Measure of Darkness (27 page)

B
y the time Gatling arrives in Prides Crossing he's in a full-blown rage. His anger is directed not only at the man called Kidder, but at himself for hiring the screwup in the first place. He'd known Kidder since they'd both served in special ops, and he'd been an oddball even then, but it was a useful kind of strange. The man simply had no compunction about breaking the law when ordered to do so, which had come in handy on more than one occasion. But Gatling sees that it had been a mistake to take him on as a civilian freelancer. Whatever competence Kidder had in the military has diminished over the past few years, along with any sense of discipline. He no longer follows orders, has no respect for the chain of command. He thinks he knows better, he makes threats, and now, finally, a screwup so huge that it's beyond mind-boggling, and might actually put Gatling and his entire organization at risk, despite all his connections, all his precautions.

Gatling screeches the van to a halt, jams it in Park and turns off the motor. Kidder meets him in the driveway, shambling out of the open bay of the garage like some oversize garden gnome wearing, absurdly, a black wool
watch cap pulled down over his ears. Plus his eyes look wrong.

“Woo!” Kidder huffs, clapping his hands together. “That didn't take long. When was it I called you? Last week?”

Gatling speaks through clenched teeth. “Less than an hour ago, you moron. What the hell happened?”

“Ha! Wish I knew!” Kidder grins. There are flecks of blood on his teeth. “There was beautiful music and then I saw God.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Kidder sidles up close. His breath is putrid, powerfully bad. “You know who God looks like? He looks like you in a bad mood. Are you in a bad mood, Junior? Huh?”

Gatling grabs Kidder's right arm and squeezes. Sees the pain light up the man's eyes. “What did you do? Speak, or so help me God.”

Kidder smiles that weird smile, that's his only outward physical reaction to Gatling's pincerlike grip on his forearm, which has to hurt like hell. “Didn't I just say you were God? So what's your problem? You're all-powerful, right? You can fix things.”

“What do I have to fix? What happened here? And why are you wearing that stupid hat?”

In answer Kidder peels up a corner of the hat, using his left hand, awkwardly. Revealing a mass of clotted blood and hair. “You tell me,” he says. “I really want to know.”

Kidder leads him through the garage, into the cottage and down into the basement lockup. He points at the floor, where a pool of blood has coagulated into a dark mess. “That's where I woke up. Last thing I remember, I was watching the ball game. Pedroia got a single, he's on first. I'm thinking the little bastard always gets
on base, how does he do it? And then I wake up with my head stuck to the floor. I mean it was like my skull was welded to the floor. It made this really scary sound when I tore myself loose. Like my brains had leaked out or something.”

Staring at the floor, feeling sickened by the loss of control, Gatling snaps, “That's blood, not brains, you idiot. Your brains, such as they are, are still in your skull. You were hit from behind with that piece of two-by-four,” he adds, pointing.

Kidder giggles horribly. “I knew you were God. The all-seeing, the all-knowing. So what happened next? Your humble servant tore himself loose from the floor. Then what?”

“Are you crazy? I can't play this game. We haven't got time for this.”

Kidder fumbles at him, pawing, his expression strangely gleeful. “Your humble servant crawled up the stairs and out into the yard. There were stars in the sky. They say that stars are like the sun, only farther away, but I never believed that. Stars are where God poked pinholes in the night. And the light that shines through, the little twinkles? That's you. God himself.”

“You're insane.”

“You made me. Whatever I am, that's on you.”

“Don't touch me,” Gatling says, jerking away.

“This is my confession, God. I crawled up the stairs and went out into the shiny night and I found him. The boy. He was in one corner of the yard and when he saw me he started waving, that's how I noticed him. Hard to see with all the blood in my eyes, you know? That's how it is for us humans, we don't see in the dark too good when our brains have been spot-welded to the floor. So the little brat makes it easy for me to find him. Isn't that
odd? He can't get away because of the fence, but still you'd think he'd try to hide.”

“What are you talking about? What fence? And where's the woman?”

“Just a little old electrified fence. Why would you notice? Stuff like that is beneath God's interest. It was supposed to be powered from a twelve-volt battery, like a cattle fence, but I did a little rewiring, hooked it up to the household current with a hundred-amp breaker. That's enough to kill us normal humans, but somehow she must have got around it. The breaker was tripped. She got away. Left the kid behind and took off. Told me all about it, the little brat.”

Gatling is incredulous. “If this was last night she could be on her way back here with the cops any moment. Why didn't you call me when it happened?”

Kidder, amused, says, “Gee, God, you must have been too busy listening to all those prayers, huh? Too busy to notice what was happening to me. Otherwise you'd know I crawled up the stairs and went out and found the kid and locked him in the closet, and then I passed out again.”

“Show me,” Gatling demands.

