Redheads (30 page)

“That’s enough. Close the bag.
”

Douglas looked at the man’s eyes a last time and then zipped the body bag closed. He could already feel the room receding, reality backing off as his mind withdrew down a long tunnel.

“
Go to the steering room
.”

He went, dizzily, a wind blowing in his ears that couldn’t have been there. The steering room was at the back of the ship and held the hydraulic gear that controlled the rudder. The second body bag was here, zipped closed. The room was covered in blood, the rubber flooring slick with it.

“Mop it down.”

He did, for thirty minutes, and then the thing told him to stop.

“Get the bag.
”

He picked it up from one end, and it wasn’t that heavy. Part of him knew why.

“
Drag it up to the stern deck
.”

He went back up into the air the way he had come down after throwing the garbage bag overboard. The thing followed him and then it was there, right behind him, speaking with its breath on his neck.

“
Open the bag.”

He hesitated.

“Open it
.”

He unzipped the bag and she was in there, the girl whose murder he didn’t try to stop. She looked to be no more than twenty. Neither her face nor her red hair had been touched, but the rest of her was mutilated. One arm was missing and both breasts were gone. A pair of handcuffs was locked onto the wrist of her intact arm, one cuff locked around her wrist and the other cuff free and dangling. He understood then, and the thing’s voice told him what he already knew.

“The other cuff is for you. Put it on.
”

He knelt and reached into the girl’s open stomach and took out the cuff. He put it over his left wrist and clenched it.
This is a dream, this is a nightmare. None of this is real
.

“Pick her up.
”

He held her to his chest and stood, lifting her out of the bag. The sun was setting and the ocean was a deep jade green shot with white in ship’s the churning wake. It looked cold.

“Jump.
”

He let himself fall forward, the weight of the girl carrying him over the rail and thirty feet down into the water. He hit head first with the girl still held in his arms. Now he was out of the reach of the thing and its voice, and he was Captain Bryce Douglas again. He was all the way back. But there was no point in trying to come to the surface, so he kicked his legs to propel himself downwards. His last thought before he took in a searing lungful of cold green ocean was of the man in the body bag, the thing’s prisoner. They had understood each other, he was sure of it. Maybe he wouldn’t go to hell. Maybe he had seen his moment and taken a chance to do the right thing, like a man. He held the girl tightly and opened his mouth for the last time.

Chapter Thirty-One

They finished their breakfasts and lingered over their second cups of coffee, and then Julissa brought the laptop back to the table and turned on its screen.

“We’ve got him,” was all she said.

Chris leaned close to her and looked. The computer showed a street map with red circles where the routers were located. The map was a city he knew well.

“San Francisco,” Chris said. All five circles were clustered within about six blocks in the Inner Sunset. “He must live nearby, walks out to find free Internet when he wants to do his work.”

“It’s a good bet.”

“If we were in San Francisco, could you find him?”

“If he’s still there, using his computer, we’ve got a shot,” Julissa said. “Finding the routers was easy, but finding the computer will be a lot harder.”

“I’ll book our tickets as soon as we get back to the hotel. If we leave Boracay this afternoon we can probably be in San Francisco in twenty-four hours.”

It didn’t take long for Chris to pack his room after he booked their tickets. He put the duffel bag with his clothes on the porch and sat down next to it, waiting for Julissa. It worried him they hadn’t heard from Westfield. For that matter, it worried him that it was so easy to trace the hacking to a neighborhood in San Francisco. And then there was Julissa. Maybe he was worrying about San Francisco to avoid worrying about her. He thought about their night, how perfectly they had fit together. He thought about the way she had ridden him, her hair spilling across his face and her breasts brushing his chest, and thinking through the memory of it, he realized throughout the entire act of their lovemaking, he had thought only of her and not of Cheryl. It was too early to wonder if they would still be together after they were finished with this.

That sort of thought had too many presuppositions—that they would finish at all, that they would both be alive at the end of it.

At every step of the trip, Chris felt their safety slip away: when they showed their passports to the guard at the airport entrance and then a second time to the guards at the metal detector and x-ray machine, and yet a third time when they paid their airport tax. Then they were on the propeller plane to Manila, and upon landing their bag was searched and their passports inspected again. They paid their airport exit tax and took a taxi to the international terminal and went through the same process to reach their next flight, except here, in the capital, their passports were entered into computers instead of ledgers.

Then there were the cameras.

There were video cameras at the security checkpoints and at passport control, and video cameras at the jetway where they would show their tickets the last time to get on the plane. The cameras’ gray wires snaked to the ceiling and disappeared, carrying the video feed with them, perhaps to the Internet. An American in khaki pants and a Hawaiian shirt stood at a newsstand and stared openly at Julissa and only turned away when Chris caught his eyes and started to walk over. The American turned and disappeared into the crowd.

They found a cafe in another part of the airport and he left Julissa at a table in the back, out of the view of the crowded terminal hallway. He went to the counter and ordered coffees, paying with his credit card. Chris looked for the American in the Hawaiian shirt but didn’t see him again. He told himself it was normal. Julissa was beautiful; therefore, men would stare.

They sat across from each other with their laptops. Chris searched the Internet for any sign of Westfield. A simple Google news search for Westfield’s name brought him to the story right away. It was a video on the website for KRQE News Channel 13 out of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The thumbnail image on the link to the video showed Westfield’s beat-up blue van parked in front of a rundown motel. Police tape cut across the front of the image. Under the image was a headline:
FBI Investigates Double Murder in Carlsbad
.

