The Hysteria: Book 4, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (12 page)

“The bags in the foyer,” Riehl said.

“Oh those. Those are from my last trip.”

“When was that?”

“Oh…last week.”

“Where did you go?” Riehl’s voice was rising.

“Out of town, just a short trip. I went to the beach.”

“Ms. Young,” I butted in, “did you ever meet Jamie Witherspoon? Megan’s ex-husband.”

“Maybe? I don’t remember him if I did.”

“He knows you,” Riehl said.

“Maybe he shares my opinions on gun control? I’ve been vocal on that issue for a long time.”

“He wasn’t at the fundraiser,” Riehl said.

She shrugged non-committally, but her eyes were deadly serious.

“How about Ken Hernando?” I said.

She didn’t blink. “Who’s that?”

“How about Esther Lee or Stan Woloski?” Riehl said.

“I knew Esther and had met Stan once or twice. They both had children in school the same time I did.”

“You really don’t like guns, do you?” Riehl asked.

Her whole face twitched. “N-n-n-no, I don’t. And I don’t like you much either.”

“Where’s Megan Turner?” Riehl said.

“I don’t know.”             

Riehl grimaced. “We know she was working with Jamie Witherspoon and we know Witherspoon is connected to you.”

I didn’t follow the leaps in his logic but I didn’t need to. He was just fishing, trying to get her to think we knew more than we did. But his question set me to thinking, about Witherspoon and Megan and Melanie and old man Turner and Dorothy herself, and for a brief, sublime moment, I almost saw the whole picture in my mind.

It was right there, just beyond the horizon.

Before I made the connection, though, Dorothy Young shot Agent Riehl in the chest.

Riehl fell backward like he’d been hit by a cannonball and clutched at his chest as he went down. I got my bearings before his ass hit the ground and fell into a diving roll. The gun I’d borrowed from Turner’s study, an old-fashioned revolver, fell out of my pocket as I somersaulted toward the patio table.

“Don’t!” Dorothy yelled.

I didn’t have time to figure out who she was yelling at. I’d lost my gun and had to go for one of the tools on the table. I picked up the shears and threw the table on its side and dove for cover as a bullet tore through the wood.

“I thought you were okay,” Dorothy said.

She was apparently talking to me.

I said, “What?”

“I don’t understand…I thought you were okay.”

I had no idea what she was on about but now I heard Riehl’s ragged breathing. I looked out around the side of the table and saw him sprawled on the walk, hand to his chest. There was no blood. He must have had some new micro-thin vest on under his clothes, courtesy of DARPA.

Dorothy pointed the gun at me and approached the table. “Eddie McCloskey, I heard you were okay.”

I ducked my head back out of her line of sight. “Megan told you I was okay.”

She stopped moving.

I said, “I saw her this morning.”

“You saw her?”

Ten seconds ago I almost had this thing figured out, now I was stuck behind an upended picnic table holding a rusty pair of gardening shears and making this up as I went along. If she was yapping, she wasn’t shooting. So I had to keep her talking and maybe I could get something out of her.

“She came to see me.” I wasn’t about to let the facts get in the way of a good story. “With her youngest sister, Mia.”

Riehl was still groaning. I didn’t want Dorothy finishing the job. At the same time, I didn’t want to hurt her.

“Were they here too?” I said.

“Why did you grab the shears?” she said.

My instinct told me to drop the shears. My brain told my instinct it was stupid.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” I said.

“But he’s—”

There was a quick rush of air then Dorothy gasped and was choking. I dared a peek from around the table. What I saw next was just one of the many horrors I’d see that day that I’d never forget.

Dorothy Young had fallen to her knees. A knife was embedded in the hollow just below her throat. Her old, wrinkled hands dropped the gun and went feebly up to the knife as blood pumped with each heartbeat out of her.

It was so much blood.

And though Dorothy had taken the blade in the throat, seeing her like that reminded me of my brother dying at Eamon Moriarty’s hands.

***

“She was coming for you,” Riehl said. “You were a dead man.”

“She was talking to me.” It was the first thing I’d been able to say since Dorothy’s death. My voice sounded unlike my own.

“She was lulling you.” Riehl groaned as he peeled off his black micro-vest. I could see where the bullet had punched him, the vest was an off-white color at the point of impact.

“Maybe, but she was talking.”

“That was a righteous kill. And by the way, you’re fucking welcome.”

I decided to play nice. “Thanks, man. I’m sorry…I’m trying to sort out what the fuck went wrong.”

He tapped the side of his head. “Her wiring is what went wrong.”

“This could happen to us, you realize that.”

“I do.” He tossed the vest aside. His chest was massive and already bruising from the gunshot. “But like Pater said, we signed up to take big risks.”

