The Upright Man (28 page)

“Really. I wonder where that’s coming from.”

“Indeed. Monroe’s in a hard place even if he lives. You know how these things go. Once someone lifts up that kind of rock, they have to find
something
underneath to justify lifting it in the first place. I know I didn’t miss a beat with the Johnson case, but what’s to say Monroe didn’t cut a corner somewhere? He wanted that ball down. It’s how he made SAC.”

She stopped and sat quietly for a little while. I let her be until I was safely out onto 18, with 90 in sight, and I had a cigarette in my hand.

“You didn’t tell him what we know,” I said then.

“Think we know.”

“Whatever. You didn’t tell.”

“No,” she said quietly. “Does that make me a bad person?”

I laughed, but then realized she wasn’t smiling. I glanced at her a moment, thinking she was hard to get to the bottom of. “In the eyes of the law, yes. In a withholding-evidence kind of way. Which is a jail-sentence kind of way.”

She nodded, but said nothing.

“Come on, Nina,” I said. “The deal cuts both ways.”

“I know,” she said, “so here it is. I didn’t tell him because I don’t think there’s anyone other than us going to see this through to where it needs to go.”

“And where is that?”

“There’s a place for men who stick things in women’s heads, and it isn’t jail.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Right at this minute I do. Even if it’s John. And I also didn’t tell Doug because he mentioned something in passing and after he said it I just couldn’t seem to . . .” She turned to me, and finally smiled. “You got some miles in you yet?”

“I guess so. How many do you need?”

“The car that Monroe mentioned, the one was clocked passing through Snoqualmie the night before Katelyn’s body was found?”

“What about it?”

“Three hours ago a local sheriff ran a check on it. It bounced because it’s a rental and there was no felony involved, but Doug noted it as logged and said someone might get around to a look-see tomorrow, if it’s a slow day. The shout came from about another fifty miles into the mountains after Snoqualmie. I think we should be there first.”

“So where are we heading, exactly?”

She looked at the map briefly, then stabbed her finger in a spot that seemed to be right in the middle of the mountains.

“This place. Sheffer.”

AT
ABOUT ONE A
.
M
. N
INA DRIFTED OFF TO SLEEP
, head lolling on the rest but arms folded tight in front. I listened to her breathing as I sped us east along 90. The landscape was way too dark to make out clearly, but some vestigial organ in my body or head clocked the steadily increasing altitude. Every now and then a car sped the other way, some other traveler on some other journey.

We climbed higher, and I dropped back to fifty, and then forty, as the road became more twisty. It was getting very cold, too, misty ghosts hanging in the trees that pressed the road, illuminated by sodium lights and a moon that kept swapping places with clouds way up above. I pulled over at
one point, to get a clearer fix on where I was headed. Nina shifted, but didn’t wake, and I set off again as gently as I could.

Just over the crest of the mountains I took an exit onto a smaller, local road, which signposted Sheffer ten miles ahead. After feeling as if the mountains and trees were a mere backdrop, I quickly felt like an intruder among them instead.

Sheffer was small, and closed. It was quarter of three in the morning. I pulled slowly down the main street, feeling like an alien invader who’d picked exactly the right time to make his move. I passed a market, a bar, a couple of diners. Then I saw there was a sign for a motel, right at the other end.

I pulled into the lot and pulled around in a big, slow loop to park. There was no light on in the office. Out of season, a town this small, I didn’t see there being a night bell. It was looking like a couple of cold, stiff hours in my seat.

I turned the engine off and opened the door, slipping out quickly before too much mountain chill could enter the car. My intention was to have a final cigarette before trying to get some sleep.

As I stood, sucking it down, I suddenly realized four cars were parked on the other side of the lot. Of course—there always are, in motel lots. But we were looking for one in particular.

I didn’t know the license we were after. Nina hadn’t told me, and I probably wouldn’t have remembered it anyhow. And would it really just be parked outside a motel?

