The Syndrome (63 page)

The only person to visit McBride during the week he spent in the Davos jail was a gentleman from the American embassy in Bern, and he was very straightforward.

There would be no publicity about the incident at the Hotel Fribourg. Henrik de Groot would be treated for his condition at a private sanitorium in an undisclosed country. Whether the Dutchman was ever to be released would depend upon how much—or how little—he chose to remember.

Meanwhile, arrangements had been made for McBride to pay a small fine for disturbing the peace at the banquet. He and his “girlfriend” would then be driven to the Zurich airport, where they would be placed on the first American carrier home. As far as the events in Spiez were concerned, cantonal authorities agreed that there was nothing to be gained by a public trial—which could only embarrass both countries.

“That’s
it?”
McBride asked.

His visitor shrugged. “I’m just a messenger,” he told him. “This isn’t my brief. I don’t know the details. But I can tell you this: based on the cables I saw—and the people who signed off on them—there’s only two ways this thing can end.”

“And what are those?”

“Well, my personal favorite is ‘happily ever after’—that’s the one we’re shooting for.”

“Great,” McBride replied. “And what’s the other?”

“The other? Well, the other is …
un
happily ever after. That’s the one where you decide to tell everyone your story. That’s the one where you wind up in a Thorazine coma on the high-risk ward at St. Elizabeth’s.” He paused. “Don’t go there.”

He didn’t.

When they finally got back to D.C., Adrienne’s to-do list was three pages long, replete with categories and subcategories. The Odds and Ends section alone—a catchall for relatively trivial matters—had twenty-three items requiring her prompt, if not immediate, attention. These ranged from
sorting out liability for the damage to the rented Dodge (finally returned after forty-two days, one paint-blistering fire and a rear-end crash) to reclaiming personal items left in her cubicle at Slough. That would be awkward, but after what she’d been through, she didn’t mind, really. On the contrary, she was looking forward to hanging out her own shingle and practicing law, her way.

But first, she’d have to clean out Nikki’s apartment, go through her belongings. She’d promised the Watermill that she’d have everything out by the end of the month—

And then, beyond this minor stuff, there was
Nikki
herself. Nikki’s ashes still reposed in the “classic urn” and Adrienne felt it strongly—the need for some kind of ritual to commemorate her sister’s departure from this earth.

McBride had his own list and most of it had to do with picking up the severed strands of an interrupted life. There were friends and colleagues—in San Francisco and elsewhere—he needed to get in touch with. He had a career to resume as a research psychologist. And there were dormant bank accounts and a small brokerage account with Merrill Lynch to reclaim. Maybe because he’d lived so close to Silicon Valley, his modest investments had been targeted toward the Internet. He remembered what he’d bought and at what prices; a preliminary look produced the happy news that during his walkabout as Jeff Duran, the value of his shares of Cisco Systems, Intel, and EMC had skyrocketed. He wasn’t rich, but his fifteen grand had multiplied many times.

*    *    *

Lew couldn’t take the idea of living in the apartment where he’d been “that robot.” So until they figured out what they were going to do and where, they lived in the Bomb Shelter, enduring the disapproval of Mrs. Spears until Lew won her over by cleaning out the gutters, pruning the overgrown pyracantha and repairing her dishwasher.

“I didn’t know you were so handy,” Adrienne remarked.

“We were hard up,” he explained, “when I was a kid. We couldn’t afford to hire people to do things.”

“Well, ditto. But I never learned how to fix anything.”

“In Maine we pride ourselves on that Yankee can-do attitude.”

“Can do, huh?” He was sitting on the edge of the bed, unlacing his shoes. She pushed him over onto his back and sprawled on top of him. She lifted herself up and looked down at him. She ran her thumb along his lower lip. “Does that extend to all areas of endeavor?”

“Absolutely.”

She kissed him.

“We’re famous for it,” he said, coming up for air. “We also have Yankee ingenuity.”

“Do you always talk so much?”

It finally came to her about two weeks after their return from Switzerland—how to send Nikki off in a style appropriate to her sister’s lively and glamorous spirit.

She explained the idea to Lew and he helped her find the perfect vessel on the Web, a Challenger model yacht owned by a gentleman named Taz Brown. They communicated first by e-mail, then by telephone. “I hate to give her up,” Brown said, “but my wife says I’ve got to trim the fleet and this one’s named after the first wife.”

Once a tentative deal had been struck, they coaxed Adrienne’s Subaru back to life and, following Brown’s intricate directions, drove the twenty-five miles to his nouveau brick mansion on the Potomac. The river was thawing, Adrienne saw, as they crossed it on Memorial Bridge; only a few patches of white, snow-crusted ice remained.

