The Heaven Trilogy (26 page)

It came at midnight during one of those exhilarating moments just after a key to the entire theft had erupted in his mind like a flare. He thought of Lacy, possibly because the solution igniting his mind's horizon brought his focus to the future. Post-theft. His new life. Not that Lacy would fit into any new life, heavens no. Still, once her image presented itself, he could not shake it free.

He dialed her listed number with an unsteady hand and sat back.

Lacy answered on the fifth ring, just as he was pulling the receiver from his ear. “Hello?”

“Lacy?”

“Who is this?” She was not sounding too pleased about being called at midnight by a stranger.

“Kent. I'm sorry. Is it too late?”

“Kent?” Her voice softened immediately. “No. I was just going to bed. Are you okay?”

“I'm fine. I just thought . . . I just needed someone to talk to.” He paused, but she remained silent.

“Listen to me. Sounds stupid, I know—”

“Lighten up, Kent. I've been there, remember? You're no more
fine
than I am a porcupine.”

He leaned back against the cushions on the sofa and cradled the cordless phone on his neck. “Actually, things are good. Surprisingly good. I've got no one in the world to talk to, but apart from that rather insignificant detail, I would say that I'm recuperating.”

“Hmm. How long has it been?” Her voice sounded sweet and soft over the receiver.

“Couple months.” Had he told her about Spencer? Suddenly it was a lump rising in his throat instead of a hard-beating heart. “My son was killed in a hit-and-run four weeks ago.” He swallowed.

“Oh, Kent! I'm so sorry. That's terrible!” Her voice trembled with shock, and Kent blinked at that. She was right. It was terrible—mind numbing, really. And he was already forgetting the tragedy of it all. So quickly. That made him what? A monster? “How old was your son?”

“Ten.” Maybe this was not such a good idea. She was bringing things back into clear focus.

“Kent, I'm . . . I'm so sorry.”

“Yeah.” His voice sounded unsteady—choked with emotion. Two thoughts slinked through his mind. The first was that this emotion was redemptive—he did care after all; he was not a monster. The second was that the emotion was actually more self-pity than mourning over loss—lamenting the notion that he was indeed a monster.

“I don't know what to say, Kent. I . . . I think I know how it feels. Have you had any counseling?”

“A therapist? No. But I have a mother-in-law, if that counts.”

She chuckled nervously. “What about a pastor?”

“Religious counsel? There was plenty of that to go around at the funeral, believe me. Enough for a few hundred years, I would say.” What if she was religious? “But no, not really.”

The phone rested silently against his cheek. “Anyway,” he continued. “Maybe we could talk sometime.”

“We're talking now, Kent.”

The comment caught him off guard. “Yes. We are.” He felt out of control. She was stronger than he remembered. Maybe the comment about religious counsel had been misplaced.

“But we can talk more whenever you're ready,” she said. “I couldn't very well turn down an old friend in need, now, could I?” Her voice was soft again. “Really, call me whenever you want to talk. I know the value of talking things through.”

He waited a moment before replying. “Thank you, Lacy. I think I would like that.”

They talked for another half-hour, mostly about incidentals—catching up stuff. When Kent hung up, he knew he would call again. Maybe the next day. She was right: Talking was important, and he had some things he wanted to talk about.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Week Ten

THE FIRST real bump in the road came the following Monday.

Kent sat hunched over a tiny table in the coffee lounge in Barnes and Noble Booksellers after leaving work early to run some “errands”—an activity he knew would quickly outlive its plausibility as a valid excuse for leaving the bank. After all, how many errands could a single man without a life run?

He'd scoured the shelves, found two books, and wanted to make certain they contained the data he was after before making the purchase.
The Vanishing Act
lay at an angle on the green-tiled tabletop before him. The other book,
Postmortem Forensics,
rested open between his hands, spread to a chapter on skeletal remains.

