Steel Breeze (20 page)

The
Palace of Pain had been designed with a sweeping global ambition in mind. Dreamed
up by a hick with a gift for machines, a man who had toured his home country extensively
with a carnival but had never left the continent, it nonetheless presented a
tour of the horrors of cultures far flung across history and geography and did
so with painstaking attention to detail, beginning with scenes from European
folklore—elements of the Brothers Grimm set in the woods and cottages of
Germany’s Black Forest—and extending to the headhunters of the South Pacific.

Lucas
went limp and silent as Bell carried his bound body into the first exhibit between
transported tree trunks. Even without dry ice to provide a heavy ground mist or
theatrical lighting to cast eerie shadows, the scene still suggested a haunted
forest to young eyes adjusting to darkness.

Bell
expected the power to be out, but he carried Lucas to the sidewall anyway and
parted a curtain of silk leaves to feel for the switch. When he flipped it,
there was a familiar heavy
clack
and
hum
, and the ceiling lit up
with constellations of pinprick stars, while the pale shadow play of wolf and
crow silhouettes embarked on their circular climb across the dusk-painted
walls, rising and falling, round and around the room.

Bell
felt the boy gasp at the scene—out of fear or awe he didn’t know, but he wished
he’d shoved the flashlight from his duffel bag into his jeans pocket before
bringing him in. It was a minor miracle for the place to have power at all, but
he would need to be careful about which lights he turned on. The farmhouse was
an electrician’s nightmare, each room on its own circuit to keep fuses from
blowing when the animatronics were running all day. Most rooms had triggers on
door hinges or motion sensors to choreograph the action and pace the progress
of visitors through the exhibits. He didn’t need Lucas freaking out at the
sights of the mummified aliens in the Egyptian room or the African cannibal
masks in the Congo room.

The
Hindu charnel ground was innocuous enough without Pete Gruen, who used to spend
his days crouching in there wearing only a loincloth and a coating of ashes,
gnawing on bones like a Saddhu on the banks of the river Ganges. The horrible
climax of the tour, the Mayan sacrificial chamber, was at the far end of the
building where the tour reached the Americas. The room they were headed for,
the room Bell knew best, came before that.

Moving
deeper into the interior, Bell flipped on the plain white house lights selectively,
which meant stumbling through several rooms in total darkness, clamoring
through sets revealed only partially by touch: fur, silicone, and the sticky
residue of theatrical blood.

When
they reached the Japan room, Bell left the lights off and set Lucas down on a
straw mat in the center of the floor.

Before
the frightened child could get his bearings, Bell ran back through the Palace
and out into the dazzling sunlight. He parked the car behind the barn, then took
the duffel bag with the food and bottled water in one hand and the silk-wrapped
sword in the other. Left hand. Right hand. Divergent paths, and he had yet to
choose.

Back
in the Japan room he turned on the lights and saw that Lucas had rolled across
the dusty floor and kicked through one of the paper screens. At least he hadn’t
hurt himself by tangling with the kimono clad automaton—the half-wax,
half-machine mannequin that knelt in the center of the room waiting for
spectators to trigger the floor tile that would initiate the
seppuku
sequence: mechanical arms plunging the dagger into the abdomen until the moment
when Bell would step forward and cut the head off, severing a dowel and
clearing the way for a blood tube to spray red sucrose across the floor.

When
the lights came on, Lucas craned his head around, his eyes darting, trying to
take in the whole scene at once. “What is it?” The boy’s voice was hoarse.

“It’s
an amusement park. It’s supposed to be scary. For older kids.”

“Why?”

“Why
what?”

“Why
do they want to be scared?”

“For
a thrill, I guess.”

“What’s
that?”

“A
thrill?”

“No,
that
. The guy.”

“Oh.
I call him Bob. He’s fake. Part of the scene.”

“What
are those?”

Bell
followed the direction of Lucas’s gaze to the trio of giant
taiko
drums suspended
from the ceiling. “Those are drums. There’s a machine that hits them with big
sticks to make a beat. They’re loud.”

“Oh.
Don’t turn them on.”

“I
won’t.”

“I
don’t like it here. I want to go home.”

“Just
rest, okay? Here, have some water.”

Lucas
shook his head. “Are you a bad guy?”

Bell
considered the question…. “I don’t know.”

“My
Daddy says bad guys usually think they’re the good guys.”

“Huh.”

The
boy’s smooth forehead furrowed. “Where’s my Daddy? I want him.”

Bell
went to a low table against the wall where he kept a few personal items that
blended in with the scene while lending it veracity: a brush calligraphy set
and a few loose sheets of rice paper. He had sometimes practiced his
kanji
when business was slow. Now he picked up the inkbottle and unscrewed the cap—stubborn
at first, it had been closed for so long. The brush was in poor shape, but he
smoothed out the strands, licked his fingers, and gave it a little twist.

“Did
you kill my mother?” Lucas said, sounding too much like an adult.

