The Devil's Bed

  They came to a place with many houses set closely together. Every corner had a bright light like the yard light of a farm. His grandfather drove down an empty street between brick buildings with glass windows that had writing on them. Stores, Nocturne recognized. Shops and businesses. He realized they were in a real town. Although he’d wandered as far as he could in the nights when he escaped the basement, the farmhouse was so distant from everything that a tiny crossroads called Higgens consisting of a bar, a gas station, and half a dozen houses was the nearest he’d ever come to a community. He wanted to know what town this was but was afraid to ask. They drove past a building of gray stone blocks, standing by itself in the middle of a patch of lawn. Carved into the stone above the door were the words COUNTY COURTHOUSE. His grandfather backed into an alley and parked facing the stone building.

  “That’s it,” the old man said.

  Nocturne looked at the building. It was three stories, taller even than his grandfather’s barn. The barn had wood supports to shinny up, but the stone building looked flat and solid. How did the old man expect him to climb to the third floor?

  As if he’d read his grandson’s mind, he said, “There’s a drainpipe. See it?” He pointed to a black line that ran down the side of the building from the gutters along the roof. “That’s your way up.” He handed the backpack to Nocturne. “I put a steel pipe in there. Use it to break the window. Don’t worry about alarms. Only the first-floor doors and windows have ’em. I’ll wait here.”

  There was no moon. Where the streetlamps threw light, Nocturne ran quickly from shadow to shadow—a trash can, a bench, a maple tree—until he reached the side of the building. The bottom of the drainpipe was lost among bushes, and Nocturne merged with the dark there. His heart pounded wildly. He was so scared he thought he might wet his pants. He reached for the drainpipe. The metal was cold, but it was ridged and easy to grasp. Nocturne looked up. The third floor seemed impossibly far away.

  Climbing proved easier than he’d imagined. Hand over hand, he pulled himself up the pipe, using the indentations between the stone blocks for toeholds. Concentrating on his task, he forgot his fear, and when he reached the place where the drainpipe ran beside the third-floor windowsill, he looked around him. He was higher than anything else in the town except the water tower. He felt as if he could reach out and grab a handful of stars.

  The headlights on the truck flashed once, reminding Nocturne of his task. Holding to the drainpipe with his right arm, he reached back with his other and drew out the length of one-inch black steel pipe to break the window. The pane shattered with a crash that seemed to break the night itself. Nocturne pressed against the cold stone and waited for something terrible to happen. Nothing did. Sharp, jagged shards were left framing the window. He used the pipe to tap them out, then he eased himself through. Inside, he found the bank of filing cabinets, and he put the device in front of them. He set the timer, then left the way he’d come.

  When he reached the truck, the old man asked, “It’s done?”

  Nocturne nodded.

  The old man drove out of the alley, down the street between the closed shops, past the dark houses, out where the farmland began. He pulled into a lane between fields of harvested corn and turned off the engine. He drew a pocket watch from his overalls and checked the time.

  Nocturne sat as silent as his grandfather, looking toward town. He wasn’t worried. He knew the device he’d built would work. He’d done just as his grandfather asked. It was now only a matter of waiting, and that was something he was very good at.

  After a few minutes, Nocturne felt the old man stiffen. “It should have gone off by now.” His grandfather’s fierce eyes settled on him with a look that froze the boy’s heart.

  “Your watch,” Nocturne offered timidly. “I think it’s fast.”

  At that moment, the sound of a muffled explosion rolled across the open field. The old man’s head jerked around, and he watched as an orange glow slowly bloomed in the dark among the buildings and the trees of the town. Without a word, without a sign that he was pleased with the boy’s accomplishment, he started the truck and drove home.

  Nocturne’s mother waited at the back door. He could see that she’d been crying, but she didn’t speak as he entered with his grandfather. The old man hung his coat on a peg near the door. He looked at the boy.

  “Tomorrow, we’ll move you to a room upstairs.”

  “I like the basement,” Nocturne said.

