“Thomas!”
Shit.
I broke free of the chair and dived to the floor, scattering toys before me. I wanted to get over to Lewis, to his body.
There was a gun, tucked into the front of his pants. Morris’s gun, maybe.
In the front room, I heard a pfft, pfft and then the sound of another body dropping.
From outside: “Ray!”
“Thomas, stop!”
Julie.
I was on my knees, reaching for the gun, my fingers just touching the grip, when the curtain flung back. I glanced up, just in time to see Nicole’s boot catch my jaw.
It was one hell of a kick.
I saw stars as my body was catapulted backward. My arms went out instinctively to brace my fall, but it still hurt like hell when I landed. Something sharp dug into my back, then skittered out from under me. A toy dump truck.
My right hand had landed on one of the other items that had tumbled off the shelves. Even before I looked at it I could feel that it was part plastic, part metal.
Nicole pointed her gun at me. But before she could squeeze the trigger, there was a loud bang from the short hallway that led to the alley.
A door being thrown open.
“I got help!” Thomas screamed. “I got Julie!”
“No!” Julie, sounding as though she was a step behind him, screamed.
Nicole’s eyes turned toward the voices, and the gun followed. The second Thomas appeared he’d be dead.
I glanced over at my right hand, which was draped across the blue plastic fins of a foot-long, metal-pointed lawn dart.
It wasn’t exactly a javelin. But I wasn’t just good at throwing one of those in high school. I was pretty damn good at regular old darts.
In the milliseconds I had before Thomas ran in, I hoped throwing darts was like riding a bike. You never forget how.
Despite the throbbing in the side of my head, the pain in my jaw and my back, I moved with lightning speed, grabbing the dart by the tail end, swinging it back over my shoulder, then pitching it forward with everything I had.
“Ray!”
Thomas burst into the room.
The dart went into Nicole’s neck. It went in far enough, an inch or two, that it hung there.
Her mouth opened but no scream came out. Her right hand held on to the gun as her left flew up. She grasped the dart, and yanked it out.
It was like water from a tap.
Blood spurting everywhere.
Nicole dropped the dart and clamped her left hand over the wound. She dropped the gun from her right, turned, stumbled over to the desk.
She coughed and blood spilled from her mouth as well as her throat. She used the desk to briefly support herself, but only for a few seconds. She dropped to the floor as the sirens became almost deafening.
Now Julie was in the room, and she hit the brakes as soon as she saw the carnage. A firefighter, running in behind her, nearly knocked her over when she stopped so abruptly.
“Ray?” she said.
Thomas was already helping me to my feet. “Look who I found,” he said. “I brought Julie.” He smiled. “I’m back.”
SEVENTY-ONE
OVER the next twenty-four hours, Thomas and I, and Julie, had to answer a lot of questions from a lot of different agencies. We were questioned separately, and together, by New York City cops, state police, FBI, even the Port Authority, for all I knew. One guy, I was told later, was from Homeland Security, but there were so many who wanted to pick our brains that I couldn’t figure out which one he was.
Thomas, when we had a moment together, expressed some concern that there was no one from the CIA. “You’d think they’d be here, wanting to see how I’m doing,” he whispered. I could see the disappointment in his eyes. He was hurt.
The benefit of all these hours of interrogation was that they had a way of informing us about what had happened. The blanks started to get filled in, in large part because the fire department and paramedics had arrived in time to save Howard Talliman and Morris Sawchuck, both found bleeding on the floor of the toy shop.
Talliman, whose condition was critical, had not been all that forthcoming so far, but Sawchuck, who’d been shot in the lung and was listed in serious condition, was telling prosecutors everything he knew. Because he was hooked up to various machines to assist with his breathing, he was answering questions as quickly as he could type them on the laptop they’d brought into the ICU.
A lot of what had happened became clear during our kidnapping. Fitch’s blackmail attempt—what she knew or claimed to have known was still not entirely clear to us—led to a decision to kill her. Bridget Sawchuck was killed by mistake. Nicole killed that couple in Chicago as part of her mission to get the image of the smothered woman off the Internet.
That was kind of it, in a nutshell.
Lewis Blocker, of course, was dead.
And the paramedics were not able to save Nicole. Turned out that wasn’t her real name. There was talk that in another life she was some kind of Olympic athlete—that explained the power in that kick—but the cops were still trying to piece a lot of things together.
I didn’t feel good about killing the woman. I knew I’d had no choice, but I took no pleasure in it. I was going to be having nightmares about this for a very long time.
Bottom line was, I’d rather it was her being put in the ground than me. Or Thomas.
Many of the questions that were put to me, when I was being questioned alone, were about Thomas, and his bizarre preoccupation. I know they were in touch with Dr. Grigorin, and our good friends Agents Parker and Driscoll of the FBI made an appearance. They confirmed much of what I’d been saying: that while Thomas was certainly unique, he was not a threat to anyone or himself. By the end, it appeared the various law enforcement agencies were not only persuaded that Thomas was harmless, but that he was a hero. Bridget Sawchuck’s murder would never have come to light without his explorations on Whirl360.
