You screwed with his mind and you dangled him out as bait for one of the biggest psychos on this planet.”
“None of this should have happened,” Corliss said. “The plan wasn’t for anyone to get hurt. But then . . . the best laid plans, right?”
“That’s horseshit,” I replied. “You were dealing with Navarro here. What did you think would happen?”
Corliss sucked in a deep breath through thin, tight lips, and his eyes narrowed defiantly. “You, of all people, should understand why I did this. You know what happened. What he did to my family.” He paused, as if looking to see if any of his words were striking home.
For a second, I put myself in his shoes, and I wondered about that. I wondered about what I would have done had I seen my daughter butchered in front of my eyes and had my wife end her life because of it. But I also felt like strangling him for what he did.
“And he was going to keep looking,” he added. “He was going to keep looking until he found that drug. Where would we be then, huh? How many parents would be standing there saying, ‘Why didn’t you do everything you could to stop him?’ ”
I’d wrestled with the same arguments after shooting McKinnon, so his words weren’t falling on deaf ears. But I still had a few burning questions for him.
“How’d you do it?” I asked, thinking about Alex and trying to keep the rage out of my voice. “How’d you get Alex to say the things he did, to do those drawings . . . how’s you get him to be so convincing that he’d fool someone like Stephenson?”
Corliss looked away, and for a moment, I thought I saw some regret there, some pain, something human that told me maybe this hadn’t been as cold and heartless for him as I thought.
“We brought in a spook. A guy who’d been in on MK-ULTRA back in the day.” He was referring to the CIA’s now widely known mind-control experiments, back in the sixties.
The sick bastards had brainwashed my four-year-old boy.
“Name?”
“Corrigan,” he said grudgingly. “Reed Corrigan.”
It wasn’t a name I was ever going to forget. Corrigan would be hearing from me. Real soon.
“How’d he do it?”
Corliss looked away, wearily. “We drugged Michelle’s water. She went to bed every night and for a week or so, she didn’t have a clue about what was really going on in Alex’s bedroom.”
I was really having a hard time stopping myself from reaching down his throat and ripping his heart out.
“He fed him key bits of information about McKinnon’s life. About his background, his travels, his work. He showed him photographs. He also showed him the video from the night you killed him. From the cameras on your helmets.” He winced as he said it, and I couldn’t imagine what kind of monster would show a four-year-old something like that. “But we had to be very careful,” he added, as if sensing my anger about that last reveal and wanting to move on. “We had to seed only the information that would be sure to mean something to Navarro, but wouldn’t alert Michelle as to who Alex was really talking about. And you played a part in that, even though it wasn’t intentional. You didn’t tell her what really happened that night.”
I’d been wondering about that, and it was another dagger through my heart. It was my turn to want to move on. “So Alex couldn’t know the name McKinnon?”
“No. That would have told Michelle who he was claiming to be. But he could talk about McKinnon’s past, about his life and his family and big moments in his career. He could talk about Mexico. About the journal. About Eusebio de Salvatierra. And about the tribe.”
“And Stephenson was part of the plan all along?”
“He’s the expert. The world authority. And he’s right here in California. If he gave it his stamp of approval, Navarro would believe it. We just made sure the local shrink Michelle first took Alex to see pointed her in his direction.”
“How?”
He shrugged again. “Homeland security and the threat of being branded an enemy combatant go a long way these days. No one wants to end up in an orange jumpsuit.”
I nodded. “But how’d you know Navarro would hear about it?”
“I knew what he was after. I’d read the full transcript of Eusebio’s journal. The one I asked the analyst to keep to himself. Navarro . . . he wasn’t just obsessed with reincarnation. He was beyond obsessed. It’s all he lived for. You didn’t see him that night at my house. You didn’t see the look in his eyes. I knew he had to be following Stephenson’s work. And Alex would have been a big story for Stephenson. A kid, here in the United States, reliving a past life that was so recent. He’d be talking about it with his peers, writing about it. And the odds were that sooner or later, Navarro would hear about it and come after him. We just had to make sure we had enough trackers in place to find him.”
He had said
“A few. One in each of his sneakers. Some of his toys. His favorite stuffed animal.” He waved it off with disinterest. “They’re small and they’re a dime a dozen.”
“And all along, all this time, you knew Navarro was still alive?”
“Come on.” He sneered. “I didn’t buy that car bomb horseshit for a minute. Then when he started grabbing these scientists . . . they were all working on psychoactives. One of the guys he took over in Santa Barbara was synthesizing
I felt a fresh surge of anger. “You could have asked Stephenson to just create a fake report. Or made him do it using your charms.”
His mouth bent downward at its edges, and he shook his head. “No. There was a high risk that Navarro would have had him grabbed by some hired guns, like he did with the others. Some bikers or what not. And Stephenson would have broken under questioning in a heartbeat. It was pointless to even try that. No, Stephenson also had to believe in our story.” He paused, then his expression softened. “How is he, anyway? Alex?”
I didn’t think I owed him an answer, but I still said, “He’ll be fine. Now that we know what you did to him, we can start to undo it.”
He just nodded vacantly. “Good.”
He didn’t say he was sorry. I guess he wasn’t.
“So what happens now? Is this where you pull out your gun as I’m ‘resisting arrest’?”
My expression soured, and I just shrugged. “No. I’m just going to go back.” I paused, then added, “And write my report about what happened.”
He looked at me, like he was sussing out what I meant. I guess my face said all I had to say.
I turned to go, and he called out after me. “For what it’s worth . . . it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t an easy call. But I couldn’t see any other way.”
It wasn’t worth much to me.
I walked out of his front door, and as I opened the door to my car, I heard the bullet.
I didn’t go in to check.
I just strapped on my seat belt, swung out of his gates, and set off to spend the rest of the day with Tess and my son while trying not to think too hard about what Navarro had said about the past lives of his that he’d researched nor about what I would do with the stainless steel vial I’d taken off Munro’s dead body.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RAYMOND KHOURY is the author of four consecutive
