The Nature of the Beast (21 page)

The old man took Craig’s measure and instantly believed him. His shiny black eyes were hard as rivets. He composed himself, found a sliver of his former dignity and used it straighten his spine. “The children,” he said. “What of the children?”

“Rebecca’s fine,” Craig said. He checked his watch. “She’ll be here in Los Angeles later this afternoon. I’ll see to it that you have immediate clearance to her.”

“Michael?”

“We’re working on it,” was all he could think to say. “I swear…no matter what, I’ll find your grandson.”

The manly oaths proved more than Jovanna Madrigal could bear. She turned in the seat, her eyes running over onto her cheeks.

“Will any of your promises bring my daughter back,” she demanded. “They said we shouldn’t take her out of the box. That we shouldn’t even see her.” Her face begged Craig to tell her
they
were wrong. That she should wash her daughter’s body, that she should dress her and lay her out for all to see one final time.

“Remember her as she was,” Jackson Craig said.

His mind’s ear could still hear Herman Waldrip telling him the same thing. He could see Gilbert and Emelda, lying dead, the tree, the yards of silver duct tape, Gilbert’s staring ‘eyes’, all of it sewn into the folds of his memory forever, as if seeing them that one last time was somehow a part of the healing process and a solace about to be denied Octavio and Jovanna Madrigal.

“I’m sorry,” Jackson Craig whispered.

“What do we do?” Jovanna Madrigal wailed.

“Bury your daughter.”

A painful and protracted silence was interrupted by a gentle knock on the door. Daniel Rosen’s secretary Marlene poked her head into the room. “Special Agent Craig, could I speak with you for a moment please?” Jackson Craig excused himself and stepped out into the hall.

“We have an emergency communication for you,” she said.

“From whom?”

“A sheriff Jennifer Parsons.”

“I have her number,” Craig said. “Tell her I’ll get right back to her.”

“She says it’s a matter of life and death.”

Craig raised an eyebrow.

“Very insistent,” Marlene added. “Very upset.”

Craig was torn. He excused himself and stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind himself. “Find out where they’re taking Rebecca Fowles. We need to get Mr. and Mrs. Madrigal there and back. Celebrity treatment. Anything they want.”

“I understand.”

“Make my apologies,” he said before stalking off down the hall.

He made it all the way to the end of the corridor before he found the South Dakota number. It rang three times. “Sterling County Sheriff,” the voice said.

“Sheriff Parsons.”

Turned out to be a ‘no preambles’ kind of day.

“My father’s missing,” she said immediately. “He’s not at home. I been up there. His bed hasn’t been slept in. He’s not answering his phone. His car’s gone too.”

“Give me the tag number,” Craig said. She read it to him.

“The state trooper was certain it was your dad who came by last night?”

“The state trooper was sure it was
his car
that came by,” she corrected. “He didn’t stop to talk with the trooper and I’m telling you Special Agent Craig…” She nearly lost her composure. “…I’m tellin’ you that’s not like my dad. He really misses being on the job. Any chance he gets to shoot the breeze about police work, he takes it. He’ll talk your damn ear off.”

“I’ll get the tag number out,” Jackson Craig promised.

37

She’d already cried. The sound of the door drew her bloodshot eyes his way. One side of her face was scraped raw and beginning to scab over. Her right arm was in a sling, her left a mass of tape and plastic tubes.

“Hey,” he said as he crossed to the bedside.

She studied his face for a moment. “I remember you,” she said.

“Jack.”

“Uncle Jack,” she said.

“That’s it.”

“That was before…”

He reached out with both hands and grabbed the bed’s safety railing.

“Yeah,” Jackson Craig said. “Back in the day.”

Somewhere along the line she’d heard some version of the Harry Joyce story, probably from her father, trying to explain the uprooting of the family. Craig pretended not to notice as she moved her eyes from one of his hands to the other and back, trying to ascertain which one was real and which one wasn’t.

In the silence that followed, Jackson Craig could hear the rhythmic bleep of her heart on one of the monitors, watch her breathing in the small black bellows above the bed. Hospitals gave Craig the willies, a fearful feeling so strong that, since his mother’s death fifteen years ago, he’d managed to avoid them altogether. Cards and flowers? Always! A personal appearance at the bedside? Unlikely.

Rebecca pulled her eyes from his hands and gazed out the window. He watched her eyes travel over the palm trees, the condos and office buildings, all the way to the smog-shrouded Hollywood Hills.

“They’re not coming are they?” she asked.

Craig took a deep breath and just said it. “No.”

“They’d have been here by now.”

“Yes. They surely would have.”

She shifted slightly in the bed, closed her eyes and began to weep.

After several minutes, she composed herself and asked, “Do I need to know what happened?”

“Someday.”

“Where’s my brother? Where’s Michael?”

“We’re working on it.”

“Please find him. Please?”

“I will.”

“I was supposed to…” She looked at the wall. “He’s my little brother, I was supposed to…”

She was crying again. Craig assured her there was nothing she could have done and then handed her several tissues from a bedside container.

“Did you get a look at the person who did this?” Craig asked.

She shook her head. The movement seemed to make her dizzy.

She took several deep breaths and then said, “No. It was too dark.” She hiccupped a sob. “He grabbed me by the hair…I couldn’t…” The hiccup was becoming a torrent. Craig put his hand on her arm. Her entire body was vibrating like a tuning fork. He patted her shoulder.

“Okay. Okay,” he said.

