Ransom X

  Chapter 39 Food Groups

  A knock at Legacy’s door set a whirlwind dinner into motion. Wagner entered with four grocery bags. She unpacked the contents of one bag that contained a vast array of cooking utensils. The other bags contained a range of food that afforded her the latitude to make almost anything on par with any of the finest casual eateries that were popularly attended by people who longed for a kind of nostalgia that never really existed except in old rusted reproductions of advertisements and posed pictures of pie eating contests on the wall. She looked like a formal version of one of the cheery waitresses that one would find in such a place, black tights tapered up her legs to a short black skirt with a white silk shirt tucked in.

  This was the first time that Legacy had seen her out of a suit. This was her version of casual. Not a hair out of place, or a single beaded cuff lace turned in onto itself.

  Legacy looked down at Chess and found that she wore a delighted smirk on her face as she introduced herself.

  “I’m Chess. You’re dad’s partner.”

  Wagner looked at Legacy waiting for an introduction. He could tell by her amusement that it was a test.

  “Agent Wagner.” Legacy clarified.

  The sight of her father’s meticulously presented partner must have made the insides of her mind race. He decided this because she was completely without comment.

  “I could use help with dessert.”

  Chess politely accepted the invitation. A look of conspiracy crossed Wagner’s face as she led Chess into the kitchen – she had no idea what kind of cook her apprentice was. Chess found ways to ruin almost any food product, neglect was her favorite tool. She was famous for burning popcorn, hot pockets and easy mac – the trifecta of simple microwave foods. Legacy waved, then turned to hide an amused concern about what came through those doors next.

  Quail stuffed with saffron and rosemary shiitake mushroom stuffing, a three-point injection of the meat with a raspberry jalapeno butter that added just enough spice to make the red pepper Parmesan rice seem tame.

  “Any vegetarians?” Wagner asked serving the placemats rather than the people sitting in front of them.

  “None.” Chess answered, “This looks delicious.”

  “I can’t take credit, Chess did most of the sauces.” Legacy perked up.

  “Under strict supervision.”

  “My father was gourmet chef. He said that if I had spent as much time cooking as I did training to put a man twice my size through a wall, I’d be in one of the top kitchens in Paris right now.” Wagner said in a tone that indicated that she was more proud of her father’s opinion of her than her own culinary abilities.

  “Your father must be disappointed.” Legacy said before he could put his normal social graces in check.

  “Dad.” Chess shot back at him.

  “Observation, not insult.” He responded.

  “He’s a broken man. He reminds me of you.” Wagner spun her knife over her knuckles, a complete pro, changing grip from cutting to attacking, and leveled the tip at the breast of the quail.

  Chess was so impressed that she imitated the move with her fork and it ended up on the floor after skidding off of the tablecloth. Legacy looked on as something very important happened. Instead of looking after the fork, both girls looked at each other. It was a moment of inclusion – something that Legacy realized he’d never been able to teach his daughter in their solitary life. Legacy noticed with a strange contentment that he was not a part of.

  And in that moment, the symphonic oddity of Wagner’s presence in their dining room was drowned out with the combined laughter of Chess and her in a kind of diminished harmony, poking fun at Legacy. It would be only ten or more times like that, where they ganged up on him, or he was the object of their surprisingly like-minded, but well-meaning ridicule.

  “Well-meaning ridicule” was a concept that sounds like a bit of a contradiction until one becomes a father to a daughter. The drive to get attention from their father, especially a stoic one like Legacy, becomes a full-time occupation. The dirt collected can’t be flung back into the face of the parent, that shows lack of respect and Chess had more respect for her father than anyone in her life. This is where it gets semi-contradictory, another trait of the adolescent girl, with the addition of a third party added to a conversation, all of dad’s character ticks are fair game. They can and will be taunted. In this context the daughter shows how observant she really is through her willingness to share her father’s flaws another person.

