To his surprise and relief, however, he was wrong. The trunk was empty. No bedspread, no Nemo.
Not that this changed anything. He had no doubt that Nemo was dead, nor did he harbor any illusions about who had pulled the trigger.
But again he wondered, where was the body?
Then he remembered the Del Sol.
He found it in the back of the gas station, only yards from where he’d parked last night. It sat in the middle of a row of cars in various states of disrepair. They looked as if they’d been there for half a decade.
The gas station was closed, just as it had been the night before, and judging by the condition of the pumps and the graffiti on the windows, it wouldn’t be opening anytime soon.
Donovan exited the Chrysler and crossed toward the Del Sol, pausing when he realized the driver’s seat was occupied.
Bobby Nemo.
He put a hand under his coat, touching the butt of his Glock, a precautionary habit more than anything else.
“Bobby?” he said, not really expecting an answer.
He didn’t get one. Nemo didn’t move. No reason he should. He was dead, the missing bedspread wrapped around him, a single gunshot wound to the right side of his head.
Donovan leaned in for a closer look and something caught his eye: a folded scrap of paper protruding from between Nemo’s lips.
He hesitated. What the fuck?
With trembling fingers, he reached in through the open window and pulled it free.
There was a logo just above the fold. Motel stationery, a dozen years old, printed back in the days when the Wayfarer Inn was halfway respectable.
His name was written across it in black ink:
Special Agent Jack
Not knowing what to expect, Donovan slowly unfolded it and found more black ink with nine underlined spaces beneath:
AUTOGENOUS WORK THAT CAN GET YOU ARRESTED
A makeshift crossword puzzle.
Knowing he’d just stepped off a high cliff into the abyss, Donovan mulled the clue over in his mind a moment, trying to make sense of it.
Autogenous work that can get you arrested.
Autogenous.
Produced from within.
It took him a moment longer, but when Donovan finally solved it, there was no doubt in his mind who the message was from and what it meant.
Alexander Gunderson was back among the living.
48
Rachel was in the shower when her doorbell rang.
It was just past 8 a.m. and she’d already been up for hours, unable to sleep. Ever since she’d left Jack yesterday afternoon she’d felt anxious and uneasy. And at the root of it was the story he’d told her.
His trip to the other side.
Rachel had never been deeply religious, but she was a believer. Growing up in a Chinese-American household with a grandmother who, as a little girl, had come straight from Tai Wo, Hong Kong, she’d heard her share of ancient stories. Tales of gods and goddesses, ghostly apparitions, the Ten Courts of Hell. Stories told with a quiet reverence and a conviction born of faith.
She remembered the fireworks and the colorful dancing dragons on the streets of Chinatown during the Chung Yuan Festival-Ghost Day-which celebrated the rising of souls from the bowels of hell to visit their earthly homes. Every year, Grandma Luke lit incense and set out plates full of mango, peaches, and roast duck on a card table in the living room, an offering to appease the restless spirits.
Against her family’s wishes, Rachel had made the mistake of marrying David in August, smack in the middle of Ghost Month. And while she didn’t exactly blame the denizens of hell for the disaster her marriage became, at times she had to wonder. Had they been cursed from the start?
Rachel wasn’t a strong believer in the stories Grandma Luke had told her-every religion had its share of tall tales-but she believed enough to feel just a tickle of anxiety whenever the subject arose. That anxiety had been reinforced the moment Jack had told her about his otherworld encounter with Alexander Gunderson.
The possibility that he might have imagined it all, that his mind had conjured up some bizarre death dream, was not a thought she even entertained. She knew that what he’d experienced was all too real.
And potentially dangerous.
Now, according to Sidney, Jack had been cut loose from the investigation, asked to step aside while the fools upstairs took over the case. She understood that they were simply following procedure, that the leeway they’d given Jack was a courtesy they weren’t obligated to extend. But she wondered how they could turn him away. Why deny a father access to the resources that might help him find his own daughter?
Now, with Jack at loose ends and still reeling from his encounter with death-and with time ticking at its ever relentless pace-the probability of disaster loomed large.
Jessie could die.
And a part of Jack would go with her.
Rachel was thinking about these things and rinsing the soap from her body when her doorbell rang. She quickly finished rinsing and shut the water off.
The bell rang twice more before she got to the front door, wrapped in a terry-cloth robe. Despite the perfunctory swipe of a towel, her hair was still tangled and dripping wet. She knew she looked a mess, but didn’t much care. She had been waiting for hours to hear from Jack-he hadn’t returned her calls-and the doorbell ringing at eight in the morning only compounded her anxiety.
Feeling like a military wife waiting for her husband to be shipped home, she pulled the door open, only to be overcome by a sudden surge of relief.
Jack was in the hallway.
Unfortunately, he looked (as David used to say on those many mornings after) as if he’d been pulled through a knothole.
“Jack, my God, what is it? What’s wrong?”
“It’s all gone to shit,” he said, then stumbled into her arms.
Donovan knew he had no right to do this to Rachel.
Sure, there was a bond between them, had been from the moment she’d first stepped into his office over two years ago. But she didn’t owe him anything. No reason she should. And throwing the weight of his troubles onto her shoulders was, to say the least, unfair.
Then again, Rachel was more than just an IA who had managed to catch his fancy. She was, Donovan had come to realize, the only one he could trust.
The only one he wanted to trust.
When she opened the door, he had practically collapsed in her arms, raving like a street-corner lunatic. But she didn’t falter. Not for a moment. She guided him to the sofa and sat him down and listened attentively as he sputtered on, telling her about the blistering headache, the night he couldn’t remember, and the untimely deaths of Luther Polanski, Charles Kruger and Bobby Nemo-two of whom he was certain he had executed.
That she didn’t immediately pick up the phone and call the boys with the butterfly nets was, to Donovan’s