Brown was a dapper fifty-year-old wearing a blue blazer, khakis with a knife crease and tassel loafers. Once they’d introduced each other and Brown had cast a worried look at the scabby Subaru, he led them to the garage to show them the
Patricia.
The craft—and its siblings—shared space with a pair of Bimmers.

“It’s big,” McBride said. In fact, the mast was taller than he was.

“Fifty-seven inches in length, twelve inch beam, mast eighty-five inches from the deck. Comes in two pieces, with a carrying case that ought to fit right on top of your car. Good you’ve got a roof rack.”

“It’s beautiful,” Adrienne said.

Brown grunted his concurrence. “Carbon fiber, composite hull—just like the America’s Cup. And it comes with a suit of high-wind sails if you have a taste for ocean racing.”

Adrienne asked him to demonstrate how to break the boat down and reassemble it, how to attach the keel, and how to operate the electronic controls.

“You’re getting quite a bargain,” he told her, as she wrote out a check for $1,250. “A new one would cost you five grand.”

“I know it’s a lot,” Adrienne volunteered as they rattled back toward D.C., “but even the most ‘economical’ coffin would have cost five times as much. And, trust me, Nikki would like this much, much more.”

The Mount Vernon Parkway is a beautiful twelve-mile stretch of road that follows the shoreline of the Potomac River south of Old Town Alexandria to the bend in the river chosen by George Washington as the site for Mount Vernon. The whole length of the parkway is paralleled by a heavily used bike and footpath and interspersed with parks, marinas, and roadside picnic areas. In nice weather, the riverfront is a lively place, with windsurfers and inexpert groups in canoes sharing the water with pleasure craft. On dry land, picnickers and fishermen share the terrain with joggers and cyclists, and families out for a stroll.

But it wasn’t nice weather, and it wasn’t daytime, so they had the shoreline entirely to themselves. The moon, fuzzy and indistinct behind the cloud cover, provided some light, but they had also brought powerful flashlights. It only took a few minutes to remove the
Patricia
from its carrying case and rig it, snapping on the mast, the keel and the rudder. Once it was floating in a protected little cove, Adrienne—fingers freezing—slipped the votive candles into the glass cups she’d affixed to the
Patricia’s
hull, one fore, one aft, for balance. After that, she settled the dish with Nikki’s ashes in the rectangular depression amidship. Last of all, the flowers. She arranged them—rosebuds and jonquils, lilacs, and Queen Anne’s lace—all around the hull.

And then it was time to light the candles and send Nikki on her way. Lew worked the radio controls and the boat moved sharply out of the cove. A breeze caught its sails and it began to heel over until he corrected the bearing to “a broad reach.” She’d been a little worried that the weight of the candles and the ashes would make the boat difficult to maneuver, but it didn’t seem to be affected by them. The votive lights winked and flickered, illuminating the white sails in a beautiful way as the boat moved out toward the center of the river. When it reached the channel, Lew maneuvered the sails so that it began to run before the wind. The tide was going out, the wind southerly—they’d checked beforehand.

“Bon voyage,” Adrienne whispered, her hand raised in farewell.

Lew dropped the electronic control box into the carrying case, then put his arm around Adrienne. It was all up to the wind now, and to the water. The craft was moving nicely and within a few minutes, they could not see the hull or the candles at all, only the occasional, ghostly white of the sail as the craft rose up on a swell, only to fall back again. Lew put his arm around Adrienne’s shoulder, and they stood together like that, in the freezing darkness at the edge of the shore, watching the sail wink out to sea on the black water.

And then, even that was gone.

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It was the mailman who reported it, calling 911 half an hour before Delaney’s shift was supposed to end.

The missing man’s pickup was sitting in the driveway and there were lights on in the house, so the mailman thought someone must be home. But no one answered when he knocked, and the mailbox was filled to overflowing. So maybe, he figured, maybe Mr. Terio had suffered a heart attack.

Delaney shook his head. He and Poliakoff were all the way to hell and gone, way out by the county line where civilization turned to kudzu.

Sitting behind the wheel, Poliakoff gave Delaney a sidelong glance and chuckled. “You want to use the siren?”

Delaney shook his head.

“The guy’s probably on vacation,” Poliakoff insisted. “We’ll take a look around—I’ll write it up. No problem.”

Delaney gazed out the window. The air was heavy and still, thick with gloom, the way it gets before a thunderstorm. “Maybe it’ll rain,” he muttered.

Poliakoff nodded. “That’s the spirit,” he told him. “Think positive.”

The cruiser turned onto Barracks Road and, suddenly, though they were barely a mile past a subdivision of bright new town houses, there was nothing in sight but vine-strangled woods and farmland. The occasional rotting barn.

“You ever been out this way?” Poliakoff asked.

