The Vanishing (8 page)

‘‘Yeah,’’ Mike chimed in. ‘‘Besides, what kind of Christmas play combines the story of Jesus and some beauty contest about a Christmas queen? What’s that about?’’

‘‘Aw, fuck you,’’ Ted said, standing and picking up his coffee cup. ‘‘Poll’s over.’’

Everyone laughed.

‘‘Charlie Brown,’’ Max said, nodding toward Ted’s retreating back.

Brian smiled. He was eating a Dave’s Buttermilk Twizzle that he’d bought from one of the vending machines, washing it down with a too-small cup of uncarbonated Coke.
Breakfast of champions,
he used to tell his buddies at UC Brea, where a Twizzle and a Coke had been part of his daily ritual. But he must be getting old, because now the combination was starting to give him a slight stomachache, and he wished he’d chosen something else.

Returning to his cubicle, Brian called up the unpublished photos of the Lowry mansion on his computer and got out the Xerox of his father’s letter. He wasn’t sure why he’d been keeping this a secret, why he hadn’t shared it with anyone, and it was getting harder and harder to convince himself that the reason was merely journalistic competitiveness.

Close, but no cigar.

Because
I
think my dad might have something to do with the slaughter.

Bingo.

For about the hundredth time, Brian stared at the Xerox with its smudged fingerprints and indecipherable scrawl. It looked to him as though a brain-damaged child had attempted to imitate ancient hieroglyphics while under severe time constraints. He found it almost impossible to reconcile the father he remembered with this chaotic, illegible scribbling. And the idea that his dad was involved in any way, shape or form with the carnage wrought by Tom Lowry was inconceivable to him. But despite his initial skepticism, he had no doubt that his mom was right, and there was no question in his mind that the letter she had given him was from his father.

His eyes looked to the photos on the screen, examining the ragged symbols scrawled in blood on the filthy walls of the Lowry mansion. The assumption everyone was working off was that the writing was nonsense, the random ravings of an unhinged mind. But Brian knew better. It was a language. What kind of language, he didn’t know, and that’s where he needed to start. His first step should be to find a linguistics expert and have him examine the letter, the journal and the bloody characters on the wall of Lowry’s house.

‘‘Brian?’’

He turned in his swivel chair to see Wilson St. John, one of the
Times’
chief financial reporters, standing by the corner of his cubicle. Wilson had been assigned by the paper’s managing editor to help Brian navigate the confusing waters of the newsroom the first few days— for no reason other than the fact that their desks were in close proximity—and Brian found that although they were an odd couple, he and the older man were surprisingly in sync in a lot of ways, especially journalistically. The two of them had hit it off almost instantly.

‘‘Hey, Wilson,’’ Brian said. ‘‘How goes it?’’

‘‘I have a small favor to ask of you. Would you mind accompanying me to my desk for a moment?’’

‘‘Sure. Hold on a sec.’’ Brian turned over the Xerox of his dad’s letter and minimized the gruesome picture on-screen—he didn’t want any of the Lowry reporters to think he was trying to horn in on their story—then followed Wilson to his workstation two cubicles away. The other man pushed his chair to the side, making space enough for both of them to stand in front of his neatly ordered desk.

Wilson pushed the speaker button on his phone console and pressed a series of numbers on the keypad. ‘‘Listen to this message I received on my machine.’’

He pushed another button, and from the speaker Brian heard a deep voice intone in a slow, carefully modulated voice: ‘‘I have been fucking her for more than a day and my erection will not stop. Oh no, it will not stop.’’

Wilson looked around, lowered his voice. ‘‘I think it’s Bill Devine, the CEO of Oklatex Oil.’’

‘‘What?’’

The other reporter nodded. ‘‘I’m working on a story involving the merger with British Petroleum, and I’ve talked to him half a dozen times. I’m pretty sure it’s his voice.’’

‘‘When did you get this?’’

‘‘It was left last night around midnight. Eleven fifty-seven, to be exact.’’ He pressed the button again and they listened to the message once more.

Brian looked at him, shaking his head. ‘‘That’s really weird.’’

‘‘To say the least.’’ Wilson paused. ‘‘Are you busy?’’

‘‘Not at the moment. Why?’’

