Bloodroot (37 page)

“Not well, we’re not friends,” I said. “But he’s here for me.”

The phone rang. Kelsey tossed it on the couch like it burned her hand. Danny. Calling to see why I was still there and not on my way to him. I didn’t bother to answer.

“You knew him when he camped outside? When I told you he scared me?”

“And what happened after you told me that?” I asked.

Kelsey licked her lips. “He stopped coming around.”

“He wasn’t stalking his ex, or you,” I said. “He was out there watching me.”

“That doesn’t make me feel
any
better. What the hell is going on?”

“Kelsey, I gotta go,” I said. “I’m sorry. My brother’s in trouble. He said lives are at stake; I’m afraid one of them is his. I’ll explain everything later.” I stuck out my hand again. “Can I have the gun? I might need it.”

“Kevin, wait a minute—”

I had no idea whether she believed everything or nothing I said. I snatched the gun from her hand.

She stepped back from me, crossing her arms over her chest.

“I’ll tell you everything,” I said. I dropped the gun in my jacket pocket. “I will. I promise. But I gotta go help Danny first. Whatever happens today doesn’t change what I said last night.”

“We’ll see about that.” She straightened and stiffened, but the hardness didn’t reach her eyes. “Go. And while you’re gone I’ll decide whether or not I ever want to see you again.”

I stopped at the front door. “I’ll be back soon. A couple of hours tops.”

“I might not be here,” Kelsey said.

I pulled the door open then froze in the hall when Kelsey called out to me.

“Make it worth it, Kevin,” she said.

AT HIGH NOON, OUTSIDE DANNY’S APARTMENT, AL UNLOCKED THE
door and pushed it open. I waited for him to go through ahead of me.

“I’m supposed to wait out here,” he said.

I ran up the stairs. Danny’s apartment was unlocked. I didn’t see him. I closed the door and locked it. I took a few hesitant steps into the room. I was about to call his name when the video stills on the screens of Danny’s workstation stopped me short. My head went light at what I saw. It was all I could do not to throw up. I clutched at my stomach with both hands, twisting my flesh in my fingers.

Naked children, frozen on every screen. Some bound, some blindfolded. All suffering, all terrified, all doing things children should never do. Doing things children
would never
do. Except under the fearsome power and command of adults. Doing things to each other, to disembodied parts of faceless adults. Children’s bodies writhing under the thick knuckles and pink fingers of adult hands. Large, grotesque hands alive and crawling in places that grown-up hands should never be, not parents’ hands, not doctors’ hands. I stared like a zombie, a thin beam of fire carving the images into my brain. The screams of the cherubs over Danny’s bedroom tore at my ears. I felt struck by lightning into idiocy.

On the screens before me flickered the great evil of our species. Snapshots from the secret world of monsters who walked among us.

Above it all hovered the wild-eyed Saturn, his mouth a tortured howl, his own bloody, ravaged progeny clutched in his fist. Days ago in his eyes I had only seen the blind rage of the insane, but now? Now I saw the agony. Agony born of knowing full well the horror of his actions while at the same time knowing he lacked the strength to stay his own hand. Saturn’s eyes told a horror story as old as the human race. A man at the mercy of all the darkness in the world, doomed to the execution of evil. A man who knows not only that evil is real, but that he is its agent.

Why did my brother have these pictures? I stared up into the image of raging Saturn, too horrified to look anywhere else. Terrified to my core that I might find a young Danny in one of those stills on the screens.

I knew the black cycles of life, at least secondhand. Danny had lived a fine, normal life in our house, but only he knew what had truly happened to him before those days. Had Dr. Calvin been Danny’s personal Saturn? Doing so much damage that my mother carried Danny through the doors of Bloodroot a white flower corrupt at the root.

Had even worse things gone on at Bloodroot than Danny had told me?

