Mystery: Satan's Road - Suspense Thriller Mystery (Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Suspense Crime Thriller) (7 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

The two and a half hour drive from downtown Toronto along the relentless 401 to Muskoka Lake had turned Kam's stomach sour and driven a wedge of pain into his furrowed brow. It hurt so much it reminded him of a head wound he once received playing College football. Funny how he hadn't thought of that for years, he mused, poking around up there for the tender spot; a place that still hadn't healed and was waiting for his guard to drop so it could kick into a tumor or aneurysm. Now
there
was a joyful thought; spinning out of control into eight lanes of on-coming traffic, his brain working towards the big surprise ending.

He had made an appointment with his doctor originally to examine his leg. Instead, they had discussed the possibility that he had suffered a minor stroke in the lobby of the Royal York. What they called a TIA, a transient ischemic attack. Kam had left out the gory details because he had no idea if what he saw was real. In fact, he knew it couldn’t be. The video was obviously a clever scam to scare him off.

It occurred to Kam again, like it had a countless number of times, that every injury you sustained throughout the years, every bruise, every bang of your head against the kitchen cupboard, even though they all healed, were only waiting for old age to ring its full bell at you again. Play the final chorus.
We're back!
The broken femur he earned falling off a horse at the age of eight was just now sending him little reminders, little nostalgic blossoms of pain. It throbbed dully when he pulled on the wheel to take the long turn past the southern tip of the lake, then up the steep climb to the road that took him home to Tamara.

Chapertah's face seemed to be hanging in the air just below the glare from the headlights flashing past the dense pine forest. He had a sickening haunted look, like a man who had just discovered he had some unknown thing eating away at him from the inside and there was nothing he could do to stop it. But what possesses a man to throw himself through a plate glass window and off an eighth-floor balcony? And if he was planning to kill himself, why do it in front of a witness – especially someone you hardly know, someone who was going to end up adopting a fair chunk of the final agony for themselves to replay during periods of broken sleep through the rest of their days.

And the scientist didn't leave a note. The police told Kam that was customary in suicides. The well thought out ones, anyway. There was always a note.

Kam's daughter, Sheila, had left him a note when she had ended her life twenty years before, in a shabby room in a cluttered boarding house two streets over from the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco. The home of the love generation. The decade that filled so many boomers with warm nostalgia had not been kind to her in any way. Kam didn't know why, but he never dwelt on Sheila's death. It always seemed so distant and wasteful, like it was someone else's daughter he was grieving for.

Chapertah on the other hand – he had chosen him to be there. There had to be a reason for it. Like he wanted someone to know.

Kam rubbed cold sweat from his neck. He couldn't make sense of Chapertah involving him in his bizarre date with destiny, and this irritated him. Kam was a stranger to the man – had no expertise in either the sciences or religion, and didn't remember even hitting it off with him that well when they first met. He only remembered thinking how he was crazier than a drunken bat. And at the same time completely brilliant.

At the age of sixteen, Chapertah had solved a physics problem that Einstein spent forty years trying to puzzle out. He was truly a novel thinker, and it was quite possible that he hit on something that made sense of the infernal knot that was the text of
Revelations
. But who really cared? The religious community would reject any re-telling of the story out-of-hand, and the scientific community couldn't care less. Yet here was Indra Chapertah giving the whole issue major brain space. Was there a link between his genius and his insanity? Kam knew that was a wives’ tale written to make fools feel comfortable. No. Chapertah was obviously stressed by something to the breaking point. It had nothing to do with his IQ. This had been building for a long time.

Reaching the top of the rise, Kam finally began to feel himself grow tired. He needed sleep. Five more minutes and he would be home. Two minutes after that he would have a glass of wine in his hand and Tamara in his arms and everything would be right with the world again.

As he rolled over the crest, his headlights raking the tips of the cedars above him, he relaxed for the first time since lunch at the Royal York that afternoon. Below him, the road coiled into darkness and flattened out.

Beyond the base of the hill was his final turn off to Muskoka Road, the moon just above the tree line.  

