“And what happened to Malcolm?”
“Yeah. That’s the big one. What happened to Malcolm.”
I’m not sure how much I want to get into everything here with the driver listening to us, but I figure that if the senator can trust him, so can we.
Tane turns toward Alysha and me. “Let’s talk this through. Malcolm tracks us down from all over the country and brings us to this secret, I don’t know, base or whatever, hidden in downtown Atlanta. He tells us he wants us to save someone else who has blurs, that she was kidnapped.”
“Petra Amundsen,” Alysha says.
“Right. And we only have until nine o’clock tonight to do it.”
“Okay. And?”
“And, why is all this happening right now? I mean, Malcolm first contacted me in November. Why wait until June to bring all of us together? Not to mention that suddenly, when he does, Petra goes missing. Doesn’t that seem a little too convenient to you? Like too much of a coincidence?”
“Maybe.” I consider that. “But I think it’s safe to say that whatever’s going on here, it’s bigger than just us. Remember, Malcolm mentioned Dr. Waxford doing tests on prisoners. Why would he have brought that up unless it was related to everything else?”
“Yeah, what was all that about, anyway? He said you knew about him?”
I explain about Dr. Waxford and the chronobiology research. I also tell them that I recognized Detective Poehlman on the video monitor and that he’d showed up in Wisconsin around the same time Dr. Waxford disappeared.
Tane looks confused. “But how does that relate to Malcolm?”
“Last winter when I first met him, Malcolm told me his agency was trying to stop Waxford.”
“And what agency is that?”
“Maybe the same one that built that maze of hallways under that parking garage.”
Back at Sue Ellen’s place, Kyle finished his shower, got dressed, and met up with the girls in the kitchen.
Mia’s aunt had left some eggplant parmesan, watermelon, and fresh strawberries for them on the counter.
“All the fixin’s are there,” she told them pleasantly. “It’s a do-it-yourself lunch. Go ahead and fill yerselves up, now.”
They thanked her, heaped some food onto the china that she insisted they use, and moved to the dining room to do some research while they ate.
“When you were showering,” Mia said to him, “Nikki and I looked up the Marly Weathers Foundation. Mainly they give scholarships, help with academic after-school programs, that sort of thing. It all looks pretty innocent and legit. There wasn’t any mention of a Malcolm Zacharias in the staff directory on their website.”
As they ate, they picked up the research where Nicole and Mia had left off, surfing on their phones and poring over the Marly Weathers Foundation website. When they were about halfway through with lunch, Nicole said, “Kyle, do you still have Daniel’s wallet?”
“Sure. Why?”
“What about that debit card? The one from whoever was paying for the travel costs to get him down here?”
“What about it?”
“Could we use it to find out who he is? I mean, the person who preloaded the card?”
“How?”
“There’s usually a phone number on the back for you to call if there’s an emergency or if the card gets stolen or lost.”
“Yeah, now there’s a brilliant idea.” Mia took a bite of watermelon. “Include a number on the back of a card for you to call when you longer have the card. Am I the only one who sees the flawed logic in that one?”
“But it might just help us this time, though.” Nicole turned to Kyle again. “Zacharias is a guy so it’ll probably be best if you make the call—in case it’s his card. Pretend you lost it or something’s wrong with it. See what you can find out.”
“It’s upstairs. Let me go grab it.”
Dr. Adrian Waxford was at his desk studying the transcriptions of what subject #832145, the serial killer from Wisconsin, had been muttering to himself over the last few weeks, when Henrik called on the satellite phone.
Adrian picked up. “Yes?”
“We have him.”
“Who? Zacharias?”
“Yes. He put up a bit of a fight, but we got him.”
“How did you find him?”
“Tracked the SUV he was driving. It was purchased through Gatlinburg Holdings, which has connections to the foundation in Philly that we were looking into.”
“Good work.”
“The kids got away, though.”
“Kids?”
“The video footage we found showed three of ’em. Byers, a blind girl, and an islander kid. Sergei confirmed it. He took a few shots at ’em, but they made it to the elevator.”
“He shot at them?”
“If we have Zacharias and Petra, we have all we need, right? Wouldn’t it be best to just get rid of any loose ends?”
“Perhaps. Hmm. I’ll need to think that over. For now, bring Zacharias here to the Estoria. It’ll give us a chance to get some answers before General Gibbons arrives.”
“The general is coming down?”
“She wants to see the facility for herself in preparation for the oversight committee meeting.”
A slight pause. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“I’m afraid it’s out of our hands. If the situation becomes unmanageable we can always move our base of operation. The renovations we made allow us that option.”
“You mean use the rapid oxidation system. Burn down the Estoria.”
“Only if necessary. We’ve had to start over before. It’s not ideal, but I’ll do whatever I have to do to keep this research going. Justice depends on it.”
As he spoke, he made sure that the 9mm handgun in his desk drawer was loaded and had a bullet in the chamber.
“But the research depends on funding.”
“True enough,” Adrian acknowledged, sliding the drawer shut again.
