Authors: Warren Hammond
Miss Paulina.
New possibilities blew into my mind, a ripple effect of connections and deductions. Sudden understanding gusted at gale force.
Riding a high of explosive comprehension, I stood and grabbed my plastic bag, tossed it over my shoulder, and let the ice chill my back as I walked, a glimmer of imaginary sunlight marking my path.
twenty-eight
A
PRIL 28, 2789
T
HE
car I’d been following pulled into a reserved space next to a glass-enclosed office building. I handed a thousand pesos to the cabdriver and climbed out onto the curb.
She was out of her car now, heading toward the building entrance, long legs taking short strides inside an ankle-length tapered skirt.
I did my best to ignore the kink in my back—last night’s rooftop hop still exacted a toll—and hustled to catch up. She stepped toward the door, hips wagging, straight black hair moving to and fro. I closed the distance, the bag of ice swinging from my hand.
She heard my approach and glanced over her shoulder.
“Mrs. Samusaka.”
She stopped, her hand on the door handle, her face as icy as the diamond studs in her ears. “Are you following me?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“You’ll need to make an appointment.” She pulled open the door.
“I need to talk to you
now.
Walk with me.”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort.” She stepped through and let go of the handle.
I shoved my words through the closing gap, getting the whole sentence out just before the door shut. “I know who killed your son.”
She slowly turned around and faced me through the thick glass. Reflections from the neon signs atop the bank across the street sparkled in the glass, her blank canvas of a face painted with flashing reds and blues.
She cracked the door. “He wasn’t murdered.”
“He was.”
“The police said—”
“The police lied.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because your husband paid them to.”
She didn’t know what to believe, her face pressed into the slivered door, her eyes swirling pools of confusion. “That’s not true. You’re a damn liar.” Her tone didn’t match her words; instead, the accusation limped from her mouth.
“Please, walk with me. You’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t at least listen to what I have to say.”
She took a look around, like she had to remind herself where she was. Then she came out and with a little more coaxing fell in step alongside my clipped wing.
“What do you know?”
The street was late-morning lackadaisical, light traffic and strolling pedestrians. I took weighty steps knowing the revelations I was about to unload.
“Your stepson killed your son.”
“I don’t have a stepson.”
“That’s because your husband never told you. His name is Bronson Carew.”
She grabbed my arm, nails digging like claws. “Carew? That’s Paulina’s name.”
“Your housekeeper. Yes. Your husband got her pregnant, but he couldn’t allow her to raise the child in your house or you’d eventually find out. You’d catch him playing with the boy. Or you’d see the resemblance in the boy’s face. One way or another you’d find out, so she sent him to be raised by his grandmother.”
She let go of my arm. “She could’ve quit to raise him.”
“But she didn’t. Maybe she loved your husband. Or maybe she couldn’t face going back to life on the south-side docks. Whatever the reason, she chose to stay in your home and sent her son to be with her mother. She probably convinced herself that the best thing she could do for her son was to keep earning a regular paycheck.”
We turned left, this street too narrow for cars, traffic noise fading, the rocking sound of slushing ice taking its place.
“But I don’t ever remember her being pregnant.”
“Did she ever take a leave of absence?”
“She left us for a few months once. She had to care for her sick father.”
“Nineteen years ago?”
Her last objection dashed, Crystal Samusaka stopped in her tracks. “That son of a bitch.”
I faced her profile, her lips pinched so tight I could barely see her lipstick. “Has he been unfaithful before?”
She stared straight ahead. “My husband is a selfish man. But he never had a bastard before.”
“Why did you stay with him?”
She took a large, overreaching step but the tapered skirt held her back. “I wasn’t born rich, Mr. Mozambe.” She hiked up her dress to her knees and stormed forward, short strides no longer satisfactory.
I stayed with her. “Your husband paid the police to report your son’s death as an overdose. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t want the police to find his son’s murderer until I realized he was protecting another son.”
“My God, Paulina brought a young boy to the house sometimes. She said he was her nephew. Brownie was his name.”
“Could be a nickname for Bronson.”
“He was such a strange boy.”
