Simple Simon (10 page)

A vapid, coarse face stared back at him a second later, red hair atop and a crooked cleft in the chin. Art looked long at it, not even bothering with the written information yet. He studied the eyes, the lines of age, the crook of the mouth. On the generous monitor the face was as large as his. Mike Bell could have been sitting two feet from him.

“So, what did you want with Simon’s family?”

The answer did not come, but Art did not expect it yet. The dead did not come right out and answer. You had to drag it out of them. And it only made it easier if you already hated them.

*  *  *

“Do you have anything to declare?” the youthful customs inspector at the Vancouver, B.C., International Airport inquired of the oddly exotic Asian woman as she set her purse on the inspection table before him.

Keiko Kimura smiled behind dark glasses and beneath a silky blonde wig. “Only that you’re cute.”

The inspector, mindful of the plainclothes Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer standing a few feet away, suppressed a smile and dutifully examined the woman’s passport. “Miss Jiang, you are coming from Hong Kong?”

Keiko nodded. The glasses hid her eyes, and she doubted that the scrumptious young man would notice the difference between Japanese and Chinese features. Oh, if only that dreadful Canadian lilt didn’t taint his speech he might pass for American. But that really did not matter. America was not far away. A short drive. So close.

The inspector took a quick look in Miss Jiang’s purse, and handed her passport back. “Enjoy your stay in Canada.”

“I will,” Keiko said, and left the customs area with an exaggerated wiggle in her walk. The inspector admired her until she disappeared into the terminal.

Blood Tears

It was called the guest room, but in reality the only guest that had ever used it was Anne’s twenty year old daughter, Jennifer, when she stole a free weekend once from her studies at Stanford. Now Simon occupied it, sitting on the bed, legs barely touching the floor, his thin frame tilting to and fro.

In the open doorway, leaning against the jamb, Art stood watching the young man, thinking, wondering.

“You should come to bed,” Anne said, coming up from behind and sliding her arms around Art’s waist, feeling him breathe beneath her touch. “He’ll fall asleep eventually.”

Art nodded absently and crossed his arms over hers. In one hand a sheet of paper was rolled into a white tube, which he tapped against his bare chest. “He misses them.”

“His world is out of sorts, Art. Miss probably isn’t something he comprehends.”

Simon rocked gently, silently, hands folded on his legs. His eyes danced over something, over nothing, over a bare space in the corner.

“He misses them,” Art repeated.

Anne cocked her eyes toward Art’s face and planted a soft kiss on his cheek. He could still surprise her, the rugged, stubborn G-Man. “Come to bed. Soon.”

Art nodded and felt Anne’s hands ease away. A moment later, when the door to their bedroom down the hall clicked shut, Art opened the rolled paper and looked to it. It had been taken off Mike Bell’s body at the Lynch house, folded in his coat pocket. Of all the other information in the ROMA file, the fake Chicago PD credentials, the copies of Lynch family medical records found in Bell’s van, their driver’s license photos, this one page stood out because it had no apparent meaning. It was a hole, and Art knew Lomax’s words to be quite true when it came to investigations. Looking at the holes would give texture, sometimes form, to the surrounding landscape of inquiry.

But this was a hole like no other, a hole of numbers, and letters, covering one entire sheet of paper. Art looked from it to Simon as his fingers curled it again into a tube.

What happened in that house, kid?
Art wondered, knowing that soon he would have to pose that question outright. Maybe Simon would answer, maybe not, but beyond that there was the paramount question that Art knew he would have to give satisfaction to. The question whose response more often than not generated more questions. Art resisted the urge to crush the flimsy roll of paper and loosed the query upon himself.
Why? Why to this family? To this kid?

*  *  *

Thousands of miles west, in a club on the expansive Seattle waterfront, a Willamette University student squeezed through a crush of people at the bar and ordered a Sharp’s from the bartender. His elbow innocently brushed the bare arm of a pretty woman on his right.

“Excuse me.”

Keiko Kimura, black hair sculpted into a French braid that narrowed as it crept down her back, looked to the young man through small, round, blue-tinted specs. She smiled, her eyes traveling down to his arms, over biceps that did not deserve to be hidden by sleeves, past the casually rolled-up cuffs just below the elbows, to forearms that might have been chiseled from marble by a Roman artisan.

