The Bone Hunters (12 page)

“I don't think he stayed in touch with anybody, at least as far as I know,” said Morrissey. “It was like he was trying to put it all behind him.”

Lexy looked at Steve and shook her head.

“I've got his Silver Star upstairs if you want to see it.”

“That's all right,” said Lexy. “Thank you for giving us your time.”

“It's getting dark,” said Morrissey. “You might want to be out of this neighborhood as soon as possible.”

They were back in the car and four blocks away when Lexy said, “Stop.”

Macaulay immediately pulled to the side.

“Did you notice those scars on his hands?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Macaulay. “He was a plant worker for thirty or forty years.”

“What about the ones on his neck?”

Steve shook his head.

“Those are burn scars. In the hospital record, it said that when Sean Morrissey was admitted, he was suffering from second-degree burns.”

“You're right . . . and he also knew I was military . . . and he used the term
short rations
.”

As he was about to turn the car around, Lexy's cell phone began to ring. She put it next to her ear and then jerked it away.

“It was in my shoes,” bellowed Barnaby.

For a moment she wondered if he was hallucinating after another seizure.

“The Chinese woman in Choate's office,” he went on. “She put microchip transmitters in our shoes. That's what triggered the arrhythmic seizures. When all the tests came back negative, they decided to scan my clothes to make sure I hadn't been exposed to something bacterial or biological.”

Lexy looked down at her feet. She had changed her shoes at the hotel from pumps to walking shoes. Macaulay was wearing his familiar chukka boots.

“Get rid of your shoes,” she said. “They might have a transmitter in them.”

Macaulay slipped them off and stepped out of the car. A pickup truck was going by and slowing down for the stop sign. He dropped them in the open freight bed and watched the truck head off into the night.

Driving back to Morrissey's, Macaulay hoped they had eliminated the threat. Still on the phone, Lexy told Barnaby about their suspicions of Morrissey and that she would check back as soon as they knew anything.

The street was still deserted when they walked back up to the front porch. Macaulay didn't bother to knock. He looked up at the surveillance camera and said, “Sorry to bother you again, Mr. Morrissey, but we had one last question for you. It won't take a minute.”

They heard the dead bolts being unlocked again and the door swung open.

“What is it now?” he asked gruffly from the wheelchair.

“Why are you impersonating your brother?” asked Lexy.

She saw a quick dart of movement in the sharp brown eyes before they went slack again.

“If you're Daniel Morrissey, it'll be easy to prove one way or another,” said Macaulay, “after we come back with the police and take your fingerprints.”

“We would prefer not to do that,” said Lexy. “All we want is information.”

The old man looked past them into the street. Nothing was moving.

“I'm Sean Morrissey,” he said.

19 May

1762 Gabriel Street

Detroit, Michigan

“What I told you before is true, all of it, including the Silver Star at Iwo,” said Morrissey. “I was a good marine. When I came back home, the girl I loved had gotten married. I went out to Oregon and later to Mexico. When I finally came back here, Dan took me in . . . nursed me back. He was already a hermit. The gangs tried to drive us off like the other older neighbors, but we knew how to defend ourselves.”

He looked down at Macaulay's feet.

“What happened to your shoes?” asked Morrissey.

“They're on their way to Chicago,” said Macaulay, confusing the old man for a moment.

“Why did you assume Daniel's identity?” asked Lexy gently, pulling out her notebook and a pen.

When he stood up from the wheelchair, Sean Morrissey seemed to momentarily dissolve into another man, tall, younger, distinguished. She could see the good bone structure in his face, a fragment of what he might have looked like as a strapping marine at the beginning of the war.

“I didn't plan any of it,” he said. “I came downstairs one morning and found Dan lying there on the floor. He must have been dead for three or four hours. Rigor was
already setting in. I called the police and told them my address and that my brother had died during the night. The dispatcher was too distracted to take my name and said she would send a sector car as soon as possible. It got here a couple hours later.”

He gave them a grim smile.

“By then I had given some thought to his pension and the comforts it provided to survive here in this city. After Dan and I got old, we looked a lot alike. His wife was dead and his daughter hadn't visited in years. When the police officer asked me for his full name, I gave him my own. No one bothered to check. A week later he was cremated.”

“Can you remember those two wooden crates in Peking?” asked Macaulay, cutting to the chase.

“I remember the one in our truck was painted bright red,” said Morrissey. “It had Chinese lettering on it.”

“Why didn't you ever tell anyone about them after you got to Key West?”

