Authors: Graham Masterton
He went into the kitchen and poured himself a large glass of cold water. He stood with his hand on the tap drinking it in large, breathless gulps. Then he crossed over to the window that faced out over Nantucket Sound, and opened up the Venetian blinds. He could just make out the pale prehistoric humps of the sand dunes, and the glimmering white line of the surf.
He felt infinitely depressed. Was the nightmare of Rocky Woods going to haunt him for ever? Would he never be able to shake it off? That terrible sensation with which it always started – as if his bed had opened up right underneath him – that was more than he could take. Any more nightmares as clear and as realistic as tonight’s and he felt that he could easily slip into total craziness.
Maybe he had made a mistake by quitting his job and trying to run away from it. Maybe he should have stayed on at Plymouth and faced his fears until he learned to control them. Maybe some therapy then would have helped. But he had come from a family which had always been proud and private and self-sufficient; a family that never asked anybody for help, either financial or emotional.
For twenty-eight years, Michael’s father had run his own boat-making business in Boston Harbor, and his rowboats and dinghies had been famous all the way from Rockland to Marblehead for their fine traditional craftmanship. But in the early 1960s, when fibreglass boats began to supersede wood, very few of the old-fashioned boatbuilders were able to make the transition, Rearden Chandlers included.
Michael could remember the time when you could walk along Boston’s waterfront and hear a cacophony of hulls being hammered together. He could also remember his father sitting on a wooden box in their empty living-room, drawn and grey, while the removal men took away the last of their furniture. He had stood beside his father and laid his hand on his shoulder and said, ‘The bank would’ve helped you; you know that.’
But his father had simply patted his hand and said, ‘You think I want to be owned body and soul by some fucking banker? Nobody owns my body and soul but me.’
Michael had inherited much of that same self-destructive cussedness: that feeling that if you couldn’t make it on your own, you were somehow less of a man.
He was still thinking about his father and watching the surfline when the telephone rang. He picked it up immediately, in case it woke Patsy or Jason.
‘Michael?’
‘Who is it?’
‘Michael, it’s Joe. Did I wake you?’
‘No, no. I wasn’t asleep.’
‘Listen ... I’m sorry to call you so late. Or maybe I’m sorry to call you so early, I’m not sure which. But I’ve just had a fax authorizing me to tell you everything we know about the O’Brien crash. It isn’t much, but I think it’ll give you some food for thought.’
Michael tiredly pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. ‘Joe ... I’ve talked this over with Patsy, and the answer is still no.’
‘Let me just tell you what we found out.’
‘I’m not interested. I don’t want to know.’
‘But this is 24-carat, I promise you. It came straight from Roger Bannerman, of Boston Life & Trust. He and Edgar play golf together.’
‘I don’t care if they take showers together. The answer is still no.’
There was a lengthy pause. Michael was beginning to feel cold, and wished he were back in bed. But he could still hear Joe breathing on the other end of the line, and it was like the steady breathing of Nemesis, the chilly respiration of relentless fate. He knew that Joe was going to tell him what Edgar had found out; and he also knew that he was going to listen. He knew, too, that it would probably convince him to give up his wayward life here in New Seabury, and go back to face the nightmarish consequences of Rocky Woods.
‘John O’Brien’s daughter was missing,’ said Joe.
‘What?’ said Michael.
‘John O’Brien’s fourteen-year-old daughter Cecilia ... she was travelling with her parents to Washington, DC, for the swearing-in ceremony. They found her purse on the helicopter, and they found her luggage. Strangely, they also found her shoes, under her seat. But of Cecilia herself, there was no trace at all.’
Michael said, ‘I thought the coroner’s office told you that physical trauma was so severe that they couldn’t even tell how many cadavers they were dealing with.’
‘That’s what they
said.
But they’ve been playing for time. The actuality was somewhat different.’
‘How did Roger Bannerman find that out?’
‘Easy. Mrs Bannerman is a volunteer emergency medical technician. She attended the crash scene herself.’
‘And she was sure that the girl wasn’t there? She wasn’t thrown clear, or anything like that?’