Bell
dipped the brush in the ink and stared at the clean square of paper. No reason
to wear gloves now, he thought. This would all be coming to an end soon. If
there were prints, so be it, they could be part of the message. He held the
paper straight with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, and stroked a
line. He thought about the trigger under the floor tile, about how the
execution scene played over and over, hour after hour, day after day, with only
a pause for cleanup and resetting. He thought of how he too, even with all of
his art, was still an automaton like the one on the mat. Someone stepped on a
spring and the sequence was set in motion. He merely watched, waited for his
cue, and cut.

“What
are you doing?” Lucas said.

Bell
didn’t answer the question until the last stroke was drawn. He blew on the ink
to speed the drying, then took another sheet of rice paper and squared it under
his left hand. Before drawing the same character again, he looked at the boy
and said, “I’m writing to your father…and to mine. You should pray that yours
finds us first.”

Chapter 20

Drelick and
Pasco gave Desmond a ride home. They parked behind his car in the driveway and
followed him into the house they had visited uninvited just hours earlier. Desmond
put a pot of coffee on, told them to have a seat, then went upstairs to brush
his teeth and put on a clean shirt. Pasco followed far enough to listen to the
man’s movements, but Drelick waved him back to the kitchen table. They both
looked at the ceiling and listened to the progress of his footsteps and the
pause at the top of the stairs where they imagined him looking in the mirror
that the landlord had just remounted over the patched hole in the wall. When
Carmichael had been on the second floor for longer than it should have taken,
Pasco started to get antsy. He drummed his fingers on the table and said,
“Think I’ll check on him.”

Drelick
shook her head. “He’ll be back.”

“You
clear him already? You think there’s no chance he killed either of them?”

“It
would be a hell of a coincidence,” she said. “I know he didn’t abduct his own
son because he was in custody when it happened. And I know he didn’t kill
anyone in Ohio last night.”

“Maybe
he has a partner, someone who grabbed the kid for him. Maybe he did read about
the Lamprey case and decided to use it as a cover, an opportune time to kill
his father-in-law. Just because he’s not part of a larger pattern of sword
murders doesn’t mean he didn’t do a couple of his own. You know that, right?”

“Yes.
Look, it doesn’t help that the police botched this as badly as they did, but
from what I gather since we’ve been here, there’s more evidence pointing away
from Carmichael than toward him. Let’s hear him out.”

Desmond’s
footsteps creaked heavily on the stairs. The two agents stopped talking as he
entered the kitchen and placed a manila envelope amid some toast crumbs and spilled
salt on the table. The envelope was soon joined by mismatched mugs from the
cupboard and a carton of milk from the fridge. Desmond poured the coffee, waved
at the milk, and said, “I’m afraid I’m out of sugar.”

Pasco
raised his mug toward Desmond. “Why ruin perfectly good coffee with milk and
sugar?”

Drelick
reached into the manila envelope and removed a creased white paper square with
bold black calligraphy on it. She looked at Desmond. He looked haggard, his
eyes rimmed pink in a way that suggested something more than water splashed on
his face while he was upstairs.

“Lucas
found that paper in a friend’s tree house the other day. It was folded into an
origami butterfly.”

“Have
you had it translated?” Drelick asked.

“It
says
Fly.
I think it was a warning, someone telling me to get Lucas away
from here. But then Phil took him…and was killed the following day.”

“Do
you think this was written by Phil Parsons’ killer?” Drelick again.

“Who
else?”

Pasco
leaned forward. “Why would someone intent on killing members of your family,
someone planning to abduct Lucas, warn you to flee with him?”

“I
don’t know. They’re going out of their way to give me messages, but the
messages are enigmatic, even contradictory. Did Fournier tell you about the
haiku someone wrote on my laptop?”

Drelick
felt Pasco looking at her and avoided meeting his eyes. She knew he thought
Carmichael might have written the poem himself. “Yes, I saw it,” she said. “The
police thought you wrote it yourself, whether you knew it or not.” She sensed
Pasco shifting in his chair, unhappy with her candor.

“Do
they think different now that Lucas has been taken?” Desmond’s fingers were
wrapped around each other like claws, each hand squeezing the other bloodless
where they made contact.

“I
don’t know what they’re thinking after you jumped on Fournier. It’s a wonder
we’re not having this talk back in your cell.”

“Well,
Chuck didn’t press charges because he knows he’s guilty of practically
kidnapping my son.”

“That
aside…they let you go, so it seems that their focus is more in line with ours
now.”

“And
that is?”

“I’m
looking for a cross-country serial killer.”

Desmond
looked down at the dirty tabletop and drew a ragged breath like a man buckled
over from a punch.

Drelick
said, “This can’t be news to you after your wife and father-in-law were killed,
after the messages you’ve received. You must have been thinking the same.”

Desmond
was nodding his head. “It’s just kind of fucked up to hear the words
serial
killer
from an FBI agent when your son is missing. Has this person you’ve
been tracking ever killed a child?” His voice broke on the words. He looked up
at her desperately, his arms wrapped tight around his abdomen. He looked cold,
as if he were on the other side of a glass door where the temperature was not
the same that she felt in the stale kitchen.

