Breathless (30 page)

T
he grenades made Henry Rouvroy happy. He had worried that the haiku-writing sonofabitch had looted the Land Rover. If the grenades had fallen into the mysterious poet’s hands, the balance of power would have shifted dramatically against Henry.

He enjoyed sitting on the living-room floor, staring at the grenades, handling the grenades, and even kissing them. The casing of a hand grenade was actually a steel waffle of shrapnel waiting to be blown apart and rip savagely through the bodies of everyone within range. It was a beautiful thing.

The senator, whom Henry had served as chief aide and political strategist, had acquired considerably more ordnance than Henry could have dreamed of getting his hands on, but right now the grenades and his cache of firearms were enough. When civil order collapsed, the senator would be at a specially prepared retreat, one of many that were well-concealed and protected for the highest of high government officials. He expected Henry to come with him and his family to ride out the half year or year of blood in the
streets. But Henry knew in his bones that the social tension in a remote and fortified compound with a slew of politicians and their kin could lead only to paranoid suspicion, ferocious infighting, and eventually cannibalism. While allowing the senator to think he was in for the plan, he made plans of his own. Henry didn’t want to be eaten alive.

Now he began to distribute the grenades throughout the house, hiding them under cushions, in drawers, under chairs. If his enemy launched an assault on the place, Henry wanted to have a grenade always within arm’s reach, so he could open a window and surprise the hell out of the bastard, blow his booty off and put an end to this game. He hid twenty-nine grenades and decided to carry the last one with him everywhere he went until he killed his tormentor.

When he finished, he noticed the disgusting filth under his fingernails. He didn’t know how he could have gotten so grimy just unloading the Rover. Manual labor was such dirty work, it was amazing that the blue-collar class didn’t lose millions a year to pestilence and disease.

He returned to the bathroom, drew a sinkful of hot water, and set to work with cheaply scented soap and with the clever brush that he had discovered the previous night. He scrubbed diligently for forty minutes before his hands were clean enough to satisfy him. His nails were white and shiny.

As he dried his hands, he wondered if something more than a desire for cleanliness drove him to wash his hands until they were fiery red from hot water and bristle abrasion. Having graduated from Harvard, he knew quite a lot about psychology. Excessive washing of the hands could be a subconscious acknowledgment of
guilt. Perhaps murdering his brother had affected him more deeply than he thought.

Well, what was done could not be undone. One thing you learned from a good education was to face the reality of existence and not live with the illusion that wrong was always wrong and right was always right. Sometimes wrong was right, and sometimes right was wrong, and most of the time neither word applied. Think, do, accept, move on.

In the kitchen, as he was preparing an inadequate lunch from the pathetic provisions left to him by his departed kin, he heard noises in the attic. Someone was crawling around up there.

M
onday morning, less than two hours after his meeting with Liddon Wallace on the eighteenth green, Rudy Neems flew out of Seattle to San Francisco.

He had told the attorney that he would make the trip that afternoon. He also promised to kill the wife and son Tuesday night.

In both instances, Rudy lied.

He didn’t trust Liddon Wallace. A guy who hired you to kill his family couldn’t be relied on to treat you with fairness and respect.

Wallace admitted having other guys like Rudy on tap. Say one of them was named Burt.

Say Burt’s job was to be waiting in Rudy’s hotel room when Rudy got back from killing Kirsten and her little boy.

Say Burt killed Rudy and made it look like suicide.

The suicide note, composed by Burt in a perfect imitation of Rudy’s handwriting, might say Rudy killed a lot of girls over the
years and hated himself and hated Liddon Wallace for getting him acquitted in the Hardy case when what he really wanted was for someone to stop him before he killed again.

Alive, Rudy was a loose end. Dead, he couldn’t rat on Wallace.

With Rudy dead, you wouldn’t want to be Burt.

Say one of Liddon Wallace’s other guys was named Ralph—or it could be Kenny or anything. When Burt returned to his
own
room in the hotel, maybe Ralph would be waiting for him.

Ralph wouldn’t know that Burt just killed Rudy, so when Burt was dead, no one survived who could link the attorney with the murders of his wife and child. No more loose ends.

Or maybe when Ralph returned to
his
room in the hotel, Kenny—or maybe his name might be Fred—was waiting to kill him. Maybe it just went on and on until the hotel filled up with dead people.

Rudy Neems possessed sufficient self-awareness to know he was paranoid. That was one of the reasons why he killed people. Although not the primary one, of course, because if it had been the primary reason, he would have been insane.

Rudy was as sane as anyone. He did not kill in mad rages. He knew exactly why he killed. His motivation was complex and arrived at by reason: masterless freedom.

So he lied to Liddon Wallace. He flew out of Seattle eight hours before he said he would. And Rudy intended to kill Kirsten and Benny that same night rather than on the following night, when Burt would be waiting to kill Rudy.

