“Somebody wearing army boots has been stomping through my memory.” I told him what I could about the camp and my escape. It would be fair to say he looked astounded.
“Jesus, Matt. What is this shit?”
I shrugged. “I was hoping you might be able to help me out there, Joe.”
He smiled. “What, along the lines of ‘Yeah, now you come to mention it, Matt, I know just the place you mean up in the Maine woods. It’s a research center run by the CIA and-oh, look-I have the cell-phone number of the man in charge.’”
I laughed. “That kind of thing, yeah.”
Joe’s expression grew more serious. “Why would someone want to mess with your mind, Matt? Do you know something they want forgotten?”
“Good questions, both.”
He rubbed his unshaven chin. “Can you remember anything about how you got up there?”
“No, that’s one of numerous things that my brain is steadfastly refusing to access. I’ve remembered Karen’s disappearance, but…” I broke off, suddenly seeing the woman on the upturned cross whose throat was cut.
“What is it, man?”
I took several deep breaths. I wasn’t going to let myself believe that Karen had been the victim. It must have been a trick. But why would anyone be so heartless? She was pregnant, for Christ’s sake. Our son…
“Matt?” Joe’s hand was on my arm. “Are you okay?”
I snapped out of it and gave a weak smile. I wasn’t going to tell him-if I did, it would seem even more real.
“Just a bit wasted-not enough sleep.”
“Not enough beer.” Joe raised a hand for more. “So you don’t recall you and me running around Virginia and D.C. after Karen disappeared? I pulled the chain of any law enforcement professional I thought might be able to help.”
“No… Doesn’t surprise me that you did what you could, though.”
“Yeah, well…” He looked away, embarrassed. “’Course, I had to do the same thing when you didn’t show for our usual late breakfast. You must have been snatched somewhere between your hotel and my place. We were using it as base camp for our investigation-the Feds were getting nowhere fast.”
“What about the local cops in Virginia?”
“Oh, they did all they could. I used a contact of mine in the Bureau to kick ass down there.”
“Then you had to cope with me vanishing, too.”
He nodded. “It was the same story as with Karen. I kept them at it, but there was nothing-no witnesses, no messages, no ransom demand. I even wrote an article about you both for the Washington Post. They stuck it on page twelve, so who knows how many people noticed. That was ten days ago. The story’s died a death since then.”
I gave an ironic laugh. “And I nearly died several more times in the camp and on my way here.”
“Certainly sounds like the people in that camp were very unhappy that you’d gotten away. I wonder…” He broke off, for once not raising his glass to his lips.
“What?”
“Nah, it’s just my suspicious mind. I was thinking that maybe those assholes in the gray uniforms have got some pull with the Bureau. I mean, I was always sure you weren’t behind any of these occult killings, despite your prints at one of the scenes. Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to frame you, my friend.”
“That much I’d worked out for myself, Joe. The question is, who?”
A spectacular waitress brought a fresh pitcher and Joe filled our glasses.
“Someone who had access to the scene, obviously.”
“Which means either the killer or someone who knew his or her movements. Or, alternatively, one or more of the investigators.”
He nodded. “The latter being the patrol cops first on the scene, the CSIs, the D.C. detectives on the case or the FBI-take your pick.”
“How come the FBI was involved?”
Joe put his hand over his mouth and burped. “Because it’s D.C. and there are so many VIPs around. That’ll no doubt be behind the Bureau pulling rank and kicking the MPDC team off the case today.”
I watched as the waitress brought another platter of food, then I picked up a buffalo wing. “So what’s your line on the murders, Joe?”
“My line? Well, apart from the fact that no one seems to have a clue what’s going on, I reckon that the occult shit is just a distraction from the real deal.”
“Which is?”
“Come on, Matt. It shouldn’t be too hard for a crime novelist like you to spot.”
Joe stared at me. “Yeah. Jesus, Matt, you hadn’t forgotten you were one of those, had you?”
“Em, no…it just hasn’t seemed very important recently.”
“No, I guess it hasn’t. On the other hand, you’ve been right in the middle of a prime example of what I’m talking about.”
“Of a…shit storm?”
Joe grinned. “Well, yeah, that. But what I’m getting at begins with a c and has four syllables.”
I shrugged, being far from in the mood for word games.
“Come on, man,” Joe said, spreading his arms wide. “This is the world capital of-”
“Conspiracies,” I said, in a flash of enlightenment.
“You got it, Matt. And I know just the man to help us nail the fuckers behind this one.”
That made me feel better, but not a whole lot. I had the feeling that time very much wasn’t on my side, or on Karen’s-if she was even still alive.
After I’d eaten and drunk enough to feel human again, we decided to go back to Joe’s place. The fact that we hadn’t seen a tail earlier suggested there probably wasn’t surveillance on him. To be certain, we went the back way into his apartment, climbing over the fences between small yards. Joe said his neighbors used that route all the time for dope deals.
We made a plan for the next day and Joe went to crash, claiming that he’d overdone the beer. I sat at his desk with great heaps of printouts and files all around me, and logged on to the Internet-one of the things that my unpredictable memory seemed to have retained was how to operate a computer. I checked the reports of the D.C. occult killings in the American Press and brought myself up to speed. Then I checked the U.K. papers. I was glad to see that my own rag, the Daily Independent, had been suitably shocked by the disappearance of its crime columnist, though the story had quickly gone cold. There had been a degree of outrage when I became a murder suspect, though it was hard for my colleagues to argue against the fingerprint evidence. No doubt it would have helped if I got in touch with them, but I wasn’t going to do so-at least not yet. Joe and I had agreed it was better that I kept my head down for the time being.
I looked at references to Karen in the Web pages, too. There was much indignation about the disappearance of a senior Metropolitan Police detective, but even that story had lost the news editors’ interest after a couple of weeks. I leaned back in Joe’s oversize chair and looked at the ceiling. It was so cracked that the people upstairs must have been ardent punk fans, though thankfully they weren’t pogoing right now. I was thinking about Karen-the way her face turned from stern to amused to loving in the space of a few seconds; the way that, in the weeks before her disappearance, she had started to rest her hand on her belly… God, how I missed her…
…and I’m in a luxurious hotel suite, watching CNN on a vast plasma TV attached to the wall.
“Matt,” Karen says from the bedroom, “come and see.”
I tear myself away from a story about Mormon marriages and go through, my legs still numb from the transatlantic flight. Karen is in the bathroom. It’s twice the size of mine back in London, and I reckon I have one of the bigger bathrooms in that city. The fittings probably aren’t real solid gold, though I couldn’t be 100 percent sure. And, miracle of miracles, there’s a normal-height bath in an American hotel.
“Neat, eh?” Karen says, laying her toiletries out on the marble runway behind the taps.
“Neat, yeah,” I reply. “Can you leave room for my toothbrush and razor?”
