A Murder of Crows (22 page)

“Maybe.”

“Come on—I'll show you how.”

They went to the local discount department store and began to purchase things—twenty packs of Silly Putty, a tub of Vaseline, a wax candle, 12 ounces of rubbing alcohol, a box of cornstarch, 24-ounce bottle of canola oil, two packages of clear gelatin, and a package of pipe cleaners.

Then Neil brought him to a part of the town that used to belong to the college but was now abandoned buildings.

“Where are we going?”

“One of the old labs. Not used anymore. But some of us still have keys.” Neil dangled his key ring like a kid who had just found a way to get at his parents' liquor cabinet.

In the lab, Neil measured 4 cups of tap water and put it into a Pyrex bowl on a burner. He increased the temperature until it boiled, then added the gelatin and mixed it thoroughly. Then he took it off the heat.

“Now what?” Walter asked.

“Now we wait till it cools, and once it does we add the cooking oil and stir.”

Walter noticed that Neil was smiling. It struck him as odd, but it—well, this interested him.

Once the mixture was completely cooled there was a thin layer of
solids on the top. Neil used a small spatula to scrape it off and then put it in a dish and into the freezer.

Walter went to ask what he was doing, but before he could Neil said, “Light the candle. Allow the wax to accumulate in that other bowl.”

Walter did as he was instructed, although he shivered when he saw the wax, the memory of the pain on his skin almost making him want to run.

“Good. Now mix in the petroleum jelly—”

“The what?”

“The Vaseline. And the cooking oil, the Silly Putty and the cornstarch—put them in that bowl and mix them together.”

Before Neil could stop him, Walter reached into the bowl with his hands and mushed the mixture together.

Neil watched him; the kid was having fun.

Neil went to the freezer and removed the mixture there and walked it carefully over to the bowl.

“Why are you—”

“Moving slowly? Because these crystals are highly unstable.” He carefully put them into the mixture that Walter had prepared.

“Now mix,” Neil said.

Walter hesitated.

“Once it's in the mixture it's stable again. So just mix it in carefully—no need for speed. A mistake and neither you nor I will have any problems left in the world.”

“What are—”

“If you are rough with it, it will explode and take you and me and most of this building to hell. Is that clear enough.”

“Yeah,” Walter said, then, using a spatula this time, he slowly mixed in the crystals.

Neil watched from across the room and said, “Once it has the consistency of ice cream, stop.”

About ten minutes later, Walter announced, “Ice cream.”

“Good,” Neil said and moved over to take a look. Then he turned to the younger man and said, “So what shall we blow up?”

“What can we with this?”

“Take a little and it'll blow up something small; take a lot and it will blow up something big.”

That night they blew up an empty barn way out on the highway. Then Neil Frost showed Walter Jones how to make RDX—the king of explosives.

That fifth night Neil met him in his rusted-out Volvo outside Dundas just as it began to snow.

“Fuck, it's cold; why can't you just pick me up at my place?” Walter complained as he hopped into the car, rubbing his hands and holding them up to the heating vent. “Does this car have heat?”

“Some. It has some heat.” Neil pulled away from the curb and his car swerved on the newly slick pavement. “So ask me again.”

“What?”

“Ask me again, Walter.”

“Okay. This is dumb. But okay. Does this car have heat?”

Neil smiled. “No, not that question, the other one.”

“Why can't you just pick me up at my place—that one?”

“Yeah. So ask.”

“I hate this. You ain't my teacher or anything.”

Neil hit the accelerator and the car complained but picked up speed.

“I get that. So here's the answer to your delightful question: because we have to keep this secret. That's the reason I showed you how to use PROMPTOR, that's the reason we never meet on campus or at your place.”

They drove on in silence, taking a wide sweeping curve at over seventy miles per hour. As they did, the back wheels slid slightly.

Walter thought to mention that they were going too fast for the increasing snow but didn't want to seem like a sissy, so he kept his mouth shut. Finally he asked, “How's about meeting at your place?”

“You don't know where my place is.”

Walter nodded and said, “Yeah,” although he'd figured out where
Neil Frost lived several days ago. But he saw no reason to tell the smartass that he wasn't all that clever.

They were picking up speed on a downslope so they could climb a steep hill. Seventy-five, eighty, eighty-five miles per hour. They zipped up that fuckin' hill like a dragster.

Then they crested the hill and the car actually came up off the pavement—and there it was, standing in the very center of the highway, its antlers proudly challenging the sky, its eyes huge and round and black.

Smack—crunch of metal—a scream—an air bag slammed Walter in the chest. The Volvo did a three-sixty and ended up in the ditch.

Blood came from Neil's forehead and nose, but Walter staggered out of the car without a cut. After checking that Neil was okay, he approached the buck.

Neil pulled himself from the car and watched the young janitor walk through the pelting snow to the animal, which lay on its side, its feet kicking, antlers raking against the pavement. Neil was about to say something but stopped himself as he saw the young janitor kneel down near the head of the buck.

Walter saw the terror in the creature's eyes and reached forward to grab one of its antlers.

The velvety smoothness surprised him. He ran his hand down the antler to the bucks head and felt the life there.

Neil was transfixed by the young man. The animal seemed to calm under the young man's touch.

Then the knife was out and a spray of bright arterial blood fountained from the buck's throat and Walter Jones stood in the now deep snow—lit by the headlights of Neil's Volvo—blood showering down on him.

And any doubts that Neil had that Walter Jones was his man—vanished.

THE TALL, SLENDER MAN WITH THE LONG GREY HAIR HAD USED
craigslist to recruit people to populate the Wellness Dream Clinic. What they'd been told was that it was a reality television show called
The Institution
.
No experience was required: Apply to the code above.

