The Man From Primrose Lane Part 32

"Let me be honest with you, dear," I said. "As a journalist who's been doing this for most of his life, I've seen a lot of cases like this. I study them, actually. It's my speciality. There's a very short window of opportunity for us to find your daughter alive."

Jo sobbed loudly, but there were no tears and she didn't turn away.

"The police are going to do their thing and that's fine. But they're limited by the law. They need search warrants. They need probable cause. They can only lie in certain situations. We are not bound by those codes. I'm willing to play dirty if it means getting Erin back to you."

Jo nodded.

"She didn't change her routine or anything like that," said Casey.

"She played soccer," said Jo. "Lately, she'd go to the park with Meghan after school. There's a small group of kids that hang out there. Erin had a little crush on a boy named Martin who is in the sixth grade. He sometimes goes there, too."

"Have you, as a family, done anything different in the last week?" asked David. "Did you go to the movies, a particular restaurant, any strangers in the house, anything like that?"

A flash of recognition lit up Jo's face. "The handyman," she said. "We called a guy to come in and patch up a leak in our roof. About two weeks ago, right?"

Casey nodded.

"Do you remember his name?"

"Harold something," said Casey.

"Harold Schulte?" David and I asked in unison.

"That's it," said Jo. "How did you know?"

David was already packing up his notepad and standing up. He wanted to get to the car.

"He was already a suspect in another murder. Another red-haired girl," I said.

"Oh, my G.o.d!" said Jo. She let go of her husband's hand and dug her nails into his arm.

"The holy f.u.c.k are you doing here?" said a gruff voice from the doorway.

It was an FBI agent past his prime, a scruffy-looking gentleman with a white handlebar mustache. He gave me a pa.s.sing glance, then stepped over to David. I learned later that this was retired agent Dan Larkey.

"What's wrong?" asked Casey.

"What's wrong? This man is charged with murder. I want to know what the f.u.c.k he's doing here. What did you tell him?"

"I didn't kill my wife," David said. I could tell he was one insult away from a.s.saulting the man.

"He was asking questions about Erin," said Jo.

Jumping to conclusions, Casey leapt up and grabbed David by his shirt. He knocked him into the wall. "Where were you yesterday?"

"Mr. McNight," said Larkey, pulling the father off David, but slowly. "Neff was in lockup when your daughter was taken. The only thing he's here for is publicity. That's all. He's just a snake, slithering out from under his rock to make some money off your daughter's tragedy. Another book, right, Mr. Neff?"

"I'm not writing a book about their daughter," David said, adjusting his shirt.

"Then why are you here?" asked Larkey.

"I think she was abducted by the same man who took Elaine O'Donnell."

"Based on what?"

"The girls look a h.e.l.l of a lot alike. Both abducted by a man in a van at a park by their home."

"Phhhhht," Larkey said, waving his hand. "Go play private d.i.c.k somewhere else."

"Wait," said Jo. "He helped us remember something important. There was a handyman here a couple weeks ago. A guy named Harold Schulte. Mr. Neff said he was a suspect in Elaine's abduction."

Larkey stopped short, as if slapped. He turned back to David. "Is that true? Was Schulte here?" he asked. His voice had changed. There was no longer even a hint of sarcasm.

"Yes."

"Well." Larkey cast his eyes to the living room carpet, thinking. "Well, let me make some calls, all right? If it checks out, it's a home-run lead." He looked at David in an odd way.

"Are you going to talk to this guy Schulte?" asked Casey.

"I have to check it out first," said Larkey. "I have to verify the information. I have to talk to the SAC. Maybe a judge."

"Jesus. What if she's there right now?"

"It's not that simple, Mr. McNight."

"For you," I said. I nodded at David and he started for the door. Larkey made brief eye contact with me then. It was hard to say for sure, but I think I detected the slightest nod from him. A simple nod of permission. Larkey understood that he was mired in red tape and that we were free to do as we pleased.

I followed David outside and a minute later we were headed west toward Rocky River.

David's cell phone chimed a mile from Harold Schulte's house, which we were able to locate quickly online. It was Katy.

"Can we talk?" she asked.

"Yes," said David. "I'm sorry. I should have called. Have you been watching the news?"

