The Innocence Game (23 page)

“Come on,” Havens said.

We crept down the path and peered into a cove constructed of landscaped bushes and trees. A steel shed sat in the very center. The woman was standing beside the door. It popped open, and she disappeared inside. Havens rushed forward, but the door closed well before he got to it. There was a large generator on one side of the shed and what looked like a heavy-duty AC unit. Havens pointed to a set of power lines crossing overhead.

“Two hundred twenty volts.”

We made our way back toward the front of the shed. Jake touched me at the shoulder and gestured toward a keypad by the door.

“What is it?” I said, one eye on the door, waiting for it to swing open.

“The keypad,” Havens said and moved closer.

The pad contained buttons numbered zero to thirty. Four of the numbers were smeared with bits of white sunscreen. Havens grinned and pointed to a # symbol at the very bottom. It, too, had a dab of white on it.

We snuck back down the path. I was tempted to take a chance on the house, but Havens pulled me into the tree line. Smart move as the woman in the hat appeared on the path less than two minutes later. She went back into the house. Twenty minutes after that, the garage door opened and a Lexus pulled out. The woman was in the front seat, alone. We watched her drive away.

“I think that was Finn,” Havens said.

“Has to be,” I said. “What about the shed?”

“You get the numbers?”

I nodded.

“Can you do it?”

“I can try.”

“Let’s take a look.”

Assuming no numbers were repeated, four digits and a # symbol generated one hundred and twenty possible combinations. I sat against the wall of the shed, closed my eyes, and lined up the numbers in my head. Havens stood by the keypad, waiting.

“You ready?” I said.

“Fuck, yeah.”

I read a combination off the inside of my eyelids. Havens punched it in. Nothing. I gave him another. Still nothing. I could hear the rush and suck of the waves as they hit the beach below us. Otherwise, my world was quiet. Just Jake’s voice. Asking for another number. Then a fourth. Combination thirty-eight proved to be the charm. The door to the shed popped open, and we stepped inside.

It was dark. A current of cold air dried the sweat on my chest and raised the hair on my arms. Havens found a light switch and turned on the overheads. We were standing in a room that could have only belonged to a scientist. A countertop of black granite ran the length of the facing wall. Above it, a row of blond-wood cabinets. Two deep sinks of stainless steel sat in equipoise at either end of the counter. In between was a row of test tubes, a rack of pipettes, a computer monitor, and three microscopes in front of three stools. From somewhere to our left came the soft thump and groan of a compressor.

“Come on,” Havens said.

We found our way into a small, adjoining room. A walk-in cooler took up half the space. Beside it was a row of three black cabinets. We moved closer to the walk-in. It, too, was locked, with another keypad set just above the handle. This one, unfortunately, wasn’t covered in sunscreen.

“What do you think?” Havens said.

I punched in the numbers from the front door. Nothing. I dropped off the # symbol. More nothing.

“Try reversing them,” Havens said.

“Why?”

“Just try it. And put the symbol back in.”

I did. The door popped open.

“Scientists,” Havens said. “No fucking imagination.”

We pushed into the cooler and a small light clicked on. The space was filled with long, low metal racks—each containing as many as ten to fifteen test tubes. I picked up a tube filled with a yellowish liquid and looked at the tag on it.

“What do you think?” I said.

“Pretty fucked up.”

“That’s it?”

“I think semen dies within a few hours after it’s ejaculated.”

“How about its DNA signature?” I said. “Planted at a crime scene?”

Havens picked up another vial. The tag read:

Havens placed the tube back in its rack. “I got an idea.” He walked out of the cooler and over to the black cabinets. “These guys are locked with a key.”

“What are you looking for?” I said.

“There’s gotta be a chart that decodes what’s in the cooler. And who belongs to what. How long have we been in there?”

“About five minutes.”

“We’ve got time.”