I walked across to the first of the cars and peered in through the window. The backseat was full of vacation junk: spare fleece jackets, trail maps, and a selection of brightly colored objects designed to forestall questions as to whether we were there yet.

The next was ten yards farther on. It was very cold, and I’d finished my cigarette. I considered leaving it. Instead I walked over. It didn’t look like something anyone would rent. It was big and rusty and covered with mud. But I leaned down to look in anyway.

I heard a quiet footstep at the last second and started to turn.

Then my head was full of stars, which rapidly turned black.

SOMETHING
RED
,
LIKE A LIGHT ACROSS A HARBOR
in the dead of night. A sound, quiet, like the rustle of water on a shoreline—the kind of noise the world makes to itself when it thinks there’s no one around to hear. Drowsy comfort, for a moment, before two types of pain came in like two long screws being slowly tightened. The ache in my shoulder. Another in the back and side of my head.

I jerked my head up, opened my eyes a little wider. I realized the red glow was a bedside clock. It took a moment to focus on the numbers properly. They said it was just after five A.M. The room was deadly quiet, the kind of silence where you think you can hear the carpet. It smelled of motel.

I was sitting in a chair, it seemed, slumped over. My head still seemed to be floating in cushioning ether, thoughts tottering forward like overambitious toddlers. I tried to sit up properly, and found I couldn’t. This scared me until I realized it was because my feet and wrists were tied to the chair’s front legs. Then it scared me in a different way.

I gave up trying to move and turned my head instead. A pain ripped down from my temple straight to my shoulder, and it was all I could do not to cry out. There was probably no reason why I shouldn’t have. There’s just something about finding yourself tied to a chair in a dark room. You
tend not to want to attract any more attention than you’ve already received.

I waited a moment, while small flashing lights faded in front of my eyes. Then I tried again, more slowly this time. The room was very dark indeed, the darkness you can only get a long way from a city’s ambient light. There was just enough glow for my heart to thud heavily when I saw someone was standing by the window.

My lips separated with an audible click, but I didn’t speak. Couldn’t, maybe. I kept my head rigid and my eyes open wide and saw that the shape by the window wasn’t standing after all, but sitting cross-legged on a desk.

Finally I managed to speak: “Paul?”

“Of course not,” a voice said, immediately. “You think you’d be alive if it was?”

At that moment I mentally gave up hope. Just like that. How the man from the restaurant in Fresno had found us, I had no idea. But I knew I wouldn’t be walking away a second time. Not when tied to a chair. I wondered where Nina was, and hoped she was alive, or if not, that I’d never know.

There was a rustling sound, and I realized it was the same noise I’d heard while fighting to regain consciousness.

It was caused by the man’s thick coat, as he slid forward off the desk.

He took the four steps between us, stood a moment looking down. Then squatted to bring his face close to mine.

“Hello, Ward.”

“You fucker.”

It was John Zandt.

HE
SAT ON THE END OF THE BED
,
FACING ME
,
BUT
made no movement toward untying the ropes.

“Where’s Nina?”

“In the next room. Tied just like you, and with a Do Not Disturb sign on the door.”

“She’ll shout when she wakes. She will shout like you won’t believe.”

“Not gagged as she is. And if you even take a deep breath I’ll hit you so hard you won’t wake up for a week, or maybe ever.”

“What are you doing, John? What is
wrong
with you?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m just not having you screwing things up.”

“Screwing
what
up? Your murder spree?”

“Who do you think I’ve killed?”

“Peter Ferillo, for one.”

He sniffed. “Yes. I did kill him, that’s true.”

“And who else?”

“Why do you think there’s someone else?”

“Otherwise why would you ask? Did you kill the women? Did you kill Jessica and Katelyn to get back at Paul?”

“Stop calling him that. He doesn’t deserve a name.”

“He’s got one. Get used to it. Did you kill them or not?”