  The old man shrugged and started from the kitchen. He turned back before he left and said to his daughter, “Don’t lock the basement door no more.”

  For an hour, Nightmare watched the monitor and listened as Kathleen Jorgenson Dixon sat with her communications director, Nicole Greene, in the office of the main house and discussed the commitments that had to be rescheduled due to her extended stay at Wildwood. She outlined correspondences to be written on her behalf, giving the other woman specific instructions regarding content and tone. She spent an hour on the telephone—briefly with her husband, then for a longer time with her daughter, then with the White House chief of staff, with a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, with her lawyer, and finally with the president of Harvard University, who was obviously a good friend. Except for her daughter, to whom she spoke gently and lovingly, she communicated in a manner that conveyed power. Nightmare liked that. Bringing down powerful people had always made his work more satisfying. Before he himself had been betrayed and left for dead, he’d been assigned to kill for many reasons, and sometimes for no reason that he could see. He never wondered about a sanction he carried out against someone in a powerful position. Power was itself reason enough to draw a sanction. It was when he was told to kill someone who was no one that he wondered. Why end a life that was no life at all?

  In South Africa once, he’d tracked a man for a month to learn the patterns and rhythms of his life. He did it to make a clean kill. In his surveillance, he found a lowly government clerk with a wife and three children, a man who liked bow ties, who drank Indonesian black tea under a kapok tree at lunch while he read the London Times, who visited his mistress every Wednesday afternoon, and who, in his position, wielded only the power of a rubber stamp. He also discovered that the wife was herself a mistress to an important political figure. He killed the clerk with poison, a few milligrams of aconitine in his black tea, and he was out of the country on an afternoon plane. The killing didn’t bother him. By then, there’d been so many. It was the why of it, to remove a small man from the path of a greater man’s desire, that ate at him. Murder as a political favor, granted as easily as an invitation to an embassy ball.

  On the monitor, he watched the First Lady head upstairs. He switched to the camera he’d put in her room two weeks earlier, on a bookshelf, inside a hollowed-out copy of Little Men. He watched her undress, prepare to take a bath, and stand for a moment in front of the mirror on her vanity. She turned and studied her profile, drew in her stomach, lifted her breasts, shook her head in a disappointed way, and relaxed. She stepped toward the bathroom and out of range of the camera lens.

  Nightmare sat back patiently. He was used to watching and waiting. However, he knew that on this kill, waiting could be a problem. The First Lady wouldn’t stay at Wildwood indefinitely. And there was Thorsen. The man was a complication, one Nightmare would have to consider carefully. He would probably have to neutralize Thorsen. But later. Now he had to focus on his purpose, which was to sanction the lying abomination called Tom Jorgenson and his daughter Kate, whom Nightmare had once called his friend. It had been his intention to kill them both together at the hospital with the C-4 explosive. Because the security guard had caught him, the plan was ruined. At first, he’d been angry with himself. Weakness, he’d chided. After further reflection, he decided he’d unconsciously sabotaged his own strategy because he wanted the man and his daughter dead in a different way. Most of his life, he’d killed for reasons tied to politics, to economics, to the expediencies of closet d
iplomacy. This was different; this was personal. He wanted to confront the man and the daughter face-to-face before they died. Not to gloat, as he had at Jorgenson’s bedside. That was a mistake. No, he wanted to be sure they went to their deaths with a full understanding of their guilt. This would probably mean killing them separately, and probably Thorsen somewhere along the way.

  A knock on the van door startled him.

  “Open up. Police.”

  Nightmare quickly turned off the monitor, shoved his Beretta into his belt at the small of his back, and opened the back doors of the van. Outside, it was twilight. The sheriff’s deputy stood looking at Nightmare, his thumbs hooked over the leather of his gun belt. Behind him, at the side of the highway, stretched a line of parked vehicles, mostly media vans and cars.

  “ID.” The deputy held out his hand.

  Nightmare gave the deputy his wallet.

  “MCC,” the deputy said. “Never heard of that one.”