I walked toward the workstation, holding my hands in front of my eyes and feeling as if I was tightroping the edge of an inferno, both afraid of and unable to imagine doing anything other than destroying it all. Just to make it go away. I remembered our trip to the dump with the bodies, the heat and the fumes as they burned. A fire might not be a bad idea.

“Kevin, I’m sorry,” Danny said, stepping out of the bedroom. He stood in the doorway, the seven howling cherubs arcing like a hovering crown above his head. “I’m sorry about making you walk into this but I needed those pictures to hit you hard. It was the only way I thought you could understand.”

My brother wore his uniform of a stylish T-shirt under a suit jacket, everything black. In his left hand he clutched his pilot glasses, in his right a leather duffel bag bulging with something heavy.

“Understand what?” I asked. “Danny, what the fuck is this?”

“You had to feel
exactly
what I felt,” Danny said.

His face was smooth and calm, as cool and placid as Willowbrook pond used to be on a windless day. No sweaty forehead, no black circles under his eyes, nothing but clear blue skies in them. He did not look the least bit high. He looked nothing like he had sounded on the phone. He looked perfectly sober and sane. He terrified me.

“So you’ll understand why I’m doing,” Danny said, “what you now know, having seen these pictures, has to be done.”

“Danny, turn that shit off,” I said. “I can’t concentrate with that . . . that sick garbage hanging over my shoulder.”

Danny reached into his pocket and took out a tiny remote. He pointed it at the workstation and the screens went black. “Doesn’t really make it go away.” He walked toward me, tossing the remote on the desk and dropping the bag on the couch. Without thinking, I backed away when he approached me.

“I swear on the graves of everyone I left behind at Bloodroot,” Danny said, “that those pictures are not mine. I didn’t take them. I didn’t buy them. I am not in them. I found those videos, Kevin, on Whitestone’s computer.”

He shrugged, raising his hands, knowing he didn’t have to speak another word for me to know his plans. He was going to kill Whitestone.

“I followed the money he gets for that group,” Danny said. “Like we planned.” He turned, passing his hand through the air at the workstation like a magician at the conclusion of his greatest trick. “The money led me right to those pictures. Took me all night to work through the maze, one dummy website, one fake bank account after another.” He grinned. “I traveled all over Europe in one night. And I feel like it.”

“No, Danny,” I said. “No, no, no. You can’t do this.”

“Oh, I can,” Danny said. “And I will. There’s no one else. No one else could’ve solved that maze, no one constrained by two continents’ worth of silly laws, anyway.”

“You’ve uncovered his secret,” I said, “done the work the law couldn’t do. Take it to them now.”

“I didn’t find Whitestone’s big secret, Kevin. It was
delivered
to me. Like a
revelation
. Whitestone is mine.”

“Please, Danny. Let someone else take it from here.”

“What if Washington had said that,” Danny asked, “at Valley Forge? No. In that bag is a booklet of computer discs. The blue one tells how I pulled the pictures from Whitestone’s computer and has a map of the money trail. The other
five
contain all the child abuse files on his hard drive at work. Only the one at work.” He paused. “His hands, literally, are all over them.”

“I understand, Danny,” I said. “I do. I get it. But you can’t kill this guy, you can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Christ, you’ll go to jail, for one. What about Mom and Dad?” I saw a flicker in his eyes and I thought I might’ve had him there. “They’ll be crushed. This would put Mom over the edge for sure.”

“They’ve lived with what Grandpa did,” he said. “More than that, they’ll be proud. Like they are of him, whether they admit it or not.” He checked his watch. “Now shut up. There’s more you hafta do for me and I’m running out of time.”

“Listen, uh, okay, let me take the discs,” I said, “to the police, or the FBI or whoever deals with this shit
before
we do anything else.”

Danny gave me a disapproving frown. “Kevin, really. Considering our circumstances and who we’re involved with, does that make any sense as a first option?”

“You can fix the computers, right? To hide all Santoro’s shit? C’mon, I know you can. They don’t have to be involved at all.”