Kidder leads him to a bedroom closet. The bi-fold closet door doesn't lock, so the door has been blocked shut by a heavy bureau. Gatling lends a hand and they both shove the bureau out of the way, Kidder dusting his hands melodramatically and saying, “Hoo-ha! Everything's easier when God's on your side.”

Gatling studies the closet door and frowns. There's nothing he likes about the situation, but he knows what has to be done. The building will have to be burned to the ground, to destroy any evidence of the kidnapping, but first he has to take care of the boy, who is himself
the most damning piece of evidence. Gatling reaches into his back pocket, snakes out a plastic Ziploc bag, holds it to his side. With his left hand he sweeps open the bi-fold door.

Crouched in the corner, small hands covering his eyes, is Joey Keener.

“Come out of there, little man,” Gatling says softly, soothingly. “It's okay, you're safe. I'm the good guy.”

He takes an ether-soaked rag from the plastic bag and holds it to the boy's mouth until he stops struggling.

T
he first Naomi Nantz case I ever worked involved a teenage girl, a movie star and a nationally known wacko-religious cult that will remain nameless in these pages because I really hate finding rattlesnakes in unexpected places. At first I didn't believe a word of the girl's story, touching, as it did, on midnight visits from extraterrestrial beings, but Naomi was somehow able to cut through all the spin and special effects (mostly created by the movie star) to the core of truth about what really happened. It's like the average person—me for instance—when confronted by the impossible, sees exactly that, the part that couldn't possibly be true, and can't get around it. Whereas Naomi sees behind the impossible, and is able to make cognitive leaps that to this day boggle my little mind.

Case in point, the strangely encoded message that arrived about ten hours after we returned from our failed mission to rattle Taylor Gatling's gilded cage. Naomi is in the command center with Teddy, all screens blazing, the two of them sifting databases for clues on where Gatling might be hiding a five-year-old boy. They're working from a fifty-mile radius of Boston, in light of
the fact that Joey and Mrs. Mancero were filmed on Harvard Bridge, within sight of the MIT dome. Compiling cross-references to buildings and properties that may have any connection to Gatling, his company, his extensive business contacts and his circle of friends.

Teddy has a satellite map up on the largest screen, with red dots indicating possible locations. This seems to include most of southern New England.

“Exclude business locations,” Naomi suggests. “Try residential properties owned by anyone who has ever crossed paths with Mr. Gatling.”

Teddy does so at the stroke of a key. If the dots were pimples the poor screen would have a very bad case of acne. “Why exclude business locations?” he wants to know. “A lot of these involve warehouses and storage facilities.”

Before Naomi can explain, every screen in the command center goes blank.

“What the hell?” says Teddy, his voice rising an octave or so.

The largest screen, the one that had been dedicated to the satellite map, starts to glow blue. Then a white dot begins to bounce along the middle of the screen, as if to an unheard musical beat. Teddy, eyes bugging, is frantically jabbing at various keyboards, to no effect.

“Wait,” Naomi says softly.

The dot finally settles in the middle of the screen, condensing and expanding in a way that reminds me of a beating heart.
Bah-bump, bah-bump.

“Now,” she says. “The escape button, top left.”

Teddy deliberately depresses the escape button. At first nothing happens. And then the pulsing dot expands and changes, morphing into an image of a young girl in
a frock-style dress. Not a photograph, an illustration of some kind. Looks familiar, but I can't place it.

Naomi chuckles, shaking her head. “Clever man,” she says.

“Clever who, and what does it mean?”

“That's Alice from
Alice in Wonderland
. The original 1865 edition, illustrated by John Tenniel. Apparently you made an impression on Taylor Gatling, Alice. He's saying hello.”

“Ridiculous,” I say, folding my arms, preparing to be stubborn. “What makes you think this is him? And what could it possibly mean?”

“I conclude that it is Gatling because he has the ability to do this. It can't be a coincidence that we've been hacked within hours of confronting him.”

“Hey, look at that,” Teddy says. “Her mouth is moving.”

“Click on her lips,” Naomi suggests.

Teddy clicks and the image of the young girl vanishes, replaced by a blinking password entry. “Any ideas?” he says. “It could be anything.”

“Not anything,” Naomi points out. “There's a blinking cursor and eleven blank spaces.”

“So?”

“Password prompts don't usually include clues about how many characters are required. And this came from Alice's mouth.” She turns to me. “Therefore I conclude that the password is something you said.”

“That narrows it down to about a million words a month, if you count all those conversations I have with myself.”

“I'm curious,” Naomi says, evenly. “Why are you so resistant to the idea that Mr. Gatling prefers to communicate with you, rather than with me?”

“Because I loathe the man. It looks like he had a child kidnapped for his own political purposes, which is disgusting enough right there. Plus he's smug and preening and so…so… I don't know, macho.”

“You're repulsed by machismo?”

“His version, yes.”