Near the side of the road, just before the turn-off ahead, he caught a dull flash of something. A small cloud of dust in the moonlight. He squinted. A dark shape sat at the side of the road, a car, perhaps a truck or a four-wheel drive. No lights. The vehicel was sitting in an odd place; as dark and narrow as the road was there, with no cabins in easy walking distance, a blind turn from the other side. Kam let his van pick up speed down the hill, the speedometer reading over 90 kilometers an hour, anxious for that final turn. What was that puff of smoke he thought he saw? Then he knew. It was exhaust. Whatever kind of vehicle was parked at the side of the road with the lights off, was still running. Teenagers? Couldn't they find a safer place to neck? When Kam was only a hundred yards away from the bottom of the hill, the dark vehicle spit up gravel suddenly, lurched and crossed his path broadside. Then it stopped suddenly, seeming to hang there in the two-dimensional glow of Kam's headlights – the driver’s face turned towards him. His expression looked blank, almost calm, prepared for what was about to come.

At high speed on a mountain road, your eyes watery and craving sleep, your right foot numb and cranky, response to sudden death situations, any response, seems almost a futile effort. Better to just hold your breath and wait. Pray that the goddamn seat belt, the one that's been putting a crease in your digestive tract for ten years now, does its job.

For reasons Kam could never guess at; a long forgotten instinct wrenched the wheel from his hands and cranked hard. Defensive driving 1998. A weekend course his first wife insisted he take. Who knows why? She must have read a glowing review in
Cosmopolitan
magazine. But whatever lingered there, some physical memory perhaps that had atrophied from lack of use, caused Kam to twist the steering wheel madly and then hang on. He was now traveling roughly at the same speed he had been at only seconds before, only now he was doing it backwards. The driver of the other car must have been just as surprised – a barreling pair of headlights replaced suddenly by two glaring red eyes, the tail lights of Kam's Toyota Van, plowing into his driver’s door.

The rear end of the Toyota sliced cleanly into the side of the shiny Jeep Grand Cherokee, driving the steel side-guard rails deep into the interior, turning the drivers head into an unfeeling, unthinking pulp that slicked up the cool leather seats and splattered the shiny face of the GPS display.

Both vehicles spun around, welded together by the force of their collision, and skidded noisily across the gravel shoulder and over the edge of the ravine that dropped into Lake Muskoka.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Esther Nates was now the fourth dead professor on my growing list.

I called the Berkeley County Sheriff’s office and was told that a William Pope was charged with her first-degree murder yesterday. Pope had been doing odd jobs around Nate’s house. A known drug addict, he told investigators he was suffering from drug withdrawals and blacked out. He said, later when he woke up, he found the professor laying on the living room floor with a plastic bag pulled over her head.

“He was apparently suffering the after effects of the drug and blacked out. He has no memory of the crime,” answered the officer in charge. Nates was found dead, suffocated, and her hands tied behind her back. By her daughter. The results of Nate’s autopsy were that she died from ligature strangulation and smothering.

I’ve been involved in dozens of homicides where the perpetrator denied any knowledge of the crime. They weren’t saying they didn’t kill anyone, they just didn’t remember the details. It’s an effective pre-trial strategy when all the cards are stacked against you.
Was that what Pope was up to?

I Googled Nates. She was world-renowned. Recent winner of a prestigious mathematics prize.
Born with three strikes against her
she had once commented to a reporter for
Science
magazine.
Grew up in the projects. Black. And a woman.

I could feel a hollowness in my stomach. This was too much of a coincidence. Four professors from a group of five – all dead within a week of each other. In different cities, connected by what?

I had worked with an FBI special agent a few years ago on a homicide case connected to a serial killer investigation. Her name was Jann Stone and she worked out of the Quantico Lab in Virginia, about two hours drive from DC. Her specialty was technology and since I’m one of the few human beings left in modern civilization who doesn’t own a PC, I thought I would get her advice.

Of course there was also a complication. We had gotten pretty close during that investigation. Seriously close. At one point I had actually considering retiring from Homicide and joining the FBI in Virginia, but then I woke up when I realized I shouldn’t be giving my hormones the vote on my career plans. Besides, I have a teenage daughter that lives with my ex in D.C. who I want to see more often rather than less. So I turned the offer down. Fireworks followed.

“Jann! It’s Hyde. How are things in Virginia?”

Jann whistled into the phone. “Gregory! Its been a while. I heard you solved that
Buzzworm
case last year.”

Usually I hate it when people call me Gregory. When Jann does, it’s like foreplay.

“That was pure luck” I said, feeling flushed.

“Pure luck? No way. You’re a human bulldozer.”

“Yeah. My ex used to tell me that. She didn’t think it was a good thing.”

