The Narrows (19 page)

28

T
HE PLACE SMELLED HORRIBLE but Backus knew he could live with it. It was the flies that repulsed him the most. They were everywhere, dead and alive. Carrying germs and disease and dirt. As he huddled under the blanket, his knees drawn up, he could hear them buzzing in the darkness, flying blind, hitting the screens and the walls, making little sounds. They were out there, everywhere. He realized he should have known that they would come, that they were part of the plan.

He tried to block out their sounds. He tried to think and concentrate on the plan. It was his last day here. Time to move. Time to show them. He wished he could stay to watch, to bear witness to the event. But he knew that there was much work to do.

He stopped breathing. He could feel them now. The flies had found him and were crawling on the blanket, looking for a way in, a way to get to him. He had given them life but now they wanted to get to him and eat him.

His laugh broke sharply from beneath the blanket and the flies that had alighted on it scattered. He realized he was no different from the flies. He, too, had turned against the giver of life. He laughed again and he felt something go down his throat.

“Aaaggh!”

He retched. He coughed. He tried to get it out. A fly. A fly had gone down his throat.

Backus jumped up and almost tripped as he climbed out. He ran to the door and out into the night. He shoved his finger down his throat until everything came up and came out. He dropped to his knees, gagged and spit it all out. He then pulled the flashlight from his pocket and studied his effluent with the beam. He saw the fly in the greenish yellow bile. It was still alive, its wings and legs mired in the swamp of human discharge.

Backus stood up. He stepped on the fly and then nodded to himself. He wiped the bottom of his shoe on the red dirt. He looked up at the silhouette of the rock outcropping that rose a hundred feet above him. It was blocking the moon at this hour. But that was all right. That just made the stars all the brighter.

29

I
PUT THE THICK FILE ASIDE and studied my daughter’s face. I wondered what she could be dreaming about. She had experienced so little in her life, what inspired her dreams? I was sure there were only good things waiting for her in that secret world and I wished it would always stay that way.

I grew tired myself and soon closed my eyes to rest for a few minutes. And soon I, too, dreamed. But in my dream there were shadow figures and angry voices, there were sudden and sharp movements in the darkness. I didn’t know where I was or where I was going. And then I was grabbed by unseen hands and pulled up out of it, back to the light.

“Harry, what are you doing?”

I opened my eyes and Eleanor was pulling the collar of my jacket.

“Hey . . . Eleanor . . . what is it?”

For some reason I tried to smile at her but I was still too disoriented to know why.

“What are you doing? Look at this all over the floor.”

I was beginning to register that she was angry. I pulled myself forward and looked over the edge of the bed. The Poet file had slid off the bed and spilled on the floor. The crime scene photos were spread everywhere. Prominently displayed were three photos of a Denver Police detective who had been shot by Backus in a car. The back of his head was obliterated, blood and brain matter all over the seat. There were other photos of bodies floating in canals, photos of another detective whose head was taken off with a shotgun.

“Oh, shit!”

“You can’t do this!” Eleanor said loudly. “What if she woke up and saw this? She’d have nightmares the rest of her life.”

“She’s going to wake up if you don’t keep your voice down, Eleanor. I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

I slid off the bed and knelt on the floor, quickly gathering the file together. As I did so I checked my watch and saw it was almost five a.m. I had slept for hours. No wonder I was so groggy.

Seeing the time also told me that Eleanor was home late. She usually didn’t play this long. It probably meant she’d had a bad night and had tried to chase her losses, a bad gambling strategy. I quickly gathered the photos and reports and slid them back into the file, then I stood up.

“Sorry,” I said again.

“Goddamnit, it’s not what I need to come home and find.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew it was a no-win situation for me. I turned and looked back at the bed. Maddie was still sleeping, with her brown ringlets across her face again. If she could sleep through anything, then I hoped she could sleep right through the roaring silence of her parents’ anger toward each other.

Eleanor walked quickly out of the room and in a few moments I followed her. I found her in the kitchen leaning against a counter with her arms folded tightly in front of her.