“Why’d you use a knife?”

“I lost hold of my gun when the bitch shot me.” Riehl was still having a hard time talking. He examined his chest. “She was coming at you. I had to do something.”

I should have felt for him. The guy had nearly gotten plugged but I couldn’t muster an ounce of sympathy. The last thing in the world this felt was righteous to me. Dorothy had been off her rocker and we’d killed her. I hadn’t thrown the knife but I felt responsible. She was dangerous and maybe there’d been no other way once she pulled the piece and shot Riehl point-blank. But I couldn’t help feeling that we’d bollixed this, somehow serving as catalysts to her meltdown.

“We fucked this,” I said.

“Don’t turn into a weepy-eyed navel-gazer on me.” Riehl retrieved his gun out of the hydrangea next to the walkway. “It was her or us. And we learned something. Next time we go into a situation like this, we know what to expect.”

I’d also learned a few other things but I kept them to myself. I’d been close to solving this mess. So close. Then Dorothy had shot Riehl in the chest and I’d lost the thread. Now I just had to wait for my brain to remake the connection. I needed those same synapses to fire in the right combination again and I’d have it.

The sirens wailed in the near distance. I forced myself not to look at Dorothy, who’d slumped to one side in death and had bled out all over her own patio.             

***

“Dorothy Young, the same woman who’s been trying to get the Second Amendment repealed for the last twenty years, had a gun on her person and tried to shoot you?” Detective Quick said.

“When you put it like that,” I said.

Riehl eyed the cop. “The situation has been explained to you, detective. You know our working hypothesis.”

Quick looked over his shoulder at the murder scene. “Yeah, sure. But why were you out here?”

“We had reason to believe Ms. Young had information relevant to our investigation,” Riehl said.

“Don’t fucking try to stonewall me, you federal asshole. This is my town and your boss promised full cooperation.”

“We discovered a list on Jamie Witherspoon’s computer,” I said. Riehl shot me an incredulous look. “Dorothy Young’s name was on it.”

“When exactly were you going to share this piece of information?” Quick looked from me to Riehl.

Riehl kept his eyes on me. “Why exactly are you sharing it now?”             

“Because I trust Quick, he trusts me, and it’s the right thing to do. If the fucking bureaucrats cooperated more across agencies, this country would be much safer. Didn’t you guys learn anything from—”

“Take your fucking pie-in-the-sky politics and shove them up your ass,” Riehl said. “You have no idea how to operate in the real world.”

He cuffed my arm and pulled me aside.

Quick said, “You two aren’t going anywhere till I tell you.”

Riehl ignored the detective and moved us out of earshot. “These people could all be affected. We can’t share what we know at this point. We’re too far along the curve in the model. From now on we assume the worst.”

“That includes us too, dipshit. We’ve been exposed to the same environmental conditions.”

“Not as long as they have.”

“That might not even matter.” I looked over his shoulder as they wheeled Dorothy Young’s body away. “Don’t pretend you didn’t just have a pissing match with local LE.”

Riehl was about to say something but his phone was buzzing. “We have a call. We have to leave.”

I shook my head. “Let’s talk to Quick, pool our resources. Take your ego out of this.”

“You don’t understand. We have to take this call.”

“Why?”

“It’s from Eamon.”

The cops had the street blocked off in both directions. I followed Riehl to our cars. Some clouds had moved in from the horizon and a breeze kicked up. The rain was coming. Riehl was still grabbing his chest where he’d been shot.

“You okay there, big fella?”

“What are you, my mother?”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“We aren’t friends, Amateur Hour. I got a kick watching you maneuver your way out of the vomitorium and onto the team but Manetti was right. You aren’t up to it and you’re reckless.”

“Let’s take the call from my car. Yours is a piece of shit.”

“Like that’s actually your car.”

We got into the corvette. A couple uniforms watched us from Dorothy Young’s front stoop. Quick came out the door and said something to them. The sixtyish couple across the street were standing at the edge of their front yard, watching the cops.

Riehl speed-dialed Eamon and put it on speaker.

“Agent Riehl?”

“We’re here, Eamon.” Riehl shot me a look. “Both of us for now.”

Eamon said, “I got a hit.”

***

I found the strip mall and parked far from the stores, close to the street. People were coming out of the organic food shop armed with smoothies. There was a local fashion store next to it with no business. Manetti was leaning against a black van, arms folded. She’d be gorgeous if she wasn’t a Class A bitch.

I parked and we got out.

“You okay?” Manetti asked Riehl.

“Not the first time I’ve been shot.”

“Hopefully the last.”

The sentimentality ended there. They went back to business immediately. They were driven, professional. Even though they’d given me attitude the whole way, I appreciated their commitment and self-sacrifice, all of it unsung. If they did their job well, nobody knew who they were or what they were doing. They were heroes. I respected the hell out of them, even if I didn’t like them.