“Too bad. Comes in handy sometimes. So what’s up?” Jann was acting very cool. Like an award-winning drama hadn’t gone down between us once. Shouting. Swearing. Historic make-up sex.

“I’ve got a suspicious suicide in D.C. that looks like it could be connected to a couple of out-of state murders. So I wondered if the Feds were on to this or would be interested in working with me on it.”

“What’s the victim’s name? I’m at my computer into HUMINT right now, so let me do a quick search and see if something pops up. But be patient. The system’s been very cranky lately. Everything takes forever.” HUMINT was the FBI’s searchable database of everything useful in crime – fingerprints, DNA, license plates, names, groups, sex offenders – you name it.

I read her the list of names. Gridley. Bugloski. Chapertah. Nates. I listened to her punching in the data. “And finally, the fifth member of their think tank, Professor Kaufmann out of Stanford.”

There was a long pause. She was right when she said the system was slow. When she spoke next her voice had changed. It was a subtle thing, but I had spent a lot of time with her on the phone during our relationship and I knew her moods. “Nothing’s showing up, Hyde.” Another pause. “This system is a real mess right now. Could be no data or just . . .” Still another long pause, like she was checking her text messages while talking to me, faint male voices in the background. “Sorry. Look. I’d love to chat with you more, Greg, but I’ve got a hard stop in the next ten minutes. I can’t miss this one. I gotta run. I’ll talk to you later.”

I put the phone down, feeling much worse than I expected. Did I think she was going to jump up and down at the sound of my voice? But to get blown off like that was a real surprise. And she wasn’t even curious about the case, which was so unlike her. But what was with her voice? This reminded me of the feeling you get seeing a fresh murder scene for the first time; your concentration hijacked instantly.

I checked my notes again, trying to put thoughts of Jann aside, wondering if there was another contact I could squeeze information out of.

I called and left a message with Professor Kaufmann and spoke to his aide; no one knew where he was. He had missed classes today, which was very unlike him. I was able to connect with campus security and spoke to a supervisor who agreed to contact the local police. The day was not going well. I might shortly be five for five.

My cell phone rang and I looked at the screen. It was a Virginia area code.

“Hyde, it’s Jann again.” This time I could hear traffic noise in the background, a lot of it. A major highway. “I’m calling from a pay phone.” I squinted into the fluorescents above me. I was getting a slight buzz and could feel the hairs on my arm rising. Something was definitely up. She was breathing hard into the mouthpiece.

“You know how hard it is to find a pay phone these days? I had to jog three freakin’ miles”

“Just felt like you needed the exercise?” I asked.

“Sorry about the first call, Greg, but people were listening.”

“To what?”

“First, you did not hear anything from me on this professor cluster. If this ever gets back to me, I will spend the rest of my career shoveling phone receipts for a two person Homeland Security office in Fargo.”

“Fargo, the center of international intrigue?”

“I’m serious, Greg. I will be totally screwed if this gets back to me. So here’s the sit rep. About twenty-four hours ago our BATF group received an email from an anonymous author at Harvard. A researcher from the Physics Department there.” BATF was Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, a division of the FBI.

“I thought you said it was an anonymous email.”

“Anonymous in the real world, but that world doesn’t really exist anymore for most Federal investigators. This research assistant, Rupinder Gupta, female, sent a note to a general FBI email address. It got transferred to our Militia division.”

Militia division, thought Hyde? What did this have to do with dead professors?

“This special ops is keeping an eye on some private militia groups. The hardcore fanatics. This investigation started right after the Oklahoma City bombing was linked to one such group.”

“Jann, are we talking about the same thing? What the hell does a militia group have to do with dead professors? And a student from Harvard?”

“Good question. She was working with all the people you mentioned. Gridley, Bugloski and Nates. Also Ezrah Kaufmann from Stanford. That’s a million in one match right there. She had a number of documents she sent that builds a pretty interesting connection to a cult slash militia group situated in our very own area code. Virginia.” I swallowed hard. I was getting that
fight or flight
feeling and I knew Jann was too.

“And now it looks like Kaufmann is missing too,” I added.

“Damn, Hyde. This kid may be on to something. Sounds really bright. It wasn’t easy to crack her firewall. And she was Chapertah’s right hand on his research.”

“So why couldn’t you just tell me all this before?”

“Hyde, you don’t get it. It just so happens this researcher at Harvard hit gold. Our team has had this militia group under heavy surveillance for over five years. They think they’re close to closing in and the last thing they want is some heads-down homicide dick to come lumbering into their net.”

