Spilled Blood (34 page)

It was funny how the mind worked. You didn’t always believe something even when you knew it was true. There was a part of him that was paranoid about what was really in the hole. He knew that he was within inches of Vernon Clay’s body, but the deeper he dug, the more his drunken mind began to panic that something had gone wrong. Vernon had survived the bullet in his skull. He’d clawed his way out of the ground and escaped. He was out there, messing with all of them.

My name is Aquarius.

Kirk’s shovel banged onto something hard. Finally.

He threw the shovel out of the hole onto the mountain of dirt. He reached for his flashlight and shined it at his feet. There he was. Vernon Clay, or what was left of him. His flesh had long ago been devoured by the dirt dwellers. Kirk squatted and wiped grime from the bones and saw that he’d unearthed the dead man’s hand and forearm. The bones were brittle. He levered the wrist bone under his heel and snapped the hand back. The entire hand broke off with a sickening crack.

‘They need you in Washington, sir,’ he said in his deepest voice, and he started howling with laughter again.

He deposited the hand on the ground and hauled his body out of the five-foot pit. His muscles rippled. He was dirty, wet, and cold, and he wanted a hot shower before meeting Florian. He thought about dragging his brother down here and making Lenny fill in the open hole, but he was still pissed enough that he might
push the pussy boy inside and dump the mud on top of him. Leno, meet Vernon.

Kirk bent in the darkness for the shovel. He pushed around with his hands to locate the handle, but he couldn’t find it. Annoyed, he shined his flashlight at the pyramid of wet soil and realized that the shovel was gone. He could see the long indentation of the pole, but it wasn’t there.

‘What the fuck?’ he said aloud.

His brain screamed a warning, but at the same moment, he heard whistling, so close and loud that he thought it was the skeleton at his feet, blowing a tune through the remains of his teeth. He was wrong. He spun toward the noise, but he was too slow to duck or shout. The whistle howled in his ears, and the shovel blade whipped with the force of a speeding truck into the meat of his skull. He never felt it.

Chris figured that the death of a prominent university researcher would have made the news. He booted up his laptop and drove out of the high-school parking lot into the residential streets of Barron, and he soon found an unsecured wireless network that he used to access the Internet. Parked on the street in the rain, with the dome light of the Lexus casting shadows inside the car, he ran a Google search and found an article with the basic facts.

Lucia Causey, fifty-one, a professor and researcher in the epidemiology of cancer at Stanford Medical School, had been found in the garage of her Sunnyvale home. She’d connected a swimming-pool hose to her tailpipe and rerouted the deadly exhaust into the front seat of her Accord.

Lucia killed herself.

Why?

That was what Chris wanted to know. Maybe her death was unrelated to the events in Barron, but he didn’t like the fact that so many of the people who might have known what happened
at Mondamin weren’t around to talk about it. Vernon Clay was missing. Lucia Causey was dead. So was Ashlynn. What had she found?

Chris searched again, hunting for blog posts connected to Lucia Causey on the day after her death, when news would have broken across campus. Most of the results were inconsequential: expressions of disbelief or sympathy, questions about classes or research projects in which she’d been involved, discussions of suicide awareness and prevention, and a handful of religious diatribes. He tried again, changing his search terms, and found a mention of the scientist’s death in a blogger’s chat room called The Truth About Pesticide Poisoning.

What caught his eye was the handle of the chat-room host. It was AMES_GREEN_GUY.

Another coincidence? The environmental activist whose fingerprint had showed up on one of the Aquarius letters lived and worked in Ames, Iowa. Chris loaded the thread, which mostly consisted of an online argument between the poster in Ames and a research assistant at Stanford who used the handle WUNDERLICH. He scrolled through the posts:

AGG: Sux for her kids, man, but hard for me to drum up sympathy for her. She was IPP.

W: She and her husband didn’t have kids. What’s IPP?

AGG: In the Pocket of Polluters.

W: Hey, slow down, green. You’re wrong. She played it straight.