“However, we probably won’t have too much trouble finding other governments who would pay through the nose for your findings.”
“That is true as well.”
“Alright, I’m going to drop Sergei off at the house in Knoxville, but I should still be able to get to the Estoria by around five o’clock.”
“We’ll have a room waiting for Mr. Zacharias on the fourth floor.”
After ending the call, Adrian looked at the bone-carved camel figurines on his desk and the vial of Telpatine that sat beside them.
Think outside the box.
Burn down the Estoria? Really?
Well, if necessary. Yes.
Sometimes unorthodox measures were required in the pursuit of doing what is right.
Kyle called the number on the back of the debit card and navigated his way past a series of automated prompts. When he finally got through to a real person, he said, in his best irritated adult bank-card-user-voice, “Yes, I’d like to report a problem with my card. It keeps getting declined but I think it should still have money on it.”
“Alright.” The woman didn’t sound a whole lot more personable than the prerecorded messages he’d just finished listening to. “May I have the card number, please?”
He read it off.
“And the security code.”
He gave it to her.
“And what’s the billing address for the card’s account?”
“The billing address?”
“Yes. To confirm the card’s ownership.”
“Oh, right. Hold on. We have, um . . . a couple different addresses we use. Let me just check which one this gets billed to.”
He lowered the phone and said to the girls, “They need a mailing address. What should I tell ’em?”
“Here.” Nicole used her cell to pull up the photo of the receptionist’s computer screen and zoomed in on the address of where the receipt had been sent. “Try this.”
Back on the line again, Kyle said, “Yeah, okay. Here’s the one we have on file.?
??
He told it to her and waited while she entered it.
“Is this Marly Weathers?”
“Yes.”
“Ms. Weathers?”
“Mister.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. It wasn’t entered correctly here. Let me just fix that . . .” She typed. “There. All set. So, now, Mr. Weathers, how may I help you?”
“Right. Can you check the amount on the card?”
“According to our records, you still have $49,911 on that card. Will that be enough, or do you need to transfer more funds from one of your corporate accounts?”
He tried not to let his shock over the dollar amount come through in his voice. “Um, yeah. Maybe transfer some?”
“From which account?”
“How about the biggest one.”
Yeah, okay, that was a stupid thing to say.
“The biggest one?” the woman asked curiously.
“Yes.” He tried to regroup and sound confident again. “Precisely. And which one would that be, actually?”
“I’m afraid I’ll need the email address associated with it to give you any additional information.”
Maybe she was onto him.
“Just a sec.”
He consulted Nicole’s cell and read off the email address of the place in Philadelphia.
“So, Gatlinburg Holdings?” the woman on the phone said.
“Oh. Yes. Of course. Okay. Thanks.”
“Did you still want to transfer any funds?”
“Naw. I changed my mind. Okay, have a good day, then.”
“But you said the card wasn’t working?”
“Um. Yeah. It started to.”
“It started to—?”
“Just now, here—”
Okay, that’s enough.
He hung up.
“Well?” Nicole asked.
“The card was issued to Marly. There’s almost fifty thousand dollars left on it. And there’s a company called Gatlinburg Holdings that’s related to it somehow—I don’t know how. It’s another corporate account he has.”
“I’m sorry.” Mia held up a finger. “Did you just say fifty thousand dollars?”
“Yep.”
“That could buy a whole lot of Fritos.”
“Yes, yes, it could.”
“So, then, we’ve got some things to look into.” Nicole ticked them off on her fingers. “First: Who’s Marly Weathers? Second: What’s Gatlinburg Holdings? And third: What do any of these things have to do with Malcolm Zacharias?”
“If anything,” Kyle said.
“Yes. If anything.”
“Man.” Mia was shaking her head. “We are talking a lot of Fritos.”
“Focus,” Nicole told her. “Remember? Daniel? Missing? Your friend? I’ll take social media. Mia, you hit Wikipedia. Kyle, Google.”
“A Dr Pepper to whoever comes up with the best stuff,” Kyle told them.
“But you’re the only one who likes Dr Pepper.”
“Then I hope I win.”
“How about if I win I get to keep that debit card,” Mia suggested helpfully.
“Focus.”
“Right.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
1:00 P.M.
8 HOURS UNTIL THE DEADLINE
As we drive, Tane tells us about his first blur.
It happened in L.A.
“So, the cops were looking for this guy from my neighborhood. It’s, well, let’s just say I don’t live in a gated community. A drug deal had gone bad and a guy got shot. He was in rough shape.”
“Did he make it?” Alysha asks.
“Yeah, he survived, but cops were searching everywhere for the shooter. I’d been following the story, you know, online. Also, this friend of mine had a police radio so we were listening in on that. And then suddenly it was like this voice in my head was telling me things I shouldn’t have been able to know. I saw the guy who’d been shot. He was lying right in front of me in the road—I mean, I wasn’t there, I was with my buddy in his room, but I saw it like I would’ve if I was really at the site of the shooting. And everything became clear.”