Havens ran out of the shed, back along the path, to the main house. The door on the back porch was locked. A small window next to it was cracked an inch. We jacked it open and squeezed through. The living room was large and shabby, with a long velvet couch at one end, two matching chairs, and a couple of bare tables. No pictures anywhere, no sign of life except for a cat who meowed at us from atop a mantel. Havens passed through the living room and walked down the hallway. I followed him to a small study. A metal desk took up nearly the entire room.

“Gotta be here,” Havens said.

“What?”

“I told you. Finn’s a scientist. No imagination. So she either has the keys with her or leaves them in her house. In fact, I bet she does both.”

Havens dug through the desk. In the bottom left-hand drawer he found a small ring of keys and dangled them in front of me. “What do you think?”

“Worth a try.”

“Damn straight.”

We sprinted back down the path and into the shed. Everything seemed as we left it. Havens tried a couple of keys in one of the cabinet locks. The third one turned easily, and the door slid open.

“Fuck me,” Havens said. I crowded closer. The filing cabinet was filled with videotapes, stored on shelves and labeled by subject matter:

I pulled out one of the tapes from the SEX shelf. It was labeled in much the same manner as the test tubes.

There was a creak of wood and metal beside me. Havens had cracked open the second cabinet. It contained more tapes and a stack of brown files marked
photos
. On a back shelf, I found a file labeled
zombrowski, j
. I stuffed it under my shirt and looked over at Havens. He had his head deep into the third cabinet.

“Anything?” I said.

“Could be.” In the dim light, he held up a Moleskine notebook bound in black. A red label stuck to the front right corner of the notebook read: master. We went back into the main room and sat at the counter. Havens opened up to page 1. The first name I saw was a former Illinois governor and onetime candidate for president. He was listed as subject 1a. Underneath his name were twenty more. I recognized a sitting U.S. senator from Iowa, subject 9a, cross referenced under sex/semen; two Chicago aldermen, subject 14a and 19a respectively, under
death/dui/blood
; and a philanthropist and CEO of a major corporation, subject 3c, tagged under
kids/pedophile/video
.

“You getting all this, memory man?” Havens moved his finger to turn the page. I grabbed the book and closed it.

“What are you doing?” Havens said.

“We can’t go through everything here.”

“We can take a peek.”

“If we’re gonna do it, let’s do it right.”

“What does that mean?”

“I think we need to bring in Rodriguez.”

“You trust him?”

“He’s about the only one I do trust.”

“Hold on.” Havens walked back into the other room.

I listened as he rustled around in one of the open cabinets and felt the weight of the leather notebook in my hand. A soft breeze crept up the back of my neck. I turned toward the shed’s front door—just in time to catch the glancing blow of a rifle across the temple.

Cold tiles rubbed up against my cheek and a finger pulled back my eyelid. I looked up at the hem of a black dress, a hand holding a pistol, and, finally, a face.

“He’s still conscious,” Z said and stepped back.

Marty Coursey swam into view. “Remember me?” Coursey raised his rifle high and brought it down again, hard. The last thing I remembered was a gun going off.

I woke up a second time on a floor of rough cement, hands and feet cuffed to an iron ring set into a wall. I was in a narrow, dimly lit room. A long window ran just under the rafters and I could hear wind and waves in the night. There was another sound, closer by. Shallow, wet breathing.

“Jake?”

“Over here.”

They’d rolled him into the shadows.

“I can’t see you,” I said.

“You ain’t missing much.” He tried to laugh, but his voice was thready. For the first time I noticed a dark stain seeping toward a sunken drain in the middle of the floor. It was blood. Jake’s blood.

“Did they shoot you?”

“Sort of. I made a run at Coursey when he hit you with the rifle. The old bitch had a gun.”

“It was Z,” I said.

“What?”

“Z was dressed in the hat and sunglasses. I got a look at her before I went out. How bad is it?”

“She got me in the lower back. I’m bleeding and feel a little dizzy. Z?”

“She’s been the brains behind this the whole time. She was the one who told me you were with Sarah that night. Probably hoped I’d do exactly what I did. She was the one who sent us out here. Set us up.”

“Why?”