“Thanks, Jann. That’s a flattering picture.”

“Sorry, Greg. But you’re not a legend in DC because you’re subtle.”

“So where does this leave us? Can you share?”

“Did I mention Fargo? No way. But I can give you enough to get you started.”

“You think the professors were killed by this cult group?”

“That’s what Gupta thinks. We haven’t had time to follow that lead up yet. But you could. ”

“She’s at Harvard. I would never get approval on the travel.”

“Take a day off. Harvard is beautiful this time of year.”

Her idea really surprised me. Not standard operating procedure for a tall dark rule-follower like Jann. “If you come with me,” was all I said.

Then I waited. And waited, perspiration soaking my shirt collar.

“This would have to be quick, Greg. I’m only open tomorrow afternoon. If I can get sign off. After that I’m up to my armpits.”

“I remember being quite fond of your armpits.”

There was a pause, which quite a few large trucks drove through based on the sounds coming through the landline. “Greg, before this goes any further, uh, you need to know that I’m seeing someone right now. So if I can get the go ahead on Harvard this would be strictly police business. You understand?”

“Police business. Got it. My favorite kind.” Jann could probably tell by the tension in my voice I was lying my ass off. My right hand had already formed a fist involuntarily.
Who was this someone?
I had built a suspect profile already. A tall Fibbie with a firm jaw and blue eyes. Pretty soon I’d be getting a police sketch artist to draw a portrait.

She added “OK.” Which of course meant nothing was OK. She was thinking of a way to get me from
heavy boil
down to
simmer
. “In the meantime, you can grab some info on this group. But you need to be careful who you talk to. They are very wealthy and powerful. Not too many militia groups have a billion dollar slush fund. These guys do.”

“And where does all this cash come from?”

“Well, you might be tempted to list off the usual suspects – bank robbery, drugs and coercion, but we think it’s far more sophisticated than that. Like Internet fraud, identity theft and the real freakin’ surprise – legitimate businesses.”

There was silence on the line as I gauged the value of the information. “What are you going to do with this, Hyde? All this silence is beginning to worry me.” I could hear another eighteen-wheeler roar by on her phone and then it hit me.

“You didn’t even trust your cell phone?” I blurted out.

“That’s the last thing I would trust in this state. You’ve got the CIA, my FBI buddies, Homeland
Insecurity
and the NSA, just to start. Who knows what other alphabet soup tribe is listening in.”

“So how do we communicate?”

“I’ll stick with public land lines until we meet. If you need to use my cell, keep it light on details. I wouldn’t have given you this info if I didn’t think you would follow up. You’re Gregory Hyde for God’s sake. But this did not come from me. You found this on your own. Google the group. Use that as your lead, if you need one. We will just happen to run into each other at the University.”

“Great. So who’s this group I’m looking up?”

“The Soldiers of Patmos. They have a very professional web site and a lot of online references. Go crazy. Their headquarters are in Hanover County near a town called Ashland. They call their compound Parkhurst. This is not a little splinter group, Greg. There are five thousand of them at Parkhurst. Very heavily armed. A town full of true American terrorists.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Kam O’Brien’s gold colored Toyota Van, the weight of the rear engine throwing it hard against the side panels of the Jeep at a little over 100 kilometers per hour, folded itself into the stationary vehicle, locking the two together in a marriage of steel and plastic and broken glass. The coupled vehicles spun, flipped over the embankment and rolled clumsily into Lake Muskoka.

The Toyota, entering the water last, tipped up nose down. Claude Gauthier’s Jeep, the driver’s debt now paid in full, acted as an anchor to pull the whole mass down into the black liquid.

Kam was slammed against the seat back, snapping the mounting brackets and throwing him into the rear. Then, as both vehicles flipped over the embankment, he was jettisoned back to the front, where he collapsed under the dash. He awoke suddenly, only seconds before the cold lake water enclosed him.

Kam came to, convince he had been unconscious for hours. His room was darker than usual – inky black – and he rolled over to reach for the lamp on his bedside table. He was surprised to bump his arm against the steel under-structure of the dash. And he was freezing – a numbing cold had swallowed his body up to his waist. He yelped and tried to kick, realizing again that somehow he was trapped, but not understanding where. Then the freezing water hit his mouth. Before he could gasp, the water filled his ears. His whole universe was now an airless, dull, throbbing echo chamber of pain.