The Searcher (39 page)

H
OLLY WOKE GRADUALLY FROM A DREAM OF
J
IM.

They had been riding in the desert on one of those cool evenings where the light was like liquid warmth, and she woke with a smile on her face, which melted away as soon as she realized where she was.

She was propped up against some pillows, her leg heavily bandaged and tubes coming out of her arm. She felt like she'd been run over by a truck, but then the memory of what had actually happened came to her and the truck seemed like a better option.

Her whole body was in pain, both inner and outer. She looked around for an alarm button to press so she could call someone and maybe get a sleeping pill to send her back to her happy dream. That's when she spotted the folded piece of paper on her nightstand with “Holly” written on it.

She reached over, pressed the button, then picked up the folded sheet of paper and settled back on her bed. The note was written on a scrap that had been torn from her medical notes.

“Your husband was right,” it said. “The lost Cassidy riches were
exactly where he thought they would be. This page was torn from the Cassidy Bible. You can verify that by matching the ripped edge. The rest is written on your study wall.”

There was no signature, but she knew who it was from.

A second sheet of paper was folded into the note, much older than the first, and she carefully unfolded it now and saw old-fashioned writing on both sides of the page. She read the longer note first:

I have sinned, God knows I have sinned, but I pray to He who is merciful and just not to visit my sins upon those who carry my name by setting down this confession.

Before I found riches and built a church and made a town and a new name for myself, I was another man with another family and another name. In my vanity I thought it was my family who was holding me back from all I imagined I could be so I abandoned them in order to seek my fortune, only to realize too late that there are no greater riches than the name you are born with and those who will carry it on into the future. By the time I realized this, it was too late, I was already trapped by my new name and the fame of it and realized if I confessed the truth I risked the ruin of everything good I had wrought.

I did confess this grave sin once, to the priest who gave me this Bible, but he died and took my secret to the grave with him, as I now take it to mine.

The foundation I set up for abandoned families and the orphanage attached was my way of trying to find the family I had abandoned without risking the ruination of the Cassidy name. It was my penance too. I only pray that my lost family managed to
thrive without me and that sometime, in a more civilized future, the two halves of my broken past might be reunited and made whole again. For as the priest told me when he took my confession:

“A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches.”

P
ROVERBS 22:1

JC

Holly finished reading just as the door opened and Dr. Palmer walked in.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like I've been shot.” She turned the page over to the dedication on the other side of the page.

“Apart from that, how are you feeling?”

“Awesome, I guess.”

The dedication was in two parts. The first recorded when the Bible had been given to a Father Patrick O'Brien by the bishop of Limerick in 1868. The second was written in a different hand, a spidery scrawl that hinted at age or infirmity. The date was May 1, 1879, and the message said simply:

I HEREBY BEQUEATH THIS BIBLE TO JAMES CORONADO, TRAVELING UNDER THE NAME JACK CASSIDY.

SIGNED–FR. PATRICK O'BRIEN. MA

She read the names again then realized exactly what Solomon's note had meant.

The rest is written on your study wall.

She pictured Jim's family tree, traced back all the way to his oldest relative, the man he had been named after.

James Coronado. Or Jack Cassidy. They were the same.

He had spent his life idolizing the Cassidys, not realizing he had been one all along.

She looked up, aware that Dr. Palmer had been speaking to her. “Did you hear anything I just said?”

“No,” she said. “I was a little . . .”

“An inability to concentrate can be one of the side effects of hormonal imbalance, along with nausea and a whole bunch of other delights.”

Holly shook her head, confused. “What are you talking about? What's wrong with me?”

Palmer smiled. “You really didn't hear a thing I said, did you? There's nothing wrong, Mrs. Coronado, nothing at all. You're pregnant.”