  It’s complicated, but it couldn’t have been too painful because at the end of the meal, Legacy asked Chess for a glass of wine and sat at the table enjoying it rather than taking scotch in his study alone.

  “You must be having a blast.” Chess said as she poured the wine and set it in front of her father. Legacy took a sip. There was a dusty residue that rose to the top of the glass.

  Wagner and Chess cleared the plates. A series of clanks and drumming of footsteps in the kitchen and the door opened. It was dessert time.

  Chess and Wagner brought down the house with their personal crockery cups of crème de leche custard presented along with a display of butane torch mastery. Wagner caramelized the sugar around the edge of the cup then scorched a cursive monogram into the top layer. When she came to her own, she didn’t bother with her own initials saying it was all for display. That didn’t sit well with Legacy who grabbed the torch and scorched AW into the top of hers while the ladies watched on laughing.

  “Martin, I’m surprised you knew my first name.” Her lips pouted ever so slightly.

  “It stands for Agent Wagner.” The pout became real until she lifted her eyes to his deep chestnut pupils and he added “Angela.” Legacy simply uttered, “Got you.”

  She could have stabbed him, she was so pleased. The dinner was one of those meetings of strangers that go much better than planned. It was the very discord of their personalities that worked that night, under that roof, in a way that none of them seemed prepared for.

  At around seven thirty, as the last of the dishes hit the drying rack Chess piped up “Can I be excused? I’m beat.”

  Something didn’t sit well with Legacy, a hair trigger went off in his mind, and the last sentiment of the night was not going to be serious. What was Chess up to? “You bugged my room.”

  “No, I was just going to listen at the door–”

  “This - case, it’s very sensitive-” His tone was protective.

  “Dad, I know what you’re working on –”

  “How?”

  Wagner said, “It’s all over the papers, the country is treating this like a baby down the well situation – excuse the crude analogy but there’s really nothing pleasant to compare this to.” She turned to Chess. “Your father is right though, stay away from the door.”

  Legacy wasn’t ready to have real conversations in front of a third party. Chess sensed his growing displeasure and chimed in. “After hearing a mature discourse from my elders, I choose,” She flipped her hair posing for her father as the model child “to reread the Gnostic gospels and go to bed.” A quick peck on the forehead, one last little joke at his expense indicating that she was really the parent and he the child, and she left the room. Wagner verbalized what Legacy was almost always thinking.

  “She’s great.”

  Legacy agreed dipping into a proud tone “I know.”

  Three hours later they were fast-forwarding through tape, looking at sections that Legacy had highlighted from the transcripts. Transcripts that could hardly be read – so much so that Legacy would point to the next section or read off time code rather than verbalize what was said on camera by the participants.

  They sat in the middle of the storm that was the escalating paper explosion that covered the flat vertical surfaces of the room and spilled onto the floor radiating out from the television and chairs. Every page that had been written every interview and analysis of the case was in that
room and had passed through Legacy’s hands before landing in its current resting spot. Legacy consistently surprised Wagner by his ability to locate whatever document he needed by standing in the middle of the room and accessing some kind of internal topographic catalog that he charted off of the constellations of pictures on the wall.

  Wagner noticed that pictures and captions were the only things allowed on the walls and all text documents were confined to resting surfaces. Nothing was filed, or inside a drawer of any kind. He had explained upon her first visit that once things were out of sight, they were, for him, truly out of mind.

  Wagner flipped forward to another section of the tape almost an hour after the one they’d been viewing.

  Wagner let out an annoyed huff. She was tired of sliding backwards and forwards looking for sections of the video where the participants spoke. Not only was it an assault her visual cortex, all the positions being changed, the wide shots turning to close ups, the impersonal nature of unnatural speed making a real document seem like a cartoon -Legacy could tell that she was frustrated by the process.

  Asking Legacy to change his ways was like staring up at the stars and asking for some new pictures. She took out her laptop and then produced a plastic divider sheet notebook filled with discs. Using her DVD drive and a piece of software called Time Code Crunch, she located the next section of the transcript by typing in the time provided by the transcript then playing forward on the DVD.