“You really think I’d kill a woman?”

“What’s the difference? Why is it okay to kill a man? You start making distinctions like that and there’s not so big a distance between you and Paul. You hit the Ferillo girl hard enough to give her a concussion. Where’s that lie on your new moral spectrum?”

“That wasn’t planned. I knew what I was going to have to do to make Ferillo talk and I was just too wired. I put her somewhere she’d be found quickly.”

“You’re a prince. And once he’d talked, he had to die, right?”

“Yes. Once I’d found out that while he was in L.A. he’d helped organize the transportation of young girls to killers. He may have thought they were just going to be trained up to be whores—that’s what he claimed. But you know what? That’s enough.”

I could see in John’s face that he either wasn’t able or prepared to revisit Ferillo’s death at his hands. “John, untie me. For God’s sake.”

He shook his head. “Not going to happen. You’ll get in the way. You’re just not up to it.”

“Screw you.”

Suddenly his finger was in my face. “Were you last time? With a clear shot? I’m sorry—did I miss that? Did you kill the man who dismembered my daughter, when he was right there in front of you?”

I couldn’t answer that. I knew I hadn’t. “He’s here, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” John said. “He’s here looking for something because he believes it’s going to make everything okay.”

“He screwed up. Is that it? He’s not the bad guys’ poster psycho anymore. They’ve exiled him and now they want him dead.”

“You’re not stupid, I’ll admit that.”

“Tell me, John. I’ve got a right to know. And either untie me or get me a drink. It’s freezing in here.”

He walked through into the bathroom. A couple of clinks in the darkness, and then he reappeared with a small glass with two inches of amber fluid in it. I opened my mouth and he tipped it in. It made me cough hard, but warmth flooded through my chest.

He stepped back, walked over to the window. Watched the parking lot for a while.

“He’s not staying here, surely?”

“He was, along with some guy he’s with. I got here midevening and he wasn’t here anymore. But he’s still around.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he’s insane. He thinks he’s found a magic masterstroke that’s going to make the world in his image.”

“What? What is it?”

He shook his head. “You won’t believe it.”

“You know the dead women were from foster families from back when he was a kid?”

“Yes. I traced people who’d worked on his case. I talked to the old woman in San Francisco. I put two and six together.”

“Why Ferillo?”

“He was a front for the Straw Men, one of many all over the country. They arranged for him to walk from prosecution years ago. I don’t think he even understood what they’re into, but he was party to them laundering money through his restaurant. The apartment he died in belonged to a man called George Dravecky. Dravecky is a property developer and a very rich man. He didn’t own a house up at The Halls but he put in the original application. He bankrolled the start-up costs. He’s one of them.”

“How did you find that out?”

“I’m good at what I do.”

“You’re no longer a cop and you obviously refused to involve Nina. So where’s your in to information sources?”

“Guy I used to work with in LAPD. In the old days he had a habit of reallocating an occasional bag of pharmaceutical evidence for personal use. No big deal, but he’s straight and more senior now and wouldn’t want it widely known. He does what I ask.”

“Doug Olbrich, by any chance?”

John smiled briefly. It wasn’t a nice sight. “Not stupid at all.”

“No. Just prone to trust the wrong people, especially ones I thought were friends. Does Olbrich know about the rest of it?”

“No. He’s just a cop.”

“Did you get to Dravecky?”

“Yes. He confirmed things I’d already begun to work out. You have no idea what we’re up against.”

“I think I do.”

“No, you really don’t. I mentioned Roanoke to see if it sparked anything. I watched your face for some sign that you’d got anywhere by yourself, and I saw nothing. How can that
be,
Ward? What have you been
doing
all this time?”

“Trying to stay alive.”

“Hiding, you mean. For
what?
Once you know about these people, there’s no way back. You can’t just sit and
watch television and jerk off. There’s no happy families, no walks along the beach, no normal life. There’s nothing to do and nowhere to go.”