“Bad night?”

“Don’t blame my reaction to this on what kind of night I had.”

I raised my hands in surrender.

“I’m not. I blame it on me. I messed up. I just wanted to sit with her for a little while and I fell asleep.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t do that anymore.”

“What, come visit her at night?”

“I don’t know.”

She moved to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of spring water. She poured a glass and then held the bottle up for me. I told her I didn’t want any.

“What is that file anyway?” she asked. “Are you working a case here?”

“Yes. A murder. It started in L.A. and came over this way. I have to go up into the desert today.”

“What a nice convenience for you. Along the way you get to drop in here and scare your daughter.”

“Come on, Eleanor, it was stupid and I’m an idiot but at least she didn’t see anything.”

“She could have. Maybe she did. Maybe she woke up and saw those dreadful pictures and then went back to sleep. She’s probably having a horrible nightmare.”

“Look, she hasn’t moved all night. I can tell. She’s been down for the count. It won’t happen again, so can we just leave it at that?”

“Sure. Fine.”

“Look, Eleanor, why don’t you tell me about your night?”

“No, I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to go to bed.”

“I’ll tell you something then.”

“What?”

I hadn’t planned on bringing this up but it all sort of snowballed and I knew I needed to tell her.

“I’m thinking about going back to my job.”

“What do you mean, the case?”

“No, the cops. The LAPD has a program. Old guys like me can come back in. They’re looking for experience. If I do it now I won’t even have to go back to the academy.”

She took a long drink of water and didn’t respond.

“What do you think about that, Eleanor?”

She shrugged like she didn’t care.

“Whatever you want to do, Harry. But you won’t see your daughter as much. You’ll get involved in cases and . . . you know how that goes.”

I nodded.

“Maybe.”

“And maybe it won’t matter. She hasn’t had you around for most of her life.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Look, let’s not open that can of worms again.”

“If I had known about her I would have been here. I didn’t know.”

“I know, I know. I’m the one. It’s all my fault.”

“I’m not saying that. I’m —”

“I know what you’re saying. You don’t even have to say it.”

We were both quiet for a moment, letting the anger ebb. I looked down at the floor.

“Maybe she could come over there, too,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“What we talked about before. About this place. About her growing up here.”

She shook her head very deliberately.

“And I haven’t changed my mind about that. What do you think, that you’re going to raise her by yourself? You, with middle-of-the-night call outs, long hours, long investigations, guns in the house, crime scene photos spread all over the floor. Is that what you want for her? You think that’s better than Vegas?”

“No. I was thinking maybe you could come over there, too.”

“Forget it, Harry. I’m not talking about this again. I’m staying here and so is Madeline. You make whatever decision is best for you but you don’t make it for me and Maddie.”

Before I could respond Marisol stepped into the kitchen, her eyes creased with sleep. She was wearing a white bathrobe with
Bellagio
written in script on the pocket.

“Very loud,” she said.

“You’re right, Marisol,” Eleanor said. “I’m sorry.”

Marisol went to the refrigerator and got out the water bottle. She poured herself a glass and then put the bottle away. She left the kitchen without further word.

“I think you should go,” Eleanor said to me. “I’m too tired to talk about this right now.”

“All right. I’m just going to check on her and say good-bye.”

“Don’t wake her up.”

“No kidding.”

I went back into my daughter’s bedroom. We had left the light on. I sat on the side of the bed closest to her and just watched her sleep for a few moments. Then I brushed back her hair and kissed her cheek. I smelled the scent of baby shampoo in her hair. I kissed her again and whispered good night. I turned off the light and then sat there for another couple minutes, watching and waiting. For what, I don’t know. I guess maybe I was hoping Eleanor would come in and sit on the bed, too, that maybe we could watch our sleeping daughter together.

After a while I got up and turned the monitor on again. I left the room to head out. The house was quiet as I walked back through to the front. I didn’t see Eleanor. She had gone off to bed, not needing to see me again. I pulled the front door closed and made sure it was locked as I went out.