Riehl said, “How are we going in?”

“The warehouse is a quarter click back the way you came.” Manetti bobbed her head in the direction. “Through the forest so they don’t see us.”

“Where’s Melanie?”

“I left her at the office. Nothing doing.”

“Alright. What did Eamon see?”

Manetti held her closed fist out. I offered my palm and she dropped a black strip the size of a pinhead into it. “Ask him yourself.”

“In my ear?”

Riehl pointed. “Peel this off, stick it on the back of your earlobe so no one can see.”

I followed his instructions. “Eamon? What are we walking into?”

His voice was clear through the transmitter, like he was standing next to me. “My connection is bad, but I saw five people.”

“Armed?” Riehl asked.

“With blades.”

I was playing a serious game of catch-up constantly with these people. “How does this work? Do you have a…live feed right now?”

“Intermittent.”

“What are they doing? What are they talking about?”

“I can’t hear them per se.”

“Speak English.”

Manetti shot me a dirty look. “Pater, is Eamon on the loop right now?”

I rolled my eyes. “That order goes for everybody: speak English.”

“Yes.” Pater’s voice was calm, his diction pitch perfect. “The feed is intermittent, like Eamon says, so we don’t have a whole picture. But we think someone mentioned Ken Hernando.”

“Wait.” Eamon’s voice was strained, like he was in the middle of lifting weights. “Someone might have said M-W-L.”

Riehl turned to me. “That means—”

“The man who laughs, caught that one. How about the rest of it? What is the loop, what’s the feed?”

“Sorry, Taxpayer.” Manetti smirked. “That’s classified information.”

I shook my head. “Okay, five people carrying blades. What else? Men, women? Ages? Where are they in the warehouse? Are they waiting for someone? What are they doing? Are they watching the doors? Did they post sentries? Are they expecting a fight? Who’s in charge? Are they just sitting around a table?”

Pater came on. “I’ll fill you in on the way. For now, Eamon needs his whole concentration.”

***

We rounded behind the strip mall. An employee was smoking behind the organic food store. If his customers saw him, they’d…consider filing an anonymous complaint with the boss eventually. He watched us with no apparent interest as we passed the dumpster and rounded into the woods. I brought my finger to my lips, making the universal sign of silence. He flipped me off and tossed his cigarette away before going back into the store.

Patterson said, “Five unsubs: three men aged anywhere from twenty-five to forty, two women who are in their twenties.”

“Do you know who they are?” I said.

“Unsub means unknown subject,” Manetti said.

“Have a primer ready for me next time. So Eamon doesn’t see Megan and he doesn’t recognize these people either?”

“He hasn’t had a chance to memorize the faces of all thirty thousand people living in the area, Eddie,” Manetti said.

“Then how are you going to figure out who they are if they don’t ID themselves in the convo?”

Nobody answered.

“What’s the setup?” Riehl stepped over a fallen tree. He’d put a new micro-vest on and was checking the action on his gun.

“They’ve been here for thirty minutes. Two of them are sitting in one of the old offices and the other three are acting like guards. My opinion: they’re waiting for someone.”

I couldn’t get over how old Eamon sounded.

“How did they arrive?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I tuned in after the program had started.”

I said, “How many cars do they have?”             

Pater jumped in before Eamon could answer. “Eamon’s range within this space is limited to the main floor and some rooms on the second story. He can’t see outside at all.”

“How did you know about this place?” I said. “What does it have to do with anything?”

“Megan told me about it,” Manetti said.

Riehl held up a closed fist. We stopped. They crouched, I followed suit. We waited like that for thirty seconds. I peered between Riehl’s body and an oak tree and could just discern one side of the abandoned warehouse.

“Somebody’s making the rounds.” Riehl owled his massive head around and spoke softly. “One of the men. Let’s get cozy. Ten paces in and hunker down, then proceed from there.”

“Hold on. I want the fucking back story here. What is the significance of this place?” I said.

For once, Manetti didn’t give me shit. “Ten-thousand foot view: this place used to wholesale carpets and upholsteries. It closed twenty plus years ago and once abandoned it became the spot for high schoolers. Megan used to come here with her friends.”

I didn’t like that. “Megan has a lot of fond memories and it’s out of the way. So you brought Boy Wonder Eamon out here to make a connection and you’ve been monitoring it ever since…”

“What’s the problem?” Riehl asked.

I could feel my mind trying to remake that connection from earlier. “Megan wouldn’t come here.”

“There are persons of interest in that building,” Manetti said.

