Bitter Waters (8 page)

“I'll try to make it,” Ukiah said. “I made plans with Indigo though.”

“She can come. The howling might do her good,” Rennie said. “Ease some of that tension she bottles up inside.”

Ukiah shrugged. “I don't know if it would be wise for her career to hang out with wanted criminals.”

“We won't tell.”

Ukiah's mind was leaping onward. “Oh, shoot. And there's this federal agent coming to the office this afternoon. Can you keep out of sight for a while? I don't want him seeing you on his way in.”

“What does he want?”

“I don't know,” Ukiah admitted and told them what Ari Johnson had told him, and then went on to describe the morning phone call.

“Maybe we should keep a close eye on you,” Rennie said. “In case he wants to arrest you, we'll take him out.”

Ukiah shook his head. “If you get involved, I might lose everything.”

 

It was a little after two-thirty; Ukiah had just put Kittanning down for his afternoon nap and changed for the upcoming meeting with Homeland Security. As he came down the front staircase, he heard someone on the front walk, heading for the doorbell. He bounded to the door and jerked it open, hoping to keep the eight-toned Westminster chime doorbell from going off.

A lean man in a black suit stood at the top stair, seeming to study the front porch before committing to it. He appeared young, but his black hair was shot full with silver, short and stiff as a wire brush. He turned sunglasses onto Ukiah while his face remained neutral.

“Can I help you?” Ukiah asked.

“Is this the office of Bennett Detective Agency?” The man asked as if he expected the answer to be “no.”

Ukiah was tempted to lie and send him away. There was something about the man that made him uneasy, but there was a bronze plaque beside the front door stating B
ENNETT
D
ETECTIVE
A
GENCY
, 9–5
WEEKDAYS
,
OTHER HOURS BY APPOINTMENT
in three neat lines. “Yes.”

The man stepped onto the porch, folding away his sunglasses, exposing dark questioning eyes. They swept down over Ukiah's moss-green silk oxford shirt, Dockers slacks, and leather hiking boots. “You're the boy raised by the wolves?”

The voice, once Ukiah adjusted for it being unfiltered by a phone line, and the phrase clicked together. This was Agent Hutchinson, an hour and a half early.

“Yeah.” Ukiah held out his hand to shake as politeness required. “Ukiah Oregon.”

Hutchinson eyed the hand as if checking for weapons and then shook it. In that moment Ukiah realized it was the suspicion and a seed of hostility in the federal agent that he was reacting to.

The silver in his hair was premature; Hutchinson was only in his mid to late twenties. He smoked Winston cigarettes infrequently. He wore an expensive wool suit, neatly tailored, but under a coat of fresh polish, his shoes were only moderately expensive and worn, and all his personal hygiene products generic. Ukiah supposed it was wise of Hutchinson, to spend the most money on the most visible part of his wardrobe, but it gave Ukiah an onion layer impression of the federal agent, without a clue to what lay underneath.

“Agent Grant Hutchinson of Homeland Security.” Hutchinson produced a government photo ID that confirmed his claim.

“Come in.”

Hutchinson followed Ukiah into the mansion, his eyes busy taking in details. They took note of the rich chestnut burl paneling, the sweeping staircase, the crystal chandelier, and the grandfather clock. “The PI racket pays better than I thought it did.”

“We do okay.” Ukiah didn't feel the need to explain that Max was a millionaire, leftover from his life prior to becoming a private investigator. “You said four o'clock.”

“I wasn't aware at that time that you had been on the television news last night and in the paper this morning.”

“So? I'm in the news a lot.”

“It might change things.” Hutchinson started to explore beyond the foyer.

People didn't like to intrude on personal space, Max explained once, which was why people seemed to have trouble “encroaching” on the office. They saw it as a private home. When Max had been deeply depressed, people's reluctance to enter the building suited him well, but now it hampered business. They found that a sterile foyer, oddly enough, put people more at ease than pretty knickknacks. So they stripped both the foyer and the reception area down to the basics: the stately grandfather clock, a leather sofa, a pair of wingback chairs, heavy cherry end tables, and a single landscape painting over the fireplace. Beyond this area, where they didn't want visitors to roam freely, Max hung personal photos to act as an invisible barrier.

Hutchinson, however, ranged down the hallway without outward qualms. “Who took these pictures?”

“Max did.”

“A man of multiple talents,” Hutchinson murmured. “He's very good; he caught the wolf in you.”

Ukiah shifted uneasily. Taken while he was tracking, focused on the trail, the photos did catch the inhuman side of him. Alien. Wolf. Feral. Whatever. The human eye took it as wild beauty, so it usually didn't bother Ukiah. But then, most people weren't federal agents. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Hutchinson ignored the question. “Tell me, how did you end up with Max Bennett?”

“Why?”

“I'm curious how he got his hands on a feral child.” Hutchinson tapped the earliest of the photographs; Ukiah looked fourteen, which was neither his real age, nor the one they thought he was at the time of the picture. Hutchinson gave a microscopic sneer. “Did he buy you off a circus? Or is the Wolf Boy thing all a scam?”

“My adoptive parents hired him to find my real identity.”

That startled Hutchinson out of his hostility. In a tone far easier to take, he said, “I thought Bennett was your legal guardian.”

“No.”

“But all your records list this address as your residence.”

“That's to protect my family. Some of the cases Max and I work on turn into a media . . . circus.”

“So he's not your adoptive father?” Hutchinson actually attempted diplomacy, and asked in a hesitant manner, “And it's just a business relationship?”

“Yes. We work well together.”

Hutchinson moved to walk into the kitchen.