Delaney shrugged. “That’s it, over there,” he said, nodding at a metal sign stippled with bullet holes. PREACHERMAN LANE. “You gotta turn.”

They found themselves on a narrow dirt road, flanked by
weeds and at the edge of a dense wood. “Jesus,” Poliakoff muttered as the cruiser crested a rise, then bottomed out with a thud before he could brake. “Since when does Fairfax County have dirt roads?”

“We still got a couple,” Delaney replied, thinking the roads wouldn’t be around much longer. The Washington suburbs were metastasizing in every direction and had been for twenty years. In a year or two, the farmhouse up ahead—a yellow farmhouse, suddenly visible on the left—would be gone, drowned by a rising tide of town houses, Wal-Marts, and Targets.

The mailbox was at the end of the driveway, a battered aluminum cylinder with a faded red flag nailed to the top of a four-by-four T set in concrete. A name was stenciled on the side: C. TERIO.

Next to the mailbox, three or four newspapers were jammed into a white plastic tube that bore the words THE WASHINGTON POST. A dozen other editions lay on the ground in a neatish pile, some already turning yellow.

When the mailman had reached out to 911, he’d suggested, “You should go in, take a look around the house, see what you can see.”

But of course, they couldn’t exactly do that. Under the circumstances, the most they could do was knock on the door, walk around the property, talk to the neighbors—not that there were any, far as Delaney could tell.

Climbing out of the cruiser, the deputies stood for a moment, watching and listening. Thunder rumbled in the south, and they could hear the distant hum of the Beltway. With a grin, Poliakoff sang in his cracking baritone, “H-e-e-ere we come to save the da-a-yyyy—”

“Let’s get this over with,” Delaney grumbled, setting off toward the house.

They passed an aging Toyota Tacoma at the end of the driveway, its rear end backed toward the house as if its owner had been loading or unloading something. Together the two policemen crossed the overgrown lawn to the front door.

The knocker was a fancy one—hand-hammered iron in the shape of a dragonfly. Poliakoff put his fist around it, drew back, and rapped loudly. “Hullo?”

Silence.

“Hel-lo?” Poliakoff cocked his head and listened hard. When no reply came, he tried the door and, finding it locked, gave a little shrug. “Let’s go around back.” Together the deputies made their way around the side of the house, pausing every so often to peer through the windows.

“He left enough lights on,” Delaney observed.

At the rear of the house, they passed a little garden—tomatoes and peppers, zucchini and pole beans—that might have been tidy once but was now abandoned to weeds. Nearby, a screen door led into the kitchen. Poliakoff rapped on its wooden frame four or five times. “Anyone home? Mr. Terio! You in there?”

Nothing.

Or almost nothing. The air trembled with the on-again, offagain rasp of cicadas and, in the distance, the insectoid murmur of traffic. And there was something else, something … Delaney cocked his head and listened hard. He could hear … laughter. Or not laughter, actually, but … a laugh
track
. After a moment, he said, “The television’s on.”

Even so, there was nothing they could do, really. The doors were locked and they didn’t have a warrant. There was no real evidence of a medical emergency, much less of foul play. But it
was
suspicious, and since they were already out here, they might as well take a look around. Be thorough about it.

Poliakoff walked back to where the newspapers were lying, squatted, and sorted through them. The oldest was dated July 19—more than two weeks ago.

A few feet away, Delaney checked out the truck in the driveway. On the front seat he found a faded and sun-curled receipt for a cash purchase at Home Depot. It, too, was dated July 19 and listed ten bags of Sakrete, 130 cinder blocks, a mortaring tool, and a plastic tub.

“A real do-it-yourselfer,” he remarked, showing the receipt to Poliakoff, then reaching into the cruiser to retrieve his notebook.

“I’ll check around the other side of the house,” Poliakoff told him.

Delaney nodded and leaned back against the cruiser, going through the motions of making notes. Not that there was much to put down.

He looked at his watch and noted the time:
5:29
. The whole thing was a waste of time, no matter how you looked at it. Delaney had responded to a couple of hundred calls like this during his ten years with the department, and nine times out of ten the missing person was senile or off on a bender. Once in a while, they turned up dead, sprawled on the bathroom floor or sitting in the Barcalounger. This kind of thing wasn’t really
police work
. It was more like a janitorial service.

“Hey.”

Delaney looked up. Poliakoff was calling to him from the other side of the house. Tossing the notebook onto the front seat of the cruiser, he glanced at the sky—there was a curtain of rain off to the south, which gave him more hope that Brent’s game would be rained out—and headed off in the direction of his partner.