M
ULCAHY FELT A JOLT OF DéJà VU AS HE EASED OFF THE ROAD AND ONTO
the ramp of the Best Western. The layout was different from the one he'd been in the previous day, bigger accommodation blocks and fewer of them, but the feel of the place was identical: impersonal, functional, slightly depressing. He parked by the reception office and checked cars as he walked to the office. Old habits.

A collection of tattoos and piercings in the shape of a man handed him a site map then the key to the room he pointed at and was back to playing Candy Crush Soda on his phone before Mulcahy was even out of the door.

The sunlight hurt when he stepped back outside. He ran his finger along the paintwork of the Jeep before getting back inside, leaving a long clear line in the dust. He'd been driving through the night, stopping only for gas and coffee, and his eyes felt like they'd been peeled.

The room he had chosen was in the block farthest from the road. It was a family unit, slightly bigger than the one from the day before, but otherwise identical: same kitchenette at the back, same lumpy
twin beds facing a TV about as ancient as the A/C unit that rattled when he turned it on.

He grabbed the remote, turned on the set, and sat heavily on the bed. Springs dug into him through the thin sheets and bedcover. All he had to do was lie back and he would be asleep before his head hit the mattress. But he couldn't sleep. Not yet.

Sound and picture faded on the screen and he nudged the volume up and channel-surfed until he found a local news station. The events at Redemption were all they were talking about, fragments of the last twenty-four hours of his life flashing before his eyes like a hallucination.

He forced himself to his feet and moved over to the kitchenette, his eyes fixed on the screen, faces and voices smearing into each other. He pulled the fold-up cot away from the connecting door and fit his key in the lock. There was a noise on the other side, like someone had been standing on the other side, listening. Mulcahy pulled the door open and stared at Pop. His hair was sticking out as if he'd just gotten up and he had dark bags under his eyes. He looked Mulcahy up and down. “You look like shit,” he said.

Mulcahy felt the weight of the last twenty-four hours settle on him and something tightened in his throat. “Mom got married again,” he said, before he knew what he was saying.

Pop blinked. “I know,” he said. “Good luck to her.”

Then he stepped forward and hugged him tight, like he hadn't done since he was very, very small.

S
OLOMON FELT THE STRETCH OF HIS LEGS AND THE WIND ON HIS FACE AS
he walked out of Redemption. He was on the road that passed the mine and the airfield and the livery yard. The horses were back in the corrals when he reached it, flicking their tails as they munched the hay that had been laid out for them. A couple of palominos looked his way when he walked up the track toward them and laid something on the ground where it couldn't easily be seen. They returned their attention to their breakfast before he walked away again. After a few steps he heard snorting and sensed something behind him. He stopped and turned to look back up the track. The ghost of the girl had appeared. She was standing where he had just been. She stooped down and picked up the twisted cotton doll he had left for her, then looked up at him, smiled, and faded away.

“Good-bye, Miss Eldridge,” Solomon whispered, then he turned and continued walking.

When he reached the city limits, he stopped and stared back at the town. It seemed peaceful at this distance, the spire rising high above everything else. He pulled the folded Bible page from his pocket and
reread the handwritten contract. Had Jack Cassidy really done a deal with a demon in exchange for the church and the town he was looking at, or did he just think he had, this contract no more than the brain-fevered imaginings of a man driven mad by heat and thirst and religion?

There was a way to test it, his teeming mind had provided it back in the church, and he reached into his pocket now for the book of matches he had taken from beside the candles. He took out a match, struck a flame, and held it to the paper's edge. The flame curled around it then caught.

Solomon gasped as hot pain bloomed in his arm. He dropped the burning page to the ground and pulled off his jacket and shirt. Someone at the hospital had fixed a new dressing to his arm and he ripped this off too and stared at the skin beneath. A new mark was beginning to form and he bit down hard against the pain of its coming. It was another
I
, lining up exactly with the first and as it formed, a new word rose in his mind.

Magellan.