The loud snap of steel on steel had a finality to it that ricocheted through me like a tumbling bullet.

30

A
T 8 THAT MORNING I was in my Mercedes in front of the lobby entrance of the Embassy Suites on Paradise Road. I had two large Starbucks coffees in the cup holders and a bag of doughnuts. I was freshly showered and shaved. I had changed the clothes I slept in. I had gassed up the car and maxed out my withdrawal limit at the station’s ATM. I was ready for a day in the desert but Rachel Walling did not come out through the glass doors. After waiting five minutes I was about to call her when my phone rang first. It was her.

“Give me five minutes.”

“Where are you?”

“I had to go into the FO for a meeting. I’m driving back now.”

“What meeting?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you. I’m on Paradise now.”

“All right.”

I closed the phone and waited, looking at the billboard on the back of a cab that was waiting in front of me. It was an advertisement for a floor show at the Riviera. It showed the beautifully proportioned rear ends of a dozen women standing side by side and naked. It made me think about the changing nature of Vegas and what had been mentioned in the
Times
article on the missing men. I thought about all the people who had moved here on the family ticket only to have that ticket punched with this and a thousand other billboards just like it after they got here.

A basic G-car—a Crown Victoria—pulled up next to me from the opposite direction and Rachel put down the window.

“You want me to drive?”

“I want to drive,” I said, thinking it would give me a little slice of control over things.

She made no argument. She pulled the Crown Vic into a parking space and got into my car.

I didn’t move the Mercedes.

“Are you going to drink both of those coffees?” she asked me.

“No, one’s for you. Sugar’s in the bag. They didn’t have cream to go.”

“I don’t use it.”

She lifted one of the coffees and drank from it. I looked forward, out through the windshield, then I checked the rearview. And I waited.

“Well,” she finally said, “are we going?”

“I don’t know. I think we need to talk first.”

“About what?”

“About what is going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“What were you doing at the field office so early? What’s going on, Agent Walling?”

She let out her breath in annoyance.

“Look, Harry, you are forgetting something here. This investigation is of high importance to the bureau. You could say the director is directly involved.”

“And?”

“And so when he wants a ten a.m. briefing, that means us agents in Quantico and out in the field get together at nine a.m. to make sure we know what we’re telling him and that there’s not going to be blowback on anybody.”

I nodded. Now I got it.

“And nine a.m. in Quantico is six a.m. in Vegas.”

“You got it.”

“So what happened at the ten? What did you all tell the director?”

“That’s FBI business.”

I looked at her and she was waiting with a smile.

“But I will tell you because you are about to tell me all of your secrets, too. The director is going to go public. It’s too risky not to. It will look like a cover-up if this comes out later in uncontrolled fashion. It’s all about managing the moment, Harry.”

I put the car in drive and headed toward the parking lot exit. I had already plotted my route. I’d take Flamingo to the 15 and then a quick jog over to the Blue Diamond Highway. Then it would be a straight shot north to Clear.

“What’s he going to say?”

“He’ll hold a press conference late this afternoon. He’ll announce that Backus is apparently alive and we’re out looking for him. He’ll hold up the picture Terry McCaleb took of the man who called himself Shandy.”

“Did they check all of that out yet?”

“Yes. There’s no trace line on Shandy yet—it was probably just a name he gave Terry. But photographic analysis and comparison of the photos Terry took and photos of Backus are under way as we speak. The initial report is they’re going to come in as a match. It was Backus.”

“And Terry didn’t recognize him.”

“Well, he obviously recognized something. He took the pictures, so there was some sort of suspicion. But the guy had a beard, hat and glasses. The analyst on it said he’d also changed his nose and teeth and maybe had cheek implants. There’s a lot of things he could have done, even a surgery that would have changed his voice. Look, I looked at the photos and didn’t see it for sure and I worked directly with Backus for five years, much longer than Terry. Terry got moved out to L.A. to man the Behavioral Sciences outpost.”

“Any idea where he got all of that done?”