“I’ve already destroyed everything on the computers that could hurt Bavasi or Santoro, so forget about them. You have to follow through on the discs. There’s enough on there to go after a dozen people in four countries. Think of those kids if you’re afraid. If I can’t, someone has to protect them.”

“Wait. Listen, listen,” I said. I thought of Waters. “I got another idea.”

“I’m losing my patience,” Danny said.

“I take the discs,” I said. “Tell the cops, tell Kelsey’s cop, just him, that
I
found them in Whitestone’s office. I was, uh, early for a meeting and snooping around in his office, you know, and I took the discs because . . . because I thought they had schedules or salaries or whatever and I wanted to hook myself up.” I clapped my hands. “Perfect. I’m a total loser, it’s a totally viable story. Yeah. There you go. Whitestone gets punished, Santoro gets his land, we get paid, and everybody wins. Just jump on the computer and get rid of anything that implicates you.”

“Kevin, I’m disappointed in you,” Danny said. “Everybody wins, except those kids in the pictures. Without my instructions, how will the law find everyone else involved? The feebs, Interpol, they can have the others. But Whitestone is something I have to do myself.”

“You can’t get revenge for those kids, Danny,” I said. “You can’t undo what’s been done to them. You know this better than anyone.”

“How long do you think,” Danny said, “it’ll take the FBI to get their asses in gear? Nobody in those pictures is riding a camel and holding a rocket launcher. They’ll watch Whitestone and the others, track him, waste weeks or maybe months building their case while those kids still get hurt. No. No way. No good. I can’t take that chance with all those lives.”

“You kill Whitestone,” I said, “and you’re killing their case, their star witness.”

“With those discs, no one needs Whitestone.”

“What about Santoro?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you talk to Bavasi first, at least? Wouldn’t they want to know? With all they have at stake here? Bodies attract cops, missing husbands and fathers attract cops.”

I stopped to catch my breath and to think of more questions. Time. I needed more time. To think of a way to get Danny off this plan. I had no sympathy for Whitestone. I could give a shit if he lived or died, but Danny had just started to get his life back. I couldn’t let him destroy it and our family over scum like Whitestone. We were so close to free. Danny had already found the keys.

“Think of what they did for Grandpa,” Danny said. “Believe it or not, some things are sacred even to them. I tell Bavasi about this, all he’ll do is ask me why I haven’t killed Whitestone already. I’d be ashamed to show my face to him with Whitestone alive. Shame is something I won’t do anymore.” Danny stopped talking to light a cigarette. “I got the body covered.” He pointed to the couch. “In that bag is also half a million dollars in cash. If you do not hear from me by dawn, then the discs go to the FBI and you take the money home.

“This is where your job gets hard. You have to explain to Mom and Dad why I’m gone again. Tell them anything as long as they believe it. I don’t care what you say or what they believe about me.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s time. Go home and wait for me there.”

He slipped his shades on and headed for the door.

I reached into my jacket for the .38. I had trouble getting it out and needed two hands. I held it out in front of me, pointed at Danny. “Wait!”

Danny stopped, looking at me over his shoulder. He slammed the door shut and turned on one heel with a heavy sigh. He took a few steps toward me. I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking. Reflected in his glasses I looked small, bent, and terrified. Not at all how I had pictured myself that night in Maxie’s driveway. But I held my ground. This time, I would not step off the tracks. Danny reached behind his back and produced a pistol of his own, a shiny, blue-black semiautomatic.

“This can’t be how you really wanna do this,” Danny said. “It can’t. It’s not you.” He cocked his head to one side. “Wait a minute. Didn’t I give you a nine? What the fuck is that?” He smiled. “I guess you got comfortable living with a gun.”

“It’s Kelsey’s. She loaned it to me. I left mine home.” I squinted and shook my head. “What’s the difference? You’re not going anywhere.”