“Delighted you agree,” I said, ever more concerned about the meeting’s shifting initiative. “But where is all this recapitulation going? Because it does have a purpose, I’m sensing.”
“Yes, Doctor,” Mei-lien answered. “It is simply that we are attempting to approach these subjects tactfully. However, our first concern centers on the member of the rather unusual Kurtz family about whom you at least made your uncertainties clear in the dossier.”
“Derek Franco,” I said, perplexed: for if they knew we’d been clear about Derek, what was it that they thought, perhaps even knew, we’d been unclear about?
“Yes, Doctor,” Mei-lien replied. “You present two possible scenarios for his behavior between the time that you, Dr. Jones, first met him, and the night of his disappearance. The first is that he was simply terrified of anything that could lead to a further disruption of his life with the Kurtzes, and so he wished to keep his distance from you—in all ways. The second suggests that he was avoiding you because he was busy selecting likely children as targets—I believe you used the word ‘facilitator’?”
“Correct, Mei-lien,” I replied. “We did conclude that Derek had been playing that role. We just wanted to see if the facts we outlined led you to the same conclusion.”
“Ah,” Mei-lien noised with a slow, relieved nod. “I see. Well, then, we may say he was indeed acting—despite his emotional and intellectual difficulties—as this same facilitator for the throwaway-children plot. Now, concerning his disappearance: the principal questions seem to be, When did he learn the full dimensions of that same plot? And how? And when he discovered everything, did he immediately demand to be placed with a willing family? Is that why the others were forced to listen? And to whom, specifically, did he make that demand? These are more complex questions…” Mei-lien paused uncomfortably, putting her notes down. “We were very impressed by your analysis of the boy’s fixation on the photographs in your house. We agree that he possessed an extreme need for a loving female figure in his life, and that, because his own mother had refused to play that role, he became vulnerable to the manipulations of other women. This seems plain. But I fear where we disagree with you—and you must forgive my presumption, here, if it is such—but we do not agree that there was only one woman. He had a contact, certainly—a ‘handler,’ is the term?”
“It is,” I answered, rather rigidly.
“Thank you, Doctor.” Given Mei-lien’s evident unease, I wondered just how long the others would let her continue; but continue she did: “But this handler could not have been the sole woman involved in the hierarchy of the throwaway organization. There must—and we all feel very strongly about this—there must have been a second woman involved, one of influence: a woman who could have made Derek believe that she could fulfill his dream on her own authority and immediately, just as soon as he demanded it. The handler, being someone from the immediate area, and someone that Derek knew well, could not have done that, and Derek—given his own organizational position—would have known as much. But this second woman, being of significantly greater power, would, until this moment, have in fact been unknown to him, to preserve her own safety: especially because Derek’s emotional instability made him a particular risk. Yet she would have had to have been able to project those key qualities at the moment of her revelation: beauty, compassion, seduction.”
“Oh, fuck,” Mike whispered in dread, forgetting to mute our laptop’s microphones. “I know where this is going, damn it all…”
I began to nod, now feeling a complete return of all the dread that had struck me when Mike and I had driven back from examining Curtis’ body. “Which means,” I said, “that when Derek demanded to leave, the handler was taken out of the loop, and the usual chain of command in the organization was temporarily suspended.”
“Precisely,” Mei-lien said, again very relieved. “Suspended by its senior members. What we do not yet know is why.”
