the fall. To minimize heating bills, his father kept the house well insulated so if the chimney clogged and carbon monoxide backed up, it wouldn’t take much to suffocate the old folks.

He reasoned his parents never really did anything for him, and he was pretty certain they would have preferred if he hadn’t bothered to even come home for a visit. What was it to him if something should happen? It would be their own fault. It was Pa’s responsibility to maintain the old house better.

When Officer Campbell called from Thread to inform him of the tragedy, Josh was of course appropriately surprised, even after Campbell tiptoed around his disclosure so gingerly that it took all of Josh’s skill not to blurt it out first. Of course, he returned to Thread for the funeral. A good son had to do that.

And he was glad that he did. He had only been expecting to receive the life insurance. The farm was worthless. But then he discovered someone was buying up land in the area. While he had no idea it was part of a plan to build a major new resort, it didn’t matter whether he knew that or not. He was still able to negotiate a great price. That extra cash really let him transform his financial life.

The trip also had other benefits. When attending the funeral and standing by his parents graves for a tedious reading by the fussy old minister, he delighted in sporting glitter on his eyelashes just to see whether the old reverend could sputter his way through the ceremony. Then he noticed how his appearance attracted the attention of a local hunk named Tony Masters. Everyone other than Tony had their eyes down to contemplate his parents’ sad passing. But Tony was looking at Josh with interest, and Josh liked flirting with the hunky husband of the town nurse. He hoped it could lead to a pretty hot night, and make his hometown visit even more memorable.

But Josh happened to glance away from Tony and that’s when he saw Danny. Danny wasn’t looking down at the ground like any good Christian should have been doing. Rather he was spying on Tony and Danny as they gave each other the eye.

That’s when his old obsession reignited. A few years earlier, he had wondered about Danny’s purity of soul for a short period following the suicide of the boy’s mother, but Josh thought he had been able to escape that interest after the previous summer’s escapade when he convinced Oliver to play his trick on Danny. He figured he had learned what he wanted to know. But now he was suddenly jabbed with an intuition that Danny had survived that experience too easily. What had Josh really learned about Danny? Somehow the question of what constituted the true Danny became even more important. He had to find out everything about the kid.

But this time he decided to be more careful about how he approached gaining that information. He could take his time. It would be his best experiment to date. It was a long game ahead.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Firmer Ground

Colby Endicott
had demanded the meeting, and he was waiting in the conference room for Danny. Danny was instead sitting in Josh’s office chair, feeling unsettled and unwilling to confront the next steps needed. A dampened sense of disorder had lowered the buzz of the office. When once the floor hummed with the energy of dozens of excited young men and women, each thinking they were about to create a new world that would endow them with riches, the remaining staff now hunkered close to their desks. They worked with a beaten air, wondering if their jobs and the company would survive to the next paycheck.

Nearly a month had passed since Josh vanished and Oliver had been found murdered. Colby and Danny needed to talk, but Danny had put it off as long as possible. No one in authority wanted to connect all the fallen pieces—Josh, Chip, and Oliver. Missing funds. Why should they? Nothing suggested that Oliver had died in anything other than a burglary gone wrong. No fingerprints on the scene linked Oliver’s murder to anyone; his own gun had been turned against him when he tried to stop a thief. Each crime was a broken shard with no matching edge to another. Different police departments. Different stories. Danny felt everything was dangerously entwined, and he suspected Colby thought the same but only Danny had access to the full details of what was hidden in the files and tapes of Josh’s secret room. But that extra knowledge gave him no insight as to what to do next.

He walked toward the conference room where Orleans was keeping Colby distracted with a review of the company’s financials. Although Orleans was upbeat about the firm’s future, Danny doubted a positive spreadsheet would diminish Colby’s concerns.

He entered the room. Colby looked a decade older. His hair needed cutting and his clothes were wrinkled. The pallor in his cheeks contradicted the beautiful spring weather outside. He smiled weakly at Danny, but his face held no joy and only sought comfort. Danny thought of the cats on the old farm where he grew up. If they lived long enough, such animals reached the point where they seemed to realize their time was over. On the sounding of their internal alarm, they would display one final bout of friendliness, rubbing their arched backs insistently once more against everyone’s legs in a final farewell before walking off in a last trek into the woods. Danny never knew where they went. But they seemed to understand there was a place waiting for their death. And he always appreciated that sad, last rub. And they never looked back once they started that stroll.

There was that scent of end times about Colby Endicott. Danny didn’t want to be in the room with him.

“Have you heard from Josh?” Colby demanded.

