Spilled Blood

Kirk had nothing to fear from Florian as long as he knew where to find Vernon Clay.

The hole got bigger and deeper. Groundwater oozed from the sides. When he was two feet down, he had to climb inside to reach the bottom. He didn’t need to retrieve the whole body. All he needed was enough to convince Florian of the truth. Vernon was dead. Kirk had made damned sure of that. One bullet, right in the forehead, delivered by a gun that was deep in the silt of a swamp outside Mankato.

‘You remember me, Vernon?’ Kirk asked the black hole in the ground. ‘I’ll bet you do. You asked me if I was from the CIA when I came to your door. That was funny. The CIA. I said, yeah, they need you in Washington, sir.’

Kirk leaned on the handle of the shovel and laughed into his arm. What a fucking hysterical line. He should have been a comedian. They need you in Washington, sir. After that, it was easy. Follow Clay outside, knock him silly with the butt of the gun, drag him here. Clay never woke up. He was unconscious when Kirk dropped him in the hole and fired the gun into his brain. Better that than to bury him alive. That was the kind of thing that could give you nightmares.

It was funny how the mind worked. You didn’t always believe something even when you knew it was true. There was a part of him that was paranoid about what was really in the hole. He knew that he was within inches of Vernon Clay’s body, but the deeper he dug, the more his drunken mind began to panic that something had gone wrong. Vernon had survived the bullet in his skull. He’d clawed his way out of the ground and escaped. He was out there, messing with all of them.

My name is Aquarius.

Kirk’s shovel banged onto something hard. Finally.

He threw the shovel out of the hole onto the mountain of dirt. He reached for his flashlight and shined it at his feet. There he was. Vernon Clay, or what was left of him. His flesh had long ago been devoured by the dirt dwellers. Kirk squatted and wiped grime from the bones and saw that he’d unearthed the dead man’s hand and forearm. The bones were brittle. He levered the wrist bone under his heel and snapped the hand back. The entire hand broke off with a sickening crack.

‘They need you in Washington, sir,’ he said in his deepest voice, and he started howling with laughter again.

He deposited the hand on the ground and hauled his body out of the five-foot pit. His muscles rippled. He was dirty, wet, and cold, and he wanted a hot shower before meeting Florian. He thought about dragging his brother down here and making Lenny fill in the open hole, but he was still pissed enough that he might push the pussy boy inside and dump the mud on top of him. Leno, meet Vernon.

Kirk bent in the darkness for the shovel. He pushed around with his hands to locate the handle, but he couldn’t find it. Annoyed, he shined his flashlight at the pyramid of wet soil and realized that the shovel was gone. He could see the long indentation of the pole, but it wasn’t there.

‘What the fuck?’ he said aloud.

His brain screamed a warning, but at the same moment, he heard whistling, so close and loud that he thought it was the skeleton at his feet, blowing a tune through the remains of his teeth. He was wrong. He spun toward the noise, but he was too slow to duck or shout. The whistle howled in his ears, and the shovel blade whipped with the force of a speeding truck into the meat of his skull. He never felt it.

Chris figured that the death of a prominent university researcher would have made the news. He booted up his laptop and drove out of the high-school parking lot into the residential streets of Barron, and he soon found an unsecured wireless network that he used to access the Internet. Parked on the street in the rain, with the dome light of the Lexus casting shadows inside the car, he ran a Google search and found an article with the basic facts.

Lucia Causey, fifty-one, a professor and researcher in the epidemiology of cancer at Stanford Medical School, had been found in the garage of her Sunnyvale home. She’d connected a swimming-pool hose to her tailpipe and rerouted the deadly exhaust into the front seat of her Accord.

Lucia killed herself.

Why?

That was what Chris wanted to know. Maybe her death was unrelated to the events in Barron, but he didn’t like the fact that so many of the people who might have known what happened at Mondamin weren’t around to talk about it. Vernon Clay was missing. Lucia Causey was dead. So was Ashlynn. What had she found?

Chris searched again, hunting for blog posts connected to Lucia Causey on the day after her death, when news would have broken across campus. Most of the results were inconsequential: expressions of disbelief or sympathy, questions about classes or research projects in which she’d been involved, discussions of suicide awareness and prevention, and a handful of religious diatribes. He tried again, changing his search terms, and found a mention of the scientist’s death in a blogger’s chat room called The Truth About Pesticide Poisoning.

What caught his eye was the handle of the chat-room host. It was AMES_GREEN_GUY.

Another coincidence? The environmental activist whose fingerprint had showed up on one of the Aquarius letters lived and worked in Ames, Iowa. Chris loaded the thread, which mostly consisted of an online argument between the poster in Ames and a research assistant at Stanford who used the handle WUNDERLICH. He scrolled through the posts:

AGG: Sux for her kids, man, but hard for me to drum up sympathy for her. She was IPP.

W: She and her husband didn’t have kids. What’s IPP?

AGG: In the Pocket of Polluters.

W: Hey, slow down, green. You’re wrong. She played it straight.

AGG: What about Mondamin? They got summary judgment in toxic tort lit thanx to her.

W: That’s one case. She wrote plaintiff-friendly reports, too.

AGG: Defense hack. The Mondamin thing smelled.

W: Shit, must be nice to see the world in black and white. There are bad actors, but you can’t blame Big Chem for every lymphoma.

AGG: Wake up, wunder. Who writes big chex to the univ research depts?

W: Lucia was clean.

AGG: She offed herself. Feeling guilty?

W: STFU.

AGG: I’m just saying. You see it coming?

W: No.

AGG: So why’d she do it?

W: Who knows why anyone does that? You can be brilliant but screwed up. She had problems. Depression. Gambling.

AGG: She leave a note?

W: Don’t think so. The whole thing sucks.

AGG: Cancer sux. Pesticide sux. Suicide is quick.

W: She HATED cancer.

AGG: Still sounds like guilty conscience 2 me. IPP.

W: She was my friend. She killed herself. FU.

There was silence from the blogger in Ames following the last comment. He didn’t answer.

Chris tried to understand the implications of what he’d read. If the chat participant in Ames was the same man whose fingerprint had been found on the hotel paper, he obviously wasn’t a fan of Lucia Causey. He’d also mentioned Mondamin specifically. According to Michael Altman, however, the Ames activist was in an Iowa jail, which meant he couldn’t be the man who called himself Aquarius. It was another dead end.

He was about to shut down his laptop when he realized that the online chat on the pollution site spilled over to a second page. He clicked on the next page of the thread and saw that there was one additional post, but it wasn’t from either of the two original participants. Instead, it was from someone new. The final comment was dated only two weeks ago, long after the chat began.

Seeing it, Chris found himself frozen as he stared at the screen. The post was dated three days after Ashlynn called Stanford, and the poster had used her initials as a handle. AS.

There were too many coincidences now. This wasn’t random.

He read what Ashlynn had written and realized she’d left him a clue, as if she were speaking to him from the