‘‘I’m scheduled to interview Devine in an hour. At his office in Century City. Would you like to accompany me?’’

‘‘Sure.’’

Wilson smiled. ‘‘To be honest, I’m afraid to go by myself. I’d take a photographer, but it’s a financial piece and Jimmy won’t let me have one. Your presence would be legitimate, however. You could write a sidebar, a feature on . . . on . . . well, you’ll figure something out. Let me talk to Jimmy and see if it’s all right.’’

Wilson walked into the editor’s office while Brian stood there and waited. On top of the other reporter’s desk he could see, next to the computer monitor and behind an old-fashioned pencil holder filled with pens arranged by color, a framed photograph of Wilson’s family: a handsome older woman and a stunningly beautiful teenage girl. His eyes shifted to the phone console, and he thought about the voice mail he’d heard.

It was the robotic, mechanistic delivery of the words that seemed so chilling. Wilson was right: ‘‘Weird’’ didn’t cover it. The more he considered the message and its improbable source, the more Brian realized how completely insane the whole thing was.

Wilson emerged from the editor’s office smiling. ‘‘You are doing a piece on the effect of the merger on Bill Devine’s philanthropic efforts in LA.’’ He held up a hand. ‘‘It’s reaching, I know, so let us make haste and leave before Jimmy changes his mind.’’

They took Wilson’s car, a two-year-old white Cadillac sedan, and on the way he filled Brian in on the details of the BP merger and his impressions of the man himself. Wilson had met with Devine twice previously and had spoken to him on the phone half a dozen times more in the service of different stories over the past few years, and his image of the CEO was of a fiercely intelligent, laser-focused, detail-oriented business savant who, like most men in his position, was wary and guarded with the press.

Which was why Wilson found the voice mail so disturbing.

‘‘I wonder if he’s just cracked under the pressure,’’ Wilson speculated as he drove. ‘‘For all I know, he could be waiting for me in his office wearing a clown nose, with a spatula in one hand and a dildo in the other.’’

‘‘Or a shotgun,’’ Brian said softly.

‘‘Exactly.’’

With two of them in the vehicle, they were able to take the freeway’s carpool lane, and they arrived at the office building ten minutes early. Rather than wait for the appointed time, they decided to go straight up to Oklatex’s headquarters on the top floor. ‘‘I doubt that he’s even there,’’ Wilson said as they entered the elevator in the lobby. ‘‘I would imagine that the message he left on my machine originated from his house.’’

‘‘Then shouldn’t you have called first to see if he was here?’’

‘‘Oh, no,’’ the other reporter assured him, pressing the button for the fifteenth floor. ‘‘He could have canceled on me if he was here—which he has been known to do. I didn’t want to give him that opportunity.’’ Wilson smiled. ‘‘Besides, we might see something . . . news-worthy.’’

The elevator doors slid open. In front of them, a sculpture of freestanding metallic letters spelled out OKLATEX OIL. Brian had been expecting a corridor, but instead they were in a large, modern, expensively furnished space that seemed to take up the entire floor of the building. Green plants and skylights gave the room an open, airy appearance. Occasional segments of curved wall partitioned the floor into sections, but there were no cubicles, modular workstations, or even any individual offices that he could see.

Wilson had been there before and obviously knew where he was going, so Brian followed him past the OKLATEX OIL sculpture to a woman in the center of the room who sat typing on a computer keyboard behind a huge drawerless desk that appeared to be made of Plexiglas. ‘‘Hello,’’ he said. ‘‘Wilson St. John, here to see Mr. Devine.’’

The woman looked up apologetically and not a little guiltily. ‘‘Oh, Mr. St. John,’’ she said. ‘‘I’m sorry. I should have called you. Mr. Devine won’t be able to make the meeting today. It’s my fault. I should have let you know. If you’d like, I could reschedule you for another time. Would you like me to check his calendar for you?’’

She was talking too fast, and they both caught it. Wilson shot Brian a look. ‘‘Did Mr. Devine say why he wasn’t available?’’ he asked.

The secretary spoke guardedly. ‘‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to divulge such information.’’

‘‘Well, can you tell me whether Mr. Devine has been in today?’’

‘‘I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Devine is a very busy and important man, and he doesn’t want his whereabouts to be made public, as you might imagine. Let me just check his schedule and see if we can pencil you in . . .