As it happened, there was an outside entrance to the basement—a set of angled metal doors that opened directly onto a short flight of concrete steps, leading down. Poliakoff was standing on the steps, the doors at attention on either side of him, like rusted wings. “Whaddya think? We take a look?”

Delaney frowned and inclined his head toward one of the doors. “That the way you found them?”

Poliakoff nodded. “Yeah. Wide open.”

Delaney shrugged. “Could be a burglary, I guess—but let’s make it quick.” He was thinking,
Dear God, don’t let there be a stiff down there, or we’ll be here all night.

Poliakoff ducked his head, calling out Terio’s name as he descended the steps, Delaney right behind him.

The basement was utilitarian—a long rectangular room with a seven-foot ceiling, cinder-block walls, and a cement floor. A single fluorescent light buzzed and flickered over a dusty tool bench in a corner of the room. A moth beat its wings against the fixture.

Delaney glanced around. Nervously. He didn’t like basements.
He’d been afraid of them ever since he’d been a kid, though nothing had ever really happened to him in one. They just creeped him out. And this place, with its cheap shelves crowded with cans of paint, boxes of nails and screws, and tools, it was like every basement he’d ever seen: ordinary and evil, all at once.

Poliakoff wrinkled his nose.

“You smell something?” Delaney asked, his eyes searching the cellar.

“Yeah, I think so,” his partner said. “Sort of.”

On a shelf beneath the tool bench Delaney noticed a red plastic container marked: MOWER FUEL. “It’s probably gas,” he told his partner.

Poliakoff shook his head. “Unh-unh.”

Delaney shrugged. “Whatever,” he said, “there’s no one here.” Turning to leave, he started for the steps but stopped when he realized that Poliakoff wasn’t following him. “Whatcha got?” he asked, looking back to his partner, who was holding a Maglite at shoulder height, its powerful beam funneling into the farthest corner of the room.

“I’m not sure,” Poliakoff muttered, crossing the basement to where the flashlight’s beam splashed against the far wall. “It’s weird.”

Delaney looked at the wall and realized Poliakoff was right: it
was
weird. At the north end of the basement, a corner was partitioned off by what looked like a pair of hastily built cinderblock walls. At right angles to each other, the walls were each about four feet across and went floor-to-ceiling, creating a sort of concrete closet, a closet without a door. “What
is
that?” Delaney asked.

Poliakoff shook his head and moved closer.

The closet—or whatever it was—was amateurishly made. Blobs of mortar bulged between the cinder blocks, which were stacked in a half-assed way that wasn’t quite plumb. The deputies stared at the construction. Finally, Poliakoff said, “It’s like … it’s like a little jackleg
room
!”

Delaney nodded, then ran a hand through his thick brown hair. “It’s probably what he did with the Home Depot stuff. He must have—”

“You smell it now?” Poliakoff asked.

Delaney sniffed. Even though he’d been a smoker most of his life, there was no mistaking the stink in the air. He’d spent two years in a Graves Registration unit at Dover Air Force Base and, if nothing else, he knew what death smelled like.

“Could be a rat,” Poliakoff suggested. “They get in the walls….”

Delaney shook his head. His heart was beating harder now, the adrenaline coursing through his chest. He took a deep breath and examined the construction more closely.

The sloppiest part was closest to the ceiling—where the top row of cinder blocks lay crookedly upon the lower course, mortar dripping from the joints. Delaney picked off a piece and crushed it between his thumb and forefinger.

“You don’t think this guy …?” Poliakoff let the sentence trail away as Delaney crossed the basement to the workbench and came back with a hammer and a screwdriver.

It only took a minute, and then the cinder block was more or less free of its binding. Hitting it one more time with the hammer, Delaney broke the block loose. Then he laid his tools on the floor and, reaching up, wiggled the block back and forth.

As it came free, a stench rose up, so pungent that Delaney could almost taste it—as if he’d touched the tip of his tongue to the place in his gum where a rotten tooth had just been extracted.

“Gimme a hand,” he ordered, and with Poliakoff’s help he removed the block from the wall and set it on the floor. By now, there was no doubt in either man’s mind about what waited behind the wall, but they still couldn’t see—the opening was too high. Taking up the hammer and screwdriver, Delaney went to work on a second cinder block, attacking it with a kind of desperation—even as he held his breath. Soon this second cinder block was free, so that there was now a window into the little room, just above Delaney’s head.

Poliakoff was doing his best to keep his stomach still as Delaney looked around for something to stand on. He saw a straight-backed chair near the basement doors and dragged it over. Delaney climbed up on it and took the Maglite from his belt. Then he cast its beam through the window he’d created—and fell silent. From somewhere above, the laugh track surged.

“So what is it?” Poliakoff demanded. “What—”

Delaney swayed. “I’m gonna be sick,” he said. And he was.