He said it aloud, repeating it over and over until the burning sensation began to ease. He looked back down at the ground where the last piece of the burning page curled into ash. The contract had been real. It had been real and he had just broken it. And the James Coronado he had come here to save had not been Holly's husband after all, or even her unborn son, it had been the original James Coronado—Jack Cassidy.

He stared at the mark on his arm, a
II
now where the
I
had been. A new name in his mind too.

Magellan.

Solomon turned the word over and facts sparkled around it like raindrops.

Ferdinand Magellan. Sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer. Often cited as the first person to circumnavigate the globe. Except he died before he completed the journey.

Was this to be Solomon's fate too, to circle the earth in search of something only to die before he achieved it? His mind continued to shimmer with information.

Magellan—the name of an unmanned spacecraft that had mapped the surface of Venus.

Magellan Straits—notoriously dangerous sea route between South America and Tierra del Fuego.

Perhaps Magellan was a place he had to travel to, or someone else he had to save—or maybe it was nothing at all.

Solomon buttoned his shirt and put the jacket back on, catching his name again, stitched in gold thread into the label:

Ce costume a été fait au trésor pour M. Solomon Creed
—This suit was made to treasure for Mr. Solomon Creed—
Fabriqué 13, Rue Obscure, Cordes-sur-Ciel, Tarn.

Maybe France was where he should go, to find the rest of his suit and the man who had measured him for it, someone who might remember him.

He slipped his arms into the sleeves and turned the collar up to protect his neck from the strengthening sun, then turned and started walking away from Redemption and toward—who knew what? He didn't expect to find easy answers, but he hoped the journey would be interesting and for now he savored this brief moment of peace, with the sun on his back and the wind on his face.

Just the road.

And him walking along it.

T
HE COMPUTER PINGED GENTLY, CUTTING THROUGH THE HUM OF AIR-
conditioning and the gentle tap of fingers on keyboards.

Harris looked up, his heart pattering a little faster inside the long-sleeved shirt he wore to hide the tattoos on his arms despite the heat outside. In the quiet world of forensic biology, the sound he had just heard was the equivalent of the stadium roar that followed a touchdown or a home run.

They had a match.

He opened the documents the search engine had returned. Studied them. Frowned.

He glanced over at his boss sitting in the corner of the room, her large glasses reflecting the screen she was glaring at, making her eyes appear as if they had turned into minimonitors. He was only a month into his placement and the main thing he had learned so far was that Dr. Gillian (hard
G
) did not like being disturbed. She liked her people to think for themselves. She liked people who took responsibility for their shit, and she did not like people who wasted her time getting her to check their homework and rubber-stamp
things that should be beneath her radar and were definitely below her pay grade.

“Why have a bunch of dogs and bark myself?” she said—a lot.

Dr. Gillian was old school and borderline abusive, but Harris also knew that the only reason this position had come up at all was because of those things, and entry-level criminalist positions did not come up that often.

He glanced back at his screen and checked everything again, comparing the smudgy columns of PCR data from one lab sheet against those of another. It was a match, no question, an exact, no-room-for-error, bang-on match.

Except it couldn't be.

He checked the dates on the two samples. The first was five years old, the second had been submitted two days ago. That in itself wasn't surprising. Sometimes matches came from samples that had been collected decades apart. Since the lab had moved to the new building on Miracle Mile, it had started processing more cold cases, digging back through evidence gathered way before the technology existed to pin crimes to the people who had done them. Their systems were linked to a wide network of other databases—CODIS, the FBI's DNA database, Interpol's DNA Gateway, and several international foundations who kept and studied DNA samples for academic purposes. The five-year-old sample had come from one of these, and this was what told him something was wrong.

He checked the PDF files that had come with the sample, trying to spot what might have gone wrong. They had a match, but it couldn't be. There was no way. He knew that what he was looking at must be wrong but he couldn't figure out how. It had to be a mistake, and, most important, it was not his mistake, it was somebody else's.

“Dr. Gillian . . .” He cleared his throat to try to make it sound less whiny. “Would you mind taking a look at this, please?”