The flight from Seattle could not have been more pleasant. They encountered no turbulence, and they didn’t crash.

Rudy chatted all the way with Pauline, an elderly woman en route to San Francisco for the birth of her great-great-grandson.

She carried a little album of snapshots of her family. She had pictures of her two cats, as well. They were cuter than her family.

Rudy had no desire to kill Pauline. Because he didn’t have sex with elderly women, he never killed elderly women.

At the baggage carousel, Pauline’s daughter and son-in-law were waiting for her. Their names were Don and Jennifer.

Pauline introduced Rudy as “the angel who made me forget all about my fear of flying.”

In fact, Rudy chatted with seatmates on airplanes because he, too, feared flying. He needed to distract himself from thinking about all the things that could go wrong in the air. Like, say, an engine might fall off, probably because a mechanic sabotaged it.

At the airport, he picked up a rental SUV and headed for the Golden Gate Bridge and Marin County.

Rudy disliked cities. They were chaotic.

Being a golf-course groundskeeper might be the best job in the world. The golf environment remained at all times quiet, serene, orderly, manicured.

And the work didn’t require constant thinking. While you did your job, you could let your mind roam.

On the job, Rudy mostly replayed in memory all the murders that he committed. Indulging in hours of nostalgic recollection seemed to be one reason he could restrain himself for so long between killings.

Another reason that he killed no more than two people a year was because he only killed people whom he found attractive, and very few people met his standards.

There were guys who could do any halfway-appealing woman they met. Rudy would never be one of them. They were transgressing on the installment plan, rebelling against moral order in a tedious series of minor skirmishes. By contrast, Rudy launched only powerful and profound attacks.

A
fter arriving by executive helicopter at the site, logging in, and signing nondisclosure agreements customized to the unusual nature of this incident, Lamar Woolsey and Simon Northcott were presented with laminated holographic photo-ID cards on lengths of cord, which they had to wear around their necks at all times.

Following an in-depth background presentation on the situation, they were told where to find Specimen 1 and Specimen 2. Already, the names given to them by the veterinarian, Camillia Rivers, were being used by both the uniformed security agents and the Homeland Security bureaucrats: Puzzle and Riddle.

The animals were confined in an inflatable tent in the backyard, only steps from the line of four mobile laboratories. Blood, urine, and other tissue samples would be collected here and taken to the labs. When needed for an MRI or other test, the animals would be conveyed to the laboratory containing that specific equipment. By
keeping Puzzle and Riddle primarily in a structure accessible to the personnel in all four labs, several scientists could observe and examine them at the same time.

The twenty-foot-square tent had been anchored to forty pitons. Each eighteen-inch-long piton measured an inch in diameter and had been driven into the earth with a pneumatic hammer.

Access to the tent was through an uninflated flap, next to which stood an armed agent. They flashed their photo ID and went inside.

Interlocking panels of tight plastic grid made a stable floor. Four free-standing racks of adjustable lamps provided illumination.

A nine-foot-long, seven-foot-wide, four-foot-high platform occupied the center of the tent. The platform held an eight-by-six steel cage that the Colorado crisis-response team acquired somehow before leaving their home base in Colorado Springs.

In the cage were a bowl of water, a dog bed—and two creatures who were inexpressibly more beautiful than the photos of them that Lamar had seen during the background briefing. They came at once to the wall of the cage and reached out entreatingly, between the bars, with their small black hands.

The sight of them affected Simon Northcott as nothing and no one ever had before: He was stunned silent.

As Lamar approached the cage, he reached out to hold one hand of Puzzle’s, one of Riddle’s.

The feeling that came over him must have been different from the one that rendered Northcott speechless, for he would have ranted his enchantment in whatever humble poetic language he could summon—if anyone had been present who would understand this most human of all yearnings for mystery and meaning.

These animals had about them an aura of innocence and purity that he found almost palpable, that he had never before encountered nor imagined he ever would. He approached them rapt with wonder, but then found himself surrendering to an unexpected veneration for which he had no explanation. He came to tears.

Moving slowly around the cage, intently studying the animals and oblivious to Lamar’s emotion, Northcott broke his uncharacteristic silence and spoke of things that didn’t matter, of things that Lamar could not compute.

When at last Lamar could speak, he said, “Their eyes. Isn’t it ironic, Northcott, that perhaps the principal challenge they offer you is the impossible nature of their eyes?”

Northcott understood his reference and was not pleased.

O
n the kitchen table stood a two-foot-square multilayered pane of sandwiched glass, held in a steel frame between two three-inch-diameter steel cylinders. Red light shown within a penny-size hole near the top of each cylinder. The device plugged into a wall outlet but also into Paul Jardine’s laptop.