AGG: What about Mondamin? They got summary judgment in toxic tort lit thanx to her.

W: That’s one case. She wrote plaintiff-friendly reports, too.

AGG: Defense hack. The Mondamin thing smelled.

W: Shit, must be nice to see the world in black and white. There are bad actors, but you can’t blame Big Chem for every lymphoma.

AGG: Wake up, wunder. Who writes big chex to the univ research depts?

W: Lucia was clean.

AGG: She offed herself. Feeling guilty?

W: STFU.

AGG: I’m just saying. You see it coming?

W: No.

AGG: So why’d she do it?

W: Who knows why anyone does that? You can be brilliant but screwed up. She had problems. Depression. Gambling.

AGG: She leave a note?

W: Don’t think so. The whole thing sucks.

AGG: Cancer sux. Pesticide sux. Suicide is quick.

W: She HATED cancer.

AGG: Still sounds like guilty conscience 2 me. IPP.

W: She was my friend. She killed herself. FU.

There was silence from the blogger in Ames following the last comment. He didn’t answer.

Chris tried to understand the implications of what he’d read. If the chat participant in Ames was the same man whose fingerprint had been found on the hotel paper, he obviously wasn’t a fan of Lucia Causey. He’d also mentioned Mondamin specifically. According to Michael Altman, however, the Ames activist was in an Iowa jail, which meant he couldn’t be the man who called himself Aquarius. It was another dead end.

He was about to shut down his laptop when he realized that the online chat on the pollution site spilled over to a second page. He clicked on the next page of the thread and saw that there was one additional post, but it wasn’t from either of the two original participants. Instead, it was from someone new. The final comment was dated only two weeks ago, long after the chat began.

Seeing it, Chris found himself frozen as he stared at the screen. The post was dated three days after Ashlynn called Stanford, and the poster had used her initials as a handle. AS.

There were too many coincidences now. This wasn’t random.

He read what Ashlynn had written and realized she’d left him a clue, as if she were speaking to him from the grave. If it was Ashlynn. If it was true.

AS: Lucia didn’t kill herself. She was murdered.

Where was Johan?

Olivia felt helpless without any way to reach him. She couldn’t sit and wait as he threw his life away. When night fell, she knew she had to move quickly, and she knew where to go. She slipped out of her window, ducked through the wet streets of St. Croix, and borrowed a rusty Grand Am from the garage of one of her friends. She turned on her brights as she reached the highway. Her tires kicked up spray behind her like an ocean wave. Kirk’s house was ten minutes away, and with each mile closer to him, her terror climbed up her throat.

She parked on the shoulder near 120th. When she got out, a wave of rain slashed her chest. She ran for the dirt road, where she stopped and stared into the hole between the trees. It felt like descending into a monster’s cave. She smelled the smoke of a log fire and a wave of pine. The wind was fierce. With her hands shoved in the pockets of her jeans, she took tentative steps into the darkness. Her feet sank into the ooze. Her hair became wet ropes on her face.

Branches from the dense woods scraped her face. The constant patter of rain drowned out the other noises of the forest, and she worried that if someone were nearby, she wouldn’t hear them until their breath was on her neck. Her brain fed flashbacks from a horror movie, but it wasn’t a movie. In the invisible night, she found herself back in the belly of the train car as the boys assaulted her. She glimpsed quick, stabbing reminders of what she’d buried in her mind. She felt the crush of their hands on
her skin, holding her down. Her body rattled on the metal floor with hammering jolts of pain.

It’s not real.

She wanted to go back home, but she couldn’t.

She hiked step by step like a blind girl. When her knee collided with something hard, she stopped and pawed with her hands, running her fingers along wet steel. It was a car, parked deep in the soft mud under a canopy of brush. She reached into her pocket and yanked out her keys; she had a penlight on the chain. It cast a feeble light, but it was enough to show her the license plate of the vehicle. She recognized it. The car belonged to Glenn Magnus.

Johan was here.