There was a momentary lull; and then, blood pounding in my ears, I reached into my vest pocket, withdrawing another flash drive as I said, “You know, Mei-lien—the others are lucky to have you. I’m not certain that anyone who hasn’t experienced firsthand just how brutal bureaucracies can be would have arrived at these conclusions…” Mei-lien only nodded slightly again as I pulled the laptop on the desk closer to me. “So: if you will all please observe your mail files, I am going to send a second document to you, one that represents my most recent profiling work on the case. It is titled—”
But before I could finish my statement or slip the USB drive into its port on the laptop, I felt Mike grasp my arm uncontestably. Without looking at me, he smiled what seemed genuinely to the students. “Excuse us for a minute, will you, people? I don’t think that Dr. Jones and I quite have our—schedules coordinated. Talk among yourselves for a moment, but don’t make any phone calls; and remember, I am recording this entire event.” Then he slapped the space bar on the laptop and rose, proceeding immediately behind the black backdrop. I could only nod in agreement and follow; for I’d been careful to keep the contents of the second flash drive from my partner, and indeed had intended to show them to no one, until there was no other option. Thus by the time I joined Mike behind the screen, I was not surprised to see him scowling grimly.
“Give me that,” he said, pointing at my hand.
“Mike—you don’t even know what’s on it.”
“Which would be reason enough, L.T.: I’ve got the right to look it over before they do. But that’s not the real point.” Very seldom during our time working together had Mike ever confronted me so angrily: “You’re not the only member of this damned partnership, asshole—and it doesn’t take a fucking sorcerer to know what you’re about to do. Jesus, L.T., this is exactly what I was talking about: don’t, just don’t do this, not until we’ve tried everything else!”
I studied him: He hasn’t got it, I realized, any more than they do; not all of it. “Meaning what?”
“What?” he said. “Listen to what Mei-lien’s saying, dude: she’s calling the law out! And maybe they’ve got all the details right, maybe not. But please, at least let them finish it, before you send it.”
“And let them look even more like they’re schooling us than they already do?” I said. “Which will make them buy into all the bad habits of forensic investigators? Come on, Mike—there are still lessons for them to learn: as important as any, maybe.”
Mike considered that for a moment, glancing at the floor and then back at me. “And you’ve thought the consequences through? Not just for yourself, but for everybody around here? Because, damn it, Trajan, I’ve spent five years watching you beat yourself up over how we handled that situation in New York. We move forward on this line now, with anything other than rock-solid proof, and I’ll end up watching you do it for five more years. And I really don’t want to see that.”
I took a moment to pause, myself. It went without saying that his concern was warranted, even if his suspicions were incomplete; but unfortunately there stood in our way, as I had told him only days earlier, the idea of justice as we understood it. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” I said, sensing that our Privy Councillors were getting restive. “I’m going to put this into the computer, and send the document along. If the group is clearly reaching the same conclusion, they can open it and I’ll expand on the subject. If they don’t…well, hell, I’ll still tell them to open it and then expand on the subject. There’s no other way, Mike—it’s why we set this exercise in motion. But okay, I’ll give them the chance to show their stuff first.”
Mike took a deep breath, released it slowly, and said, “I never saw anybody so damned anxious to flirt with disaster…” He started back to the partition. “But I guess you’re right. So come on.”
Once we were reseated, Mike hit the space bar on the laptop again. “All right, people,” he began. “Here’s how we’re going to proceed: Dr. Jones is going to transmit to you a final document, but we’ve got to ask that you don’
t open it until we give the okay.”
“Then why send it at all?” Vicky asked skeptically. “Why not just tell us what it says?”
“Because we want to make sure you have these facts, Vicky,” I replied, “along with any you’ve come up with yourselves. If something happens to Dr. Jones and myself, it will be up to the five of you to take this case on and make sure justice is done.” Each of them grew visibly more apprehensive, at that. “We don’t anticipate any such thing occurring, of course; but we leave for New York tomorrow, to contact the couple you have already studied in the dossier, Roger and Ethel Augustine. And one never knows what the results of such confrontations can or will be. I’ve done my own humble job of encoding the file. You’ll need the password, The Faust Dialectic, to open it.”
“The Faust Dialectic?” Linda said. “Didn’t we—?”