“Clear?”
“The voice told me to go to this one abandoned building we used to hang out in. I didn’t have any idea what I’d find.”
“But you went?”
“Yeah. Turns out, the shooter was holed up there. I ended up finding the guy and I had to decide whether or not to turn him in.”
“What did you do?” I ask.
“I figured if he’d already shot one person, from there on out it would just get easier to shoot others. So in the end, I called the cops. And they got him.”
When he was done, he asked Alysha to tell us about her blurs. “If you don’t see anything, how does that work? Is it like your dreams? Your nightmares, where you hear or touch things?”
“I guess. Sort of. I hear people speaking, snippets of conversations, sometimes frightening noises, and then I have to piece it all together to make sense of it. That’s how I helped find this girl from Billings who’d been kidnapped. She was twelve. Pandora Hutchinson. And she—”
“Hang on.” I don’t mean to interrupt her, but the girl’s name catches me off-guard. “Did you say her name was Pandora?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“It’s just that the myth of Pandora’s box has been on my mind the last couple weeks.”
“Weird.”
“Another coincidence,” Tane says.
“If coincidences even exist.” Alysha shifts in her seat and her leg brushes against mine. “I think stuff always happens for a reason, even if we can’t tell what it is at the time.”
“Like with the story of the Chinese farmer’s son?”
“Maybe. Yeah. So, well, with Pandora—she lived near me and I was listening to the news stories about her. I didn’t go into a trance or anything, but it was like I could hear someone in a coffin and she was crying out and she said his name, the name of the guy who’d taken her, and then buried her. It was almost like I could imagine myself being there, trapped in that coffin, in her place. The scent of cedar. The sweat. The dirt falling between the cracks and landing on my face. Everything.”
“Did they find her in time?” There’s a slight chill in Tane’s voice.
“Yeah. Thank God. I was at school when I had the blur. I started screaming. Freaked everyone out. The public safety officer came to help me. I kept repeating the kidnapper’s name and the cop recognized it—I guess they’d already questioned the guy once but then let him go. He was a checkout person at the grocery store where Pandora’s family shopped.”
Alysha takes a deep breath, then lets it out as if she’s trying to help herself relax. “They went to his house and found a shovel with some type of soil on it that led them to the part of the county where she was buried. They were able to use details from my blur to locate her. It was all over the news afterward. I think that’s how Malcolm first heard about me.”
“So that was your first one?”
“Yes. There were people who were saying I was psychic, but that wasn’t it for me. It’s not supernatural or paranormal—at least I don’t think it is. It’s just that my blurs, they help me hear things I wouldn’t normally be able to hear and when I decipher them, there are answers embedded inside ’em that I hadn’t even realized I’d pieced together.”
I nod in agreement, but then realize that, of course, she can’t see me doing it. “It’s the same for me. So do either of you have any history of this sort of thing happening in your family? Any mental illness? Depression, or—”
Malcolm’s phone rings, the same chiming tone as before.
Senator Amundsen.
I answer. “Hello?”
“Everything alright with the driver? You’re on your way?”
“Yes.”
“Listen, I was thinking, is there anything I can do here that would help you out when you arrive? Maybe to facilitate the visions to help you find my daughter?”
“Well, it’
s probably the same for Petra, but we can’t make the blurs—or the visions, whatever—come on command. We only experience them when our minds have images, sounds, details to work with. So as much as you can tell us about her would be helpful. Also, pictures, videos—and especially any info you have about what happened when she disappeared.”
“I’ll see what I can come up with.”
When I’m off the phone again, Tane, Alysha, and I talk through our family histories. They know about a few cases of depression and even schizophrenia among their relatives, but we can’t identify any one specific thing that all three of us have in common, other than the fact that we were all going through a stressful time when our blurs first began.
“Before you two came to the center,” Alysha says, “Malcolm told me that he couldn’t explain for certain why my hallucinations had started, but that adolescence is a time of tremendous change. I mean, obviously it is—developmental, physical, hormonal, all that. Our brain’s physiology is developing at an astonishing rate and any of those factors, or a combination of all of them, could be the deciding one. He said he didn’t know what was most important in causing the hallucinations. But he did mention what he called the honeybee factor.”
“What’s that?” I ask her.
“He encouraged me not to think of the hallucinations as being genetically caused, but instead that I was just genetically predisposed toward having them. Then, whenever I encounter the right environmental cues, they kick in. Like with a bee sting—you never find out if you’re allergic until you’re stung. Having a reaction, well, it’s partly who you are, partly being at the right place at the right time—or the wrong one, depending on how you look at it. Some people are allergic but are never stung so they never find out. He said the hallucinations require a convergence of genetic predisposition and environmental cues. That’s part of what makes all this so rare.”
Huh.
Genetics. Family history. Environmental cues. Analytical thinking.
All pieces of the puzzle, one by one falling into place.
Along with pain and tragedy.
Rips in the fabric of reality.
The conversation trails off as we each take some time to process things.