“I was out of it for months in the hospital. At first I couldn't even remember my name. By the time I started to get my memory back, it seemed . . . It just didn't seem important. Anyway, the crate was gone. . . . It went down with the ship I was on.”

“Another marine was reported missing in action with you . . . Sergeant James Donald Bradshaw,” said Lexy. “Do you know what happened to him?”

Morrissey was quiet. His jaw began to tremble and he turned away. When he regained his composure, he said, “Ol' J.D. . . . him I can see very clearly in my mind. I see him every day. He gave his life for me.”

He described the scene on the docks at Chinwangtao
when J. D. Bradshaw had ordered Sean to board the ship as the Japanese advance guard arrived. And what Bradshaw had done with the grenades as the ship pulled out.

“Did either of you know what was in the red crate?”

“When J.D. saw the coolies carrying them, he said they were too light to be gold. After he died, I didn't care. What did they matter? What did any of it matter? By the time my memory came back, I knew the red one was at the bottom of the sea.”

“Do you have any idea where the ship went down?” asked Lexy.

“None,” said Morrissey. “All I remember with any certainty is waking up in the hospital in Key West with a bandage about as big as a hornet's nest around my head.”

“Someone had to have rescued you,” said Macaulay. “You have no recollection of it?”

“To this day it's all a blur. Over the years, bits and pieces have come back. I remember the ship I left China on stopped somewhere for a long time. I think it might have been the engine. It was an old tramp. At that point, I was really sick from malaria.”

Lexy continued jotting his statement down in shorthand as he sat down in one of the easy chairs opposite the couch.

“I remember it was night and the sky was full of stars. It was very warm with a soft breeze on my face and then there was a brilliant flash of light. I remember being slammed into a steel bulkhead. . . . Later I was floating on a piece of wreckage. I was alone. Then there was a strange voice around me. I was very thirsty. Then I woke up in the hospital.”

“Don't worry about it,” said Lexy, again very gently.
“There are therapeutic ways to help you regain your memory. None of them are painful or harmful.”

“I don't like hospitals and I don't like doctors.”

“Who does?” said Macaulay with a grin. “Look, you won a Silver Star at Iwo. You've put your life on the line for this country. I want you to trust us that this is a matter of great importance.”

Morrissey thought about it for a few moments and nodded. “I haven't done anything worth a damn ever since.”

“Do you remember the name of the ship that was waiting at Chinwangtao?”

He shook his head. “I would tell you if I could. . . . It was some kind of foreign name.”

He suddenly stared up at the ceiling.

“Did you hear that?” he asked them.

They shook their heads. Macaulay waited for a sound. Aside from the distant hum of traffic on the Mikeries Freeway, the silence held. Morrissey sat there with his ear still cocked toward the ceiling.

“Someone's gotten into the house,” he said, going to the door that led into the hallway and barring it with an iron shaft. He did the same with a second door on the opposite side of the room.

“Check the monitor,” he said.

Macaulay went to the small television monitor mounted near the front door that was connected to the surveillance camera. The screen was blank.

“It's down,” said Macaulay.

“There are three cameras and they are all wireless,” said Morrissey. “Someone has disabled them.”

Lexy had punched Barnaby's number into her cell phone.

“There is no cell phone signal,” she said.

“They're jamming it,” said Macaulay, looking through the peephole in the front door. The street was dark. He thought he saw a shadow move across the lawn. A shudder went through him, an atavistic warning.

“This is a secure room,” said Morrissey. “Dan and I built it over the years. The doors are bullet-resistant and the windows are backed with reinforced concrete. There are steel plates behind those back cushions on the couches.”

Morrissey was standing at the third and last door off the room. When he opened it, Macaulay saw what looked like a small arsenal, including two rifles, a sawed-off shotgun, several handguns on pegs, and stacks of ammunition on the shelves. A set of stairs led down from the weapons cache into the darkness.

“The basement is secure too,” said Morrissey. “The outside entrance to it is lined with a bed of concrete.”

Picking up the sawed-off shotgun, he handed it to Macaulay along with a box of shells.

“Ten-gauge rifled slugs,” he said.

It was a Browning pump action. The slugs looked big enough to stop a horse as Macaulay fed them into the magazine. Morrissey removed an M1 carbine from the wall rack and began loading it with .30-caliber hollow-point bullets. “I carried one of these at Iwo . . . good for close work.”

Lexy heard a soft thump somewhere above them.

