Читать книгу Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 4-6: Blood Brother, In the Blood, Little Girls Lost - J. Kerley A. - Страница 15

I returned to the hotel and set the files on the table, pushing them to the far side. Guilt at my inability to tell the cops the truth pooled in my guts like cold oil. There was more to feel guilty about: Even though a specialist in psychological crimes, I had never read the details of my brother’s murders. I had always feared that, in reading the cold facts of Jeremy’s cases, I might see a monster, and not the tormented child who killed his father after years of unspeakable misery …

I am just past my tenth birthday. Jeremy is sixteen. One day, playing alone in one of the forts Jeremy and I built in the woods behind our house, I walk from the trees to find the county police at our house. There is a policeman on the dirt drive of our house, another at the wheel of the car. The cop in the drive is looking at my mother, three steps up on the porch. Jeremy is on the porch as well, sitting a dozen feet away in the glider. He looks between the policeman in the car and the one in the drive, his eyes pensive.

The policeman’s hat is off and he is holding it over his privates. He is tremendously old, fifty maybe. He removes his mirrored sunglasses, his face creased with sorrow. I hear his words in soft groupings.

“I’m so sorry, ma’am …

“The coroner’s there now, no need for you to see such a …

“We’ll find this madman, ma’am, this person …”

I look to the police car and see the second policeman through the open car door. Younger. He’s reloading one of those cameras where the film turns into pictures as you watch. He sets the camera aside and his eyes study me. Strangely ashamed, I look at the ground. When I look up again, he is studying Jeremy. Then the moment passes and the cops turn to dust in the hot air. My mother stands in the yard like a statue. Jeremy rocks the glider to and fro, a faraway smile on his face.

I had never asked Jeremy about the day our father died. I had hated the man. When he left for work in the morning, I watched the truck disappear down the road and prayed for his death. A retaining wall cave-in, crushed under a bulldozer, falling from a bridge. I had a dozen hopeful scenarios.

Please God, make him die today in a gasoline explosion …

Instead, it was my big brother who finally exploded. Only later, after interviewing a hundred fiercely dysfunctional minds, did I realize Jeremy’s explosion had saved me from an escalating madness destined to end in a house full of dead bodies with the standard news bites from the neighbors.

“We never knew the Ridgecliffs real good, but they seemed decent enough … Earl didn’t seem the kind of man to do that to his family and hisself … it’s a tragedy, is what it is …”

Jeremy knew how it would end, and took the only course he could take. I am alive because my father never got the chance to kill me.

Every breath I take is a gift from Jeremy.

I arrayed Jeremy’s files before me in chronological order, starting with paperwork generated the day my father died. One of the first officers at the scene was Jim Day of the county police. Though higher-ranking officers had been in early attendance – Sergeant Willis Farnsworth, Lieutenant Merle Baines, Captain Hollis Reamy – it was Day who wrote up the report. It may have been that Farnsworth, Baines and Reamy wanted to avoid paperwork, not unusual for guys with the rank to lay the work on others; but it could also have been Day’s eye for minutiae and vocabulary for description.

Victim’s intestine, Day wrote, appeared to have been severed at lower end and pulled like rope from the slit in victim’s abdomen. This “rope” extended across the ground for a dozen feet. And later in the report: A kidney appears to have been thrown with great force into a tree, bursting like a water balloon. Fragments were on the ground at the tree’s base.

And near the conclusion of the report, Day noted that, “the scene seemed one of total anger. The feeling was of a threshold crossed, some form of decision acted on.”

It took an hour to read Jim Day’s details and descriptions. When finished, I was soaked in sweat and my hands shook, forced to experience the crime as it unfolded. I’d heard the screams for mercy, smelled the cut-copper reek of flowing blood. My mind’s-eye watched my brother cut my father apart with a knife I’d used to slice bologna.

I blotted sweat from my brow and pushed aside the six-inch-tall stack of copies generated by Jeremy’s remaining murders of the five innocent women. I’d get to them later.

Tomorrow for sure.

Twilight painted the air a clean and fragile blue as Jeremy Ridgecliff rode a subway car downtown. He was feigning sleep while shooting sidelong glances at his quarry, a pasty little man, fortyish and balding. He was dressed in khakis and a gray wool cardigan, and had wary, flickering eyes that often shot to the tattered briefcase locked beneath his arm.

Jeremy had spent the afternoon wandering in the library, never going too far from the Political Science stacks and the Archived Newspapers: Cheese for a very special kind of mouse.

Had he found one?