What was left unspoken was that it was these same explorations that led, ultimately, to the deaths of Kyle and Rochelle Billings. Whether this crossed Thomas’s mind I don’t know, and I certainly didn’t point it out to him. Maybe because their deaths were as much my fault as his. I was the idiot who’d waved that printout around when I’d knocked on Allison Fitch’s apartment door, which, evidently, had been picked up on a surveillance camera.
The one thing that never came up was the call Lewis took in Thomas’s bedroom. Thomas told me he’d never mentioned it, and neither had I.
THOMAS was more withdrawn than usual in the wake of everything that had happened. What we’d been through would be traumatic for anyone. Yet I wondered whether Thomas’s idiosyncrasies actually made him better prepared to cope. He generally shut the world out, except those parts he could access online. With that kind of wall around him, maybe he’d taken in less of the horror.
I just didn’t know.
He had been brooding, though, and I wondered whether it might have less to do with our recent experience and more to do with what he had seemed ready to tell me just before Nicole and Lewis invaded the house. This thing that had happened to him, when he was thirteen, that had sparked trouble between Dad and him.
He’d said, back then, that he might be willing to talk about it with Julie, but the time wasn’t right yet. We needed to decompress before we tackled anything else.
Besides, I had a couple of things on my mind, too.
I’d been debating whether to stay at my father’s house, live there with Thomas, at least for the foreseeable future. But to my surprise, when I proposed the idea to Thomas, he was reluctant.
“I don’t think I want to live with you,” he said. “Look at all the trouble you got me into.” He said he wanted to live at the place I had gone to visit, so long as he could keep his computer.
Which still left me the option of selling my place in Burlington and moving into Dad’s house permanently. Then I’d be close to Thomas, could check in on him as o
ften as I wanted. Over breakfast, our last morning in New York City, we talked about traveling. Thomas said he wanted to touch the window of a particular pastry shop in Paris.
“I think,” I said, “if we go all that way, we might want to go inside and eat the pastry.”
“I guess that would be okay,” he said.
Our future plans weren’t the only thing on my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about the phone call.
WE went home with Julie, in her car.
I shouldn’t have been surprised to find a police car blocking the end of the driveway at my father’s house when we got back. The press—reporters other than Julie—had gotten wind of the story and been trying to find Thomas and me. So far, we had managed to avoid them. Not just because we didn’t need the aggravation, but because I wanted Julie to have a chance to break the whole story before anyone else got the details. Our—well, mostly my—firsthand accounts of what had happened were going to give her a hell of an exclusive.
The uniformed officer sitting behind the wheel got out to see who we were. Once we’d identified ourselves, he pulled his car out of the way. Julie drove up to the house and stopped. Thomas got out first. Although he was never very demonstrative, I could tell he was excited to be home.
As he was approaching the house, I called to him, “Do not touch the phone in your room.”
“Why?”
“Just don’t,” I said. “Don’t even go near it.”
He didn’t argue. He didn’t care that much about phones. It was the fact he had no computer to return to that most upset him. If he asked me once he asked me ten times on the way home when we would be going out to get him a new one.
I came around to the driver’s door. Julie powered down her window.
“Thanks,” I said, bending over, my head half in the window.
“You say that a lot.”
“It’s ’cause you’re so damned nice.”
“I’m going to the office. I’ve got a story to write up. Did I tell you about it?”
“A little,” I said.
“Maybe I’ll give you a call later.”
“Look forward to it,” I said, then leaned in and kissed her.
I watched her drive off, then went into the house. I was going to head up to Thomas’s room first thing, but I saw the light flashing on the phone in the kitchen, and thought I’d better check the messages.
There were five.
“Hey, Ray. Alice here. Harry needs you to come in and sign a couple more things. Let me know.”
Beep. I hit 7 to delete.
“Ray? Hey, it’s Harry. Alice left a message for you yesterday. Right? Give me a shout.”
Beep. I hit 7 again.
“Ray, Jesus, Harry here, I saw the news. God, I hope you guys are okay. Look, when you get back, call me.”
Beep. 7 again.
“Hi, I’m trying to reach Thomas or Ray Kilbride. My name is Tricia, and I’m a producer for the Today show and we’d very much like to get in touch with you. It’s very important that—”
Didn’t have to wait for the beep this time. Hit 7.
“Hello, this is Angus Fried, from the New York Times, and—”
7.
I was parched, so I ran water from the tap until it was cold, filled a glass, and drank it all without taking a breath.
It was time.
I didn’t know what I was going to learn when I checked the call history on Thomas’s phone, on his separate line. Maybe nothing. Maybe the ID had been blocked, and the identity of whoever called the house would remain a mystery forever.
I put my empty glass in the sink and started heading for the stairs.
There was a rapping at the front door.
Standing there was an overweight, middle-aged man in a rumpled suit, his shirt collar open and black tie yanked down, holding up a badge for my inspection.