"Just saw you on TV. My dad is f.u.c.king p.i.s.sed about me being mixed up in all this. Thinks you're robbing the cradle and breaking up my marriage. For a couple days he thought you had some private investigator tailing him. He's paranoid. But, you know, you are charged with murder."

"I didn't kill anyone and you're not married."

"Duh. But things got sort of complicated. I've got Ralph over here leaving necklaces and s.h.i.t in my mailbox. Sobbing voice mails. I don't know if I should get a restraining order or take him back."

"Kate, I can't talk now. But I'd like you to come meet me later tonight. Can you do that?"

"I guess. Just talking, though?"

"Do you have a pen?"

"Uh, okay. Go ahead. We're not meeting at your house?"

"Nope. Here's the address." I listened, stunned, as David gave her the address of my secret hideaway.

He hung up and gave me a crooked smile.

"Planning a reunion?" I asked.

"It's time she learned what you did for her," he said. "Life is too f.u.c.king short for games. And you could use a little grat.i.tude."

I laughed. "But it was never about saving Katy," I said. "I was obsessed about an answer, not a solution."

"If that was the case, you could just as easily have decided to confront her killer when he dumped her body. You would have had him red-handed."

I sighed. I hated myself. "The only reason I came back far enough to see the abduction was because it gave me two chances to see who did it, or so I thought. The first chance was the abduction, the second was the dump site. That's all I was thinking."

"If all that drives us is some pigheaded need to learn who committed these crimes, then why did the Man from Primrose Lane save Elizabeth's life on the cruise? Why did he care anymore?"

"Her life became his obsession," I said. "As much as her death was the obsession of her would-be murderer. It's a perversion, David. It's about control. Don't you see? We stalk these girls, too."

EPISODE FIFTEEN.

THE UNIKS.

They caught up with me a mile from the western edge of the Cleveland quarantine. I heard their banshee screams from above as they honed in on the unique biometrics of my body. It sounded like a dozen modems suddenly beginning to communicate with their Internet provider: disorganized electrical conversations suddenly merging into one common language, a binary patois with only one paragraph and purpose: Find David Neff. Stop David Neff.

We call them uniks. But they're really UNICs. As in, Universal Nan.o.bots for Identification and Capture. Built by Lockheed. Programmed by attorneys general. They are about the size and shape of a hockey puck, able to fly through use of graviton fields. Before they are launched from the warehouse of the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation in London, Ohio, the biometrics of the target are uploaded into the machines. They have no reasoning ability, no negotiating parameters. They find targets and stop targets. They do this by crashing into the fugitive and sticking to his body. Once contact is made, a barbed hook shoots from the machine into the fugitive's flesh. Then the nan.o.bot's graviton field turns in on itself and, to the fugitive, it feels as though the machine suddenly weighs seventy-five pounds. They travel in packs of twelve.

A unik's purpose is to immobilize a public enemy long enough for the nearest understaffed police precinct to catch up. But sometimes there are unforeseen problems. I once wrote about an escaped con who had attempted to evade capture by swimming across a lake when the uniks caught up with him. The machines attached themselves to him over the middle of the lake. His body is still at the bottom, somewhere. Severely thin fugitives have been crushed to death. My death would not be so quick. No police officer would venture into the quarantined zone to place me under arrest. If the uniks got me inside the boundaries of the quarantine, I would be pinned to the ground, or to the seat of the tow truck's cab, and I would eventually die of starvation. There was no hiding. If I tried to duck into some fortified building, they would hover outside the exits until I ran out of food and water. Time meant nothing to them. They would wait through eternity for me, and I didn't have that long.

On rare occasions, fugitives have "beaten" the uniks. There are, actually, several ways in which this can be accomplished, but each method is fraught with such risk that many criminals simply stop running as soon as they hear the machines approaching. One such way to avoid detection is to "alleviate" your biometrics. Sane people call this death, as it requires a temporary end to your thought patterns and heartbeat. If you have someone in the medical profession you can trust to revive you after three minutes, you will awake to find the uniks have given up the chase. Some have successfully altered their biometric patterns by performing amateur lobotomies. A third method is electrocution. If you wait until all twelve uniks are attached, you can electrocute yourself. An electrical impulse of sufficient strength can short-circuit the nan.o.bots' graviton field and, if you survive, all you have to do is pull their barbs out of your body and go on your merry way. I had planned to use the stunner to achieve this. Events in Cleveland had waylaid those plans.