“They could be just gangbangers,” said Morrissey. “We've had plenty of those over the years.”

“I don't think so,” said Macaulay. “I'm sorry we led you into this, but they're probably a Chinese paramilitary force. If I'm right, they're going to try to take you alive to find out what you know about those crates. She and I are disposable.”

“Don't be sorry, man,” said Morrissey, grinning back. “There are a few surprises for anyone who tries this place. One is waiting on the other side of that door leading into the kitchen, and there are more upstairs.”

He turned to Lexy and said, “Ma'am, you better stay right there behind the couch.”

“Hand me that .45 on the right shelf,” she said. “I assume you keep it loaded.”

He laughed and tossed it over to her.

“Semper fi,” he said as she charged the first round in the chamber.

The lights went out.

Morrissey threw a switch and two small recessed spots came on, the cones of light aimed at the door into the hallway and a second one on the opposite side of the room.

“That one leads into the kitchen. I'll kill the lights when we know which way they're coming. These will help too,” he said, passing Macaulay a pair of infrared night-vision goggles. “If these guys are using body armor, be sure to aim for the hands, legs, and face.”

“You've spent your brother's pension wisely,” said Macaulay.

They heard a sudden cry of raw agony from behind the door leading to the kitchen. It stopped a few seconds later and was followed by a loud thumping on the floor above them until it finally ended too.

“Dan imported and raised baby Indian cobras,” said Morrissey with a short laugh. “After he died, I let them stay on. They have most of the house to themselves.”

There was a sharp detonation and the bolts blew off the hallway door, the half below the iron bar bursting wide-open. As Morrissey killed the spotlights, a man in a black body suit darted through and dove to his right, his light machine gun extended forward and firing at the couch where Macaulay and Lexy were positioned. His rifle was equipped with a suppressor and the slugs thudding into the quarter-inch steel plates sounded like a high-powered nail gun.

Through his infrared goggles, Macaulay watched as a single shot from Morrissey's carbine drove the man's head back at an odd angle to his body. He hit the floor and didn't move again.

“Liquid body armor,” Morrissey said calmly.

A small device was tossed through the door opening. A cloud of gaseous smoke billowed up from it as a second explosive charge shattered the door to the kitchen. The iron bar remained in place and the next attacker ran into it, stopping in his tracks. Macaulay fired from behind the second couch, the ten-gauge rifled slug shattering his helmet and eviscerating his brain.

The odor of the gas reached Macaulay. A few seconds after smelling it, he knew it was some kind of immobilizing agent. He felt himself getting light-headed and knew the others would quickly suffer the same consequences.

“We have to get out,” he said before holding his breath.

He heard a half dozen words barked out in guttural Chinese.

“The basement door,” said Morrissey as a third attacker came through the hallway door in a low crouch, his infrared goggles swerving quickly back and forth to survey the room. He was bigger than the first two and carrying what looked like a heavy machine gun.

As Lexy dove toward the basement door, he fired at the couch where Macaulay was still hiding, ripping the couch apart and dislodging the steel plates. Macaulay fired back at the man's helmet before dropping prone to the floor.

The rifled slug hit the attacker in the chest of his body armor, driving him back against the wall as Lexy turned to fire a full clip from her .45. One round must have hit his right hand, because he dropped the machine gun. Morrissey did not miss his head with his next shot from the M1 carbine.

Morrissey covered for them as Macaulay headed for the basement stairs behind Lexy. They were into the darkness when a fluorescent light came on automatically below, lighting up the stone foundation walls.

As two more attackers came through the shattered doorways, Morrissey reached the door to the basement stairs and swung it shut behind him.

The diminishing shaft of fluorescent light attracted one of the attackers and he began firing, spraying the small opening with machine gun bullets. Morrissey dropped the iron security bar into position before tumbling headfirst down the stairs.

Macaulay caught him in his arms as he reached the concrete floor. The old man was bleeding from three wounds stitched across his upper back.

“Behind the bookcase,” he said, his voice hoarse, “a
passage between this house and the one built by my uncle.”

Macaulay remembered the identical house next door that had been gutted by fire. There was only one bookcase in the basement. He stepped toward it and pulled at the left side. It didn't move. When he tried the right side, it swung open on the steel rollers hidden beneath its base.

Lexy knelt next to the old man, his head cradled in her arms. Above them, another small explosion signaled the destruction of the reinforced basement door.

“Good luck,” he said as blood swelled from the corner of his lips. “Semper fi.”