Michael Koryta - Last Words

“Hey, Jeff.”

“ Hey, Jeff? I left two messages. Markus, I’ve got to sit down with the board tomorrow. Do you have anything, and I mean anything, for me to show in your defense? I thought you said that you were making progress!”

“I am.”

“Good.” Jeff’s exhalation was audible. “Tell me something I can use.”

“I’m not quite there yet.”

“I don’t mean full resolution, I mean anything! What happened to the hypnotist? What about the ketamine? What can I tell them?”

The road rolled by for a few seconds before Mark said, “You know I’ve never broken a case?”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“Not one case. I never broke one open.”

“Bullshit you didn’t. Your work was critical on so many different—”

“Critical, sure. I made some finds. I passed them off to you. I never got to see one through. That’s the point, isn’t it, Jeff? To come in without the truth and stay until you’ve learned it?”

“The point is generating quality work product for the team.”

“Did you ever solve one? I mean really solve one? Ever go from looking at crime scene photographs of a murder victim to seeing the truth come to the surface thanks to your own work?”

Jeff’s voice softened. “A few times.”

“How’d that feel?”

“Why are you asking this?”

“I need to know,” Mark said. The wind had picked up again and it should have chilled him but the cold felt good, familiar in the ways he’d wanted to deny when he arrived. “I need to know what it feels like. Maybe you were right that it shouldn’t be Lauren’s case.”

“I know I’m right about that. You’ll drown in those waters, Markus. You’ve already come close. Don’t go back in.”

“Sarah Martin isn’t Lauren. But she deserves it just as much.”

“They all do,” Jeff said. “It’s the reason I sent you up there to begin with. I’ve already acknowledged that was a mistake. Don’t double-down on it. Please.”

Mark was now just two miles from Trapdoor, and the open fields came into view and with them the snow-covered, collapsing trailer and beyond those and far on the horizon the high bluffs where the horses had been visible on Mark’s first visit. He hadn’t heard back from the Leonard family. Maybe it was time to go see the old man again. Maybe it was—

“Markus? Mark?”

The urgency in Jeff’s voice made Mark blink back into reality. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I’m here.” But he’d pulled off the road and was staring at the trailer. “Listen, Jeff, I’ve got to go. I’ll be back in touch fast. With something you can use. I promise.”

He disconnected before Jeff could utter a response.

What had once been the drive to the trailer was so overgrown that small shrubs were visible even beneath the blanket of snow. The trailer still stood, but that was a generous term. The whole structure canted to the left, like a sinking ship listing to port. On the road-facing side, the roof was bowed in almost to its limits. The windows were broken and even the plywood sheets that had been fastened to them from the inside were pocked with holes and splinters. A corrugated metal ramp that had once served as a front porch was disengaged from the main building completely; at least three feet of air separated the top of the ramp from the front door.

Mark killed the engine and stepped out of the car. To the east he could see the bluffs, no horses in sight today, and to the south he could see the tree line where the bluffs began their descent to Maiden Creek and the caverns its water had opened. He turned again, putting his back to the trailer, and looked to the west, his face into the wind.

The wind worked on you with a honed blade, coming over those fields with nothing to disrupt it. Mark closed his eyes and felt the wind and thought of Julianne Grossman’s recap of his hypnosis session.

You said that it was probably a house, you weren’t sure about that, but you knew that it was someplace where you couldn’t feel the wind, though it was still cold even without the wind. Your memory of getting inside involved walking a plank.

He opened his eyes, turned back to the trailer, and studied that ramp, the way the connecting bolts were sheared, leaving it loose at the top. He walked down the drive and up the ramp slowly, and this walk he made with his eyes closed, paying attention to every other sense. The thin metal boomed with each step and flexed beneath his weight because it was no longer anchored to anything, the top end floating in the air. With his eyes closed, it felt very much like walking a plank.

There were hinges for a storm door, but there wasn’t a storm door. The knob on the main door didn’t turn. Locked.

He removed a credit card from his wallet and slipped it between the door frame and the door. It slid down past the dead bolt without making contact, which was good. Dead bolts were more time-consuming, though hardly impossible. Shimming a lock was a skill you picked up fast when you were regularly evicted from apartments. Mark’s mother had been a hell of a lock pick.

He felt pressure on the card and then twisted the knob hard to the left and flicked the card down. The door swung open, releasing a wave of dank air. On the other side was a strip of peeling linoleum and stained carpet beyond that. A skim of ice had formed on one portion of the carpet.

Cold even without the wind.

As Mark stepped inside, he heard a plinking noise and saw that water was dripping through the molded tiles of the drop ceiling, probably right below the place where the roof bowed severely. He stood on the linoleum square and looked around, wishing for a flashlight. Not that there was much to see. The trailer was vacant and had been for years, save for the occasional rodent. There were mouse droppings on the kitchen floor to the right, beside a chair that been smashed and left in shards.

He slipped his cell phone out and used its flashlight function and swung back to the left, where the trailer’s only source of sound was provided by the steady plinking of the dripping water on the skim of ice over the carpet, and then he stopped scanning the place and stared at the far wall of the living room. It was covered in the faux-wood paneling that had once been popular and now made most people shudder, the kind that was supposed to give a room a log-cabin feel. There was clearly another leak behind the wall, because the paneling was peeling away from the studs, warped and bubbling.

He stepped over the ice and walked up to the wall. Ran his fingertips along the warped panels. Moisture had caused some to peel free and others to sag, although a few remained in place. The final effect was something you wouldn’t want in your home but that Salvador Dalí might have appreciated — it looked like the wall was melting.

“Well done, Julianne,” Mark whispered.

He’d been here before, and she’d gotten him to tell her about it. During hypnosis he’d ranted to her about a melting wall. It made no sense unless you’d seen these warped panels through a semiconscious haze, which was exactly what he’d done. He dropped to one knee and looked at the filthy carpet, tracked back through it until he found what he was looking for: four faint impressions, the kind left behind by the legs of a chair. Yes, this was where he’d been. The chair would have faced the wall. It was probably the one in splinters in the kitchen. Evan Borders had taken some frustration out on it. There were red stains on the carpet. Mark’s blood, probably. He lifted the cell phone higher and passed the faint glow over the filthy carpet. He turned halfway to the kitchen, froze, and then — slowly, as if rapid motion would scare off what he’d seen — brought the beam back.