Knowing that Danny didn’t like to talk about Josh, Orleans quickly jumped in and answered. “The last communication we received was two weeks ago after he executed a durable power of attorney and sent it to my attention by express mail. It came from a notary public near the Miami airport. We tracked that guy down, who said he had never seen Josh before that day. According to him, Josh didn’t say anything about what he was doing or why. He simply provided his driver’s license, stamped his fingerprint on the register, and signed the documents. We had the fingerprint checked. It was Josh’s. Since this happened in Miami, I think he may have fled to Latin America, but if he did he used a fake passport. In short, we have not seen Josh.”

Danny listened passively to Orleans’ speculation. He didn’t believe it. Josh was still nearby, watching, waiting, and plotting. He knew it. He had listened to the tapes. All of them. Josh would never let him go.

Colby feared someone was trying to kill the investors in Premios, and because he assumed Josh was motivated by that same emotion, Colby believed he had fled to safety, a step that Colby desperately wanted to take if only he knew where that zone of safety might be. So he demanded to know, “Why did Josh disappear?”

For Danny
, the acceptance had been slow and painful achieved, but he finally realized that he never really knew Josh. Maybe decades of experience together and the slow accretion of daily details should have made Josh’s character clear, but it took the metaphorical bomb dropped into Danny’s life to knock down the obscuring trees of life and open up the dangerous vistas that he never realized existed.

But that wasn’t quite right. The situation was more like the first time he returned to Thread after residing in Los Angeles for several years. Upon his return, the house he grew up in seemed so small, and the stores around Thread’s town square so barren. Without being able to see them each day, the elements that once defined his life had melded into something different. The trees in the forest no longer seemed so tall, the clouds in the deep blue sky of summer appeared alien, and the shadows they pulled across the lake water below were chilly and dark. Everything was different and yet remained entirely the same. A Wisconsin summer in a small town was eternal. It was he who had changed. He grew comfortable existing under different kinds of light and shadow. The familiar elements of his youth were transformed into a foreign place, not because they had shifted, but because the man he once had been was now transformed by new experiences.

So too had Danny lost the Josh he loved. It was more than discovering the man’s secrets. Once he might have laughed about his lover shielding a private hideaway. Everyone kept secrets. Good lord, he harbored enough of his own, each hidden away and never expressed to Josh. In all likelihood, that room meant less to Josh than Danny’s tortured childhood memories meant to him. But then Danny discovered all the details squirreled away within the folders and he listened to Josh bare his soul on those inexplicable tapes. Facts that once learned could never be ignored.

Neither Orleans nor Danny
answered Colby’s rhetorical question, so Colby gave a response that they already knew he held. “We’ve stumbled into something evil. I don’t understand it, and maybe that’s all for the better. But Chip and Oliver were murdered because of something about this firm. And Josh is hiding to avoid the same fate. I know the police laugh at me. I can tell. But I don’t think you can laugh so easily. But I don’t know for sure. Maybe Josh let you in on the truth. Maybe you know what was unleashed. Maybe he figured out how to protect you.”

Danny was certain Josh had done just the opposite. After so many years, Josh ripped off his mask and forced Danny to stare at the man’s true appearance. Colby wasn’t the one in danger. It was Danny. At any moment, the snare would be drawn tight.

Neither Orleans nor Danny had any idea where Josh was, nor did Danny have any faith in anything Josh told him these past few months. For all of Josh’s talk about the dangers of Premios going under and their entire lives at risk of bankruptcy, such a view had proved to be highly melodramatic. While the company might have missed the window for a big successful public launch, the outlook for Premios currently appeared bright.

Somehow Josh made that happen. At least that’s what Orleans claimed.

Maybe that was the trap intended to lure Danny in. Within days of Josh’s talk at the New York BLINK conference and from his hidden location, Josh arranged a sale of one of his major pieces of land. The real estate deal arrived neatly wrapped up in a folder with a real bow accompanied by a transfer of several million dollars into the couple’s bank account. It came with instructions to invest the money back into Premios. Orleans was shocked. Josh never mentioned trying to sell that particular block of land, nor was she aware that a real estate company was assembling a major block of land for a new plant in the inland empire. Danny remembered how well Josh had negotiated the sale of his parents’ marshy farmland years ago to the Lattigo when they were secretly buying up the land needed for the American Seasons resort. Josh knew how the world worked.

Colby understood how the firm’s financial footing was stronger, but he didn’t care. He sputtered out what he had come to say, “Endicott-Meyers wants to sever our relationship with Premios. We don’t believe there’s a future in your business model.”

Orleans and Danny exchanged looks. She had warned Danny to expect this ultimatum. Colby had been hinting at it for days.