“Interesting. Maybe Mr. Gatling is attracted to women who revile him. But that's neither here nor there. The image of Alice speaking is conclusive. Therefore the eleven blank characters represent a word or phrase uttered by you, in his presence.”

I shrug. “I said a lot of things.”

“Yes, but what utterance did he remark on? A few come to mind. ‘Swamp Yankee' is twelve spaces, so that doesn't work. And ‘backwoods colonial' is out,” she says, before pausing to muse for a moment. “Teddy, try this: ‘wicked good.'”

He keys in the letters, hits Return.

The password entry space vanishes and is instantly replaced by a video play-bar on the bottom of the screen, with icons for play, pause, fast-forward and stop, and a digital clock that begins counting as a slightly grainy nighttime image forms out of the darkness.

“Stop right there,” Naomi says, and when Teddy hesitates—apparently fearful that he'll lose the video enclosure—she reaches out and taps the keyboard herself, freezing the image.

“How did you do it so fast?” I ask, incredulous. “What led you to ‘wicked good'?”

“Logic. Rather obvious, actually. We can discuss the finer aspects of deductive reasoning later. Right now I want Jack Delancey, the quicker the better.”

As it happens Jack is already in the residence, specifically downstairs in Mrs. Beasley's breakfast nook, fuel
ing himself on her French press coffee while he makes phone calls to various sources. He joins us in the command center in exactly the time that it takes him to bound up the stairs.

“What have we here?” he asks, focused on the big screen. “If I'm not mistaken, that's the Keener residence. Taken with some sort of night-vision camera. High quality, from the look of it.”

“Play,” Naomi commands.

The scene doesn't change, even though the clock is ticking off the frames. Professor Keener's home on Putnam Avenue, as seen from a slight angle that covers the front porch as well as part of the south-facing side of the house. Obviously, from the steadiness of the scene, the video camera had to have been mounted on some sort of tripod or steadying device. The windows are dark, as if the house itself is sleeping. A minute ticks by. Lights flare onto the front porch and I hold my breath, but it's only headlights from a passing vehicle.

“My guess, this is a remote,” Jack says. “An operator would have instinctively panned toward the light.”

“We know Gatling had Professor Keener under surveillance,” Naomi says. “Remote cameras make sense. Probably automatic feeds.”

“Right there,” Jack says, pointing.

The guy has good eyes, I'll grant him that. He's the first to spot an approaching visitor, screen left. A male of average build, seen from the back as he emerges from the dark of the sidewalk to the slightly more illuminated area of the front porch. The pool of lesser darkness is apparently the result of an unseen streetlight. Whatever the source, the night-vision camera is sensitive enough to show that he's wearing jeans, sneakers, windbreaker and a ball cap.

“Pause,” Naomi instructs, and this time Teddy obeys. The image on the porch freezes. “Ring any bells?”

Jack shrugs. “Not yet. I'd say young rather than old. Slender rather than fat. Male rather than female.”

“Note the time stamp,” Naomi says. “It could be faked, of course, but it corresponds to the day Keener was killed. 05:10. Military time for 5:10 a.m.”

“A further observation,” Jack says. “Whoever that is on the porch, it's not Randall Shane.”

“Continue,” Naomi says.

We watch the visitor ring a doorbell, wait. A light comes on upstairs.

“Oh man,” Jack says. “Makes me want to shout out ‘don't answer the door!'”

But he does answer the door. We follow his progress as lights come on, and less than a minute after the bell was pushed, the door opens.

“Freeze,” says Naomi. “Now try zooming in.”

Teddy makes a face, sucking his teeth. “What if I screw up? We could lose the whole thing.”

“Nonsense. This has been sent to us because he wants us to see it. Just try the normal zoom, centering on his face.”

It works. Teddy sighs with relief.

“Do we all confirm that the man at the door is Joseph Keener?”

We do. The video continues. Keener opening the door wider, the visitor stepping into the hall, the door closing behind him.

“I wonder if they had a camera inside,” Jack says.

I'm hoping there was no inside camera. It's sufficiently horrible as it is—I really don't need to see an actual snuff film, thank you very much.

“Are we going to sit through this or fast-forward?”
Jack wants to know when nothing happens for another sixty seconds.

“Patience,” Naomi says. “We watch every frame. It can't be long.”

Long depends on what you're waiting for. In this particular case, five minutes seems to be an eternity. Finally it happens. No sound—there's no audio track—but a distinct flash of light from the ground floor, no doubt from the kitchen area.

“God rest him,” Naomi says.

Ten seconds later the front door opens. The man—the killer—steps out, one hand shoved into his windbreaker pocket, the other reaching up to tug down his ball cap.

“Freeze and zoom,” Naomi says.

“I'll be damned,” Jack says. “I've seen his mug shot. That's Micky Lee. Aka Mr. Baked Alaska.”