  “We’ve got a system going here, agent.” It took only seconds to get to a still image of the group on camera. She hit play and Blue’s voice crackled over the speaker a static complaint.

  “She moves like a cat, but she doesn’t purr enough.” The camera moved in to a close up on Purple.

  “Freeze that.” Legacy studied the clear digital signal on screen. Two sadistic eyes peered out of the form fitting purple mask. “That’s good.” A pure form of human viciousness seemed to deflect light away from Purple, Legacy soaked it up and his voice became sinister too. “He’s a killer, and he enjoys what he’s doing.”

  Wagner looked over and saw that Legacy had a chart of important moments for each Blue, Brown, Green, Yellow and Purple – Legacy had put that moment in the Purple column. She asked, “How did you know that Blue was talking directly to Purple?”

  A frown creased Legacy’s even brow, “I always know who he’s talking to. In fact you could read any line off this transcript and I could tell you the speaker.”

  Wagner picked a paper out of the stack and read. “How does that feel?”

  “Full sentence please – “ Legacy demanded.

  “What?”

  “If it’s “how does that feel, cunt?” it’s Purple, if it’s “How does that feel, bitch?” it’s Yellow. Brown says “Howsabout that baby?” Green never talks to her directly, he’ll say, “Do you think she’s had enough” or “I think she’s done.” Blue doesn’t ask questions, he gives orders.” Legacy was distracted, already moving on to the next moment in the video.

  “Give me the time numbers on the side of the transcript and I’ll pull the moments that you highlighted up. Afterward I can give them twenty second handles and compile a DVD reel of all of them.”

  If he was impressed, he’d decided not to exhibit it. Legacy rolled a pearl of wisdom around the tip of his tongue. “New ways aren’t always better.”

  “Just this time.”

  Almost an hour without a word passing between the pair, articulated by the tapping of keys on a keyboard and the occasional screech of the computer speaker as it cut into the audio of the digital video momentarily and gave a split second snapshot of what was going on in the session. Groans, screams, and foul language were the usual accompaniment – the soundtrack played like a haunted house, with all of the edges rounded off and all the sharp objects blunted by the distant nature of the evil. It barely seemed real. Legacy had to remind himself that these images were being broadcast through the air on wifi and satellite Internet connections all the time. They surrounded and penetrated walls and buildings into the most civilized recesses of everywhere.

  Legacy filled up his time while Wagner was compiling the disc, tracing a thousand obscure connections on the walls, eyes darting between pictures and reports, transcripts and diagrams. He knew he could step into the settings of any of the abductions and feel the grass or gravel beneath his feet. Legacy prepared himself to lay in wait at each location – and ready himself for the next abduction.

  He only noticed that Wagner was done when she stood directly in his line of sight holding up a disc. “Make a fresh pot of coffee and I’ll show you what I’ve been up to.”

  It was one of the few appliances in the kitchen Legacy knew how to use.

  The pronouncement no almond milk for creamer was met with a face that made the statement equivalent to lets eat household pets for dinner. Legacy couldn’t believe the topics that lead Wagner to unfiltered displays of emotion. He’d seen joy and disappointment, but never did he expect that a lack of pressed nut creamer would bother her.

  There was a moment where she teetered on the edge of going to the local convenience store, but in the end it was agreed that using cream for creamer wasn’t the most unnatural of purposes. She was in a hurry to show Legacy the compilation of video. In the dead of night with a coffee pot spitting out steamy gasps of water into the basket, Wagner flipped her notebook open on the counter.

  Legacy watched the first few clips like a conductor watching the trains come in and out of the station. No surprises, it was clockwork, but he had to be there to confirm a previously formed schedule of expectation. Green never showed on camera on Mondays, Purple liked to mark Laura so that his smell would stay on her during the shoot. He’d wipe the sweat under his arms above her top lip or spit some of his sticky tobacco brown spittle onto a lock of her hair then curl it down around her cheek.