Brian glanced around as the woman spoke, looking up at the domed skylight, down at the potted palm beside the secretary’s desk. His gaze settled on a dirty piece of paper lying on top of a pile of business correspondence next to her computer. His heart started to pound. Even upside down, Brian could recognize the type of characters scrawled on the page. His mouth suddenly felt dry.

The secretary saw where his eyes were focused and quickly turned over the paper. Her face reddened with embarrassment, and she looked away from him, refusing to meet his gaze, keeping her focus on Wilson. Brian’s heart was pounding so loud in his chest that he was afraid everyone in the room could hear it. ‘‘Where—’’ Nervously, he cleared his throat. ‘‘Where did you get that . . . letter?’’

She pretended she didn’t hear and asked Wilson if she could reschedule the meeting for next Monday.

‘‘I’m sorry,’’ he told her. ‘‘My deadline’s today—’’

Brian took a small step forward.

The secretary nearly jumped out of her chair. Her arm shot out, trying to cover the paper on top of the pile and accidentally knocked over the entire stack. Before the top page was engulfed by the falling batch of correspondence, Brian saw dark brown smudges—

—and what looked like a cross between simple hieroglyphics and a child’s scribble, drawn with some sort of charcoal pencil.

Just like on his dad’s letter.

The woman glared at him. ‘‘Would you please leave?’’ she asked. ‘‘I’m very busy.’’ Her eyes were angry, but her voice was frightened, and he understood that she was as lost as they were.

What he wanted to do was quiz the woman about what she
did
know, then go around the desk, grab the paper and take it with him. But instead he followed Wilson’s lead, and the two of them retreated, saying good-bye and going back the way they’d come, down the elevator and out of the building. They walked across the parking lot toward the car. ‘‘If we were real reporters,’’ Wilson said, ‘‘we would drive immediately to Devine’s house and see what is going on there.’’

‘‘Do you know where his house is?’’ Brian asked.

‘‘No,’’ Wilson admitted, ‘‘but with a little bit of research we could find out.’’

Brian looked at him. ‘‘
Are
we real reporters?’’

The older man sighed. ‘‘Jimmy won’t let us. We’re on
his
time here, and I don’t know about you, but I have a merger article due this afternoon.’’

Brian didn’t really have a specific deadline today, but he was still on his probation period, and he knew how it would look if he spent the rest of the day gallivanting around the city with nothing to show for his efforts. Which is probably what would happen. His position was not secure enough that he could go on wild-goose chases
hoping
that something would come of it.

‘‘Let’s go back,’’ Wilson said. ‘‘Maybe something else will occur to us in the meantime, and we can come at it from another angle.’’

Brian didn’t tell Wilson about what he’d seen, about the letter. He wasn’t quite sure why. Part of it was a proprietary interest in the information. Part of it was embarrassment about his dad’s connection to all of this. Part of it was . . . something else.

They drove back to the
Times
building, speaking very little on the return trip. Wilson, no doubt, was thinking about his article, planning on how to write around the fact that he lacked a final interview with Bill Devine. But Brian was thinking about that letter. It was like a virus, this written language, popping up everywhere all of a sudden, corrupting everything with which it came into contact. What did it mean? he wondered. Was the secretary in on this? Could she read that letter? Did she know what those symbols meant? Was she able to communicate that way? Or was she like his mom, merely a confused recipient, trying to figure out what the hell was going on? Was Bill Devine going to end up like Tom Lowry, slaughtering his loved ones and going on some sort of murderous rampage?

Brian pushed that thought from his mind.

There was too much to think about, and he didn’t want to think about any of it. He glanced out the side window of the car but quickly readjusted his focus to look at the glove compartment in front of him.

There was graffiti on the cement wall adjoining the freeway.

And he didn’t want to discover that any of it consisted of those strange scribbled symbols.

Once in the newspaper office, he and Wilson went their separate ways, Brian to the bathroom, Wilson to Jimmy’s office to explain what had happened. But they were apart for only a moment. Brian was just sitting down at his desk, about to check his e-mail, when Wilson poked his head around the corner of the cubicle. ‘‘Come here,’’ he said. The seriousness of his voice and the shortness of the command told Brian that something was up, and he followed the other reporter to his desk.