“We’re pretty sure we know. About six years ago the bodies of a surgeon and his wife were found in their burned-out home in Prague. The home had a surgical suite and the doctor was the subject of an Interpol intelligence file. The wife was his nurse. He was suspected of being a face man—a surgeon who would change your face for a certain price. The theory was that someone he changed murdered him and his wife to cover the trail. All records he might have kept on the faces he changed were lost in the fire. It was ruled an arson.”

“What connected Backus to him?”

“Nothing for sure. But as you can imagine, everything Backus did or touched as an agent was gone over once he was revealed. His entire case history was audited as much as possible. He did a lot of consulting on cases abroad. Part of the FBI image machine. He went to places like Poland, Yugoslavia, Italy, France, you name it.”

“He went to Prague?”

She nodded.

“He went to Prague on a case. To consult. Young women disappearing and ending up in the river. Prostitutes. The doctor—the face man—was questioned in the investigation because he did the breast augmentations on three of the victims. Backus was there. He helped question the doctor.”

“And he could have been told about the doctor’s suspected sideline.”

“Exactly. We think he knew and we think he went there to change his face.”

“That wouldn’t have been easy. His real face was on the front of every newspaper and magazine back then.”

“Look, Bob Backus is a psychopathic killer but he is a very smart psychopath. Outside of the made-up guys in books and movies, nobody’s ever been smarter at this. Not even Bundy. We have to assume that he had an escape plan all along. From day one. When I put him out that window eight years ago, you better believe he already had a plan in place. I’m talking about money, IDs, whatever he would need to reinvent himself and get away. He probably carried it with him. We assume from L.A. he made his way back east first and then split to Europe.”

“He burned down his condo,” I said.

“Right, we give him credit for that, which puts him in Virginia three weeks after I shot him in L.A. That was a shrewd move. He torched the place and then got to Europe, where he could lie low for a while, change his face and then start again.”

“Amsterdam.”

She nodded.

“The first killing in Amsterdam occurred seven months after the face man burned in Prague.”

I nodded. It all seemed to fit together. Then I thought of something else.

“How is the director going to announce the surprise that Backus is alive when four years ago you had Amsterdam?”

“He’s got all kinds of deniability on that. First and most important, that was another director’s watch. So he can lay anything he needs to off on him. That’s FBI tradition. But realistically, that was another country and it wasn’t an investigation we were running. And it was never absolutely confirmed. We had handwriting analysis, but that was really it and that is not in the same league as fingerprinting or DNA when it comes to confirming. So the director can simply say nothing was for sure about Backus in Amsterdam. Either way he’s safe. He just has to worry about the here and the now.”

“Manage the moment.”

“FBI one-oh-one.”

“And you people are going along with his going public?”

“No. We asked for a week. He gave us the day. The press conference is at six p.m. eastern time.”

“Like anything’s going to happen today.”

“Yeah, we know. We’re fucked.”

“Backus will probably go under, change his face again and not turn up for another four years.”

“Probably. But the director won’t get hit with any blowback on it. He’ll be safe.”

We were silent for a few moments thinking about that. I could understand the director’s decision but it certainly helped him more than it helped the investigation.

We were on the 15 and I was pulling into the exit lane for the Blue Diamond Highway.

“What happened at the nine a.m., before the director’s meeting?”

“The usual round-robin. Updates from every agent.”

“And?”

“And there’s not a lot that is new. A few things. We talked about you mostly. I’m counting on you, Harry.”

“For what?”

“For a new lead here. Where are we going?”

“Do they know we’re riding together, or are you still supposed to be watching me as in
watching
me.”

“I think they would prefer the latter—in fact, I know they would. But that would be boring and besides, like I said, what are they going to do to me if they find out I’m riding with you, send me back to Minot? BFD, I got to like that place.”

“Minot might not be a big fucking deal, but maybe they’ll send you someplace else. Don’t they have bureau offices in Guam and places like that?”

“Yes, but it’s all relative. I heard Guam isn’t that bad—a lot of terrorism angles, which is all the rage. And after eight years in Minot and Rapid City, a change like that might not be bad no matter what the investigations are about.”