  Yellow and Brown got the dirty work, the kinds of things that professionals get paid extra for. They did them on command, trained dogs, and never initiated anything without Blue telling them. Green was always the first out of the room and the only one of them who routinely seemed to set his own schedule. He would walk out and in without a word from Blue. Knowing the temperament of Blue, Legacy was sure, after watching the tape, that Green had some kind of essential job outside of the shoot. The girls’ faces changed with each cut, but the behavior of the men seldom changed at all.

  “When did that line start coming up?” Legacy pointed to a message that scrolled across the bottom of the video. “Any disruption of this video web cast by federal authorities will result in the termination of the subject.” It was on some of the clips and not on others.

  “Brit was in the crosshairs when this became a federal investigation. And the minute our people yanked on the wires of the Internet distributors and put out feelers on where the money went – this message popped up.” Wagner responded.

  “Blue put it up.” Legacy watched another clip where the image was framed slightly low. “He leaves room in his frame for the message. That’s no accident. He controls every aspect of the images we see.”

  Wagner watched as three more examples of Blue’s camera work flashed across the screen, each keeping the content high in the frame.

  “Push him and he responds with a threat.” Wagner said.

  “Speaking of responses. Where is that section that I put a star by in my notes, that's the section I need another set of eyes. It’s what I wanted you to look at the other day.”

  Wagner said, “It’s about an hour away.”

  Legacy replied “Fast forward.”

  Wagner hit him with a quaint smile, fast forward. How does one fast-forward a disc with digital information with pickup lasers ready to scan any sector? The chiding look reminded Legacy of why he so needed a female perspective on the next clip. There were some things that Legacy could not process, and although he knew the clip was significant, he didn’t know exactly why the alarms had gone off in his head.


  “There.” Legacy said seeing the image materialize on the screen at a touch of a button. “That’s it.”

  A thin trickle of blood cut a path down Laura’s bound wrists making a line or crimson that would soon soak into the raven slope of her hair. She spoke, “You don’t get to control everything. See it in my eyes.” The words repeated in his mind. It was a flash of desperation, set jaw, nothing about the delivery of words could be found at any other time in the transcript. They were the words of a girl pushed to her limits – Legacy recognized those limits, having come up against his own and having pushed others into facing their own on so many occasions in the past. This was a raw tap into Laura and what she was saying had a frantic importance.

  “I know Laura, and that’s not her.” Legacy looked up and saw shock on Wagner’s face.

  Wagner said, “She’s terrified.”

  “Look past that, she has a purpose. Terrified people want to give up, she wants something else, something about her eyes, line of sight, something she’s seen or wants us to see.” Legacy responded.

  “The lines around her eyes, are drawn by her, they line the inner eyelids. The curves match the curves on the fertility lines that she paints on her body.” The eyeliner marks indeed bulged and curved creating a striking pattern, like the eye was in full blossom.

  “Your experts say that she draws these lines to exert control over her body, but the patterns – “ Legacy couldn’t quite grasp the meaning.

  “The runes are gibberish, we’ve had teams of people looking for any hidden meanings and they’ve found nothing.”

  “She wants you to look at her eyes.” Legacy and Wagner turned toward the voice. Chess stood in the dark hallway.

  “Chess? Glad to have you eavesdropping, come in.” His voice was so calm he couldn’t possibly be furious underneath.

  “I’d rather stay here.” She replied.

  “Dear, you shouldn’t be seeing this.” Wagner said.

  Chess stepped out of a long shadow onto the linoleum of the kitchen. Her face glowed in the yellow light and her eyes sparkled. She had something in her mind that she knew would make her father happy, and all of the grotesque circumstances melted away under her bare feet as she walked to the computer.

  “Find a frame where she blinks.” She watched Wagner advance the video until her eyes were closed motionless.