Then the listing had added:
About the show: Each actor will be assigned a role in the mental institution: some as orderlies, some as cooks, some as cleaners, some as patients. Each will be given a scenario which they must faithfully follow. Every moment will be filmed by more than 300 hidden cameras. Anyone acknowledging that they are playing a role, at any time, will immediately be taken off the show and forfeit the $1,000 payment. Please read the release below and sign it before you apply.

The tall, slender man with the long grey hair had been inundated with folks anxious for their fifteen minutes of fame. So he'd cast his show then brought in its star—Seth Roberts.

* * *

Once Seth had abandoned the goggles, the man took to watching him sleep, although the fact that the boy slept with his eyes open was disconcerting. And then there was all that rapid eye movement. The kid seemed to dream from the moment he fell asleep, then on and on through the entire night.

Such dream behaviour was completely outside the norm.

The man tied back his long grey hair, pulled up the video of Seth in the Duomo from the synaesthetes website again and watched carefully: for the thousandth time he examined the joy on the boy's face.

Then he looked through the one-way mirror again—the boy was awake. It was time.

IN WHAT SEEMED TO DECKER LIKE ONLY A MINUTE AFTER HE'D
left Mr. Rabinowitz's dorm room and crawled, exhausted, into his bed, he was yanked to his feet by strong hands—Mr. T's hands.

In the morning light streaming through his open window he saw Yslan and a tall man standing beside her—a sort of beat up leading man, sans the charm and currently scowling.

Mr. T held out a towel to him.

It was only then that Decker realised that he was naked. He took the towel and wrapped it around his waist.

“We need more on Professor Frost so we need her to go back in,” Yslan said.

Decker pointed at the window. “It's daylight.”

“Yeah, that happens at ten thirty in the morning,” the scowling man said.

“Who's the ghoul?” Decker asked Yslan.

“Never mind that. Get her to go back.”

“I assume you've tried to convince her.”

Yslan nodded.

“Give me a minute to get dressed.”

It was then that Decker looked out the dorm window and saw the moon just above the horizon, despite the intensity of the sun. He turned back to Yslan and the others and thought,
The marines marine, the cops cop and everything goes on as before—except that like in Namibia the moon is out in broad daylight.

And there it hung like a ghostly presence in the brightness of the day.

* * *

As Decker entered the locked, windowless room he was once more struck by the profound connection he felt with the strange diminutive creature who sat on the floor against the far wall.

VIOLA

His death shroud's grown.

DECKER

She's been crying.

“They want you to go back,” Decker said.

“Tonight.”

“Now.”

“I said tonight.”

“They say now.”

She stood but she didn't look at him. Somehow she seemed larger—fuller. Then she turned her eyes to him. “Are you of the clearing or not?” Her voice was deep and centred. The lightness and lisp were gone. This was a warrior speaking, one who could wield a flaming sword. “Are you one of them or one of us?”

Decker resisted saying what he always said to such questions:
I'm not one of anything.
He grimly remembered the endless comments on his grade-school report cards: “Does not play well with others.”

Then she demanded, “Or are you of the enemy?”

He was surprised to find himself on his knees and even more shocked as he heard his voice say, “I am no enemy of Viola Tripping.”

“And of the clearing?”

He held out his arms. “I don't know. I don't.”

They heard knocking at the door and shortly thereafter Yslan's voice—but they ignored both.

* * *

Just after sunset he emerged with Viola Tripping and they reentered the blast sight. All night they moved slowly from numbered chair to numbered chair. Over and over Viola Tripping settled her feet
and raised her arms, but her spin, when it came, was slow and awkward. And quickly her arms came down and she looked at him. Her features were drawn—old. She added a few snippets to their knowledge but nothing significant.

When she stood where Neil Frost breathed his last she momentarily opened her mouth, but no voice came. She tried a second and a third time then looked sadly at Decker and said, “It's gone.” For a moment Decker wanted to ask “What's gone? How does it work?” but he realised that Yslan had asked him the same things when she kidnapped him from the restaurant in Manhattan sixteen months ago. He'd found her questions ludicrous. As no doubt Viola Tripping would have found his.

Long before the sun rose Viola Tripping was back in her locked room and a bleary-eyed Decker sat in the provost's office with Yslan and the scowling man, whom Decker finally was introduced to as Leonard Harrison, head of the NSA.

Harrison addressed Yslan as if Decker weren't in the room. “So the shards led us to a junkyard, which led us to a professor who slept with her student.”

“Right,” Yslan said, clearly not pleased with the tone of his voice.

“And the student was cleared?”

“He was with her.”

“Swell. So they alibi each other.”

“And Professor Palmer's roommate and her building super both saw them together at the time of the blast.”

“So she wasn't even hiding her affair with the kid?”

“Evidently not.”

“Why wasn't she at the graduation?”

“No one she taught was graduating and she's not a tenured faculty member. She's paid from a trust fund so she didn't have to attend to get her final paycheck.”

“Okay. So she couldn't be Frost's contact?”

“His cell phone records show no calls whatsoever to her.”

“Well, what do they show?”

“Calls to take-out restaurants. To a publisher who refused to
publish his biography of Gerald Bull. To his bank. That's about it.”

“What do you mean ‘about it'? What's the rest?”

“He called the chemistry department secretary at least once a week.”

“Why?”

“He called in sick more than any other faculty member in the university.”

“Was he? Sick, I mean.”

“There's no record of it. We checked every doctor in town and none of them saw him in the past three years.”

“So no calls to a potential accomplice?”

“Not that we could find.”

“There're pay phones on campus,” Decker said.

Harrison slowly turned to Decker. “So?”

“So he may have used them to make his phone calls.”

“Fine, but how exactly are we to know which calls from those pay phones were his?”

“I don't know,” Decker said.