‘She must have been sure or else she wouldn’t have told her husband.’
‘All the same, the second-hand opinion of a volunteer EMT isn’t exactly evidence.’
‘I didn’t say anything about it being evidence,’ Joe replied. ‘What I did say was that it’s food for thought.’
Michael hesitated, shivered. Dawn was well advanced now, and he could see the horizon, slate grey sea against lighter grey sky. Out toward Nantucket Island, it looked as if it were raining. ‘What else do you know?’ he asked.
‘That’s it. The helicopter crashed, and person or persons unknown were seen removing something from the wreck. Subsequently, when the rescue squad arrived, there was no trace of Cecilia O’Brien – even though it was known for certain that she was accompanying her parents.’
‘I still don’t understand why you need me.’
Joe let out a heavy sigh. ‘I need you, Michael, because I need somebody sensitive. I need somebody crazy. I don’t need a plodder, or an analyst. I need somebody who can jump to conclusions. What was that thing you were always going on to me about? “Downwind thinking”. That’s what I need.’
‘What do the cops say about Cecilia O’Brien?’
‘Squat. They won’t even admit that she wasn’t in the wreck.’
‘So who’s covering this up, and why?’
‘Give me some guesses.’
Michael ran his hand through his tangled hair. ‘O’Brien was a liberal, right? He didn’t approve of the death penalty, he didn’t approve of racism or segregation or police discrimination against ethnic minorities. He campaigned in favour of abortion; he also campaigned against censorship. He hated bribery and he hated featherbedding. He supported the legalization of soft drugs; but he was down on crack and heroin and snow and he was heavily down on guns. In fact, he made himself a prime target for every drug dealer and every bent politician and every redneck and every religious whacko in the continental United States.’
Joe said, ‘Exactly.’ But then he said, ‘Remember Rocky Woods.’
‘You don’t seriously think that I could
ever forget
Rocky Woods?’
‘No, of course not, I’m sorry. But remember who died at Rocky Woods.’
‘Three hundred and forty-five unsuspecting men, women and children. That’s who died at Rocky Woods.’
‘Including Dan Margolis.’
‘Dan Margolis?’
‘That’s right, Michael. Dan Margolis, who had just been selected by William Webster to head up the Drug Enforcement Agency, so that they could strangle the Colombian coke trade before it even climbed out of its crib.’
Michael said, ‘I remember Dan Margolis. He used to work in the DA’s office, didn’t he? All fire and shit and pepper, the way I recall.’
‘The very same.’
‘So what are you trying to tell me?’ asked Michael.
‘I’m not trying to tell you anything. If I knew the answers, I wouldn’t be asking, would I? I’m just trying to think downwind, the way that you think.’
‘And?’
‘And – well – nothing. Except that we have two fatal air crashes within two years of each other, both involving a well-known liberal campaigner; both involving the deaths of innocent people; and both involving the complete and unaccountable disappearance of a single female. In the case of Rocky Woods, it was Elaine Parker. In the case of John O’Brien’s helicopter, it was Cecilia O’Brien.’
‘Joe,’ protested Michael, ‘this isn’t downwind thinking. This is making shopping malls without straw. The most logical explanation for Elaine Parker’s disappearance at Rocky Woods was that she fell way outside the search area. A gust caught her, a piece of debris deflected her, who knows? Those people fell across nine square miles. As for Cecilia O’Brien – well, we just can’t tell yet, for sure. And there were at least three other people who died at Rocky Woods who could have been the target for revenge killings, or insurance scams. That’s quite apart from the fact that we never discovered what caused that L10-11 to blow up in the first place.’
‘Michael,’ Joe retaliated, ‘I’m trying to get you thinking. I’m trying to get you
involved.
’
‘For Christ’s sake, Joe, I don’t want to be involved. I don’t want to know how that helicopter crashed, and I don’t want to know why it crashed; and more than anything else, I don’t want to see the people who died in it.’
This time, Joe went silent and stayed silent.