Jeremy had watched the man working in a carrel, muttering to himself and making notes. After an hour, the man exited the library cautiously, clutching the briefcase to his chest and jitter-stepping to the street, shooting glances over his shoulders.

Jeremy had followed, his antennae quivering.

The man had stopped at a cart for a sandwich. He opened the bread like it was booby-trapped, and inspected the interior. After wolfing the sandwich down, he’d skittered to the subway entrance. Jeremy slipped his Metro Pass from his pocket, followed the man into the ground.

Next stop Chambers Street …

The train slowed. Jeremy saw his quarry’s hands tighten on the bar, ready to exit, but not wanting anyone to know. The wheels squealed to a halt. Doors snapped open. People entered and exited. At the last possible moment, the man jumped from his seat and slipped through the closing doors.

Jeremy was already outside, waiting in the shadows. The man walked east for a dozen blocks, entering a neighborhood of expensive high-rise apartments and condos.

Jeremy slipped ahead with the stealth of a cat, appearing at the man’s side.

“Keep walking,” Jeremy growled. “Walk or die. Don’t make a sound.”

The man moaned. Jeremy steered him to a paved area outside an empty dog run. A dirty streetlamp turned the twilight into yellow haze. Jeremy’s finger jabbed the man toward a bench.

“Sit,” he demanded.

The man sat and held up the briefcase like a shield. “I-I have c- copies. If anything h-happens to me, copies g-go to the New York Times, the Wuh-Washington Post, the Chicago T-Tribune and the R-Rocky Mountain News.”

“Shut up or I’ll slice your throat. Show me what you have.”

The man fumbled at the locks with trembling fingers. The open case revealed hundreds of tattered pages. He selected what seemed an important page, names and dates linked by colored arrows. He pushed the page at Jeremy.

“You c-can’t hurt me. It’s all backed up. I have c-copies.”

Jeremy moved beneath the streetlamp. He studied arrows and lines snaking from Trilateral Commission to Ronald Reagan to the House of Saud to GW Bush. The Bay of Pigs was represented, as were the Kennedys. Each name was followed by a half-dozen exclamation points.

Jeremy stepped to the man’s side. Shook the page in front of the man’s eyes. “How long have you known about this?”

“T-Twenty-two years.”

Jeremy replaced the anger in his face with calm. He surprised the man by gently squeezing his shoulder.

“It’s terrible, isn’t it? They used hidden speakers to fill my house with noises at night. They were always sneaking up on me, dressed as repairmen. They put things in my food to make me sick.”

The man’s eyes widened. “You’re … one of us?”

Jeremy looked from side to side, whispered, “They were after me for a decade, but I managed to get free.”

“HOW?”

Jeremy put a finger to his lips and pointed to an approaching jogger, a man in white sweats, MP3 player wire running to his ears. The jogger shot an uninterested glance as he padded past.

“He saw us,” the man gasped. “Do you think he’s one of Them?”

“He’d been wired for sound,” Jeremy said. “Did you notice one wire was black, the other one white?”

The man’s hand swept to his mouth. “Oh Jesus …”

Jeremy crouched to look the man in the eyes. “Things are falling apart in Washington. They might be willing to forget you. I made them forget me.”

“TELL ME HOW! I’ll do anything!”

“Shhhhh. I bribed them. And I was free.”

“The NSA takes bribes? The CIA?”

Jeremy rubbed his fingers in the money-whisk motion. “It’s Washington, everything slides on the green grease.”

“What do they want?”

“What can you give them?”

The man’s brow wrinkled in furious thought as his fingertips drummed his briefcase. “Paper money’s going to be worthless soon. I can get my hands on Krugerrands, gold coins. Most gold is radioactive, but the South Africans make Krugerrands immune to the rays. I can’t get many – seventy or eighty thousand dollars worth or so.” He shook his head. “It’s nothing to Them.”

“They’ll soon be the only currency left. Give them half. It’s what I did.”

The man’s wary eyes returned. He pulled the briefcase to his chest, pages spilling across the pavement. “You could be one of Them. You’ll steal from me and still follow me.”

Jeremy patted the man’s forearm, one friend to another. “If I was after your money, wouldn’t I ask for all of it?”

The man absorbed the information, sighed with relief. “I don’t want to meet them. Can you take the gold for me?”

Jeremy straightened, put his hands in his pockets, shot furtive looks from side to side.

“I’ll have to catch the red-eye to DC tomorrow. Can you get the gold tonight? And maybe some cash to tide them over?”