I slammed on the brakes.

The uniks screamed and whirled past me in a dark swarm.

I clicked the lever for the truck's hood, then reached behind the driver's seat and grabbed the jumper cables. I hopped out of the cab.

The machines course-corrected and came for me.

I was opening the hood, a semblance of one last idea playing in my mind, when the first one hit me in the small of the back. THUNK. The barb shot into my skin, missing my spine by a fraction of an inch.

"David Joseph Neff, you are under arrest," the nan.o.bot said in a loud prerecorded voice. "Please arrange yourself into a safe and comfortable position. Your ma.s.s will greatly increase and it may be some time before an officer of the law will arrive to take you into custody. Five, four..."

I attached one end of the jumper cables to the truck's hydrogen battery.

"... three, two..."

I clamped the black cable to the fingers on my left hand, gripping the red pincers by the protective handle, daring myself, trying to find the nerve to do it.

"... one."

The sudden weight of seventy-five pounds knocked me to the ground. The red cable fell from my grip and dangled a foot off the broken pavement, a few inches in front of my head. I reached out for the metal teeth with my right hand but it was suddenly hit by another unik. The barb pierced through my hand like a wooden nail, crucifying me to the pavement. The machine's graviton kicked on, the weight crushing my palm nearly flat. I screamed.

Then a series of uniks pounced on my outstretched legs, my other arm at the elbow, and my b.u.t.tocks. A dozen uniks were upon me, holding me completely still with 900 pounds of pressure distributed across my 160-pound body.

I stared straight ahead at the dangling cable for some time, getting up the nerve.

You know how when you step into a swimming pool that first day of summer, how pushing yourself into that freezing water feels like torture? How it feels to make yourself sit in the doctor's chair for a root ca.n.a.l? Multiply that by a hundred million and you'll come close to understanding the apprehension I felt at that moment.

I blew at the cable.

It jostled in the air a little.

I blew harder, as much as I could manage with such weight upon my chest.

The cable began to swing.

Every time it arced to me, I blew again, and, slowly, it came nearer to my head. Forty, fifty times. I began to feel light-headed.

I blew again. This time the cable's metal claw collided with the aluminum b.u.mper of the truck as it arced back, shooting hissing sparks into the air. It came at me but missed my forehead by a quarter inch. I blew as hard as I could.

Again it collided. The sparks were brilliant fireworks.

I wondered if I would ever wake up.

The cable connected with my face at the bridge of my nose. The circuit completed. I don't remember pain. Just the taste of copper filling up my mouth and coursing down my throat. And then all was blackness.

I awoke in the darkness and I was not alone.

Ten feet away, a mangy dog with matted hair bared its teeth and approached with a pensive growl. I saw its eyes and its vague shape reflecting the cancerous pink glow of the city behind us. It meant to eat me. But it had thought I was dead.

"Get out of here!" I screamed.

The dog tucked its tail between its legs and danced away into the night to feast upon mutant rabbits and blind rats.

I tugged the black cable off my bruised left hand. I bled from a dozen superficial wounds where the uniks had cut into me but the machines were lifeless, fried. One by one I plucked them off, too, pulling bits of skin away as I did. My right hand got the worst of it. I had lost a lot of blood from the wound there while I was unconscious. A pint, maybe more. If I hadn't woken up as soon as I did, it's possible I could have bled out. I wrapped it in a piece of fabric I tore from my shirt. Still, I barely felt the sting of the cuts for the constant throbbing of my brain. It felt swollen and molested inside my skull, worse than a migraine. My nose felt like it was broken.

I was more concerned about the truck at the moment. It was no longer idling. If it had run out of gas while I lay unconscious, I was in a load of trouble; it was a long walk to Tanmay's home in Vermilion and I would have to leave the black egg behind.

A bit of luck: it had stalled. When I turned the key, it kicked to life again. Soon I was, once again, headed west.

Tanmay was waiting.

His large cabin sat on a cliff overlooking a Lake Erie no longer inhabited by edible fish. Nothing but r.e.t.a.r.ded walleyes in there now. When it rained or snowed, you weren't even supposed to be outside.