  Legacy and Wagner stared at the screen. A wave of energy crashed outward as they saw the message in a bottle that Laura had been so careful to guard from her captors and yet so desperate to have others find. Etched in dark lines on her eyelids were two perfect symbols slightly out of character of the older glyphs that decorated her body. Legacy recognized them immediately.

  “It’s Mandarin.”

  “Hea Wah” Chess sounded out the words.

  “What does it mean?” Wagner asked eyes wide.

  “Nothing.” Legacy said.

  But Laura obviously had something to say and now they were listening. Wagner threw her arms around Legacy’s neck hauling her off of the ground.

  She rocked back onto her feet and Legacy’s hands gripped her tight by the shoulders and he looked like he wanted to say something to the young agent at four in the morning, but then came another input from the room.

  Chess smiled, “I’ll go.” Legacy turned. He had almost forgotten how much he wanted to kill his daughter. The smile didn’t help; she’d used that smile to get away with murder from age six to ten. He knew if she was going that far back, she must know she was in a childish kind of trouble.

  He whirled on her and looking down the bump on his nose expressionless and her smile crashed upon those rocks. She turned and walked out of the room allowing herself a skip as she turned the corner onto the shag carpet.

  It was a move that Legacy was not intended to see. The irregular footsteps let him know that she was proud of herself no matter how angry he was.

  It was an act of rebellion that only a father and daughter with a very complicated playbook could have called. The room Chess left came alive with activity in her absence.

  Wagner was on her feet, “We should turn this over to IT to isolate the blink frames.”

  Legacy responded, “That’ll take too long, I know someone who’ll have it done overnight.”

  Wagner was incredulous, “But we need to report this up the chain, this could be a major break in the case –”

  “Let’s find out.” Legacy pulled out his cell phone.

  “Who is up at three AM?”

  Tyke was always up at three AM; in fact he called the time between three and five in the morning prime time. It was his time to be at one with himself with no interruptions. Tonight, prime time was preempted by Legacy time.

  “This should be easy for you.” Legacy said into the phone.

  “That’s not fair Legacy.” Tyke snorted in disgust. “You know that everything is easy for me.”

  “Then stop being so versatile, I’ve got another call coming in.”

  “At three a –”

  Legacy set down the phone, allowing himself a moment to enjoy Tyke’s indignation. There was something satisfying and amusing about chipping away at someone who thought he had no weaknesses.

  Legacy excused himself then went down the hallway to Chess’ bedroom to unruin her life.

  “What you saw on that screen was ugly, and I don’t want anything ugly like that to touch you, do you understand?” Legacy started, looking directly into Chess’ eyes. The hall light flooded the dark room and father paced in front of daughter, creating a slow strobe pattern of light on her face.

  “It was indeed the first time I’ve seen anything like that, so it did make a lasting impression.” Chess countered.

  Legacy’s chest caved in with defeat, it was like the air inside him turned solid, but every method of exhaust would just pollute the air between him and his daughter further. He sighed instead of speaking.

  “I’m just kidding dad. There was a porno on Veronica’s big screen half the night last sleep over.”

  “Which one is Veronica?” his inflection rose, Legacy couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “The one you love. It’s all over - “

  “At your age?” Chess took her father’s hand and pressed it to her shoulder, he stood leaning delicately on her, testing reality like a grounding rod after a lightning strike.

  “Did I help you with your case?” Her eyes shone pure and true.

  Legacy answered, “Yes, and could you make me one promise? One that you also promise not to break.”

  A smile lit her youthful face, it was the kind of expression that Legacy was beginning to miss, even before it went away, “Anything, dad.”

  Legacy found their normal banter waiting for him as he crossed his hand over her forehead. “Conform your life to the image that I have of you inside my head until you’re at least twenty one.”

  “If you can morph that image so that I have a tiny tattoo on my shoulder.” Chess teased.

  Legacy strode toward the door and spoke into the open hallway, “Twenty-one it is then.”