Bitter Waters (14 page)

“I'll keep him safe,” Rennie promised. “Anyone trying for him will have to go through me first.”

“Let's go,” Ukiah said.

“The busway goes downtown or out to Wilkinsburg.” Rennie half carried Ukiah back to the Cherokee. “Which way do we go?”

Downtown would have dropped the kidnappers beside I-279 or I-376, rushing away from Pittsburgh in two and three lanes of express traffic. Nearby Wilkinsburg was one of the poorer neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, providing countless nooks and crannies to dive into. The Pack had the advantage, though, that if they got close enough to Kittanning, they would sense his presence.

“Downtown,”
Ukiah decided. If the kidnappers had buried themselves in Wilkinsburg, then the Pack would dig them out. But if the kidnappers had headed downtown, every second made it less likely he would find Kittanning.

So he and Rennie followed the busway toward downtown, the walls of the road rising up, crowned with chain-linked fencing, guaranteeing that the kidnapper hadn't veered off it, nor abandoned his car.

Ukiah shared two of the power bars out to his hungry mice. He was too hurt to take the mice back; the lost blood cells had expended all their stored energy taking mouse form, and at the moment, the effort of merging the cells back into his body would kill him. He'd have to wait, building up both his own and the mice's strength before he could take them back and discover what he'd forgotten. The mice took their share of the food and scrambled to the dashboard to stare out the window shield, looking for their lost brother.

“Do you think that the Ontongard might have finally gotten smart enough to use a human to take Kittanning?” Ukiah asked.

“Hex would never trust a human.”

Hex wouldn't, but Hex was dead.

 

Nine of the Pack roared through downtown, bullying their way through the heavy rush-hour traffic, looking for any sign of Kittanning or the Taurus. Their reports trickled in even as Rennie reached the end of the busway and nosed out into the stalled traffic.

“There's an accident in the Liberty Tunnels; no one's
getting out of the city that way.”
Hellena made a U-turn at the mouth of the tunnels to work her way back into town.
“The parkway looks like a parking lot.”

Confirmation came from Smack working his way through the parkway congestion, riding the centerline since there was no berm.

“Everything's crawling as far as Greentree on two-seventy-nine south,”
Heathyr reported, nearly a whisper, at the limits of the Pack's telepathic range. Unfortunately, that range depended on number of body cells; Kittanning's smaller size meant his reach was much shorter.

“North Side, South Side, West End,” Rennie named the possible directions that the kidnapper could have gone as the Dog Warrior narrowed down possibilities. “Two-seventy-nine north.”

“Two-seventy-nine,” Ukiah decided after a moment. “A quick run as far as the turnpike in Cranberry. If we don't pick up Kitt's trail, we'll double back and start combing the suburbs.”

 

The food kicked in and Ukiah slept without warning.

He had been scanning the cars they passed, and then he was asleep. The deep echoing horns of tugboats woke him. Ukiah opened his eyes to find himself reclined nearly flat in the bucket seat. Headlights from an oncoming car cut through the dark Cherokee's interior. For a minute he lay confused. Where was he? A faint scrabbling noise caught his attention, and he turned his head to look into five pairs of tiny anxious black eyes.

Kittanning.

He levered himself up, feeling guilty, herding his mice into his lap. “Any sign?”

“None,” Rennie murmured.

They were running along one of the rivers on a desolate stretch of road that Ukiah didn't recognize. Ukiah glanced at the mileage counter and noted that they had put several hundred miles on the Cherokee, endlessly driving through the side roads and back alleys, working their way through the dozens of Pittsburgh's neighborhoods. “This random looking
isn't working. We missed the chance while I was dead, and now we're running like a chicken with its head cut off.”

Rennie growled softly. “What else is there? Hex has had since June to lay his plans, and the humans can sense neither his Gets nor Kittanning.”

“There were several kidnappings in the area while you and I were in Oregon.” Ukiah's stomach rumbled with hunger, emptied by his body's frantic healing of itself. “The MO on Kitt's kidnapping is nearly the same: two people working together grab a kid out of his home and run. Indigo is the agent assigned to the case. She can tell us details on the other cases and maybe that will give us a lead.”

Grudgingly, Rennie considered possibilities other than the Ontongard. “What about that federal agent?”

“Hutchinson?” Ukiah thought about what the federal agent had said, and what he hadn't said. “He said this cult of religious lunatics called the Temple of New Reason had photographs of me, implying that they had some interest in me. The Temple's Web site was full of biblical verses about the second coming. Hutchinson is looking for the cult; they've gone into deep cover for some reason.”