  “Metro Cable Communications,” Nightmare replied. “Usually we stick with city council and school board meetings, but this is too big to pass up.”

  “Parking here all night?”

  “Unless the First Lady leaves.”

  “You know the rule. You let her motorcade pass, then you can follow at a reasonable distance.”

  “I know.”

  “All right, Mr.”—he double-checked the ID—“Solomon. Good evening.”

  The deputy moved to the next vehicle in line, a white van that carried the call letters KSTP on the side. Like Nightmare’s van, it had a small satellite dish mounted on top and a short broadcasting antenna.

  Nightmare glanced across the road at the entrance to Wildwood. A Washington County Sheriff’s Department cruiser was parked behind the stone arch, controlling access. Nightmare smiled at the futility of the effort.

  chapter

  fifteen

  The fax came through a little before 9:00 P.M. Deputy Williams from the Washington County Sheriff’s Department had moved quickly on Bo’s request. Luther Gallagher had no criminal record. He was employed as an attendant at the Minnesota State Security Hospital in St. Peter, and the photograph on his hospital ID card was included. Bo only had to glance at the photo to see that it wasn’t Max Ableman. Gallagher had a large square face and a bald head that reminded Bo of a professional wrestler. The presence of Gallagher’s pickup truck at the motor court probably had nothing to do with Ableman.

  Camera eight, mounted on the north side of the main house, went dead as Bo was studying the fax. He left the Op Center to check it out. A squirrel lay on the ground directly beneath the camera, stunned but not dead. It had happened before. For God knew what reason, the squirrels liked to chew on the camera cables. When they bit through the insulation, they shorted out the connection and zapped themselves in the process. He’d suggested to the Jorgensons that something be done to get rid of the squirrels, but they rejected the idea. The squirrels, Annie pointed out, were there long before the Jorgensons. Bo radioed to the Op Center and said he’d fix the cable himself. He spent half an hour installing new wire. In the meantime, the squirrel staggered to its feet and stumbled off into the orchard.

  Bo had just finished and was folding up the ladder when Diana Ishimaru drove up and parked in front of the guesthouse. Jake Russell followed in his own car. Bo hung the ladder in the barn, then headed to the Op Center, where he found his boss, Manning, and Russell in conference.

  “A change of plan, Bo,” Ishimaru said when he joined them. “I’m pulling you off Wildwood. Agent Russell will be assuming responsibility for the Op Center.”

  “Why?” Bo asked.

  “I’m reassigning you.”

  “To what?”

  “Investigating Tom Jorgenson’s accident.”

  Bo glanced at Manning, who gave no sign of how he felt about this turn of events. “I thought we’d agreed that wasn’t our jurisdiction.”

  Ishimaru replied, “When the director of the United States Secret Service calls us personally and gives an order, we find a way to make it our jurisdiction.”

  Bo thought about Annie’s final comment as he left the main house late that afternoon: You don’t know Kate. It was true. He didn’t know Kathleen Jorgenson Dixon. But he was beginning to.

  “While the First Lady is at Wildwood, any concern regarding Tom Jorgenson’s safety is to be viewed as a concern that involves the First Lady’s safety as well.”

  “When do I start?” Bo asked.

  “Immediately.”

  Russell offered his hand. “Good luck, Bo.”

  “Thanks.” Bo flashed Manning a brief smile. “Looks like you got your wish, Chris. I’m out of here.”

  “Looks like you got yours, too,” Manning said.

  Bo gathered his things. Diana Ishimaru accompanied him to his car.

  “Are you okay with this, Bo?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ll be working with Sheriff Quinn-Gruber. He’s been notified. If any jurisdictional disputes arise, direct them to me.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  It was almost dark. The yard light was on. Ishimaru stood near Bo, and she shook her head. “I don’t like this feeling that I’m authorizing a wild goose chase.”

  “Things don’t add up, Diana. Somebody should be finding out why.”

  She took a deep breath of resignation. “Keep me posted,” she said as she turned to her car.

