Nightstalkers (29 page)

“Debbie Simmons?” one of them asked, as if they might have come to the wrong apartment, but they had an air about them that indicated they didn’t make such mistakes.

“Yes?”

The man who’d asked flipped open a leather wallet briefly showing her a badge, then flipped it shut faster than she could read the ID card below it. “We’re with the government.”

“Is it about the grant?” Simmons asked. A girl had to try.

“No.”

“Is it about that guy who picked up the hard drive?” A girl had to give up in the face of the inevitable.

“Yes.”

Holding the afghan tight around her, Simmons flopped down in a chair and pointed at the narrow couch. The two men sat in unison. They removed their sunglasses also in perfect unison, as if they practiced it. Simmons blinked, not sure she was seeing what she was seeing. The one who’d done the talking and flashed the badge had a solid black left eye, the socket surrounded by scar tissue. He must have been used to the surprise because he reached across his body with his right hand and tapped his left arm, making a metallic sound. “I got a deal on the prosthetics. Black was all they had in stock for the discounted eyes in the package deal.”

Was that supposed to be funny?
Simmons wondered.

“So, Ms. Simmons—” Black Eye began, but she interrupted, trying to level the playing field.

“Doctor Simmons.” She usually wasn’t a stickler on that, and technically it hadn’t gotten final approval from the board, but she was half-naked and had just woken up and had a wicked hangover. A person had to hold on to something because she knew this was going to get bad.

Black Eye leaned forward, placing his hands, real and fake, on his knees.
Shrink
, Simmons thought. That was the universal empathy pose they used. He probably wasn’t even aware he was giving himself away with the movement. Simmons crossed her legs and tucked them underneath her in the chair, then crossed
her arms, the universal
I don’t want to talk about what you want to hear
pose. She stared at him across a wilting hibiscus on the table. He seemed to read her as easily as she’d read him and leaned back on the couch. “Doctor Simmons, my name is Frasier, and good luck on final approval from the board. About the other day with the Courier picking up the hard drive? Can you tell me what happened?”

She succinctly covered the encounter.

The guy who wasn’t a shrink pulled out a small notepad and began writing. Simmons saw a big gun nestled in a shoulder holster and realized the notepad was a charade. He’d wanted her to see the gun. This was going to get very bad.

“And your professor? When was the last time you saw her?” Frasier asked.

“Four days ago. The dean says she’s on sabbatical.”

The two men exchanged glances and Gun Guy wrote something in his notebook.

“The professor’s report is incomplete,” Frasier said. “Do you know why?”

She shook her head.

Frasier got up and went to the sink and brought her a glass of water. She noted it was in his artificial hand, which seemed to be capable of full articulation. You had to look very hard to see it wasn’t real, so that was no yard sale on the prosthetics. She was pretty sure he did the eye for effect.

He handed it to her. “What happened to the professor? She’s not on sabbatical.”

Simmons drank some water and cleared her throat. “I don’t know.”

“Do you know why she scheduled the pickup for the drive a week early?”

“No.”

“Did
she
schedule it?” Frasier asked.

Simmons squirmed in the chair. “No. When I found out she was gone, I followed the instructions in the binder. I scheduled it.”

“Did you, Doctor Simmons?” Frasier asked, indicating he knew the story was incomplete.

“Debbie.”

He smiled and actually seemed like a human being for a moment. She noticed he had very nice teeth. Government health care wasn’t that shabby, was it? Then she looked at the eye and the arm and realized some of the government people really needed good health care given their job. She wanted to smile back but her gums ached, hell, even her teeth ached. Like she hadn’t flossed in three days. And she knew where this was heading.

“Excuse me,” she said and ran to the bathroom. She heaved into the toilet.

“You okay?” Frasier called out.

She stood straight and washed her mouth out. She pulled the afghan tighter around her shoulders; this would all be so much easier if she hadn’t been naked at the start. She looked at herself in the mirror and started to laugh with a manic edge.

“Simmons?”

She realized she was losing it, so she took a towel and pressed it against her face. Slowed her breathing down. Got control. She walked back out. Frasier was standing near the door, a hint of concern on his face. Gun Guy looked like he could care less.

“Peachy,” she said in a tone that indicated she was anything but.

“Did someone visit the professor?” Frasier asked. “Wanting the hard drive?”

“I thought I was doing the right thing,” Simmons said. “The professor didn’t give it to him.”

“Not directly,” Frasier said. “We found the professor’s body last night. You might consider that a sabbatical.”

Simmons ran to the bathroom again, heaving again, but there was nothing coming up.

Frasier was standing in the door to the bathroom. “Was his face scarred?”

“Yes.”

“It’s strange,” Frasier said. “He could have made you give him the hard drive, couldn’t he?”

She could only nod.

“Instead,” Frasier continued, “he told you to move up the pickup.”

She nodded again.

“And he paid you to do that, correct?”

She started to shake her head, but Frasier reached out and grabbed her jaw. “Speak.” He let go of her. “I have to hear it.”

Simmons licked her lips, swallowed, trying to get some moisture in her mouth. “Yes.”

Frasier glanced over his shoulder at Gun Guy and she realized who was really in charge. Gun Guy cocked his head and looked at her and she got a cold chill and knew the gun wasn’t for show. He’d as soon shoot her as write a note in that pad.

“Go sit back down, please,” Frasier said.

She scooted past him, gripping the afghan tightly. She fell into the chair.

Frasier sat on the couch next to Gun Guy. “Strange that he did that,” he repeated. “There is always a purpose to things. He could have done things so much more directly and simply if he’d wanted the drive. But he wanted a reaction.”

Gun Guy finally spoke. “Your professor is dead. The Courier who picked up the drive is dead.”