“Mr. Kilbride?” he said. “Our man at the end of the drive there told me you were back. I understand you’ve had quite the few days. You and I, we really didn’t get a chance to finish our chat the other night, on the phone. I’m Detective Barry Duckworth, with the Promise Falls police. It’s a hell of a thing you’ve been through. I’ve heard all about it. But I was wondering if we could still have a word about your father.”
SEVENTY-TWO
“COME in,” I said.
Detective Duckworth and I took seats in the living room. “I can understand that you’ve got a lot to deal with, all that’s happened to you in the last couple of days. How are you doing?”
“Okay, I guess. It was…harrowing.”
“Yeah, that would be the word. Are you up to finishing the conversation we were having the other night?”
“I am,” I said. “It seems like a long time ago.” I rubbed my forehead. “You had been speaking to my father.”
“That’s correct.”
“He’d gotten in touch with you,” I said.
“He had.”
“Tell me about it.”
Duckworth settled in the chair, relaxing his arms at his sides. “Your father contacted me about something that happened to your brother, Thomas, when he was in his teens. But for years, your father didn’t believe it had happened—he didn’t believe your brother. Because he, well, how should I put this…?”
“My brother is not what you’d call a credible witness,” I said.
“There you go.”
“Because he hears voices when there are none to be heard, sees conspiracies where there are none to be seen.” I hesitated. “Most of the time.”
“So when Thomas came to your father many years ago, alleging an assault, your father was reluctant to believe it. In fact, he refused to believe it, because Thomas was pointing the finger at one of your father’s friends. He accused your brother of making it all up, and told him to never talk about it, never to bring it up again.”
“An assault,” I said. “Thomas managed to tell me just a bit about this, before we were kidnapped.”
“A sexual assault,” Duckworth said. “At the very least, an attempted one. An attempted rape.”
I felt anger welling up within me. “Who did Thomas tell my father it was?”
Duckworth held up a hand. “I’m getting to that. Your dad, he did talk to the man, this friend of his, and the man was stunned, shocked by the accusation, denied it completely, and your dad, he believed him. Because he couldn’t believe Thomas. Thomas had lots of crazy tales back then, I gather.”
“It’s always been that way.”
“But then something happened to change your dad’s mind,” Duckworth said.
“What was that?”
Duckworth looked around the room, saw the new TV, the Blu-ray player. “Your dad, he liked the high-tech stuff, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” I said. “He did. He liked his toys, his gadgets. A lot of men, they get to his age, they resist the new technologies, but he thought they were pretty cool. He loved to watch sports on that TV.”
“Your dad was thinking of getting a new phone,” Duckworth said.
That hit me. “How did you know that?”
“He told me. That’s how it happened.”
I gripped the arms of my chair, like I was strapping myself in for a rough ride. “Go on.”
“Your dad wanted a cell phone that would do lots of fancy things, instead of just being a phone. Me, I got a phone that does a lot of things but I don’t know how to do hardly any of them. Had it a year before I could figure out how to take a picture with it. But that was the very thing your dad was interested in having a phone for. To take pictures.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“He told me he’d been looking at a few of them, but getting recommendations from store people, you don’t know whether to trust them. Maybe they’re just trying to sell you the most expensive kind. You want to know what your friends got, what they have to say. Word of mouth, you know?”
“Sure.”
“So your dad happened to be with one of his friends, he to
ld me—this would be the same friend your brother had accused way back when—and he picked up his phone to have a look at it. Just curious. This friend wasn’t in the room at the time, but your dad didn’t think anything of it. Didn’t think he’d mind. He wanted to see how the camera worked on this phone, so he pressed the whaddyacallit, the camera app, and up it came. And then he tapped again, so it brought up the pictures that had already been taken.” Duckworth paused to catch his breath.
“What?” I said.
“He didn’t like what he saw.”
I swallowed. “What were the pictures of?”
“Boys,” Duckworth said. “Pictures of young boys. These weren’t friendly family pictures, if you get my drift. These were young boys—ten, twelve, thirteen years old—in provocative poses and positions. Your dad, he could barely describe them to me, they upset him so.”
“These were pictures his friend had taken.”
Duckworth nodded. “Seems he’d just come back from some trip. A place where a person with those kinds of tastes can find just what he’s looking for. And in that instant, when he saw those pictures, he realized that what your brother had said years ago was the truth. He hadn’t been making it up. A man who would take these kinds of pictures was the sort of man who would have assaulted your brother.”
“Who?” I asked, but I believed I already had the answer.
Duckworth held up his hand again. “Let me tell this. So when this friend of your dad’s came back into the room, your dad confronted him with it. Asked him what the hell it was. Said he now realized it had to be true, what Thomas had told him.”
“What did the man say?”
“Denied it to hell and back, of course.”
“What’d my dad do?” One thing I was pretty sure he must have done was a search on his laptop for child prostitution.
“I guess he stewed about it for a while. Finally, he called me. He said he was just sick about it, that he’d tried to apologize to your brother about it, that they’d had a fight over it. He wanted to know whether the man could still be charged, for what he did to Thomas. I told him it was pretty unlikely. It happened so long ago, and given your brother’s tendencies, it would be pretty hard to get a conviction.”