Reluctantly, Rennie conceded. “But you can't go back to your offices looking like that.” Rennie turned the Cherokee in a tight U-turn. “With the bloody mess you left behind, any cops you run into will probably want to see what you look like under the jacket. You need to clean up first.”

 

Neville Island was a few miles downriver of Pittsburgh, a long strip of land in the center of the Ohio River, home to numerous industrial sites. Storage tanks that dwarfed many Pittsburgh skyscrapers sat at the head of the island, and I-79 leapfrogged across the river at its center. The ethereal flame that burned over Neville Island licked the night sky.

The Pack had taken over the office area of an abandoned Dravo Barge dry docks, replacing a padlock on the chain-link gate with one of their own. Rennie had sent Smack on ahead, so the gate was open when they reached it.

“He needs to be bandaged,” Rennie told Smack as the Dog
Warrior helped Ukiah out of the Cherokee. “The less noticeable his wounds, the better. I'll be back.”

Whoever had pulled den duty had swept out the offices and pinned up the tapestry dividers, but the futons still sat stacked by the door. Ukiah wandered about the empty space, wanting to sit down before trying to take off his bloody clothes. Smack produced a folding chair, and then worked at setting up a washbasin with hot water. Ukiah carefully lowered himself onto the chair. Trembling, he plucked at his shirt; there didn't seem to be a method of getting it off that didn't involve flexing in some painful way, and parts of it were stuck to him.

“Here. That's past saving.” Smack pulled out his boot knife and cut off the T-shirt in sections, leaving what was stuck to the healing wounds. The blade sliced through the blood-crusted fabric like tissue paper. “We'll have to soak the scabs to get the rest off. You don't have a knife or gun on you?” Smack slipped the blade back into its sheath and then pulled the sheath from his boot. “Take this one. I'll pick up another one tomorrow.”

Ukiah didn't argue; if he had been armed, perhaps he could have stopped the kidnapper.

Rennie returned as they washed the last of the dead blood cells out of Ukiah's hair; all of Ukiah's clothes except his boots had been reduced down to strips of bloody cloth lying on the wet floor around him. The Pack leader growled at the damage done to Ukiah and held out a bag of McDonald's food. “Eat, and then take back your mice. See what they can tell you about the kidnapping. We'll find your little one,” Rennie promised darkly. “And we'll make this man sorry he ever thought to lift a hand against either of you.”

Dravo Barge Dry Docks, Neville Island, Pennsylvania
Tuesday, September 14, 2004

After Ukiah had eaten, absorbed his mice, and given both Rennie and Smack a full replay of the shooting, he climbed painfully into the Cherokee. Rennie slid behind the wheel to drive Ukiah back to the office, while Smack locked up the gate behind them.

Unsure of how things stood with Indigo, Max, and Sam, Ukiah checked the company's voice-mail system. Max had guessed that the Pack would feed Ukiah and let him sleep; instead of calling Ukiah directly, he'd left a series of messages in a tight, harassed-sounding voice.

Sam's wound proved to be deep enough for stitches. The police, though, had arrived, responding to Sam's 911 call, and needed to be dealt with first. Luckily there was no one conscious to connect the private investigators to the “untimely coincidence” of the Pack's trashing of the bar.

After giving statements on Kittanning's kidnapping, Max and Sam drove back to the office for Sam's clothes and ID. There, they ran into a second mess. Neighbors had reported Sam's single gunshot and police found an empty house with a foyer full of bullet holes and blood. With a lack of a gunshot victim, the questioning grew decidedly hostile. Then Indigo arrived with her FBI team, full of icy rage, and found a volunteer to focus her frustrations on.

“One of the cops made the mistake of asking if she was
‘the F-B-I' and smirking.” The police had used the initials to nickname Indigo “the Famous Bitch of Ice” in reference to her glacial calm. “You'd think by now the cops would know not to piss her off. It was like watching a surgeon work as she took him apart—very quiet and precise. Sam's impressed, and I think a little afraid of Indigo now.” Max summed up the meeting of the two women.

Like the Pack, Indigo stayed only long enough to get the make and model of the car; she left to personally lead the search. Agent Joan Fisher remained behind to get a full statement and fight skirmishes over jurisdictions.

During everything, Max and Sam kept to the edited version of the truth; someone had shot “at” Ukiah and taken Kittanning. No, they didn't know how badly Ukiah had been hurt, but he had left in the Cherokee to find his missing son. Max neglected to mention that Ukiah had his phone on him; Max didn't want the police pestering Ukiah while he was sleeping. “At least that's what I'm hoping you're doing right now.”