“Did he play with your sons?”
“Sometimes, but mostly they picked on him. He couldn’t have been more than nine or ten when she stopped bringing him. But I saw him years later when Franz brought him around. Franz said he’d run into Brownie somewhere, and now they were palling around.”
I stopped, put the bag down, and pulled Deluski’s chip from my pocket, held it to her temple. “That him?”
She jerked her head away. “That’s him.” Tears came, twin raindrops rolling down her cheeks, her mouth caught in a silent, misshapen cry. She let her skirt fall back down, hands moved to her eyes.
“Why?” she managed to wail. “Why did he kill my boy? Franz tried to be his friend.”
I lowered my eyes. “You won’t like the answer.”
“Tell me!”
“Your son was involved in the gay community. At some point he got sucked into a clique centered around an offworld doctor. This doctor made a new drug called the genie. It makes people extremely susceptible to suggestion. Your son Franz used the drug on Carew. He raped him for several days.”
The crying stopped. I expected denial. Refusal to believe. A wall of motherly love that would keep her from seeing the truth about her son. Instead she asked, “Is it a pill?”
“A liquid. It comes from snails.”
Her face went white. She wobbled on woozy legs. I reached for her in an attempt to catch her before she went down, but she’d already dropped to a seat on the asphalt. “Snails,” she whispered.
I sat next to her. “That’s right.”
A pair of teenagers walked by, strange looks aimed our way.
“Hudson gave me a snail to eat.”
I nodded, not entirely surprised.
“He told me it was a delicacy, fed it to me in a wine sauce. It was his birthday. He took me to bed, undressed me. Th-then he brought out a stranger from the closet. I remember wondering what he was doing in there. Hudson told me he was a friend. He wanted me to have sex with this man while he watched.”
The genie was true evil. “And you did it.”
“I did. I didn’t want to, but I did. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with me. I thought I was depraved. I mean, who would do something like that?”
“You were raped.”
She pulled at her hair, strands coming out in her fingers. “I fucked him.”
“That wasn’t you. It was the drug.”
“How could I—”
I pulled her hand away from her hair, gave it a pat. “It wasn’t you.”
“Oh my God, he filmed it. I let him film it.”
“When was this?”
“He just had another birthday, so a little over a year ago.”
The last tile cemented into place, the Samusakas’ dirty mosaic now in full focus. Franz and his pop were quite a pair. Franz the young entrepreneur, selling the doc’s plastic surgery and introducing the genie to his gay friends. His father, a man who treated family like possessions. A man who would let his own wife get raped for his pleasure.
Franz must’ve shared the genie with his father.
Hey, Pop, look what this snail can do. Gee, that’s pretty neat, son. I think I’ll try that on your mom.
“Do you remember when your home was broken into?”
She closed her eyes, her hands back in her hair, squeezing down, clumped strands poking through her knuckles like weeds through a fence.
“That was Carew’s doing. Paulina let him in, which was why no windows or locks were broken. He wanted Franz’s rape vid. He ransacked Franz’s room to find it and then he brought it to the police, but the police ignored it. These were the same two detectives who later covered up your son’s murder. They said the vid didn’t prove he was raped. Looked like he enjoyed it.”
She wrung her hair some more.
“Carew killed them.”
She moaned.
I kept talking. “Your other son, Ang, was the first to find his brother’s room after Carew ransacked it. But instead of reporting the robbery right away, he decided to hit his father’s study. He doesn’t like his father, does he? I’m guessing Franz was your husband’s favorite.”
I couldn’t tell if her moaning meant I was right or wrong. I plowed ahead anyway. “Ang found your husband’s vid, the vid of him feeding you the snail and everything that followed.”
She grabbed my arm, nails digging in. “Are you saying my son watched me?”
“Yes. He has the vid. But at first, he let your husband think the burglar took it. It must’ve taken him a few days to figure out what he wanted to do with it. He’s been using it to blackmail your husband ever since. I didn’t know what was on the vid until now.”
Her moans turned to sobs. Another shattered life.
Welcome to the club.
