Brian Freeman - Spilled Blood

‘Blame me,’ Chris said.

‘It’s not that simple.’

George’s colleague came back on the line.

‘Are you sure about that?’ George asked. His face grew puzzled. ‘Let me give you the spelling again.’ He spelled out the name of the epidemiologist, but moments later, he shook his head. ‘Okay, thanks, Chester. No, that’s okay. I’ll see you at the conference in May, okay?’

George hung up.

‘Lucia Causey isn’t in the Stanford directory,’ he told Chris. ‘She doesn’t work there anymore.’

‘Where did she go?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Was she ever there to begin with?’

‘You mean, was she fictitious? A fraud? No. She was there, and she left. She probably got a better offer. It happens.’

‘So how do we find her?’

‘You mean, how do you find her? I’m sorry, Chris, but I’ve already stuck my neck out too far for you. I’m done.’

Chris nodded. ‘Understood. I appreciate your help, George. Really.’

The scientist opened the door. Rain poured through the gap onto the leather seats. George Valma slammed the door shut, causing the Lexus to shake. He got back into his own white sedan and drove out of the parking lot, leaving Chris alone.

Chris sat in silence as the taillights disappeared.

He didn’t like coincidences. He didn’t like the fact that a top-notch researcher had left one of the nation’s premier research universities shortly after completing the investigation at Mondamin. Lucia Causey wasn’t Vernon Clay. She couldn’t drop off the face of the earth. Someone at Stanford knew where she’d gone.

Chris opened his own phone and called directory assistance. He got the number for the Stanford Medical School, and when the receptionist answered, he asked for a transfer to the school’s epidemiology division. He found himself directed to the department of Health Research and Policy, where a secretary named Leanne answered the phone.

‘Leanne, I’m trying to track down an epidemiologist named Lucia Causey,’ Chris told her. ‘She used to work in that department, and I was wondering if anyone there had forwarding information for her.’

‘I’m sorry, what was that name?’ the secretary asked, with a slight Georgia twang in her voice. ‘I only just started here, and I’m not real up on all the people yet.’

Chris spelled the name.

‘Okay, sure, hang on.’

She put him on hold. He was patient for the first minute of silence, but the length drifted to two minutes, and then three. He knew he was still connected because of the music playing in his ear. It was a Mahler symphony. After five minutes, he began to get concerned, and his concern grew when a different voice picked up the phone. The man on the line was all business.

‘This is Dr. Naresh Vinshabi, how may I help you?’

Chris repeated his request and gave his name.

‘May I ask why you’re trying to contact Lucia Causey, Mr. Hawk?’ the doctor asked.

‘I have some follow-up questions about a report that she prepared as a special master for litigation in Minnesota.’

‘I see. I’m sorry, but I can’t help you with that.’

‘Yes, I know that Dr. Causey isn’t at the university anymore. I was hoping you knew where she went.’

The Stanford doctor didn’t reply for a long time, but Chris heard him breathing. ‘She didn’t go anywhere,’ the man finally replied.

‘What does that mean?’

‘She’s dead,’ he told Chris.

40

Kirk drove a shovel into the sodden earth.

The blade cut the soil easily, and he hoisted a heavy pile of mud into the air and overturned the shovel beside the hole. The pattering noise of rain beating on the trees covered the sound of his digging. Sweat and rain seeped under the neck of his tank top onto his chest. His arms and hands grew black with dirt. He worked at a feverish pace, driven by drunken anger.

He was two hundred yards from his house. It was as isolated a burying place as he could find. To be safe, he should have disposed of the body permanently, but he liked to have an insurance policy for certain jobs. If you burn a murdered body, you lose your leverage. He liked to have leverage when he was dealing with Florian Steele. You want to fuck with me? Watch me fuck with you.

Kirk had nothing to fear from Florian as long as he knew where to find Vernon Clay.

The hole got bigger and deeper. Groundwater oozed from the sides. When he was two feet down, he had to climb inside to reach the bottom. He didn’t need to retrieve the whole body. All he needed was enough to convince Florian of the truth. Vernon was dead. Kirk had made damned sure of that. One bullet, right in the forehead, delivered by a gun that was deep in the silt of a swamp outside Mankato.

‘You remember me, Vernon?’ Kirk asked the black hole in the ground. ‘I’ll bet you do. You asked me if I was from the CIA when I came to your door. That was funny. The CIA. I said, yeah, they need you in Washington, sir.’

Kirk leaned on the handle of the shovel and laughed into his arm. What a fucking hysterical line. He should have been a comedian. They need you in Washington, sir. After that, it was easy. Follow Clay outside, knock him silly with the butt of the gun, drag him here. Clay never woke up. He was unconscious when Kirk dropped him in the hole and fired the gun into his brain. Better that than to bury him alive. That was the kind of thing that could give you nightmares.

It was funny how the mind worked. You didn’t always believe something even when you knew it was true. There was a part of him that was paranoid about what was really in the hole. He knew that he was within inches of Vernon Clay’s body, but the deeper he dug, the more his drunken mind began to panic that something had gone wrong. Vernon had survived the bullet in his skull. He’d clawed his way out of the ground and escaped. He was out there, messing with all of them.

My name is Aquarius.

Kirk’s shovel banged onto something hard. Finally.

He threw the shovel out of the hole onto the mountain of dirt. He reached for his flashlight and shined it at his feet. There he was. Vernon Clay, or what was left of him. His flesh had long ago been devoured by the dirt dwellers. Kirk squatted and wiped grime from the bones and saw that he’d unearthed the dead man’s hand and forearm. The bones were brittle. He levered the wrist bone under his heel and snapped the hand back. The entire hand broke off with a sickening crack.

‘They need you in Washington, sir,’ he said in his deepest voice, and he started howling with laughter again.

He deposited the hand on the ground and hauled his body out of the five-foot pit. His muscles rippled. He was dirty, wet, and cold, and he wanted a hot shower before meeting Florian. He thought about dragging his brother down here and making Lenny fill in the open hole, but he was still pissed enough that he might push the pussy boy inside and dump the mud on top of him. Leno, meet Vernon.

Kirk bent in the darkness for the shovel. He pushed around with his hands to locate the handle, but he couldn’t find it. Annoyed, he shined his flashlight at the pyramid of wet soil and realized that the shovel was gone. He could see the long indentation of the pole, but it wasn’t there.

‘What the fuck?’ he said aloud.

His brain screamed a warning, but at the same moment, he heard whistling, so close and loud that he thought it was the skeleton at his feet, blowing a tune through the remains of his teeth. He was wrong. He spun toward the noise, but he was too slow to duck or shout. The whistle howled in his ears, and the shovel blade whipped with the force of a speeding truck into the meat of his skull. He never felt it.

Chris figured that the death of a prominent university researcher would have made the news. He booted up his laptop and drove out of the high-school parking lot into the residential streets of Barron, and he soon found an unsecured wireless network that he used to access the Internet. Parked on the street in the rain, with the dome light of the Lexus casting shadows inside the car, he ran a Google search and found an article with the basic facts.