The car was empty, but when she laid a palm on the hood, she felt the heat of the engine. He hadn’t been here long. She still had a chance to catch him. She opened her mouth to shout his name, but she caught herself and bit her tongue to stay quiet. She couldn’t let anyone know they were here. Even so, she felt his presence nearby, like a wi-fi signal connecting them. All her old feelings came back, as strong as ever. Memories of the two of them in the corn field last summer supplanted the black memories of the train car. She felt him holding her as they made love. Her first time. His, too, he said. His body was on top of her, and his heaviness was arousing.

Olivia walked faster. She needed to find him.

She reached Kirk’s house steps away from the black river. It was flooded with light, but she saw no one moving inside. She recognized Kirk’s pick-up parked near the garage. He was home. Or was he? The stillness bothered her. She expected the music of a party, or boys’ voices, or the squeals of stupid girls who didn’t know better. Instead, the house was as silent as a tomb.

She crept closer, exposed in the glow of the garage lights. If Johan could see her, she hoped he’d break cover and call her. No one did. She walked past the truck to the front-porch steps. Loose
boards groaned as she climbed them, and she winced at the noise. At the front door, she cupped her hands by her face to stare inside the house. The living-room lights were on, and the place was a mess. Someone had torn it apart. Two drawers of a file cabinet were open and had been emptied onto the floor, which was strewn with papers and photographs. A desktop computer lay on the floor; its metal side had been stripped open.

What the hell?

Olivia backed away and retraced her steps off the porch. At each window, she saw more signs of a frantic search, but she saw no one alive. Not Kirk. Not Johan. She reached the rear corner of the house backing up to the wilderness and the river. The window on the corner looked in on a small bedroom, ten feet by twelve. She saw the high-school textbooks on the laminate desk and figured that the room belonged to Kirk’s brother, Lenny. He had a lava lamp, glowing with floating orange clouds. Dirty clothes covered the floor. There were posters tacked on the wall, all of naked porn stars. Front. Back. On their knees. It was disgusting.

On his bed, immediately below the window, she saw other photographs, too. Photographs of her.

Olivia felt violated all over again. She saw herself in the swimming pool at school. On the street outside her mother’s clinic. On her front lawn in St. Croix with Tanya. Wherever she’d gone, he’d been there with her. Spying. Lenny had been following her for weeks.

She recoiled from the window, and as she did, a hand clapped over her mouth from behind. Another hand snaked around her waist, and she felt dirty fingers on her bare stomach.

The touch of a boy’s hand set her off like a bomb. She drove her elbow backward into her attacker’s kidney, landing the blow so hard she thought the fleshy organ would squish out onto the mushy ground. She heard a yelp of pain and felt the hands loosen on her body. Free now, she spun, throwing her left fist, colliding with
hard bone. It was the side of his skull. Another gasp. His hands flew in front of his face in self-defense. She shoved violently on his bare chest, and his legs spilled out underneath him, and he dropped flat on his back. His body was a mucky stretch of skin; he was naked. She swung her leg to punt his groin like a football kicker, but he squirmed away and covered himself, screaming, ‘No!’

She focused on his face for the first time. It was Lenny. She looked around, expecting Kirk and the other Barron boys to charge her. No one did. The two of them were alone.

‘Lenny, you bastard!’

On the ground at her feet, the boy wailed. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Olivia, I didn’t know it was you.’ There was a dirty wool blanket near him on the ground, and he scrambled to cover himself. ‘Honest, I didn’t know.’

‘Where’s Kirk?’

‘I don’t know. He kicked me out. I fell asleep in the truck.’

‘Have you seen anybody else?’

‘No, nobody. I told you, I was sleeping. Something woke me up.’

Lenny struggled to his feet, clutching the blanket at his waist. His chest was scrawny, his arms like toothpicks. His eyes darted up and down Olivia’s body, and she realized that her nipples were pointy and visible through the soaked fabric of her shirt. She folded her arms over her chest.

‘How long have you been following me?’

His eyes widened. ‘What?’

‘You’ve been stalking me, you creep. I saw the pictures on your bed.’