“What was said about me at the meeting?”

“It was mostly me, since you are my assignment. I told them I ran a check through the L.A. field office and got your pedigree. I gave them that and told them you went behind the wall last year.”

“What do you mean, that I retired?”

“No, Homeland Security. You ran afoul of them, went behind the wall and came back out again. That impressed Cherie Dei. Made her more willing to let you run a little.”

“I had been wondering about that.”

Actually, I had been wondering why Agent Dei had not simply put the clamps on me.

“What about Terry McCaleb’s notes?” I asked.

“What about them?”

“Better minds than mine must have gone to work on them. What did they come up with? What was their take on the triangle theory?”

“It is an established pattern with serials that they commit what we call ‘triangle crimes.’ We see it often. That is, the victim can be traced through three points of a triangle. There is their point of origin or entry—their home or in this case the airport. Then there is what we call the point of prey—the place where killer and victim come into contact, where they crisscross. And then there is the point of disposal. With serials the three points are never the same because it is the best way for them to avoid detection. That is what Terry saw when he read that newspaper story. He circled it because the Metro guy was going the wrong way with it. He wasn’t thinking triangle, he was thinking circle.”

“So is the bureau working on the triangle now?”

“Of course they are. But some things take time. Right now there is a higher emphasis on crime scene analysis. But we’ve got somebody in Quantico working the triangle. The FBI is effective but sometimes slow, Harry. I am sure you know this.”

“Sure.”

“It’s a tortoise-and-hare race. We’re the tortoise, you’re the hare.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re moving faster than us, Harry. Something tells me you figured out the triangle theory and are taking a shot at the missing point. The point of prey.”

I nodded. Whether I was being used or not didn’t matter. They were allowing me to stay in the hunt and that was what was important to me.

“You start with the airport and you end with Zzyzx. That leaves one more point—the intersection of predator and prey—and I think I’ve got it. We’re going there.”

“Then tell me.”

“First tell me one more thing about McCaleb’s notes.”

“I think I already told you everything. They’re still being analyzed.”

“William Bing, who is that?”

She hesitated but only for a moment.

“That’s a no-go, a dead end.”

“How so?”

“William Bing is a heart transplant patient who was in Vegas Memorial getting a checkup and some tests. We think Terry knew him and when he was over here he visited him in the hospital.”

“Did you people talk to Bing yet?”

“Not yet. We’re trying to track him.”

“Seems odd.”

“What, that he would visit a guy?”

“No, not that. I mean that he would write that on the file if it wasn’t connected to the case.”

“Terry wrote stuff down. It’s pretty obvious from all his files and notebooks that he wrote stuff down. If he was coming over here to work on this, then maybe he wrote Bing’s name and the hospital number down on the file so he wouldn’t forget to visit or call him. Could be a lot of reasons.”

I didn’t respond. I still had trouble seeing it.

“How did he know the guy?”

“We don’t know. Maybe the movie. Terry got hundreds of letters from transplant people after that movie came out. He was sort of a hero to a lot of people in the same boat as he was.”

As we headed north on Blue Diamond I saw a sign for the Travel America truck stop and remembered the receipt I had found in Terry McCaleb’s car. I pulled in, even though I had gassed up the Mercedes after leaving Eleanor’s house that morning. I stopped the car and just looked at the travel complex.

“What is it? You need gas?”

“No, we’re fine. It’s just that . . . McCaleb was here.”

“What is this? You getting a psychic reading or something?”

“No, I found a receipt in his car. I wonder if this means he went up to Clear.”

“To clear what?”

“No, the town of Clear. That’s where we’re going.”

“Well, we might never know unless we get up there and ask some questions.”

I nodded and pulled the car back onto Blue Diamond and started north again. Along the way I told Rachel my theory of the theory. That is, my take on McCaleb’s triangle and how Clear fit into it. I could tell that my telling it drew her interest. She may have even been excited about it. She agreed with my take on the victims and how and why they may have been chosen. She agreed that it appeared to mirror the victimology—her word—in Amsterdam.