Ukiah put up his arm, blocking him. “That's a private area, let's go into the office.”

The hostility came back to Hutchinson's face. “Do you have something to hide?”

“No.”

“So what's your worry?”

“I find missing people. I'm very good at it. Often the people are dead when I find them. It wouldn't be hard for someone to construe that I had something to do with their deaths.”

“Occupational hazard, I suppose.” In a dry, slightly mocking tone, Hutchinson observed, “Construe; that's a big word for a wolf boy.”

“I have a perfect memory, and parents with doctorates. They tell me what ‘big words' mean when they use them, which is often, and I remember.”

Hutchinson seemed to measure him up. Slightly over six feet tall, the federal agent had several inches height and reach on him. Thanks to his alien heritage, though, Ukiah carried a more compact build, hard muscles rippling under his dress clothes. They stared at each other as the grandfather clock measured out a minute.

Hutchinson broke the silence. “Okay, let's do the office thing.”

Ukiah led the federal agent to his office and took the position of power, as Max called it, behind his desk.

Hutchinson inspected the two visitors' chairs and chose the one by the window. He sat with surprising grace. “Are you religious?”

“Pardon?”

“Do you belong to a church?”

“What does this have to do with anything?”

“Answer the question.”

“Yes. Do you?”

“No, I'm agnostic, increasingly so every day.” Hutchinson reached into his suit coat and pulled out a pack of Winston cigarettes. He tapped out a cigarette with a force that indicated a barely controlled anger. “Religion is just a tool that power-hungry men use to steal intelligent people of their common sense.” He tucked away the pack, produced an elegant gold lighter, and lit his cigarette. “Most Christian doctrines are laughable in their claim of following the word of God; the King James Bible is translated from highly edited Hebrew text and then fudged to sound beautiful. How can it be the exact word of God if it keeps getting changed?”

“I'm not the person to ask.”

“Because you were raised by wolves?”

“No, because I'm Unitarian.”

Hutchinson laughed. The smile flashed onto his face, warm and easy, and then vanished completely, like water spilled in the desert. After seeing how full his eyes could be, it was easy to see their emptiness now. Max had been that way when Ukiah first met him; something had scoured the happiness out of Hutchinson's life. Ukiah felt sudden sympathy for him.

“Which church do you go to?” Hutchinson seemed unaware that his mask had slipped.

“We go to the Unitarian Universalist Church of the North Hills, on Ingomar Road.”

“Do you like it there?”

Ukiah nodded, not sure if Hutchinson was asking out of politeness or this had something to do with his investigation. “They're very accepting of my family.”

“Do you use the Internet?”

“Yes,” he said without considering why Hutchinson might be asking. It wasn't the question that threw Ukiah, but the abrupt change in subject.

“Do you post on news groups and chat rooms?”

He considered the question this time; it seemed harmless enough. “No, I don't socialize on-line. I don't have enough time.”

“Bennett keeps you busy?”

“It's an hour commute from my parents', and we're shorthanded. We're hiring a new full-time employee this week.”

“We? You have a say in hiring?”

“We're equal partners.”

Hutchinson leaned back in his chair, taking a deep drag of his cigarette, thinking.

“Why are you here?” Ukiah asked. “What is it you want?”

“Tell me about June 24, 2004.”

The date of the shoot-out. Ukiah moved an ashtray in front of Hutchinson to give himself a moment to think. That Wednesday had been a busy day, trying to pick up the pieces of his broken life. Hex had shot Ukiah dead late Saturday night, and while he healed back to life, the Ontongard had
raided his moms' farm, killed half of the wolf dogs, created Kittanning, tossed the office, kidnapped Max, and tried to make his partner a Get by injecting Ukiah's stolen blood into Max. But he couldn't tell Hutchinson that.

Normally his lies lacked the complexity of his truth. Simply, given only a moment to think, he could not imagine as many details as the reality supplied. In this instance, however, he and Max had woven a rich cloth of truth and fiction, stored faithfully in his perfect memory. With slight dismay, Ukiah realized that they had focused only on his going to the abandoned airport terminal and retreating to Cranberry Township. What if Hutchinson wanted something prior to that?

Ukiah stalled with, “What part of that day?”

“The interesting parts,” Hutchinson said, blowing smoke.

“You're investigating the shoot-out?”

“Is there something else to investigate?”

Ukiah spread his hands. “For all I know, you're looking into a minimarket robbery. June twenty-fourth, though, was the day of the shoot-out at the airport terminal, so I figured that's what you wanted to talk about.”

“Yes, it is.”

So Ukiah told his elaborate lie. Since his desperate search for Max was public, that part remained fairly intact. The change started with Ukiah discovering that the Pack, not the Ontongard, had seized Max, and continued with a highly edited version of what happened inside the old airport terminal. Since police reports showed Ukiah kidnapped by the Pack and released days prior to the shoot-out, a second kidnapping was believable, if not equally obscure. By changing from the Ontongard to the Pack, there was no need to explain the Ontongard's interest in them. Hutchinson could even question the Pack, if he had the desire, determination, and a great deal of luck; Rennie and the others knew the revised version of the day and would back Ukiah.

Hutchinson sat still while Ukiah talked, listening with his eyes as well as his ears. After Ukiah finished, Hutchinson took the moment of silence to gaze about the office. His dark eyes lingered on the private investigator license, the bookcase
stuffed with research material, the current case files still filling in the in box.

“So, your parents hired Bennett to find your real parents. He discovered that you're highly intelligent, good at observation, mature for your age, have a real talent for tracking, and the perfect memory doesn't hurt. He took you on, taught you the trade, and made you a full partner.”