  Bo went directly from Wildwood to the St. Croix Regional Medical Center. It was 10:30 P.M., and a security guard was locking the front doors. Bo flashed his Secret Service ID and was allowed to enter. The guard relocked the doors behind him.

  “The First Lady’s not coming tonight, is she?” the guard asked. His name badge read: H. BLOCK.

  “No. I’m checking on another matter. Mind if I head down to the laundry?”

  “Be my guest. I’m closing up shop here and going down to the E.R. station. If you need me, that’s where I’ll be. My partner’s finishing his rounds.”

  Bo took the elevator to the basement and followed the tunnel to the laundry building. The lights were on, but the laundry was deserted. Bo remembered that Ableman made a final trip to gather soiled linen near the end of the shift, so he waited. The laundry seemed a harsh place. The machines were huge, and the fluorescent lights glinted off the metal with a sterile gleam. The linen-folding tables were empty. They reminded Bo of rows of autopsy tables. The ceilings were high and full of pipes. The whole place had a cold industrial feel.

  The laundry elevator began to climb from the basement. Bo waited. But it wasn’t Ableman pushing the cart that emerged. This man was older and heavier. He stooped in his labor, and he eyed Bo with a sour look. “Who’re you? What’re you doing here?”

  Bo offered his ID. “I’m looking for Max Ableman.”

  “Makes two of us.” The man pushed the cart past Bo.

  “I thought he worked evenings,” Bo said, following.

  “I thought so, too. Guess maybe he thinks different. Didn’t show, didn’t call. If I didn’t need him so bad, I’d fire his ass.” He positioned the cart between two big washers.

  “Did you try calling him?”

  “Hell, yes. No answer.” He was wearing yellow rubber gloves, and he began to reach into the cart and sort out linen into different machines. Some of it was blue surgical linen heavily bloodstained and still wet. Some of it was bedding, badly soiled. The strong smell of blood and human waste rose from the cart, and Bo could understand why the job was a hard one to hire for and to keep filled.

  “Has he pulled this kind of stunt before?” Bo asked.

  “He was good for the first month. Lately, he’s called in sick a lot. And tonight he didn’t call at all.” He looked with disgust at the linen in his hands. “Christ, I hate covering for these worthless jokers.”

  Bo left the hospital and headed to the Bayport Court. Several cars were parked in the lot, but the old Chevy pickup wasn’t there. Room ten was dark. Bo knocked on the door and got n
o answer. He walked to the office. The hour was late, but the desk was still occupied. He was surprised by the desk clerk he found on duty. The kid looked to be no more than eighteen, and wore a white Stillwater High football jersey, number 7. There was innocence in his blue eyes and the natural blush of youth and health in his cheeks. He’d been watching a rerun of Saturday Night Live on Comedy Central, but he stood up as soon as Bo walked in, and he stepped attentively to the desk.

  “You in charge?” Bo asked.

  “Yes, sir. Need a room?”

  “No thanks.” Bo looked him over, then impressed the kid with his Secret Service ID. “You work here?”

  “Not really. My uncle owns it. During the summer, he likes to spend time at his cabin up in Wisconsin, so I help out. I get a little extra money toward tuition, and a hell of an education.” The kid smiled wide, white teeth in a face that could have done milk commercials.

  “I’m interested in the man renting number ten. Have you seen him this evening?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you ever seen him?”

  “Sure. See him head off to work in the afternoon. Don’t see him very often when he comes back. It’s usually pretty late. Times I’ve seen him he’s been covered with dirt. I figure he must work construction somewhere. Maybe roadwork they got going at night, you know.”

  “You haven’t seen him today?”

  “No, sir.”

  Bo glanced back at the lighted walkway that ran in front of the rooms the length of the court. “I’d like to see his room.”

  “I don’t know—” the kid began.

  “I can have a warrant in a couple of hours, but I’d prefer to see the room sooner. It may well be an issue of national security, son.”

  The kid caved easily. He reached into a drawer and drew out a key. “It’ll open every door.”

  “Thanks.” Bo started away but turned back and asked, “What does he drive?”