“We did, Linda,” I replied, “and thank you for remembering, as it was last year. But the concept remains as deceptively simple as it was then: basic dialectical thinking. I’m sure you already have ideas as to its application here, but hold them, for the time being, until our discussion leads us there. All right? On its way, then…” And at last I inserted the drive into the laptop and sent its contents firing along their way, knowing full well how terrible the consequences of the act could ultimately be. “Everybody receive it?” They all nodded in turn, still too apprehensive to speak. “Good. Then we’ll go on with Mei-lien’s summary.”
The nervous young woman managed to recover her poise with greater speed than the others: more evidence of someone who had grown up in a world where harsh realities of the body and soul were commonplaces. “Thank you, Doctor. And so we return to the subject of the mummified boy.”
“The mummified boy?” Mike said. “Mei-lien, we’ll be happy to hear whatever you have to say, on that score, but I should warn you: we’re really more concerned with preventing the next tragedy than we are with solving that one, right now. Because, as Dr. Jones has said, the mummified kid’s death is not central to this case.”
“Which is precisely our point, Dr. Li,” Mei-lien answered. “You have been so focused on the possible dangers to the Kurtzes that you have overlooked the possibility that the mummified boy’s life may have been a tragedy crucial to the case—despite his death already having occurred—and you have also overlooked the possibility that the story of his final days may hold critical clues to Derek Franco’s fate.”
Mike looked suddenly surprised: we had asked our Council to give us perspective on the moves we’d already made during the case, and for insight into what moves should come next; we hadn’t been looking for the five to point out things that we might have missed entirely. What my partner didn’t yet know, however, was that I hadn’t missed them; especially the worst and most important of them. The keys were waiting in that last file: the tale of the mummified boy’s final days, as Mei-lien had said. Yet I would, for my own selfish reasons, gladly have left that story in electronic limbo…
{vi.}
“In addition,” our budding expert from Kunming continued, “you seem to have been determined not to repeat such errors as may have led to the attack on Dr. Grace Chang—”
“What?” Mike said reflexively; and there was no hint of flirtation in his voice, now. “Mei-lien—are you saying that you’ve actually investigated Dr. Chang’s accident?”
“We have,” she replied. “Enough to know that it was not, in all probability, an accident. And I have been in contact with her only this morning. I apologize if you consider this improper. I did not realize until I spoke to her that the two of you were quite so—close…”
Mike covered his mouth and whispered to me, “Damn, L.T., I thought you were the one who was going to take shit for being too personally tangled up in this thing…”
“Please be certain,” Mei-lien rushed to say, “that our purpose is not to embarrass either of you; we merely wish to point out that your personal concerns may have blinded you to important clues, particularly where Derek Franco is concerned. Therefore—the mummified boy.”
“Who had a name,” Frankie said, in a manner that exhibited a kind of protectiveness for the dead youth. Glancing down to double-check his own notes, he continued: “He was—”
But I was through having the tables turned: “His name was Danny Gunderson,” I said. “Fifteen years old, from the town of Essex, located in the county of the same name.” As Mike looked at me in amazement, I added, “So, again, let’s just drop the ‘gotcha’ tone, and you give us the facts that you know, straight.”
None of them had been any more ready for my awareness than had Mike: “Chido,” Frankie said reflexively, smiling. “You are the man, Doc…Okay, well, Danny Gunderson lived with foster parents, as I guess you know. The couple runs a snack shop on the marina in Essex: it’s a shithole, doesn’t take in much, so they foster kids to ‘augment their income.’ Danny, though, was no boat boy: liked to hitchhike up to some pretty serious caves to the west, go exploring. About half that hitch, by the way, is on Route 22, which, if you keep going south on it, puts you in Surrender—looks like you were right about the whole copycat method thing.”
“But, Frankie, how…” Mike began uncertainly; and then, glancing at me, he went on: “How can any of you possibly know all this? The cops didn’t tell you, I’m assuming.”
“No, they didn’t,” Frankie answered. “We found it all—Linda and me did.”
“Yes,” Linda said. “The trail began with a bunch of credit card charges: all at one spot, and all on one card—a card belonging to Ambyr Kurtz.”