Finally, Max drove Sam to the hospital to be stitched up, given a tetanus shot, and released. At the hospital, Max had thought to call Ukiah's moms and had given them an edited version of what had happened. “I left out the part about you being shot. I figured it would only worry them.”

“We're heading back to the office,” Max said in the last message. “Give me a call soon. I'm getting worried about you. If I don't hear from you soon, I'm heading out to look for you. I've called Chino to hold down the offices while Sam is sleeping.”

Ukiah glanced at the dashboard clock as the voice mail gave the timestamp of nine-thirty; he had been listening to the messages when Max recorded the last one. He and Rennie were already downtown, meaning they would hit the office just minutes after Max and Sam returned.

Of Indigo, though, there was no word, so he called her.

She answered with a curt “Special Agent Zheng.”

“It's me.”

“Any good news?”

“No.”

“I can't talk now. Have you gotten your mice back?”

“Yes, but there's not much to tell. I answered the door and got shot.”

“Where are you?”

“Passing through downtown. We've just swung onto the Tenth Street Bypass. We're heading to the office.”

“I'll meet you there.”

The Hummer, its engine still ticking, was in its place in the garage when Rennie pulled into the second bay.

Rennie cocked his head, catching the murmur of voices from the mansion.
“Your partner has company.”

“Stay here,”
Ukiah said, in case it was the police.

The back door of the mansion was unlocked and opened to the smell of old blood, gunpowder, and spilt milk. The kitchen was dark. Like a cave opening to daylight, the unlit hallway led to the brightly lit living room, which doubled as the office's reception area. Sam sat in the wing chair by the fireplace, her bandaged bare foot propped on the ottoman, talking to someone standing out of sight. Max paced the room, wrapped in anger. Ukiah paused in the dark kitchen, nostrils flaring to catch the stranger's scent.

“I've already told both the police and the FBI what happened,” Sam was saying. “And I only saw the back of the kidnapper's head, so I don't know if he was one of these people or not.”

The interloper was Hutchinson, sitting in the second wing chair. “Please, just tell me what happened.”

He reported the visitor's identity to Rennie while stripping off the Dog Warrior jacket, glad now that Smack had cleaned the blood from him. He hung the incriminating jacket on a kitchen chair and moved quietly to the living room's door. Stealth came to him as natural as breathing. Hutchinson was focused on Sam, who glared angrily back at the federal agent. Only Max seemed aware that Ukiah had entered the offices, giving him a hopeful look, so that he had to shake his head,
no, no, they hadn't found Kittanning.
Max gathered his rage closer.

“The doorbell rang just as I turned off the water,” Sam continued without noticing Ukiah's exchange with Max. “The
baby started to scream, and I yanked on a T-shirt, some underwear, and found my gun.”

“Just because the baby was crying?” Hutchinson asked.

“Screaming,” Sam said. “I don't know why but it just hit me at gut level, and I reacted. The only reason I got any clothes on at all was I didn't want to flash Ukiah if it just turned out his son regularly screamed like someone was killing him.”

“Go on.”

“I heard a heavy thud, the kind you hear when heavy furniture tips over or a person falls, and someone running through the downstairs, and the baby screaming,” Sam said. “When I say it, it seems so sane, but it was really creepy, like listening to a soundtrack for a horror film. I ran down the back steps and into the kitchen as someone ran out the front door with the baby.”

“Why the back steps?” Hutchinson indicated the sweeping front stairs. “You might have been able to stop them if you had gone down the front staircase.”

“I don't know the layout of the house. I just drove in from Oregon this morning. I wanted to go downstairs, and the back steps were right outside the bedroom door.”

“You didn't hear shots?” Hutchinson asked.

“No. The shooter must have been using a silencer. When I got to the kitchen I could see Ukiah lying in the hall and someone running out the door, carrying the baby. I shot once at the kidnapper, and I think I hit him, but he kept on moving. There was a car waiting at the curb. He got in the car and it drove away. I chased after the car but I couldn't keep up with it.”

“Where was the kidnapper when you hit him?”

“On the front porch.”

“So all the blood in the hall, that's Ukiah's?”

“I suppose so,” Sam said.

“If you came down the back steps and went to the front door, you had to step over Ukiah. Didn't you notice he was bleeding?”

“I noticed.”

“Did he say anything? Tell you who shot him?”

“He wasn't conscious at the time,” Sam said.

“Did you stop and check how badly he was hurt?”

“He was okay when I saw him later.”

“He was unconscious and bleeding and you didn't check on him?”

“Leave her alone,” Max snapped.

