Ridley Pearson - Cut and Run

He explained his situation again, detailing his need for a day or two at least. “I do love you. But I owe some explanations. I won’t leave my friends in false grief. I’ve seen enough of that.”

They kissed, though for the first time without passion, and that kiss would haunt him as he told Rotem of his plan to join her, and later considered her offer through the night, phone off the hook, his bed not slept in.

In the morning, his mind made up, he returned to the farmhouse.

He found it empty and deserted. Even the tire tracks had been swept out of the dirt, as if no one had been there in years.

He blamed Rotem, though never to his face. He blamed her for waiting so long to ask. He blamed himself forever for wavering, for leaving her side, even for a moment, that day.

Touchdown returned him to the present and delivered the requisite black Navigator to the jet’s stairs. This kind of service made Larson feel both important and uncomfortable, neither of which pleased him. The three federal employees were whisked off by a driver, who also carried Justice Department creds. Larson was once again reminded of how serious this must be.

Uncle Leo. It was little more than a name to Larson, but it carried weight, of legendary import in the realm of WITSEC. Uncle Leo had had something to do with the witness protection program’s modernization which had begun in the mid-1990s. Leo’s name spoke as much of secrecy as anything else, as did so much of the WITSEC program’s overhaul. It was the equivalent of the program’s very integrity, its security, and the security of its protected witnesses. Uncle Leo’s predicament had rallied the big hitters. It might be nothing more than an unscheduled vacation, or a trip to a hospital, but Uncle Leo had disappeared and Rotem had obviously been ordered to move heaven and earth, along with a sizable private jet, to find the man. It was as if WITSEC and FATF, separate entities, with one rarely having anything to do with the other, would be working together. The presence of these Justice agents spoke volumes. This was the varsity squad; if Larson was being called off the bench, as it appeared he was, then people wanted Uncle Leo found. The desk jockeys were ready to sit back and watch people like Larson work.

This particular October night in Princeton, New Jersey, left Larson wishing he’d brought a sweater, rather than the black jeans and black blazer he’d been wearing at the play. The smell was of car engines and tire rubber as he climbed out of the Navigator, stepping onto a blacktop driveway alongside a modest, unremarkable home in what was probably called a “nice neighborhood,” a place where kids could ride bikes and skateboards at any hour but the current hour of four A.M.

Larson, for no reason other than his own experience, had been expecting a crime scene-local cops, a crime scene unit, maybe an effort to hold back the press. Instead it was the Navigator, a Town Car, and one other Navigator, also black. The house was dark, and it took him a minute to realize someone had taped black Visquine or garbage bags over the interior windows. He followed his two escorts inside.

He was struck both by the hideous color of the living room’s yellow carpet and the abundance of printed matter-books, magazines, and more magazines. The owner was a reader. The place was a litter basket. The furniture wanted to be contemporary but stopped at modern and so looked like the before-shot of a custom-renovation ad. A ’50s ranch for a scientist who belonged in Back to the Future , judging by the few shots of Uncle Leo and various dignitaries and politicians that hung on the wall amid copies of Warhol lithographs and some fairly decent black-and-white portrait photography that included John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

“He knew everybody, once upon a time.” Scott Rotem, forty-one or -two going on fifty-five. He sported bulging eyes a comedian would kill for if they’d been capable of carrying any expression at all. A patch of missing hair cried out for Rogaine. Rotem was all right if you liked your bureaucrats with zero sense of humor, a mean streak burnished into a crease between the eyes, and the vague aura of foot odor following one about. The man not only woke on the wrong side of the bed, he also willingly entered it from that side, too. Not simply a stick-in-the-mud, but a phone pole, pile-driven at that. Larson liked him, though it confounded him exactly why this was. It might have been the beauty and polish of Rotem’s stubborn persona, that never-give-an-inch, bastard-at-a-glance attitude that made him both an asshole and yet someone Larson could rightfully respect. Rotem was consistent, if in a vaguely pernicious way, and that struck Larson as a noble attribute in this day and age.

“You owe me half a performance of Much Ado about Nothing . Your guys pulled me at intermission.”

“Come in here.”

Larson followed. Whenever possible he took the high ground against Rotem, took it early and fought to hold it, because the man had a way of getting under his skin, getting him to do things, to take assignments he didn’t want. Larson would say yes before he meant it, even if the one time in his life he should have, he hadn’t.

The moment he entered the side hall, now passing framed snapshots of what had to be family, he smelled the blood. Once you’ve been around it a few times, your nose can pick it up at a distance, and Larson had been around it more than a few times, so the memories attached to that odor like ticks. Each step down the hall was a step down memory lane, only the snapshots on the walls of his recollection were all of victims.

He found the silence of the house disturbing. He wished Rotem would say something. He caught himself humming and wishing he could carry a tune better than he could.

The smell grew riper now. All of a sudden, it reeked like someone had opened a long-ignored trash can. It hit Larson like twisting the cap off a bottle of ammonia. Hit him in the eyes and deep up into his sinuses where he knew it would lodge and remain for hours to come. Days perhaps. It came from a Macy’s parade balloon, facedown in a vanity bathroom, fallen to the linoleum floor, the body so swollen and distorted that the wrists puffed out above the shirt cuffs, straining the buttons. Two to three weeks. Decomposition so advanced that the skin on the back of the neck had split as it swelled, leaving a set of narrow trenches running from the shirt collar up under the hair.

“It’s not Leopold Markowitz,” Rotem informed him.

“Not Uncle Leo?” Larson asked. “Then this was…?”

“One Emerson Brighton Doyle. Name’s not important. A graduate student. Markowitz’s personal assistant. Against the university’s bylaws-unpaid personal assistants-but fairly common practice, especially for the emeritus types like Markowitz. He did consulting for Princeton, Markowitz did. Consulted all over the place. We’re collecting that information now.”

“Did or does?” Larson sought to clarify the tense.

“You catch on quickly.”

“You wanted me to see Emerson Brighton Doyle in person. I don’t get that.”

“A picture wouldn’t have done it,” Rotem said.

“Aromatherapy?”

“Come around this side.”

As Larson stepped across the pale log of a khaki-clad leg, Rotem continued. “The moment they move him, disturb him, some or all of this will be ruined. He’s going to come apart like an overcooked brisket. You’re right about me wanting you to see this. But it’s not as if I’d wish this upon anybody,” he said, displaying what was for him a rare moment of humanism.

“Then why?” Larson asked, as it turned out, a little prematurely. For by then Rotem had pointed toward the head, which looked more like a horrific beach ball. Larson backed off a step, his back now pressed against the coolness of the wall between the corner sink and toilet, his left arm on the roll of toilet paper like an armrest. That chill found its way through the blazer and shirt and into his skin and bored down into him like a dentist’s drill. Rotem was right, moving the body would have likely destroyed it. At first blush, it looked like nothing more than another of the series of chins-Larson counted nine or ten of the folds despite the heavy bloating. But the pink one just below the man’s right earlobe was more than a tear or a split. It was too precise, the slight smile of a curve that started at the ear. Too intentional.