I had known the words were coming; but my heart still sank when I actually heard them, and I tried one last evasion: “Ambyr? She hasn’t been outside Burgoyne County in—well, four to six months, anyway. Which she would need to have been, given the period required for the mummification process.”
“We know that, too,” said Linda. “But she is blind, Derek could’ve taken the card without too much—trouble…”
And that was that: I turned down to stare at the desk before me, knowing I must begin: “He didn’t take it,” I said quietly. “She gave it to him…”
Stunned silence reigned, until Linda finally noised, “Oh?” After a few more seconds, she continued, very carefully: “Well—whatever the case, the owners of the only establishment where we know he used it told me that they recalled a ‘pretty slow kid’ who said it was his mother’s. And that place wasn’t in Essex, it was at a takeout joint, China King, in Cambridge. That’s in Washington County, north of Burgoyne and Rensselaer. About twenty miles up Route 22 from Surrender.”
“Holy fuck,” Mike murmured. “I’ve been there.”
“We know that, too,” Linda said. “Your card is also in their records. But it was not used at the same time as Ambyr Kurtz’s. Danny Gunderson, however, had his own MasterCard, which was given to him according to a pattern that you must both find depressingly familiar, by now: his parents disappeared, leaving him plastic that had been put in his name, and which was guaranteed by them, despite the fact that soon they just—didn’t exist. As long as the interest was paid on time, though, the credit company didn’t care what Danny’s circumstances were. Or, unfortunately, how the money was raised.”
“You are fucking kidding me,” Mike blurted. “The mummified boy was also a throwaway child?”
“That idea never occurred to you?” Vicky replied; and it was becoming ever clearer that, while the others were doing the talking, she and Colleen were the ones scrutinizing my partner and especially me the most, the one with her eyes, the other with her ears.
Realizing this, I flattened my tone even more: “No one said it didn’t, Vicky.”
“So it did?” Colleen finally glanced up from her notes quickly. “To both of you?”
“Immaterial to your report,” I answered stiffly. “Presumably, then, Frankie gained Ambyr’s credit card number through his usual mysterious methods, and the location gave you the name of the Gunderson boy, once you’d made
the cross-reference at the restaurant?”
“We caught a lucky break, there,” Frankie answered with a nod. “The two split the bills on their cards. And the owners remembered them, because there’s just a few tables in the place, it’s mostly takeout and the guys stayed for hours every time. Both of them mentioned hitching to get there. So that let us access Danny’s card history. Anyway—Linda?”
“I researched the Gunderson boy,” Linda continued, “and found out he was a missing child—a family he stayed with whenever he ran away from the fosters finally reported it.”
“A family?” I asked dourly; but she only looked back at me quizzically. “An inter-agency police report requested by Sheriff Spinetti revealed that that ‘family’ consisted of one middle-aged man who was believed to be a child molester, and who lived with a non compos mentis mother.”
“Well, well…” Linda answered with an appreciative nod. “That would probably explain it: Danny’s body was found in one of those caves Frankie mentioned—a crevasse deep, narrow, and cold enough to protect it from predators, and to allow the mummification process. The discovery was a complete accident: a group of cavers with oxygen tanks spotted it. Now it would, admittedly, have been fairly easy for somebody else to stage the event, by cramming his body down there.”
“I doubt that,” Mike said, trying to get over his amazement. “There were no marks or deformities indicating that any force was used.”
“Okay.” Linda gave Mike that same nod of esteem, this time. “Just an accident, then. An accident that happened to occur to a kid who’d probably developed a fairly pronounced sense of risk, of disregard for his own safety. And so—case closed, at least on the Gunderson story.”
I took a deep breath, then lit a cigarette. “Yes. And it is indeed a depressingly familiar tale, although the first to actually illustrate the failures of the foster care program—which is vital to understanding why the others took the path they did. So, well done, all of you.”