And then to the hands. The perfect fingers spread on the bar, thumbs prominent, nails clean and tailored.

When she looked back to the young man’s face, Keiko could almost
feel
the resistance of the nails as they came free of the flesh that anchored them, could
hear
the slender bones of the hand snapping, could imagine the screams. Screams, probably no, she decided, but she could imagine. The agony. The ecstasy.

The young man smiled at her. That was a mistake. It would not be his last.

“I’m Suzy,” Keiko said, leaning closer to the prey she had just claimed.

*  *  *

The closet door creaked open in the dark, and the man with red hair stepped out, holding a knife, the dangerous end toward Art.

Guess
, he taunted.
Guess
.

The upper half of Art’s body sprang up in bed, tugging at the sheets and waking Anne. She rolled toward him and put a hand on his back.

“What is it?”

Art wiped at his face and batted his eyes. “A dream.”

“Good or…” Anne’s inquiry stopped abruptly and she sat up next to Art, ear tuned to the door. “Do you hear something?”

The blurred image of Mike Bell fading, Art opened his eyes fully and listened. There was something. He nodded and pulled the covers off his legs.

“What is that?”

Art stood and could tell that Anne was doing the same to his rear. His instinct was to take his weapon from the nightstand, but something about the sound quashed that.

Anne came around the bed, gathering her robe. “You hear it, right?”

A low, broken buzzing…no, humming, almost melodic in its fracture. Art stepped toward the door and eased it open. When he did, the sound defined itself. It wafted through the open door to the guestroom, a tortured repetition that made their hearts sink in unison.

“Daddy’s gonna sing. Daddy’s gonna sing. Daddy’s gonna sing.”

Anne started past, but Art held her back. “Let me.”

“Art.”

He didn’t know why he was about to say what he was about to say, but he nonetheless knew that it was right. For some reason. “I should do this.”

If she thought she’d been surprised earlier, Anne was doubly so now. Not by the words her husband spoke, but by the calm surety with which he spoke them. Before she could react, with either shock or approval, or a combination of both, Art was through the door and moving toward the guest room.

The lyrical repetition continued, even after Art pushed the door slowly open and saw Simon standing in the empty corner of the room he’d earlier stared endlessly at. Standing, hands folded together, rocking gently, and singing as though the song would make itself come true.

Art stepped into the room and said, “Simon.”

The singing ended, fading away on the word ‘Daddy.’ The rocking increased as Simon stood, silently now, in the barren corner of the room.

A few steps closer, until he was right at Simon’s side, and Art lowered to a crouch, looking up into the downcast face. The eyes flitted over his for the briefest of instants before finding haven in the inanimate anonymity of the rug.

“Did Daddy sing to you?” Art asked, notching his voice down somewhere below its normal commanding tone.

“Daddy’s gonna sing,” Simon said, the melody gone from the words.

Art nodded slowly. “What did Daddy sing?”

Simon’s head tilted away, and came back as a yawn swept over it.

“You look tired,” Art said.

“Simon is tired.” Another yawn now, manufactured this time, a gesture to please.

“Do you want to go to sleep now?” Art asked, his hands coming to rest on his knees. Without reply to the question, Simon reached with his hand and gripped the fingers of Art’s right hand. He looked long at the small white hand before standing and leading Simon back to bed. He guided him under the covers and pulled the bedding up snug over the exhausted body. Simon looked away, head sideways on the pillow, eyes dancing as the lids closed over them, and Art realized that, for the first time since his grandmother had lay dying in her bed, he had tucked someone in.

He watched Simon for a long time before he turned for the door. When he did he saw Anne standing there, watching him with wonder. He was embarrassed.

It was the first time she had seen him cry.

Process of Elimination

The lone door to the Chocolate Box swung open into the brilliant light of the early spring day, patches of snow still on the ground, and uniformed Marines staring seriously from their perimeter posts at Brad Folger. After a moment he saw their eyes track in another direction and followed the lead.

Kudrow walked slowly along the gravel bed that ringed the Chocolate Box just inside the inner fence. He knew he’d be causing havoc in the security center right then, trampling the buried motion sensors as he was, but he honestly didn’t give a damn. He needed air. He needed to walk in the open. He needed to think.