“You’ll wanna watch this.”

Julissa moved to the other side of the table and looked at Chris’s screen.

“Oh shit.”

Chris clicked on the link and waited for the video to load. They both leaned close to the laptop so that they could hear the audio over its small speakers. Chris lowered the volume so no one else in the cafe would hear.

The video opened with a newscaster sitting behind a desk in a studio. As he spoke into the camera, a newsreel played in a box to the left of his head.

“Yesterday’s double murder in Carlsbad took a new twist today when agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced the FBI is taking the case off the hands of local officials.”

The newsreel showed video of the murder scene, presumably shot the day before. Policemen and crime scene teams were moving in and out of the hotel room beside Westfield’s van. The camera panned to show a white-sheeted stretcher being loaded into a black van.

“The FBI made the announcement today after two of its agents removed the bodies of both victims from the Eddy County morgue.”

Now the video cut to a shot of a man in a blue FBI windbreaker standing in front of a concrete Federal building in Albuquerque. There were other news crews around and the man was in mid-sentence.

“—all we can say at this time is that there’s an FBI interest in this case. Both victims were preliminarily identified as persons of interest in an ongoing Federal investigation—”

“There any terrorism connection?” an off-screen reporter asked.

“No comment.”

“How were they identified?”

“The victims’ profiles matched information in the State Department’s biometric database.”

“You know the victims’ names?”

The FBI man blinked. “That’s an ongoing investigation. I don’t have any comment on that.”

“Is Captain Westfield a suspect?”

“Captain Westfield is a person of interest and we would like to talk to him. That’s all.” The man turned and went up the steps. The shot cut back to the newscaster in the studio.

“Our field reporter Kate Bledsoe is on the scene in Carlsbad with more.”

Now the video cut to a feed from the motel parking lot. The reporter Kate Bledsoe stood in front of the motel. She wore a tight khaki blouse and blue jeans and her booted foot was on the curb. In the desert behind her, Chris could see the neon sign for the Caverns Motel and below that the plastic letters that spelled out
Free Wi-Fi
and
Vacancy
. This story was starting to make sense. Their warning had been too late.

“I’m standing on the scene at the Carlsbad motel where police responded last night to a shooting. They found two unidentified men dead in the parking lot and in one of the rooms. One had a gunshot wound to the throat and the other to the back of the head. Police reported both men were wearing black combat fatigues and were armed with illegally modified sub-machineguns.”

She pointed, and the camera panned across the desert and focused on a low, boulder-strewn hill.

“Police say the shots were fired from this hill. Investigators found a sniper’s nest and recovered cartridges from a 30.06 rifle.”

The camera zoomed on the hill and Chris could see a low rock wall built between two boulders. He imagined Westfield crouched behind it. Then the camera turned and focused on Kate Bledsoe again.

“One of the victims was found halfway inside room 109, which was registered to Aaron David Westfield. Investigators recovered Westfield’s blue 1982 Ford van from the hotel parking lot. According to the clerk, Westfield checked into the hotel that afternoon and paid in cash. Westfield was an officer in the U.S. Navy and retired with the rank of captain. Investigators are looking for any leads as to Westfield’s current whereabouts. They believe he’s from Washington State, but have no information on recent employment or activities, and no information on why he was involved with the men who were gunned down. Back to you, Dave.”

The video cut back to the newscaster in the studio. Kate Bledsoe was reduced to a little square over the newscaster’s shoulder.

“Kate, have the local police gotten any fingerprints off the shell casings they found?”

“No. They said that would be unusual. Firing the shell burns the prints off.”

“Does anything connect Captain Westfield to the murders?”

“Only that one of the bodies was found in his motel room, and his van and all his things were left at the scene, and the 30.06 rifle in the parking lot was sold in Carlsbad yesterday to a man using Westfield’s ID.”

“What’re the local authorities saying about the FBI’s sudden involvement?”

“The local sheriff’s office never asked the FBI to step in. According to the sheriff’s office, two FBI agents arrived in the morgue without warning and took both victims’ bodies into Federal custody.”

“What happened to the bodies?”

“They were loaded onto a plane and flown to Quantico, Virginia.”

“Does the FBI have a theory about who these men were, or why they were gunned down in Carlsbad?”

“No, Dave. The FBI hasn’t released any statement at all. Local police tell me they’re looking for answers and would appreciate any information from the public.”

Kate Bledsoe’s image disappeared from the screen and was replaced by the same picture of Westfield that Chris had first seen in Galveston: Westfield as a younger man, in his Navy dress whites.

“Police say this man, Aaron David Westfield, is a person of interest in the Carlsbad killings. Anyone with information on Captain Westfield is encouraged to call Crime Stoppers, or you can submit a tip online at www.tipsubmit.com.” The image of Westfield expanded to take up the full screen, while the website and phone number scrolled across the bottom in yellow lettering.

The video ended and Chris closed his laptop. Julissa had gone pale and was holding her coffee in her lap at an angle. Chris took it from her and put it on the table before it spilled on her legs.

“Maybe he got them both and switched vehicles?” Julissa said.

Chris shook his head. “He wouldn’t have left all his stuff.”

“When they came for Mike, they killed him and left him there. If Aaron’s body isn’t in the hotel, where’d it go?”

“Maybe they wanted him for something,” Chris said. “If they took him, he’s probably still alive. Otherwise, why bother?”