Within five minutes he knew the books were perfect. But he decided to read just a little further in one particular chapter. Like another article he'd gleaned off the Internet suggested, the editor here was confirming that a gunshot wound would not bleed after death. If the pump wasn't pumping—if the heart wasn't beating—the blood would not flow. But he already knew that. It was this bit about the effects of high heat to flesh and skeletal remains that had Kent's heart suddenly drumming steadily.

He flipped the page. Human flesh was rather unpredictable, sometimes flaming to a crisp and other times extinguishing itself midburn. Various accelerants assisted the burning of flesh, but most left a residue easily detected in postmortem forensics. Gasoline, for example, left a detectable residue, as did all petroleum products.

Kent scanned quickly down the page, tense now. What then? If he could be certain of the flesh burning . . . A sentence jumped out at him. “Magnesium is sometimes used by mortuaries to—”

“Excuse me, sir.”

The voice startled Kent, and he snapped the book shut. A middle-aged man sat across from him, smiling past wire-framed glasses. His black hair was swept back neatly, glistening atop a small, pointy head. A pinhead. He was dressed not unlike Kent himself: tailored black suit, crisp white shirt, red tie held snugly by a gold tie bar.

But what had Kent's pulse spiking was the fact that the stranger now sat down at Kent's table, elbows down and smiling like he had been here first. That and the man's piercing green eyes. Like snowboarder Cliff 's eyes. He sat, stunned, finding no words.

“Hello.” The stranger grinned big. His voice seemed to echo low and softly, as if he'd spoken into a drum. “I couldn't help noticing that book.
Postmortem Forensics,
huh? Is that the kind of book that tells you how to carve someone up without getting caught?” He chuckled. Kent did not.

The man calmed himself. “Sorry. Actually, I've always been rather interested in what happens after death. You mind if I look at the book? I might want a copy myself.” The man stretched out a big tanned hand.

Kent hesitated, taken back by the man's audacity. He held out the book. Was it possible this man was an agent, somehow on to him?
Relax, Kent. The crime is nowhere but in your mind. He fixed his jaw and said nothing, hoping the man would catch his disinterest.

The stranger scanned through the book and stopped dead center. He flipped the book around and showed a centerfold of a spread-eagle corpse. “Now where do you suppose this man is?” he asked.

“He's dead,” Kent answered, “in a grave somewhere.”

“You think?” The man's eyebrow arched. “You think your son is in a grave somewhere as well, then?”

Kent blinked and stared at the man hard. “My son?” Now he was growing angry. “What do you know of my son?”

“I know that he was struck by a car a month ago. He say anything to you before he died? Something that morning before you left, perhaps?”

“Why?” Kent demanded. Then it hit him. “Are you a cop? Is this part of the investigation of my son's death?”

“In a matter of speaking, yes. Let's just say we are reviewing the implications of your son's death. I understand you were angry when you left him.”

Linda!
They had interviewed the baby-sitter. “I wouldn't say angry, no. Look, mister. I loved my boy more than you'll ever know. We had a disagreement, sure. But that's it.” What was going on here? Kent felt his chest tighten. What was the man insinuating?

“Disagreement? Over what?”

The man's eyes stared like two green marbles with holes punched in them, dead center. It occurred to Kent that the eyes were not blinking. He blinked and wondered if the man had blinked in that split second while his own eyes flicked shut. But they did not look as if they'd blinked. They just stared, round and wet. Unless wet meant that he had indeed blinked, in which case maybe the man had blinked. If so, he was timing it pretty good.

The agent cleared his throat and repeated himself. “What was your disagreement over, Kent?”

“Why? Actually we really didn't have a disagreement. We just talked.”

“Just talked, huh? So you felt pretty comfortable leaving him in the doorway like that?”

Kent flashed back. “How I felt is none of your business. I may have felt like throwing up, for all you should care. Maybe I'd just ingested a rotten apple and felt like puking on the street. Does that make me a murderer?”

The man smiled gently. His eyes were still not blinking. “Nobody called you a murderer, Kent. We just want to help you see some things.”

“Do you mind if I see your credentials? What agency are you with, anyway?”

The man casually reached for his pocket. He found a wallet in his breast pocket and pulled it out.