He did not, however, need Folger.

Granite pebbles grinding beneath expensive shoes brought Kudrow’s walk to a halt. He looked up and stared through the several layers of wire toward the woods beyond still more wire, letting Folger come to him. When his assistant was alongside he said, “I take it you’ve heard.”

White mist flared from Folger’s nostrils. “Nick, end this, now, before we all end up in prison.”

“I’m tiring of your resistance, Bradley,” Kudrow said, as if referring to an annoyance that could be driven off with the swat of his hand.

“Nick, the kid is with his doctor, who is married to a ranking FBI agent, who just happens to be running the investigation of Bell!” Folger glanced toward the Marines, but they were out of earshot.

“I’ll note your concern.”

“God dammit, Nick!” Folger swore, loud enough now that two Marines did look, briefly, before turning discreetly away.

Kudrow snatched his glasses off and snapped his head toward Folger. His small, myopic eyes glared at the shorter, younger man, saying much before the words came. “Bradley. I don’t have to say to you what I can say to you. Do I?”

Folger’s eyes fled first, then his face, looking off to the same woods that Kudrow had gazed at. He breathed deeply, haltingly, and felt almost like laughing, but nothing was funny. Everything, however, was quite absurd, and quite awful. “I never thought you’d do this to me.”

“I’ve done nothing,” Kudrow reminded and warned his assistant, then replaced his glasses.

Folger nodded. “Yeah.”

“I hope I don’t have to.”

Now Folger did chuckle, at himself, for being so damn naive to believe that G. Nicholas Kudrow had once saved his ass out of pure humanity. One mistake. One lousy mistake.

“You find this amusing?” Kudrow asked, mildly perplexed.

“Fucking hilarious, Nick,” Folger answered through a pained grin. “You’re good. You know that?”

Kudrow again looked off toward the trees and thought of whitetail season, the crack of the rifle, the taste of venison.

“You kept it real close, right up to the chest, making me feel like you weren’t even looking.” Folger swallowed hard. “You kept that card to play later. Right?”

“Stop worrying,” Kudrow said with irritation. “You think you’ve sinned?” His head shook slightly. He knew real sinners. “You’re a saint, Bradley.”

A saint. Folger was certain the authorities wouldn’t characterize him as such if Kudrow played his ace. “You have all the cards, Nick. The whole fucking deck. Who else do you own…or rent as needed?”

Kudrow told himself that when this was all over, when the next season opened, he was going to go into the field and bring down a magnificent buck with just one shot. Dead on. A clean kill. “You don’t want to know what I know, Bradley. You might wonder what we work so hard for.”

“Yeah,” Folger agreed with offhand sarcasm. “Yeah. That’d be a shame.”

A venison tenderloin sizzling on the grill. Kudrow could hear it, could smell it. But he could not see it. All his mind’s eye could manage to conjure at the moment was the face of the FBI agent he’d seen in a photograph transmitted from one of the field teams. A black man, a serious, hard looking man, with careful eyes and determination cut into the jaw line.

A smart man.

An uncompromising man.

“He’ll have to be removed,” Kudrow said to the distant treeline.

“As in gotten rid of, done away with, eliminated,” Folger observed. “You suggest it like it’s no harder than lighting a cigar. Do you really think it’s that easy?”

“Removal through less than lethal means,” Kudrow explained. “It is possible. Quite possible.”

“And how is that?”

Kudrow had been considering how it might be done before Folger’s interruption, and there was one, and only one, course to follow to that end.

“I’m going to run it by Rothchild,” Kudrow said. He looked to his assistant to measure his response. Folger had one hand over his quivering right eye, the other cast toward the ground. Without a word he showed Kudrow his back and walked away.

*  *  *

Conrad Cabral, in thirty years on the Seattle Police Department, sixteen of those working homicide, could not remember seeing an arm bent at the angle it had been on the body of this male. At least they were reasonably sure it was a male. No genitalia had been found as yet, and the face was no help, chopped and even bitten as it was. There were no breasts, but then the chest had been opened with a rough X cut from each armpit to the opposite hip bone, making certain determination doubtful until the medical examiner got a look.