Steel Breeze (21 page)

Chapter 21

Erin Drelick
stared for a long time at the sketch of the samurai mask. The fact that a
little boy, a boy now missing, had described this face made her shudder. It was
a hot summer day, and sitting beside the wall-length airport window, dressed in
her black slacks and shirtsleeves, she should have felt hot. But the thought of
Lucas Carmichael looking at this mask right now in some basement or barn, the
thought of the boy she had never met wetting his pants and waiting for the
masked man to do to him whatever gray and indistinct abominable thing he
imagined had been done to his mother chilled her in a way that seemed to glow
cold and blue from her core, as if her vertebrae were a string of ice cubes.

Was
she doing the right thing, flying to Ohio? Flying away from the zone in which Lucas
was likely to be found, alive or dead, within the next forty-eight hours? She
had seen the crime-scene photos on her tablet computer; those grim images were
sleeping in the memory chip in her lap right now. What was there that she
needed to see in person? The photos were bad—especially the ones of the blonde
girls—but they didn’t chill her the same way the mask did because in Ohio the
deed was done. It was past. The threat foretold by the mask was worse because
she could still do something about it if she caught the right scent.

But
going to the crime scene was what you did. There could be some detail, some bit
of information that might not emerge if she wasn’t there reading the scene and
the people, developing a rapport, and using her intuitive sense to ask the
locals the right questions.

Possible
intuitive connections. Was that enough to fly away from Lucas Carmichael for?

“He
could be anywhere,” she said aloud, looking now at a photo of the boy on her
screen.

Anywhere…but
probably not Ohio.

Why
Ohio? Why
this family, Tibbets? Why Massachusetts for that matter, and Parsons?

The
hours in flight would feel like being in a holding cell. Unable to connect to
the web, her hands would be tied. If she was going to dig in and try to connect
the dots, she had better do it here at the airport terminal before they boarded
her. She drummed her fingers, tapping her nails across the glass touch-screen. She
had to prioritize. An intuitive search process could take too long.

The
inflamed corner of her toe was broadcasting infuriating low-level pain again,
pain that thrummed below her consciousness most of the time, straddling the
threshold between actual hurt and a kind of itching sensation. She wanted it to
either go away or really hurt, not just flirt with hurt. She opened a search
engine, typed “Tibbets + Parsons,” and ground the toe of her shoe into the dark
blue carpet, reveling in the bright flare of actual pain, a sensation with
conviction.

* * *

Chuck
Fournier was trailing Agent Pasco through his own house, trying to interject
himself into the conversation, but Pasco was only interested in talking to
Ginny. Fournier had never seen his wife talk to an officer before. Well, not
within the framework of an interrogation, anyway, and he was horrified by the
spectacle. She wasn’t guilty of anything, but she still managed to answer every
question in a way that felt
way
too direct and incriminating to Chuck. She
was a wreck, and all she had to offer was the bald, guilty, nauseating fact
that she had let Lucas out into the backyard to play while she washed dishes,
and when she looked up he was gone.

“Was
the yard secure?” Pasco asked.

When
Ginny looked confused by the question, Chuck said, “There’s only the one gate,
and the latch is too high for Lucas to reach.”

“Detective,
you were not at home. I’m asking
Mrs.
Fournier about something only she
was in a position to observe.”

“I
just thought that seeing as it’s my house and I’m the only one who uses that
gate when I mow the lawn—”

“Don’t
worry, I’ll have plenty of questions for you soon. I want to hear all about
what made you think you could take the child home in the first place.”

Fournier
squeezed his chin and cheeks with the fingers of his right hand like he was
trying to wring a rag soaked with enraged anxiety dry and, managing to keep his
mouth shut, turned to face the fridge. He wondered if making a sandwich would
constitute some kind of
faux pas
. He was, after all, in his own kitchen,
and it wasn’t entirely clear to him at the moment if he was here as a cop or as
a suspect.

* * *

Erin
Drelick found an immediate connection between the names Parsons and Tibbets,
but not Lamprey. She knew she should turn off the tablet and put it back in her
briefcase, knew she should get in the boarding line that was now moving, but
she was staring at a black‐and‐white photo taken in August of 1945 on the
island of Tinian.

A
group of young men from the 509
th
 Composite
Group are standing in front of the riveted aluminum hull of an aircraft, a huge
beast of a plane judging by the small section that can be seen in the photo. Behind
them, one of the wheels and a segment of hydraulic landing gear are visible. They
are dressed in what look like plain, beige Boy Scout uniforms devoid of any
insignia. Only their hats vary in style. One looks like the visor cap of a
Marine or an airman, another is some kind of wool skullcap, and the tall,
serious man, second in from the left is wearing what she thinks of as a folded
newspaper boat hat—the hat of a Navy man, and sure enough, the caption
identifies the tall man who might be older than the flyboys surrounding him as
Navy Captain William (Deak) Parsons.

In
the center of the photo, a baby-faced young man, shorter than the others, with
a thick head of black hair to match his black eyebrows, stands with hands
clasped behind his back, looking like a man who would belong at the center of
every photo that ever captured him. The afterimage of a smile plays across his
face as if someone—probably him—has just cracked wise. Erin Drelick knows his
type from the Academy. Different eras may come and go, different styles of
clothing and music, different presidents and different wars, but if there is
one thing that America produces with consistency, it is cocky young men. The
caption identifies him as Col. Paul Tibbets.

Drelick
felt a sensation of groundlessness, as if she were already on her flight,
rising against a headwind. She had to work fast now, had to open as many
browser windows as possible and load them with information she could read in
flight when she would be unable to connect. She had found the photo of Tibbets
and Parsons by searching for images only, knowing that it could save time to
find two people with those names in the same photo for starters. Now she would
need to copy the full names into Wikipedia, but first another image search for
“Carmichael + Parsons.”