“Because you wouldn’t let it be.” Z stepped into the light. Her skin was scrubbed to the consistency of rubber and her hair was pulled back from her face. She wore a black rain slicker and green boots. When the slicker opened, I caught the flash of a knife in her belt.

“How bad is he?” she said and pointed in Jake’s direction. Coursey was just behind her and moved forward to check.

“He’s bleeding pretty good.”

Z looked at the puddle on the floor. “Bandage him. And clean up the blood before it gets into the drain.”

“You’re worried,” I said.

“You should have left things alone. I told you that from the beginning.” She moved closer and checked my cuffs. Jake let out a small groan as Coursey tugged at him.

“I don’t want him dying in here,” Z said. Coursey just nodded and kept working.

“When did you start running the show?” I said.

“You mean when did I decide to stop being a victim? They blackmailed me for ten years. During that time, I learned all I could about the operation. Then I just worked my way up. Like any good organization, it takes time. Eventually, however, I got to the top of the food chain. Now, I control the information. People pay for us to stir the sewer. People pay to keep things quiet. Either way, business has never been better.”

“We saw your files,” I said.

“You’ll be at the bottom of the lake within the hour, so it’s not a big problem.”

“Why did you wait until we were out here?”

She cocked her head. “You should be a lot more scared than you are.”

“I’m terrified.”

“We’ll see. I would have done the deed at my house. Had something nice and easy to slip into your drinks, but we didn’t know where Rodriguez was. So I sent you out here. Let you run around until we’d made sure no one followed you out of the city. Then we put you down. For all the headaches you caused, it’ll be pretty simple in the end. Tragic boating accident. Your friends might kick and scream, but they’ll get over it.”

Z took a syringe out of her pocket and unsheathed it. I couldn’t take my eyes off the needle.

“Are you going to fight me?” she said.

I wanted to cry, beg, plead, but it wouldn’t do any good. I understood now. Or maybe I knew just enough to realize I knew nothing at all.

“Why the graveyard, Z? Why the black dress?”

“I grieved for Rosina Rolland. I still do. I’ll grieve for you as well.

But what’s to be done?”

“Fuck you.”

“Perfect.” She sank the needle into my arm and watched my eyes.

“Where’s the old lady?” I said.

“Finn?” She laughed, her donkey bray rattling around the room. Across the way, Coursey had Jake bandaged and laid up against the wall. His face looked like melted wax, and I wondered if they’d drugged him.

“Why do you care about her?” Z said.

I didn’t really know why. Except that it was better than going to sleep.

“She’s upstairs in the house,” Z said. “Her brain is mush, and she’s strapped to a bed. Any other questions?”

My head felt impossibly heavy. I grabbed at a thought, but missed. Another came at me out of the mist. I caught it and shaped it into words.

“Why did you help Rodriguez when I was arrested? Why did you tell him about the girl?”

“Trust.” Z turned my hand over and felt for a pulse. I looked at her dumbly. “Give someone like Rodriguez a bone like that, and he trusts you forever. Then he’s yours. We call it the Innocence Game. That’s why I taught the seminar at Medill. I mean, what better place to be?” She let my arm drop. “Now go to sleep. When you wake up, you’ll be on the bottom of Lake Michigan.”

To my great surprise, I woke up dry and still breathing air. They had me laid up in the bottom of the Whaler I’d seen tied off to the dock. Except now it was moving. My hands were cuffed in front of me. A length of heavy chain was wrapped around my legs and looped through a cleat near the engine. Jake was slumped a few feet away. His cuffs were off, and he was bleeding freely again. I wasn’t sure if he was still alive. Not that it mattered much.

It was dark and covered running lights ran down both sides of the boat. A damp fog had crept over the lake, and the bow was shrouded in a yellow mist. Somewhere behind me the engine cut out, and we drifted. Coursey came through the curtain first. He had a rifle in his hands. Z was next. She had the knife out. Wicked and sharp. Coursey handed the rifle to Z and took the blade. Then he squatted over Jake. Like a jackal looking over the remains of someone else’s dinner.

“Let him go,” I said. “He didn’t see anything.”