Kent did not know where the man was headed. Didn't even know what he meant by what he'd said. He
was
aware, however, of the heat snaking up his neck and spreading over his skull. How dare this man sit here and question his motives? He had loved Spencer more than he loved life itself !

“Listen, sir, I don't know who you are, but I would die for my boy, you hear?” He didn't intend for it to come out trembly, but it did. Suddenly tears blurred his vision, but he stumbled forward. “I would lay down my life for that boy in a heartbeat, and I don't appreciate anybody questioning my love! You got that?”

The stranger pulled a card from his wallet and handed it to Kent without moving his eyes. He didn't seem affected by these emotions. “That's good, Kent.”

Kent dropped his eyes to the card: “Jeremy Lawson, Seventh Precinct,” it read in a gold foil. He looked up. The agent's wire glasses rode neatly on his nose above a smug smile.

“I'm just doing my job, you realize. Now, if you'd rather, I can haul you in and make this formal. Or you can answer a few questions here without coming apart at the seams on me.” He shrugged. “Either way.”

“No, here's just fine. But you just leave my son out of this. It takes a real sicko to even imagine that I had anything to do with his death.” He trembled saying it, and for a moment he considered standing and leaving the cop.

“Fair enough, Kent. And to be straight with you, I believe that you did love your son.” He offered no more but sat there, smiling at Kent, unblinking. And then he did blink, just once. Like camera shutters, snapping a shot.

“Then that's that,” Kent said. “If you've done your homework, you'll know that I've been through enough these last few months as it is. So if you're finished, I really need to get back to work.”

“Well, now, that's just it, Kent. Seems to me there just might be more here than meets the eye.”

Kent flushed. “Meaning what?”

“Have you talked to anyone else about this?”

“Talked to anyone else about
what?”

The agent grinned knowingly and licked his forefinger. He turned the page to the book and glanced at its contents. “Just answer the question, Kent. Have you talked to anyone else? A stranger, perhaps.”

Kent felt his hands tremble, and he removed them from the table. “Look. You're speaking a foreign language here. Do you know what I'm saying? I don't have the slightest idea what you mean by any of this. You come in here haranguing me about my son—practically accuse me of killing him—and now you want to know if I've talked to any strangers lately? What on Earth does this have to do with me?”

The cop may very well have not even heard him by his response. “A vagrant, say. Or a homeless man in an alley? You haven't talked to anyone like that recently?”

The man pried his eyes from the book and stared at him, that ear-to-ear grin still splitting his jaw. Kent squinted, sincerely wondering if Mr. Cop here hadn't slipped over the edge. His own fear that this bizarre exchange led anywhere significant melted slightly. What could a vagrant possible have anything to do with . . . ?

Then it hit him, and he stiffened. The cop noticed, because his right eyebrow immediately arched curiously.

“Yes?”

The vagrant in the alley! They had talked to the spineless vagrant!

But that was impossible! That had been his mind playing with images!

“No,” Kent said. “No, I haven't talked to any vagrant.” Which was true enough. You did not actually talk in your dreams. Then again he
had
seen the vagrant in the alley prior to the dream, hadn't he? The man's summary of life whispered through Kent's mind.
Life suckssssss . . .
But he hadn't actually talked to that vagrant either.

“Why don't you ask me if I've had wine and cheese with the president's wife lately? I can answer that for you, as well.”

“I think you did talk to a stranger in an alley, Kent. And I think he may have told you a few things. I want to know what he told you. That's all.”

“Well, you're wrong. What? Some fool said he told me a few things, and that makes me a suspect in the crime of the century?” Kent almost choked on those last few words.
Control yourself, man!

“Crime of the century? I didn't say anything about a crime, my friend.”

“It was a figure of speech. The point is, you are groping for threads that simply do not exist. You are badgering me with questions about events that have nothing at all to do with me. I lost my wife and my son in the last few months. This does not automatically place me at the top of some most-wanted list, am I right? So then, unless you have questions that actually make sense, you should leave.”