Glenn Cooper - Secret of the Seventh Son

“Skipped lunch?” Elvis challenged.

“I think I’ve got a stomach bug,” Mark said.

“Maybe you should go to Medical. You’re sweating like a pig.”

Mark touched his damp forehead and realized his jumpsuit was soaked through the armpits. “I’m all right.”

When there was half an hour until quitting time, Mark paid another visit to the men’s room and found an empty stall. He pulled two items from his jumpsuit pocket-the bullet-shaped flash drive and a crumpled condom. He slid the plastic bullet into the condom and shed the jumpsuit. Then he clenched his jaw and shoved the greatest secret on the planet up his rear end.

That night he sat on his sofa and lost track of time while his laptop burned his crotch and stung his eyes. He trolled the pirated database, shuffling it like a deck of cards, doing cross-checks, verifications, writing lists by hand and revising them until he was satisfied.

He worked with impunity. Even if he’d been online, his computer had hack protection the watchers couldn’t penetrate. His hands and fingers were the only parts of his body in motion, but when he finished he was almost breathless from the exertion. His own audacity electrified him-he wished he could brag to someone about his brazen cleverness.

When he was a boy he would run and tell his parents whenever he got a good grade or solved a math problem. His mother was dead from cancer. His father had remarried an unpleasant woman and was still bitterly disappointed at him for leaving a good company for a government job. They hardly talked. Besides, this wasn’t the kind of thing you could tell a living soul.

Suddenly, he had an idea that made him giggle with delight.

Why not?

Who would know?

He closed the database, locked it with password protection, then opened the file containing his first screenplay, his Thornton Wilderesque ode to fate that had been trashed by the little Hollywood toad. He scrolled through the script and started making changes, and each time he hit Find and Replace he squealed excitedly, like a naughty little boy with a wicked secret.

W hen Will was young, his father would take him fishing because that’s what fathers were supposed to do. He’d be awakened before dawn with a poke on his shoulder, throw on clothes and climb into the pick-up truck for the drive from the panhandle town of Quincy down to Panama City. His father would hire a 26-footer by the hour from a working-class marina and chug south about ten miles into the Gulf. The journey, from his dark bedroom to the sparkling fishing grounds would occur with scant exchange of words. He would watch him pilot the boat, his bulky frame tinged orange by the rising sun and wonder why even the natural beauty of a warm morning boat ride on calm shimmering waters did not bring joy to the man’s face. Eventually, his father would stub out a cigarette and say something like, “Okay, let’s get these lines baited up,” then lapse into sullen silence for hours at a time until a snapper or a wahoo hit the tackle and orders had to be barked.

Crossing City Island Bridge and gazing out toward East-chester Bay, he found himself thinking about his old man the moment the first marina came into view, an aluminum forest of masts bobbing in the stiffening afternoon breeze. City Island was a small, curious oasis, a part of the Bronx from a municipal perspective, but geo-culturally, quite a bit closer to Fantasy Island, a speck of land that led visitors to free associate about other places and other times because it was so unlike the city on the other side of the causeway.

To the Siwanoy Indians, the island had been for centuries a fertile fishing and oyster ground, to the European settlers, a ship building and maritime center, to the current residents, a middle-class enclave of modest single-family houses mixed with fine Victorian seafarers’ mansions, its coastline dotted with yacht clubs for wealthy off-islanders. With a rabbit-warren of small streets, some almost country lanes, myriad ocean dead ends, the incessant infantile cries of gulls and the briny smell of the shore, it was evocative of vacation spots or childhood haunts, not metropolitan New York.

Nancy could see he was slack-jawed over the place. “Ever been here before?” she asked.

“No, you?”

“We used to come here for picnics when I was a kid.” She consulted the map. “You need to take a left on Beach Street.”

Minnieford Avenue was hardly an avenue in the classic use of the word, more like a cart path, and it was another poor spot for a major crime scene investigation. Police and emergency vehicles and media satellite trucks clogged the road like a thrombosis. He joined the long single file of hopelessly stuck cars and complained to Nancy they’d have to walk the rest of the way. He was blocking a driveway and was expecting a fracas from a thick-limbed fellow in a wife-beater who was giving him the once-over from his steps, but the guy just called out, “You on the job?”

He nodded.

“I’m NYPD, retired,” the man offered. “Don’t worry. I’ll watch the Explorer. I ain’t going nowhere.”

The jungle drums had beaten loud and fast. Everyone in law enforcement and their uncles knew that City Island had become ground zero in the Doomsday Killer case. The media had already been tipped off which ratcheted the hysteria. The small lime-green house was surrounded by a throng of journalists and a cordon of cops from the 45th Precinct. TV reporters jockeyed for angles on the crowded sidewalk so their cameramen could frame them cleanly against the house. Grasping their microphones, their shirts and blouses fluttered like maritime flags in the stiff westerly winds.

When he spotted the house he had a mental flash of the iconic photographs that would blanket the world should it prove to be the place where the killer was captured. Doomsday House. A modest 1940s-era two-story dwelling with warping shingles, chipped shutters and a sagging porch with a couple of bicycles, plastic chairs and a grill. There was no yard to speak of-a spitter with good lung power could lean out the windows and hit the houses on either side and to the rear. There was just enough paved space for two cars-a beige Honda Civic was crammed between the house and the neighbor’s chain-link fence and older red BMW 3-series was parked between the porch and the sidewalk, where a patch of grass might otherwise have been.

He wearily checked his watch. It was already a long day and it wasn’t going to end anytime soon. He might not get a drink for hours and he resented the deprivation. Still, how superb would it be to wrap the case up here and now and coast to retirement, reliably hitting the barstool by 5:30 every night? He quickened his pace at the thought, forcing Nancy into a trot. “You ready to rock and roll?” he called out.

Before she could answer, a babelicious reporter from Channel Four recognized him from the news conference and shouted to her cameraman, “To your right! It’s the Pied Piper!” The video cam swung in his direction. “Agent Piper! Can you confirm that the Doomsday Killer has been captured?” Instantly, every videographer followed suit and he and Nancy were surrounded by a baying pack.

“Just keep walking,” he hissed, and Nancy tucked in behind and let him plow through the scrum.

The kill zone was in their faces the instant they walked inside. The front room was a bloody mess. It was taped off, perfectly preserved, and Will and Nancy had to peer through the open door as if they were viewing a cordoned museum exhibit. The body of a thin open-eyed man was half-on, half-off a yellow love seat. His head was lying on an armrest, well and truly caved in, his brown hair and scalp cleaved, a crescent of dura mater glistening in the last golden rays of the sun. His face, or rather, what was left of it, was a swollen pulpy mess with exposed shards of ivory bone and cartilage. Both his arms had been shattered into sickeningly unnatural anatomical positions.