Drelick
looked at Pasco, using her eyes to keep him from talking while she chose her
words. Some details of the Ohio massacre were still being kept from the media,
but not for long. If he dared turn on a TV, Desmond would know everything
before she had even boarded her flight to Cincinnati in two hours. “There were
two children killed in Ohio,” she said. “Girls, older.”

“Christ.”

“But
Lucas going missing doesn’t necessarily mean he was taken by Phil’s killer. It
may have no connection to what happened in Ohio.”

“How
could it not?”

“There’s
no way that the killer in Ohio could have been in both places within that time
span. You used the word
they
earlier. Do you have reason to believe
there’s more than one person stalking your family?”

Desmond
sighed. “Maybe. When I visited Harwood in prison, I asked him about his
memories of the night Sandy was killed. He didn’t have much because he was a
blind drunk at the time, but he said that two angels in black robes handed him
the sword and told him he needed to confess what he’d done.”

Pasco
snorted. “Two angels? He give you anything more descriptive than that?”

“No.
But you might have better luck. You could spend more time with him.”

“Okay,”
Drelick said to Pasco, “That’s two meetings for you while I’m in Ohio. First priority
is Mrs. Fournier. Then follow up with Harwood. See if he has enough for a
sketch.”

“He
might start making shit up if he thinks there’s a chance of being acquitted,”
Pasco said.

Drelick
shrugged.

Desmond
said, “The police used a sketch artist with Lucas to get a picture of the man
who almost abducted him at the playground. Have you seen it?”

Drelick
felt a quick thrill of hope that things might start moving faster. “No. I’ll
have them scan it and send it to me en route. What can you tell me about it?”

“It
turned out he didn’t see the man’s face, just a mask, a faceplate from a samurai
suit of armor. I won’t be surprised if Harwood describes something similar.”

“I’ll
be asking him different kinds of questions than what you would have.” Pasco
said. “We might get height, shoes, voice type, et cetera. He probably remembers
more than he knows.”

Drelick
read the sick look on Desmond’s face, a face weathered with grief, now
preparing itself to erode to deeper strata. A face aged beyond its years. She
reached across the table and placed her hand over his forearm. “I don’t want to
give you false hope,” she said, “but if Lucas
was
taken by the same
people, if he didn’t simply run away…then it doesn’t fit their pattern to take
a victim to a different location. That’s a small thing, but it’s good, I
think.”

“Because
they usually kill their victims where they find them,” Desmond murmured.

She
nodded.

“What
could it mean? What if they took Lucas somewhere just because it was too risky
to do it at a cop’s house in broad daylight?”

“It’s
harder to take a live person with you. Even a child.”

“I
think Lucas would struggle. I think he’d make noise. That’s what I’ve taught
him anyway, if he remembers. But scared, I don’t know, maybe he would go
along.”

“I’m
speculating here, mind you,” Drelick said against her better judgment, but the
man needed
something
for the despair. “If we have
two
killers
working together, then this abduction while one of them is out of state…to me
it suggests hesitation, possibly a lack of conviction.”

“You
think the one capable of killing children is the one in Ohio?”

“He’s
probably not in Ohio any more, but I still need to go out there and
investigate. The police are setting up roadblocks on all of the main roads and
some of the smaller ones. We’re looking at flight records for the past few
days. We will likely catch him before he can return to this area.”

“How
do you know he won’t just go south, go in some random direction and leave the
country?”

“I
don’t.”

“Lucas
is his unfinished business,” Desmond said.

“Let’s
hope so, or we lose the fucker,” Pasco said. Drelick flinched. She would be
talking to him later about his bedside manner. To Desmond she said, “The
victims in Ohio were a family named Tibbets. Does the name mean anything to
you? Have you heard it before?”

Desmond’s
eyes flicked back and forth over the tabletop as he searched his memory. “No.”

“Maybe
Phil Parsons mentioned the name to you? Think.”

“No.
Sorry.”

“Well,
please give it more thought while we search for your son.”

Desmond
took his pen from his jeans pocket and wrote the name down on the manila
envelope. Drelick nodded at the paper square with the calligraphy. “Can I take
this with me? I’d like to have the paper and ink analyzed.”

“Please.”

She
took an evidence bag from her briefcase, and dropped the paper into it. “Thank
you, Mr. Carmichael. You have our numbers, and Agent Pasco will be nearby. I
have a plane to catch.”

“Don’t,”
Desmond said, standing up. “Don’t go to Ohio. You’re the first person who
believes that we’re being stalked, and you won’t find Lucas in Ohio.
Please
.
I can’t lose him. Not him too. I just…please. I don’t know how much time we
have.” His voice thickened as he begged. He gripped the chair for support.

Drelick
looked at Pasco. He looked as uncomfortable as she felt. “We’re going to do
everything we can to find your son, Mr. Carmichael,” she said, and to her own
ears the words sounded like the reheated assurances of a doctor who has seen
too many terminal cases. She needed to get out of here and do what she was good
at.