“Yeah, but not Megan. And we’re not going to find her here. If she was hiding she wouldn’t go to the one place that’s been an open secret for twenty years, where anybody could find her or where she could easily bump into some upperclassmen looking to get hammered and screw.”

“Amateur Hour,” Riehl said, “we know she’s not here. Other people are here. With knives. It’s worth investigating, don’t you think?”

“What is your wider point, Eddie?” Pater sounded sincere.

“Something else is going on. I don’t know what that is but we don’t have the whole picture.”

“You’re really good at stating the obvious,” Manetti said.

“No, Agent Manetti. Eddie has a very good point. Megan wouldn’t come here.”

Megan wouldn’t come here…and with that, the right sequence of synapses fired again and my mind remade the connection from earlier.

I knew what was happening.

Problem was, I had circumstantial evidence at best and I didn’t entirely trust Pater and his team.

“Fair enough,” Riehl said. “Megan in her right mind wouldn’t come here. But she’s affected. And we’ve got a real-time play to make here, Pater.”

“Agreed. Move in and observe.”

Manetti was watching me. “You look like you just swallowed the canary.”

I opened my mouth wide.

She shook her head. I wondered when she’d last laughed at anything.

We went on, ever more slowly till I could see the entire side wall of the warehouse. The parking lot was long and wide, sized to accommodate delivery trucks, and completely overrun by weeds and grass. The wall facing us was riddled with holes and weather-beaten.

We crouched in the brush, about fifteen paces short of the tree line.

Riehl dropped his voice to a whisper. “Probably takes that guy three, four minutes to make his rounds.”

We waited to time it. The sentry came out from behind the other side of the warehouse a couple minutes later. He wore a heavy black overcoat. He was working on a cigarette. His walk was slow, deliberate. His eyes were active.

I dropped my voice. “I know this guy. Yesterday morning at the bakery. He and two shlubs chased me to my car.”

“Yeah, I heard they threatened you with plasticware and you ran off,” Riehl said.

“We know who they are,” Pater said through the earpiece. There was a short pause. “Peter Holyoke, Dan Chesley, Harvey Dosh. They’re late twenties.”

“This dude looks like he’s forty,” Riehl said. “Blonde hair, hasn’t shaved.”

“Sounds like Holyoke,” Pater said.

The guy wasn’t in bad shape, but Riehl was right. It had something to do with his face. He looked much older than late twenties.

“No priors, stable employment since graduation, no known criminal associates,” Pater said.

I said, “Absolutely no reason in any of their records why they’d be here in the middle of the day, playing soldier and spy.”

“Except one.” Manetti looked over at me. “It pains me to say this, but McCloskey’s right. MPI is a last resort diagnosis. But it’s a diagnosis all the same.”

“We need eyes and ears inside that building,” I said.

The sentry stopped at the corner of the building nearest us. His eyes scanned the woodland and seemed to settle on us. He stayed like that for an eternity of seconds. Then he took a last drag on his smoke and tossed it away before proceeding with his route.

I waited till the guy had marched the length of the side wall facing us and rounded the next corner. “You guys are all teched-up, don’t you have some kind of long-range listening device we could set up right here?”

“The office is in the middle of the building, too many walls and other obstructions between us,” Eamon said.

“And you can’t hear them, and you can’t really see them either?” I said.

“I see three people at the table, two have their back to me. They’re not talking.”

“Where’s the fourth?” Manetti had her gun out now. She tucked a loose strand of her black hair behind an ear. Her eyes scanned the building.

“…I don’t know,” Eamon said. “Can’t see him or her anywhere.”

“This place have a basement?” I asked.

“There is a sub-level,” Pater said. “It runs the expanse of the first floor.”

“Are we doing this?” Riehl asked.

“They could have eyes on this side of the building,” Eamon said. “Just give me another minute to see what I can see.”

“Won’t help us if you can’t locate and rule out the fourth unsub.” A little piece of me died when I fell into the federal jargon. “But you can help us another way.”

“How?” Eamon, Manetti, and Patterson all said at once.

I wasn’t dying to sneak into the warehouse where five people suffering from MPI, also armed with blades, were trying to meet in secret. But all the same it was the only play we had, and we weren’t any closer to locating Megan.

“Pater, you said Eamon’s ability was more than just remote viewing. Let’s see what he can actually do.”

***

“Go now!” Eamon said through the earpiece.

We went fast and we went silent across the blacktop and rounded the corner to the rear of the warehouse. There were about a hundred cigarette butts on the ground there. We found a doorway that had been missing its door for awhile.

“It worked,” Eamon said. “They’re still distracted.”

“What are they doing?” Riehl said.

“Trying to figure out what fell still. They have their backs to your direction.”

“Do you see the fourth—”

“He just came into the room.”

“The sentry?”

“No. Must still be making his rounds.”