“You know what he said?”

Before Craig could respond, another bout of weeping wracked her body. Craig snagged another tissue and used it to wipe her runny nose.

“What did he say?” Craig whispered when she’d regained some measure of composure.

She pawed at her nose with the back of her hand and lowered her voice an octave. “And now…the new order begins,” she boomed.

The resonance of her voice and the strangeness of the phrase reduced Craig to silence. For a second, he wondered if she was serious.

Becky sensed his confusion. “It’s from an old video game,” she said. “Apocalypse Three. I used to play it all the time. It’s what the Avenger says whenever he kills any of the demon seed.” She waved a dismissive hand. “There’s millions of the demon seed, so, if you play the game and you’re not a complete spaz, you hear it a lot.”

Craig frowned. “Demon seed?”

“The ones who killed his father,’ she said off-handedly. “They’re like the undead. Zombies. You know like that. Cause they’ve already been dead once, they’re really hard to kill the second time. You gotta stab them over and over if you want them to stay dead.”

She pushed herself erect in the bed and peered out through the window. Craig threw his eyes in that direction. A dozen stories below, the roof of the parking garage was alive with comings and goings. “All those people out there,” she said. “Just going about their day. It’s like…you know…to them…it’s like nothing happened …like they don’t know…like nothing’s happened to them at all.”

“Your grandparents are downstairs,” he said after a moment.

“Are you going?” Her eyes said she didn’t want to be without a familiar face.

“I won’t go until they get here,” he assured her.

“Okay,” she said.

“Then, I’m going to find your little brother.”

38

The first beep, he ignored.
The motion sensors sounded false alarms on a daily basis, mostly from birds taking off and landing, so the sound of the beep instilled in him no particular sense of urgency.
He went back to watching the boy and pondering his next move.
Perhaps he
’
d been expecting too much too soon.
When you thought about it,
they
’
d only been together for a few days. No wonder the kid seemed so stubborn. All he knew was that things were different and that he wished they weren
’
t.
He
’
d come around.
If not, they
’
d burn that bridge when they came to it.

The boy looked up from the video game.

Another alarm beeped.
He held his breath.
This wasn
’
t birds.

A tentative knock sounded on the front door.
He listened as whoever it was located the doorbell and rang it twice. He quickly closed the door to Michael
’
s room and padded into the kitchen on bare feet, wondering as he walked how anyone could possibly have gotten through the gate without the code.
The bell sounded again, more insistently this time.
He hurried through the darkened kitchen, past the empty dining room and into his own bedroom where he lifted the pillow and picked up a small chrome-plated automatic. He released the safety and pumped a round into the chamber. He kept the gun in his hand as he walked back through the house.

The clomp of shoes told him the intruder was moving around the porch now, walking, stopping, walking again, probably peering into windows looking for signs of life as he made his way around to the north side of the house.

He tiptoed to the side door and very slowly pulled back the dead bolt.
He waited until the visitor started back around toward the front, counted to five and then stepped out onto the porch. The low overhanging clouds accentuated the coming of nightfall, throwing deep shadows across the already darkening landscape. He brought the automatic to bear and sighted.
He held his breath and watched the shadow turn right and disappear around the front of the house.
In silhouette two things became obvious: The visitor was carrying something in both hands, and the visitor was a woman.

His sigh of relief became visible in the cold night air.
He slid the automatic into the waistband of his jeans and covered it with his shirt.
As he slid along the wall, the sound of an idling engine found its way to his ears.

He stepped around the corner.
He had a thumb hooked in his belt. His hand was no more than a foot from the automatic.
The intruder turned his way.

“
Oh Mr. Brown,
”
she said.
“
You startled me.
”

He recognized the voice.
“
Miss Lopresi,
”
he said.

The gate was open.
Her car, one of those square Honda Elements, was idling just inside the gate.
“
I thought Michael might like a little treat,
”
she said holding out the package.
“
I was hoping a chocolate cake might help him feel more at home.
”

He stepped forward and took the package from her hands. Unwilling to have his hands encumbered,
he set the cake carefully on the rail.

“
Poor little fella
’
s having such a hard time,
”
she said.

He forced himself to make small-talk.
Although time and experience had taught him to approximate their meaningless drivel, he still felt a great deal of discomfort when forced to do so, as the vagaries of conversation defied enumeration.

When, inevitably, the conversation lagged, he asked.
“
How
’
d you get the gate open?
”
in his best conversational tone.

Harriet Lopresti grinned, took off one of
her gloves, put it on top of the porch railing and reached into her coat pocket.
She came out with a key card.
“
U.S. Postal Service Issue,
”
she proclaimed.
“
A universal
Master. Opens darn near every key card latch in the world.
It
’
s so we can deliver things too big for the mail box.
”

“
Ah,
”
he said.

She was still smiling.
“
Great if you lose your hotel room key.
”

“
Yeah,
”
he said.

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,”
she recited
.

He had no idea what to say, so an uncomfortable silence settled in.
She was practically pawing at the dirt, wangling for an invite inside.
He wanted nothing more than for her to leave.

“
Well…
”
she began.

“
Thanks,
”
he said, sliding past her, moving along the porch, then down the front stairs and across the grass toward her car, leaving her little choice but to follow along in his wake. Always the gentleman, he opened her door for her, once again leaving her no choice but to follow his lead.
He closed the car door.
She rolled down the window. The perfume smell of her nearly buckled his knees.