The other two criminalists in the room looked up from their terminals, exchanged a glance, then got right back to their work again.

Dr. Gillian's bright reflected eyes fixed on him for what seemed like an age. “You want me to get out of my chair and come to you?”

“Well, er . . . I guess I could forward you the files, but I have them open here and lined up, so it'll be quicker if . . .”

She stood abruptly, sending her chair wheeling away behind her to a mark on the wall showing where chair and wall had met many times before.

“This better be worth the trip, Mr. Harris,” she said, striding across the floor to his desk. “You better have a positive ID for Jack the Ripper or something, because anything less and I'm going to be most displeased.”

She came to a halt behind his chair and he pictured her windshield glasses reflecting his screens now.

He studied his monitors, seeing it all again and suddenly less certain now of what he had and what it might mean. Perhaps it was his mistake after all and he was about to be made to look like a dick in front of the whole office.

The silence stretched.

A hand reached down, took control of the mouse, and started scrolling through the documents, checking the same things Harris had checked. “Well, that can't be right.” Harris breathed out. “You sure these files haven't got mixed up?”

“I checked them both; they're genuine.”

“They can't be.” She clicked on the lab submission form for the older sample and Harris reread it, knowing Dr. Gillian was doing the same. It was different from the standardized police forensics forms with lots of extra narrative detail and photographs showing the site the sample had been taken from. It had been filled in by a Dr. Brendan
Furst, lead archeologist on the excavation of a burial site in Turkey known locally as Melek Mezar. They had found some remains including hair from which the DNA sample had been extracted. Carbon 14 tests had dated the remains as belonging to a man who had lived around four thousand years earlier. The other sample suggested the same man had been walking around a town in Arizona two days earlier—a man called Solomon Creed.

Dr. Gillian clicked on this now, then pointed at the screen. “There's your answer. Look at where this came from and who filed it.”

Harris did as he was told. It had been filed by a Garth Morgan, police chief of the town of Redemption. The town name rang a bell. “Isn't that the guy who was in bed with the cartels?”

“Yep. Dirty cop,” Gillian said, as if she was cursing. “Wound up dead and did us all a favor. What's the case number?”

Harris hovered the mouse arrow over the number and a pop-up window appeared with a few headlines written inside. “It's related to that plane crash,” he said.

“Then it's a mistake,” Gillian said. “I'm certainly not going to bother anyone with a match to a four-thousand-year-old corpse on a sample submitted by a dirty cop. Junk it. Good catch.”

She moved away and Harris stared back at the screen, relieved that he hadn't been reamed out in front of his colleagues for asking a dumb question. He closed all the files, unlinked the match alert, then opened a new search window and typed “Melek Mezar” into it.

The top hit was a Wikipedia entry showing a photograph of a town that could have been lifted straight from the Bible. The buildings seemed to rise from the ground in square blocks, with small black windows cut into them, everything the same color, like pale dust. Another photograph showed what appeared to be a cave, the flash of the camera throwing light into the darkness and picking out the outlines of bones half-buried in the ground.

The article mentioned Dr. Furst, the archeologist who had submitted the DNA sample taken from the body pictured in the photograph. He had spent years searching for the lost tomb, believed to be the final resting place of some powerful, Messianic prophet who had lived a full two thousand years before Christ. Harris skim-read the section detailing the legend of the prophet, a shining man who had walked out of a fire and possessed deep and sacred powers, including the power to heal and the gift of prophesy. Many at the time thought he was a god, but Dr. Furst had discovered that he wasn't. The DNA proved that he was only a man, despite the name the prophet had given the town in death. Melek Mezar is Turkish for “Tomb of the Angel.” Harris smiled when he read that and filed it away in his mind to tell his girlfriend later. She believed in all that shit—angels, demons, vampires. She'd love it if he told her he'd processed some angel DNA in the lab. He closed the Wikipedia page and went back to work.