Hutchinson glanced up to retort, saw Ukiah standing beside Max, and straightened. “Where the hell have you been?”

Ukiah growled, glaring at Hutchinson through his dark bangs.

“I told you,” Max said. “He was out looking for his son.”

Hutchinson took out a pack of cigarettes, tapped one out, and lit it. His attention stayed on Ukiah, the gears in his mind spinning behind his watchful eyes. “Some of the bullets they took out of the wall had passed through a body first.”

Ukiah lifted the bottom of his shirt to show the white of his bandages. “None of them hit anything important.”

“Do you know who it was that shot you?”

“I saw him.” He had taken back his mice before leaving Neville Island; while slightly fuzzy in quality, like viewing through a hazed window, his memories were complete. “I didn't recognize him.”

The front door opened then. Ukiah had been focused on Hutchinson and had missed the person's approach. The swing of the door, however, brought him Indigo's scent. She checked at the door, hand still on the doorknob at the sight of Hutchinson.

“Who are you?” A half octave lower than normal, her voice sounded so hard and authoritarian that Ukiah barely recognized it as hers.

Hutchinson startled, looking to Max and Ukiah in surprise. “I'm wondering the same thing. Who are you?”

“This is Agent Hutchinson,” Ukiah told her. “Homeland Security.”

“Can I see some ID?” Indigo held out her hand.

“Who are you?” he said, handing her his ID.

Indigo inspected it a moment before returning it. “Special Agent Indigo Zheng, FBI.” She showed him her ID. “This is an FBI case.”

“The NSA believes that this kidnapping might be related to a case that we're investigating.”

“The Temple of New Reason?” Indigo said. “From what I've been able to gather, there's no connection between the kidnapping and their interest in Mr. Oregon.”

Surprise flashed over Hutchinson's face and he glanced to Max before smoothing his features back to neutral. Still, under the careful facade, he showed signs of being disturbed by Indigo's foreknowledge. “I see. Have you received cooperation files?”

“There hasn't been time,” Indigo said.

Hutchinson turned back to Ukiah. “Counting the three bullets that went through you, and the six in the wall, the shooter emptied his gun at you. That's a little excessive. Are you sure you don't know him, Mr. Oregon?”

“I would remember. It's part of having a perfect memory.”

“And yet two days after you've returned from an out-of-state trip, this stranger nails you and takes your kid.” Hutchinson reached into his jacket and took out an envelope filled with photographs. He dealt the top four onto the coffee table. “Are these photos of you with your son?”

The photographs were taken the day of the shoot-out with the Ontongard. Kittanning, wrapped in Ukiah's black tracking T-shirt, was merely a dark shapeless bundle, identifiable as a baby only by Ukiah's body language. In the first picture, Ukiah had his son tucked in the crook of his arm. In the second photo, he started the careful transfer of Kittanning to his shoulder, still stunned and awkward by his sudden fatherhood. In the third and fourth photo, he settled Kittanning on his shoulder, carefully protecting the wobbly head and tiny body.

“Where did these come from?” Ukiah said.

“The five I showed you earlier was just a selection of those we found on the cult member. There are nearly three hundred in all showing either you or your partner. Is this your son?”

“Yes.” Ukiah felt sick. The Ontongard in Pendleton hadn't known that Hex found him and made Kittanning. Did this mean another group knew that Ukiah and Kittanning existed but hadn't known where to find him? Why not take them both
while Ukiah was helpless? Why use a human in the first place?

He realized that Hutchinson was speaking and ran back through his memory to catch up with the conversation. Hutchinson was pointing out that Ukiah's personal information all indicated that he lived here at the offices, not out at the farm with his moms. Someone looking for Kittanning would have had to wait until Ukiah returned from Oregon before knowing where to find the baby.

“That's a possibility,” Indigo said. “Kittanning, though, is not the only child kidnapped. The kidnappers have taken four other children. The first was August twenty-fifth, the second was August twenty-ninth, the third was September second, and the fourth was September sixth. Two boys, two girls, all under the age of eighteen months.”

Hutchinson took out his PDA and took notes as Indigo spoke. “And the MO is the same as this case?”

“Yes. The kidnappers steal a car. They change license plates with another car of the same model and color as the stolen car to muddy the waters. We think they spend a day or two stalking their next victim until an opportunity arrives to snatch the child. They then abandon the car at a parking garage, apparently after transferring the child to a new car or location. We've managed to lift several sets of fingerprints from all the cars, but so far they're not in the national database.”

“The other children—weren't they in foster care? Kittanning doesn't fit the profile. This could be a copycat crime.”