Redheads (17 page)

“I’ve been thinking along the same lines.”

“What I’m wondering is what we do with a guy like that after we’re done asking him questions.”

“Maybe we should just figure that out when the time comes. Based on the circumstances,” he said.

“I’m in this all the way. I’m not taking anything off the table and I’m not going to lose any sleep over what we do.”

Chris nodded. They sat in silence for a while and drank their beers. Chris finished his and set the empty bottle on the table.

“I’ll go pay,” he said. “Take your time.”

She watched him walk past the pool tables, across the small dance floor, and up to the empty bar. The college student came and took his credit card. Julissa continued to pick at the label of her beer and finally peeled it off the bottle and stuck it on the tabletop, smoothing it down around its edges. She wasn’t sure why she felt so nervous.

“Julissa!”

She looked up. Chris was waving her to come.

“You need to see this!”

Then Chris was motioning to the girl behind the bar.

“Can you turn off the music and turn that up? Please?” He was pointing at a TV behind the bar. Julissa couldn’t see it yet, but something in Chris’s voice had her moving fast. The bartender found the right remote controls, turning the music down and the TV up. The TV was showing CNN. A blonde reporter stood before a burning building, between two fire trucks. The building was a two-story stone-and-glass structure, half of which was completely lost in flames. The other wing of the building had smoke pouring out of the shattered windows. The firemen in the background were aiming streams of water at the flames and into the broken windows.

The banner headline underneath the image said,
Blaze Engulfs Genetics Lab in Massachusetts, 16 Feared Dead
.

“Oh shit,” Julissa whispered.

Over the reporter’s shoulder, the camera filmed a crew of firefighters approaching the building with a hose. They were in full protective gear and wore oxygen tanks on their backs. They entered the building through a broken ground-floor window.

Now the reporter was talking.

“…not sure if this is domestic terrorism or some kind of tragic accident. None of Intelligene’s employees are accounted for. Right now the first fire crew is going inside the south wing of the building. We’ve been told this is an unprecedented move at this stage in a fire. They’re risking it because people may be trapped in the building. Deputy Fire Chief…wait, someone’s talking in my ear piece.”

The reporter put a hand to her ear and listened for a moment. Behind her, the last of the four firemen entered the building. The hose trailed in through the window and black smoke poured out.

“Our mobile news truck has a scanner that can pick up the fire crew’s radio transmissions and we’re going to broadcast them live. We’re switching over to that now,” the reporter said. She stepped to her right and out of the frame of the camera’s shot. A new headline appeared at the bottom of the screen.

Live feed as Fire Crew Enters Burning Lab.

Julissa hadn’t realized it, but she’d taken Chris’s hand. She stood next to him, held tight and watched the screen. She heard the girl behind the bar say something.

“You from there or something?”

“Sort of,” Chris muttered. He didn’t take his eyes off the screen.

Then the live audio feed started. The firemen’s voices were muffled behind their oxygen masks and barely audible over the roar of hot air that blasted past their open microphones.

“We’re in a conference room. Furniture is…melted. No bodies.”

A different voice, “Can get through here.”

“Watch it.”

There was a long blast of static and then finally a voice emerged from it.

“We’re in the main lab. I see a body behind a collapsed table. Make that two. Wait a minute…hang on…”

For a moment the sound cut out completely. The camera went on filming the burning building and the fire crews on the outside who were losing their fight against the fire on the other half of the lab. The sound clicked back on.

“…oly shit, Chief, there are at least a dozen bodies here. They’re stacked in a pile. No heads. No fucking heads at all. Some are missing arms and legs…just ripped apart…Jesus fucking…”

There was a splintering crash and a roaring boom. A different voice came back.

“We gotta pull the fuck outta here. There’s no survivors. This place is gonna collapse in about thirty seconds. Now! Now! Now!”

On the screen, the amount of smoke billowing from the widows suddenly tripled. The front façade of the building teetered and then fell in a flaming cascade of bricks and glass. The first of the firefighters emerged from the shattered window and turned to help the others. One by one they made it out and then ran at a crouch away from the building.

Julissa looked down and saw she was squeezing Chris’s hand. He didn’t seem to notice. She tugged on his arm.

“Chris. Let’s go.”

They went straight from the bar to the valet stand, got into Chris’s car and pulled onto Kalakaua Avenue. Julissa sat in the passenger seat. She got out her cell phone, put it on speaker, and dialed Westfield’s number. It went directly to his voicemail and she left a message saying to call her. Then she called Mike Nakamura. His phone rang ten times and no one picked up. The voicemail answered on the eleventh ring.

“Jesus,” Julissa said, after she’d left a message and hung up. “What now?”

“We’ll go to my house. We’ll keep calling them.”

“What about Chevalier?” she said.

“He’s probably dead.”

“I believe in coincidences, but this is too much. It had to be because of us.” Julissa was thinking of the firefighter’s voice on the radio. Everyone at Intelligene had been ripped to pieces.

“I agree.”

“But how could the killer have found out about Chevalier?”

“I don’t know. But if he knows about Chevalier, he knows about us,” Chris said.

Julissa had already thought of that.

“Assuming that was him in Massachusetts an hour ago, we’re safe for now,” she said.

“Yes.”

Chris pulled onto the freeway. They followed it a few miles and then took the exit for the Pali Highway. The mountains ahead of them were capped in clouds. She tried calling Westfield and Mike Nakamura again, with the same results.

“Let me ask you something,” Chris said. “I already know what I think. If Chevalier was murdered because of his work for us, does that mean his email was true?”