‘It’s all finished,’ Michael told him. ‘I’m an inventor now, no matter how badly you think I’m doing. I’m an inventor, and I’m making things, creating things. I’m not picking through wreckage; I’m not making my living out of other people’s grief. I’m not a carrion crow. I’m doing something poor, but I’m doing something honest.’
‘All right,’ said Joe. ‘I’m sorry I disturbed you.’
He put down the phone, and Michael was left alone, naked, with that lonely continuous tone. After a while, he put down the phone, too; and looked around; and then went quietly back to the bedroom.
He was just closing the door behind him when Patsy opened her eyes and stared at him and said, ‘What are you doing up? What time is it?’
‘Four-thirty,’ he said, climbing back into bed.
She cuddled up to him. ‘God, you’re cold,’ she told him.
‘In bed,’ he replied, ‘you can call me Michael.’
Three
The morning was just beginning to warm up. Lieutenant Thomas J. Boyle climbed out of his new dark-maple Caprice and buffed some fingerprints off the roof with the cuff of his coat. He crossed the sidewalk, searching in his pockets for his cigarettes, while at the same time picturing them quite clearly on his nightstand beside his bed, where he had left them. Sergeant David Jahnke was waiting for him outside the old brownstone house, wearing a cotton blouson jacket and looking more like Michael Douglas in
The Streets of San Francisco
than any sergeant had a right to. He offered Thomas a Winston; Thomas took it without even looking at him or saying a word. David lit it for him and waited for him to speak. The door of the house was open; and in the hallway Thomas could see brown-patterned wallpaper and six or seven pictures hanging in frames, although the light was reflecting from the glass so that he was unable to tell what they were.
He blew out a thin stream of smoke and looked around him. Already, there were three squad cars and an ambulance parked neatly beside the kerb. Neat parking meant dead already. No point in screeching to a halt right outside the house at whatever angle and running in with a backboard and a trauma kit, and guns unholstered in case of trouble.
‘Nice area,’ he remarked. ‘One block away from the Public Gardens. What are we talking about? Nine-hundred-thousand freehold?’
David shrugged. ‘Out of my league.’
‘Asshole. I’m asking you to assess it, not buy it.’
David self-consciously brushed his hand through his swept-back hair. ‘Miltjaworski’s inside, if you want to take a look.’
‘In a while. Tell me about it.’
David took out his notebook and flicked through it. He paused, flicked one page forward and two pages back. Then he said, ‘Okay, here it is. Caucasian female, aged about twenty. Blonde, blue-eyed, no birthmarks. She was found face down on a divan bed in the bedroom, hogtied with razor wire, which had caused severe lacerations to the wrists and ankles. There was severe bruising all over her body, including marks which looked like fingerprints and other marks which looked like cigarette burns and other burns by pokers or branding irons. The divan bed was heavily stained with blood and urine.’
Thomas inhaled smoke and blew it out through his nostrils. He hated smoking, he wished he wouldn’t do it. Other officers could cope with all of the blood and all of the smell and all of the chaos of human life, and they never resorted to booze or Marlboro or crack or XTC. But Thomas needed a crutch. He needed to do something obvious, to show that his psyche was wounded by what he did; and smoking was the least dangerous way that he could think of. He could still remember his mother dying in a cancer ward, puffy and yellow and shuddering with pain; and every morning he promised himself that he would smoke less. But every morning they called him out to look at gunshot victims and families burned by fire and dead molested children; and what could he do but light another cigarette?
He was forty-four years old, close to retirement age. He was handsome, in a lanky, bushy-eyebrowed, Abraham Lincolnish way. But he was unreasonably tall, almost six-feet-four, and his height had affected his whole life. At school, it had made him a target for merciless bullying and jokes. In his early years in the Boston police force, however, it had brought him respect, and assisted his promotion. He had been young, decisive and physically commanding. But in middle age, it had made him something of a dinosaur – easily picked out by aggressive young opponents both police and political, easily spotted by the press, and easily marked by Boston’s criminals. Kevin Cato, who ran one of the most profitable import/export rackets from Rockland to Marblehead and back again, called him ‘Giraffe’.