“An eighteen-year-old girl was used as bait to kill the Courier,” Frasier added. He sighed. “Few people realize how serious life is. How our decisions, no matter how trivial, can have the greatest consequences. But you got very drunk last night because on some level, you know you did the wrong thing. You knew the professor wasn’t on sabbatical. Your dean was covering for her while she was missing. And all of that would be fine, except you ultimately did it because he paid you.”

Simmons felt as if she wasn’t breathing, there was no more air to take in.

“How much did he pay you?” Frasier asked.

Gun Guy flipped shut his notepad and slid it into his inside pocket, once more revealing the big gun.

“A hundred thousand dollars,” Simmons managed to get out. She looked out the window and saw a bluebird flitting among the branches of the tree. She envied that bird.

“I think I’m going to be sick again,” she said, but she didn’t get out of the chair. She felt that if she could stay exactly where she was, this would all pass.

Gun Guy put on his sunglasses, a not so subtle way of saying
we’re done here
. Frasier looked concerned, but not overly.

He stared at her a long time, then turned to Gun Guy as he put on his sunglasses. “Let’s go. Nothing more here.” Frasier paused at the door. “Sorry to have disturbed your morning.”

Then they were gone.

Ivar looked like he hadn’t shaved in days, which was odd because he rarely shaved. He was one of those guys, the ones who got a little scraggly here or there, but a full beard would be an impossibility. Today, though, the look was deeper than unshaven: disheveled, slightly crazed, perhaps even manic. He’d been giggling to himself at times, which he found disturbing at first but no longer noticed. Then there was the whistling. He’d never been a whistler, but it seemed that had changed along with a lot of other things.

There was no tune to the whistle, just noise. It would have sent anyone around him climbing the walls, except the only person around was Burns and he didn’t seem to care. He just sat in a chair looking at the monitor with his golden eyes, occasionally telling Ivar what to do.

Ivar sometimes stopped the whistling to look at what he was building. He wasn’t sure what it was. He’d been through every lab in the building pilfering what was needed. The place was empty at night, and during the day he stayed in this basement lair.

He liked that word:
lair
. Much better than
lab
.

He’d even taken apart other people’s projects to take what he needed. Probably ruined a few PhDs along the way, but this was big. Very big. Not big in a physical sense, although it did fill the center of the room, but he knew, on a very base level, that this was something very, very different, and that excited him.

Despite Burns, who’d put an explosive collar around his neck.

Despite the gun and the collar and the eyes, Burns was a lot easier to work for than Doctor Winslow. Which should have made Ivar wonder about the career path he’d chosen.

Ivar had felt this same drive as a kid when he’d decided to build the greatest fort ever in the dining room. He snuck into his sister’s room and pulled the comforter off her bed without
waking her. He’d pulled down his mother’s new brocade drapes in the living room, something she still reminded him of in the mandatory weekly phone calls to maintain the illusion he had a family. If he talked to her now, he knew he could convince her that they had served a much better function being part of his fort than as curtains.

So the drive was familiar, even comforting because of that, but he wasn’t building a fort. He stopped whistling for a moment and fingered an angry pimple on his neck, a thing growing as fast as the contraption in the center of the room. He saw the beauty in the mass of wiring and tubes and vacuum cases and batteries.

Fortunately someone had left their Prius parked behind the building overnight so he’d been able to pilfer the batteries protected by an orange cover that warned against touching or trying to do maintenance on them, as if they were some magical thing. High voltage, indeed. Of course the voltage was recharged by the brakes, so he’d had to improvise. He had appropriated the bike of Professor Whatever the Hell His Name Was, Ivar couldn’t remember. The professor was known all over UNC for pedaling to and from campus every morning and evening in his spandex, his warning light flashing on the back of his helmet, and taking up his allotted three feet of space in the two-lane roads, causing massive backups behind him, lots of middle fingers and screams, and smiling all the way to and fro.

He’d miss the bike, and that made Ivar happy.

Of course the expensive bike had required some adjustments as suggested by Burns, who seemed to know exactly what Ivar was building, but wasn’t sharing. In that, he was like Doctor Winslow. Ivar had rigged it to pedal backward as he was ordered. He wasn’t quite sure why it needed to be that way, but he knew that there was no going forward anymore. The bike was cabled to the
batteries, which were cabled to the mainframe, which was cabled to a huge glass incubator used for newly born rats that he’d had to go over to the psych labs to appropriate. They did some bad stuff in there to those rats, so taking the rats away from them made Ivar feel somewhat better. They used the pretty white ones that were sacrificed for science, not the ugly brown ones that were sacrificed by the exterminator.

The bike technically wasn’t powering the batteries, as it was somehow part of the entire device, in between the batteries and the rest of it, in some way Ivar didn’t comprehend.

At Burns’s order, Ivar had gone back and taken some of the rats, saving them from their fate on the end of needles from grad students studying the latest way to flatten out the brain, get rid of the sine curves, the lows, and the highs, too, because you can’t have one without the other.

He didn’t know why he’d been ordered to get the rats, but like his mother’s drapes, he knew they were essential and would fit in someplace because everything else Burns had told him to get was fitting someplace.

On his own initiative, Ivar had grabbed a large ziplock bag full of dog kibble from a grad student’s locker who thought that if kibble was good for dogs, it must be just as nutritious for humans. Ivar had thought that weird six months ago when he first saw the guy eating it, but now he chewed a handful and tossed a few to the rats, and they seemed to like it, too.

Burns didn’t seem to need food.

The rats, his nonhuman company, were watching him. He was sure that they turned their heads to the door as he left and seemed to wag their long pink tails whenever he returned, dragging a cart full of wires and circuits and whatever else he was told to scavenge.