Julissa looked out the window. There were waterfalls on some of the high cliff faces. Normally, she would have asked to stop at the lookout they were passing. They rounded a bend and sped into a tunnel.

“Yes. I think so. If the killer tracked him down and murdered him, then he was probably on to something.”

“Shit. That’s what I think too.”

“Unless—okay, here’s a weird theory. What if Dr. Chevalier just ran a genetic sequence and found enough normal information about a human being that we could have traced the killer? The killer finds out somehow—maybe Chevalier actually identified the person through known records and then made the mistake of confronting him. The killer hacks his account and sends us the email from Dr. Chevalier. Then he kills him. Now we’re left with nothing solid to go on.”

“Why bother sending us the email if he could just kill Chevalier and get rid of all the evidence?”

Julissa thought Chris was right. The explanation for the attack on Intelligene which made the most sense also required them to accept that the killer was not human. If they weren’t willing to accept that premise, then the attack would be hard to explain.

“Maybe it was just a coincidence,” Julissa said. “The reporter said something about domestic terrorism.”

“A dozen people dismembered and decapitated at the same lab that was sequencing his DNA? Less than ten hours after he sent his email?”

“It’s hard to swallow,” Julissa admitted. “But so’s the alternative.”

They had come out of the tunnel and were making a sweeping turn as the road curved and clung to the side of the Nuuanu Pali cliffs. She could see the east side of the island, which she remembered from a map she’d studied in Galveston. The map hadn’t shown the turquoise waters off the beaches of Kailua and Lanikai, or the darker water of cloud-covered Kaneohe Bay, but she recognized the towns of Kailua and Kaneohe, and the Marine Corps base that lay on the peninsula between them.

Fifteen minutes later they were at Chris’s driveway. They pulled off the road and drove down a steep hill. Both sides of the driveway were lined with mountain ginger and banana trees, and when they reached the flat lawn, he parked under an awning beneath a giant banyan tree. They walked through the grass to the house along a path of stepping stones. The house was two stories, with decks and balconies to give it views of Kaneohe Bay, Chinaman’s Hat, and the cliffs that towered over the road.

At the front door, Chris punched the code to his security system, waited for a green light, and then put his thumb over a fingerprint scanner next to the door. A second green light came on and the door opened electronically. A computerized voice, vaguely feminine, announced, “Front door. Disarmed. Ready to arm.”

Julissa watched Chris enter. He looked so fit, handsome and sane for someone who’d spent years breeding paranoia and rage and thinking of nothing but revenge. A man like him should have a long beard, live in a rented room, and wear the same overcoat every day. She followed him into his house.

“Let’s go up to my study,” Chris said. “I’ll send an email to Mike and Westfield. If they’re not answering their phones, maybe they can read email.” They went through the living room and up a koa wood staircase. His study had windows on three walls and looked out over the bay. She could see his boat moored in deeper water a few hundred feet from the end of his dock.

Chris woke his desktop computer from hibernation and pulled the chair back from the desk. “You can use this to look for news, and I’ll email the guys from my cell phone.”

Julissa nodded. “It bothers me they’re not answering.”

“Me too.”

Julissa put her purse on the desk and sat behind Chris’s computer. The purse had a laptop computer, a cell phone, two hundred dollars in cash, her ID and credit card, and her Sig Sauer with two extra boxes of .45 ACP rounds.

“It’s summer vacation—Mike could be snorkeling with his kids. Westfield’s probably driving across Texas out of cell phone range.”

“Too many coincidences,” Julissa said.

The doorbell rang and they both looked at each other.

“Mike?” Julissa said.

Chris picked up a remote control and turned on the TV mounted on the only wall of the study not covered with windows. He turned it to channel two and then scrolled through a list of security cameras. He selected a camera labeled
Entry
. The screen showed an image evidently filmed by a tiny camera mounted in the front door’s peephole. A man wearing an aloha shirt and khaki pants was standing on the doormat.

He was carrying a manila mailing envelope.

“Know him?” Julissa asked.

“No.”

Chris went to the phone on the desk and put it on speaker.

“Morning,” Chris said.

On the screen, the man looked up, then looked around. The intercom speaker must have been well hidden.

“Help you with something?”

“I got a delivery for a Chris Wilcox,” the man said. He had a Russian accent.

“Leave it on the door mat. I’ll pick it up later.”

“You got to sign for it.”

“Who’re you with?”

“City Express.”

“Supervisor over there still Doug Hirayama?” Chris asked. He opened the drawer to the left of Julissa’s leg and took out his Glock. She watched him take the safety off.

“Yeah, that’s him,” the man said.

Chris put the phone on mute.

“I’ve got no idea who the supervisor at City Express is. Neither does he. Doug Hirayama’s an attorney I used to work with.”

Julissa pulled the Sig Sauer from her purse.

The man outside clearly did not know there was a camera as well as a microphone. They saw him take a silenced pistol from behind the envelope and shift it to his right hand.

“You gonna sign for this thing or what?” the man said.

Chris took the phone off of mute. “Be down in a minute. I gotta get dressed.”

“Okay,” the man said. They saw the right corner of his mouth go up in a half-grin. “I’ll be right here.”

Chris turned off the intercom and then flicked the remote control until the TV screen showed small shots taken by all the exterior cameras around the house. He pointed at the screen.

“I’m going out the back door. You’ll see me here, here and then here,” he said, touching the video feed from each camera he’d pass. He dug into his desk drawer and found an earpiece for his cell phone. He put it on and clipped the phone to his belt.

“Call me now. Talk to me while I’m going around. If he moves, tell me where he’s going. Just say the number of the camera feed.”