“That doesn’t make sense,” she countered. “Have you even looked at what’s been happening over the past month? We’ve turned the corner. Look at the growth in unique visitors and their levels of engagement. Advertisers are noticing. The aggregators have started to sign up and they’re bringing in big name brands. Revenue is way up. With the added investments that Josh and Danny placed in the firm, our projections look great. We’ll weather this storm in the market and be in a great position to go public when the timing is better. We might even be profitable by the end of the year.”

Colby pushed away the folders. Normally, Danny would have found this behavior odd, but he knew no amount of capitalistic voyeurism was sufficient to make Colby grab the bait.

“I’ve been looking around,” Colby said, “and talking to friends on Madison Avenue. I know people at Razorfish and the other big digital agencies. None of us believe what you’re seeing is anything more than a statistical blip. It’s time to pull the plug.”

Silently Danny cheered Colby on. It was time to end it. He should follow that advice himself. If he ever saw Josh again, he would make clear that their life together was over, including that part called Premios. It had come to an end. Danny should never have looked at all those papers or listened to those tapes. Josh didn’t love him. Yet for some reason, Danny felt obligated to continue to protect Josh by holding on to the files.

How had he never seen the true Josh? He thought back over a relationship filled with memories: the first time Josh kissed him when they went skating on that frozen flowage; the evening they first had sex in his parent’s house the night before the sale was finalized; the way Josh convinced him to pack up and move west and their first nights together in that tiny duplex in the Silverlake neighborhood. His mental scrapbook, once filled with beautiful moments, was dissolving into a brownish swirl of muck.

Colby was still talking. “We don’t care what you do, but I intend to stay alive. Find a candidate to buy out the Endicott-Meyers stake. We’re done.”

“Where will we find an investor? You have to give us time,” said Orleans.

“Don’t give me that. I’ve talked to Barbara Linsky. Josh asked her to find a buyer months ago. We’ve known for months that he wanted us out. Well, now we’re granting Josh his wish. Make it happen.”

Cynthia toyed
with her food. The pork medallions with potato pancakes and freshly made applesauce looked delicious. It was one of Wally’s favorite recipes, first perfected at his original Loon Town Café back in Thread and long retained in the Los Angeles incarnation. When she was a waitress, she always encouraged patrons to order the dish. She chose it today thinking that its taste would somehow comfort her. But she had no appetite.

“So you’re really going back to Wisconsin?” Wally asked. He was developing a serious paunch and his hair displayed a healthy dose of grey. Both Stephen and Wally were at the table. She was the one who suggested a last lunch together. She touched her own stomach to remind herself of why she was leaving. Already starting to show, she wanted to ensure that Chip’s daughter, their child, would be born on tribal land. Her return had been delayed too long. Lingering in Los Angeles had taught her nothing and gave her no comfort.

“Do you have any theories?” Stephen asked. “I mean about what ties all this craziness together.”

“What do you mean?” she replied, although she knew exactly his intent. When she was a child, Cynthia seldom wondered how pieces fit together or why things happened the way they did. While everyone and everything fascinated her, she never felt a need to understand the connections beneath the surface but accepted everything as it was thanks to her boundless optimism. Recent events took more than Chip from her. They had also absconded with her joy.

Stephen’s question was typical of him, as the logical and serious one in this couple. Before he met Danny, Stephen ran the Van Elkind estate as their local majordomo. Stephen seldom smiled, but he noticed everything.

“There’s such a pattern of wrong-doing,” Stephen pointed out. “The police stay in their own little circles of responsibilities. Maybe they don’t want to see the linkages. But it’s obvious. All these crimes must be related to Premios and Josh. You and Chip invested in Premios, and your company is embezzled and Chip is killed. Someone breaks into Danny’s house. A major investor in Premios is found murdered in a household break-in back in Chicago. And Josh conveniently disappears. Has anyone heard from him?”

“No. I talked to Danny yesterday,” Cynthia replied, “to tell him that I was leaving tomorrow. He said there’s been no recent sign of Josh, but I have trouble getting him to say anything more.”

Even over the phone she could tell that Danny had hardened. At the same time she worried that she was allowing Jesus Lopez’s conversation at the park to influence her. No matter what Lopez insinuated, whatever connected all of these incidents, Danny was not at the heart of it. It was Josh.

“But Kenosha told me that no one has seen Josh since he was in New York to speak at the BLINK conference. Still they know he’s alive. Apparently he arranged the sale of some property and signed over responsibility to Danny for all his legal affairs. That’s the last anyone at Premios has heard from him. I’m hoping he’s fled to protect Danny.”

“You really think he would do that?” asked Wally.