There
it was. A tingle passed through her stomach, a sensation that told her she had
just connected enough dots to see the big picture when she widened her field of
view. Here was a photo from a science fiction and fantasy magazine called
Teletrope
.
She clicked on it and found that it was from an interview the magazine had done
with Desmond Carmichael in 2006 at his home. The caption read, “Desmond
Carmichael in his home office with wife Sandy Parsons, whose photography
illustrates their forthcoming children’s book,
The Forest Queen
.”

Desmond
was seated at his desk, his swivel chair angled toward a slim, pretty woman who
sat at the end of a couch with her legs crossed and her hands folded in her
lap. Two objects were mounted on the wall behind the couple: a large framed
print of a mushroom encircled by what looked like an aura of wispy fairies, and
a Japanese
katana
.

The
frisson of pattern recognition flushed through Erin Drelick’s synapses—an infusion
of truth riding a wave of neuropeptides. It was a tenuous connection, she knew.
It was anything but legally admissible evidence, but she recognized the
familiar, if rare, sensation for what it was: the conjunction of disparate
elements into a form that would be absolutely concrete when the waters of
intuition receded—the solution to a puzzle.

The
killer had seen this photograph. Maybe he had stumbled upon it by chance or
maybe he had been searching like she had for the name
Parsons
, but when
the killer saw the sword and recognized it as a Japanese infantry blade, a
puzzle had been solved for him as well. Something had slotted into place like a
detonation cap into a bomb.

She
looked up. The line for boarding had run down to its end, and the uniformed
lady behind the microphone was looking at her with a raised eyebrow that said,
Do
I really need to turn this thing on just to tell you it’s last call?
Drelick
stood up to show that she was coming and took a tentative step toward the gate,
toward the portable corridor through which she would soon walk with the noise
of aircraft machinery rushing in through the gaps, toward the flight crew that
would greet her at the end and look at her boarding pass.

Flight
crew. She tapped a tab on the screen in her hand as she walked.

The
plane that Tibbets and Parsons and the others were standing in front of was the
Enola Gay
, a B-29 Superfortress. And not just any B-29. This was the plane
that had dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Tibbets,
the pilot, had named the plane after his mother. The bomb had a name too:
Little Boy. Drelick imagined that bomb dropping out of the behemoth aircraft
like a baby out of a mother’s womb.

The
birth of an apocalypse.

She
clicked again. If there was a midwife for that birth it was Deak Parsons of the
Manhattan Project, he who had spent a sleepless night on August 5
^th
 in the cramped munitions
bay of the bomber, practicing the maneuver he would execute in flight the
following day: loading the mammoth shell with powder charges and arming the
mechanism that would drive the uranium slugs together with divine velocity like
the sound of one hand clapping.

She
could read the rest on the plane. She raised a finger to turn the tablet off,
and froze. Looking at the corner of the screen to check the time and confirm
that she wasn’t getting her ass in gear quite as late as the woman at the desk
was implying with that expression, she saw the date: August 6
^th
.

* * *

Chuck
Fournier decided that making a sandwich while watching his wife get
interrogated by the FBI would be in poor taste. Instead, he grabbed a jar of peanuts
from the cabinet, screwed the lid off, and tossed a handful into his mouth,
dropping a few on the kitchen tiles. He bent over and plucked the runaways from
under the bottom cabinets; he didn’t want Pasco to think he was a slob or
something. His knees popped on the way back up, and he had an embarrassing
moment when he thought he might not be able to get fully upright again.

Pasco
was looking at him with a funny expression on his face. What did you call that,
bemused?
More like fascination. What was with this guy? Pasco slowly
swiveled his attention back to Ginny. Chuck tossed the dropped nuts into the
trash under the sink and brushed his hands together over the steel basin to
knock the crumbs off. He wasn’t really tuned in to the line of questioning. He
was thinking that the nuts he’d just tossed weren’t really dirty; Ginny kept
the place spotless. He wondered if Pasco was a two-second-rule kind of guy. Would
the fact that Chuck had tossed the nuts in the trash instead of tossing them
back make Pasco think the floor
was
dirty? Who would know the
cleanliness of the floor better than the man who lived here? Chuck was deciding
to get a fucking grip and forget about the nuts, it wasn’t like Pasco was from
Child Services or something.
Get a fucking grip, Chuck, and start acting
like a man because this is your turf, your territory. And not just the house
but the whole goddamn town.

Running
his foul mental-mouth off was already helping him feel more like himself. He’d
tried to clean the language up a bit while Lucas was in the house, but it put a
strain on the brain. Maybe censoring himself was what had knocked him out of
his groove so that somewhere along the line he’d let this Mexican desk jockey,
this
cocksucker
—there you go, feelin’ better already—get the upper hand.

Having
a little something for the ol’ blood sugar was also helping. Maybe he could
focus now and stop feeling like everything was sliding into the shitter off a
table with a broken leg. One mistake was all it took sometimes. One good mistake,
and like a broken table leg or a blown-out tire, the three good ones didn’t
matter anymore.

Pasco
was yammering about the “child’s disposition.” Ginny was making noncommittal
vocalizations that weren’t even words, but maybe that was good. Maybe she was
thinking right after all. If he had a nickel for every time he’d told her about
a dumbass who could have got away with something if the dumbass had enough
sense to keep his trap shut, he could buy a decent cigar. So maybe she knew that.
Hell, she watched enough TV she ought to know it by heart.