“Carew went into hiding after killing Franz. Nobody will admit to seeing him since. Your husband and housekeeper won’t talk to me. I came to you hoping you could help me find him.”
She wiped her face with a sleeve, fabric streaked with mascara. “How would I know where he is?”
Figured as much. I stood and stretched my aching back. I picked up my bag. It was mostly water now, the ice melting away. Just like my options.
“Brownie ran away one time.”
“He did?”
“This was right before Paulina stopped bringing him over. He was gone for two days, hiding in the abandoned boathouse.”
“You have a boathouse on your property?”
“It’s on the lake. Hudson’s father used to fish there. When he died, Hudson stopped maintaining it. He doesn’t like to fish.”
“Is it still there?”
“It’s jungle now.”
* * *
The boathouse was right where Crystal Samusaka said it would be, cracked stone walls held in place by a sprawl of thick roots that spilled down the sides like a melted scoop of coffee ice cream, ferns sprouting from the crevices.
I sloshed through shallow lake water. I’d given up on the trail, thick jungle making it nearly impassable. I looked back to see if anybody was coming. Stopped and listened.
I’d gotten a helluva scare when I jumped the wall, saw a line of uniforms with flashlights coming right at me. Rusedski’s task force had made the Carew–Samusaka connection, and a search of the grounds was under way. Wouldn’t be long before they made it here.
Rusedski was probably in the main house right now, grilling Hudson and Miss Paulina, the proud parents of a lizard-man serial.
I climbed onto the twisted dock, turned off my flashlight, and pulled the weapon I’d picked up on the way here, actually stopped by my place to get it. I faced the boathouse, honed in on dim light seeping from the window.
He was here. And time was short.
Dock boards creaked under my shoes. I gripped the weapon tight in my left, plastic bag handles hooked over my right’s crooked elbow.
I moved slowly in the dark, approaching the doorway, picking my way through tumbled stone and tangled roots when a loose rock rolled out from under my foot. I caught my balance, plastic bag swinging from my arm, the sound of crinkling plastic. I steadied the bag with my gun hand, breath held in my lungs, silence restored.
Did he hear that? I waited, listening.
Nothing.
I allowed myself to breathe, allowed my foot to take another step when a voice came from inside. “I can hear you.”
My soaked pant legs suddenly felt cold, like I’d waded through ice water. I trained my weapon on the doorway, finger sweating on the trigger.
Wait for him to come check on the noise. Just wait him out.
Time passed, a minute, maybe longer.
“I can see you.”
Heartbeats thudded in my chest.
Don’t believe him. Stay quiet and force him to come to you.
“I can see you through a crack in the wall. Whoever you are, you should come in. I don’t have a gun.”
His voice was calm. Soft. I didn’t move, eyes probing the shadows, my finger primed to fry the doorway with fire.
The wall lit with points of light, a bright light poking through a half dozen cracks and holes. I looked down at the constellation of light spots on my chest. Shit.
“See, I could’ve shot you right then if I had a gun instead of this flashlight. Come inside.”
I wanted to run. Wanted to be anywhere but inside that boathouse. But I had no choice. I had to see this through.
I followed my weapon to the doorway—a slanted rectangle of stone—and inched my way inside. The air was scented with formaldehyde. Weak light drooled from a portable light wedged into a cluster of roots that had conquered the rafters. The room was long and narrow. Floor-to-ceiling racks ran up each side with canoes stowed in several bays, one of the shelves converted to a sleeping space, pillow resting on a blanket.
I stood face-to-face with Bronson Carew, arms by his sides, his flashlight aimed at the ground. He glanced down to the missing part of my right arm, an out-of-kilter smile forming. “It’s you.”
I kept my lase-pistol on his chest, wondering why I hadn’t already wasted the bastard.
Black bangs hung over ink-centered eyes. “You can’t shoot me. In fact, you’re going to give me your gun.”
I caressed the trigger, itching to get this over with, but he was unafraid. Confident.
He twisted his neck to look toward the boathouse’s back corner. “Come on out, Ang.”
From behind one of the canoes came Ang Samusaka. He held a knife to his own throat, trickles of blood running down his neck and sopping into his shirt collar.