“John, what is it that you think you know?”

“The Indians didn’t kill the settlers at Roanoke, Ward. The Straw Men did.”

I stared at him.
“What?”

“The Croatoans knew all about it. They told the next group of settlers that ‘another tribe’ did it, that another tribe had killed the fifteen left behind from the second expedition. That other tribe was the Straw Men. Ancestors to them, anyway, trying to wipe out other Europeans before they could get a foothold in a country that had been quietly theirs for a long, long time. They took out the next expedition too, except they kept some of the women and children—guess why. They did the same with the Spanish and with everyone else, whatever chance they got. That’s why the word
Croatoan
was on that cabin. Then it was a blatant attempt to pass the blame; now it’s come to mean ‘we were here’ or ‘this is our place.’ ”

“The Straw Men were here back in the 1500s? Get real.”

“They were here long before that. They got here first, Ward. They stole America from the locals four thousand years before anyone else even knew it was here.”

“But who
are
they?”

“No one, and everyone. They came from all over the world at different times. Phoenicians, Romans, Irish, ancient Egyptians, Portuguese, Norse. The Romans conquered half the world, moved tens of thousands of men across whole continents—you really think some of them couldn’t make a few hundred-mile hops up around the North Atlantic? They came in handfuls, people who didn’t want to live with the new rules of the world, who didn’t want any part of the way it was going, especially after Christianity started screwing things for the old beliefs. There are signs of them all over the country, pieces of suppressed evidence. Western artifacts in the wrong strata, ancient Chinese coins in the Northwest, folktales of natives speaking English or Welsh, a hidden
Egyptian shrine in the Grand Canyon, old Celtic ogham script carved into rocks in New England, megaliths in New Hampshire, legends of red-haired Indians in Oregon. The new world has always attracted those who didn’t like the old one, who thought it was getting tainted with the virus of modern civilization—and gradually the groups came into contact and worked together. Every now and then a story would leak back—the journey of St. Brendan, or the Peri Reis map, showing sections of the world we now claim we didn’t know about back then—but it was always quashed. The Straw Men wanted the place to themselves, their own private country and kingdom and lair—not least because it was making them rich.”

“How, precisely?”

“Copper. Starting from 3000 B.C., half a million tons of copper was mined out of the Upper Peninsula in Michigan. Five thousand mines, stretching one hundred and fifty miles, with work taking place over the course of a thousand years.”

“I’ve never heard anything about that.”

“Strange, huh? Despite the fact they left behind millions of tools and thousands of holes. Where did five hundred thousand tons of copper go? It was exported around the world, and it’s what first made the Straw Men rich—and gave them the power to keep the place secret. When anyone here gave them trouble, they simply took them out. They took out the Anasazi when it looked like their civilization was getting too advanced. They wiped out Roanoke. They nearly did the same with Jamestown. They just picked off as many of the pioneers as they could. In the middle of the diary of Patrick Breen, a member of the Donner party, there’s this weird reference where he says in the entry for Friday the eighteenth: ‘saw no strangers today from any of the shantys.’ What strangers? Through the rest of the diary, there’s no mention of these ‘strangers.’ What were they doing out there, out in a place so remote that the original party was dying left and right and—interestingly—starting to eat each other? Who
were
they?”

“Straw Men, presumably, according to you.”

“Yes. They were here before us. They had always been here. People knew, occasionally came into contact with them, but it didn’t fit in with our genesis myths for the country we’ve become and so gradually mention of them died out.”

“And they just gave up?”

“Of course not. But you can’t fight an influx of millions of sane people, and there’s never been many of the Straw Men. They faded into the shadows, did their business the quiet way. I think they have connections with the neoconservatives now, but I’m never going to prove it. They make their money and do the things they like to do, the kind of things we’re not supposed to do anymore, and every now and then they create an atrocity just to keep their hand in and honor the gods. It’s their way.”