Now all he had to do was find them without getting killed.
‘It’s going to be fun, seeing you lose it all again,’ Andy said.
TWELVE
Groote ordered the two security guards to dump the kid on the bed, fasten the restraints to his arms and then to the railings, then told them to get out. They left and shut the door behind them. He clicked the call log back open from Allison’s cell phone that he’d taken from her home. A cell-phone number from the man who had called, coded in Allison’s cell phone as MR.
MR was the walking dead.
He tucked the phone back in his pocket and dumped a pitcher of water on the kid. Nathan Ruiz sputtered to consciousness with a jerk.
‘Hi,’ Groote said. ‘You’ve had a field trip tonight.’
‘I – I…’
‘You’re at a loss for words. Probably because you were expecting to see Doctor Hurley. Well, he’s not suited for this kind of therapy, Nathan.’ Groote sat down next to him. He lit a cigarette, although he hadn’t smoked in ten years, puffed deep enough for the fire to catch hard, blew the smoke without a cough. ‘It’s just going to be you and me.’
Nathan blinked.
‘You’re back where you belong.’ Groote tapped his own temple. ‘You’re not getting out again.’ He let five seconds drip by and said, ‘Your friend took off without you. Guess he didn’t care.’
‘Who?’
‘His initials are MR. You give me the rest of his name, we’re cool, you and I. Cool is good.’ He held up the smoldering cigarette. ‘Hot is not.’
The boy’s expression hardened past the grogginess. Groote could see him summoning up what stray courage remained in his gut. ‘I don’t know his name.’
Groote jammed the cigarette into Nathan’s wrist.
Nathan screamed. Groote withdrew. ‘I’ll do the other wrist, then I’ll do your tongue. Then your eyes. It’ll be incredibly gross.’ He thought: Please don’t make me burn you bad. ‘What’s MR’s name?’
‘I really don’t know who he is – he wasn’t supposed to be there.’
Groote decided to deal the boy a bit of rope. ‘Then who was supposed to be there?’
‘Allison.’ Nathan gritted his teeth against the pain. ‘She gave me a passkey to get past the door… told me to meet her at her house.’
‘And do what?’ He leaned back, as though getting comfortable for their nice chat.
‘Leave here.’
‘Why?’
‘She said… I shouldn’t be at Sangriaville anymore.’
‘Your insurance hasn’t expired, Nathan, so why did she want you to check yourself out?’
‘She said Doctor Hurley wanted to kill me.’
‘Gosh, Nathan, and he only speaks highly of you.’
‘I don’t know anything else.’ Fear clenched his eyes shut.
Groote considered, put himself in Allison’s shoes. You suspect illegal drug testing. You steal the research as evidence. But you also want a patient who’s been guinea-pigged as a show-and-tell for the FDA. Given that, wouldn’t you concoct a better scheme to get him out of the hospital? No – not if you were pressed for time, if you knew Quantrill was ready to move on Frost, shut the operation down now that the testing was complete. ‘Where’s Frost, Nathan?’
‘Frost?’
‘Allison took some DVDs, the kind you use in a computer to store big files. They had information on them for a project called Frost. Tell me where those DVDs are.’
‘I don’t know. I just did what she told me, please don’t hurt me no more.’
‘Oh, I don’t want to, Nathan. Seriously. But I have a problem. Those DVDs Allison took, they’re not in her house. Could be they blew up with her at her office. But it’s awfully convenient, you see, and I don’t believe in that convenient a world. She takes something of great value, she gets obliterated, and then there’s a group hug at her house. It changes the equation.’ He smiled at Nathan. ‘I read your file while you were napping. You’re quite a special case, Tin Soldier. Maybe you made Allison go boom-boom.’
Nathan shook his head in horror. ‘No, man, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t ever…’
‘You tell me what happened from when you ran.’ Groote rotated the cigarette in his fingers, studied the smoke, reheated the tip with a deep drag.
‘She left an electronic passkey for me. Told me to run at six-thirty, told me how to get to her house. She left a change of clothes for me. She had told me to sit and wait in her bedroom until she came in, but there was a big mirror in there, I don’t like mirrors, don’t do mirrors, no mirrors.’
‘You may like them less when I’m done,’ Groote said quietly.
Nathan kept on: ‘So I went into the den, stood near a window so I could see her come. But a man came. He drove up past her house, left his car, came back down. No sign of Allison. I got scared. He came in and I hit him on the head with this Indian carving she kept on the mantel. I tied him up with sheets and dumped him in the tub. I didn’t know what else to do… I figured Allison would tell me.’
Groote frowned. That matched MR’s story. ‘He wasn’t there when we found you, Nathan. Who was he?’
‘The other guy… said the first guy’s name was Sorenson.’
The name meant nothing to Groote. ‘And you had no idea who the other guy was?’
‘No.’
‘But him you didn’t crack on the head, him you didn’t tie up. Why so nice to him, Nathan?’
‘I wanted him to talk – tell me what was happening.’
‘Did he?’
‘No. He didn’t know… He said Allison’s office was bombed.’
Groote considered. It bothered him, deeply, that an apparent bomb had killed Allison Vance. Bombs were not built on a whim. Bombs were complicated and technical and a pain in the ass. Guns and knives and rope were far easier ways to accomplish the goal of shutting up one person. Bombs meant resources, expertise, time to plan. Bombs meant an enemy who might blow Groote’s ass out of the water.
‘I – I don’t think this guy you want killed her,’ Nathan said.
‘I don’t have a lot of suspects.’
‘That Sorenson guy-’
‘- could just be a story you and your friend hatched to throw salt on the trail if either of you got caught. No, Nathan, I think MR’s the answer to my prayers.’
‘I don’t know anything about MR… I’m sorry, I don’t.’
Groote dropped the lit cigarette at the bottom of the water pitcher. It hissed and died. ‘I’m sorry, Nathan, but cigarettes are too slow.’ He pulled the screwdriver from his pocket, held it up so Nathan could see. ‘You need the right tools for the right job.’
‘Please. Please don’t.’
‘Custom-made for me in Hungary. Precisely balanced. I keep the edge cleaner than an angel’s ass.’
‘I don’t know him! I can’t tell you.’
‘I bet you liked word problems in math class. I mean, launching missiles and shit in the army, you must have gotten at least a C in geometry.’
‘Word problems?’ Nathan, trembling, shook his head.
‘If you’ve got an inch of flesh covering your bones, and the screwdriver can penetrate two centimeters at a blow, how long before the screwdriver reaches bone? I threw in the metric angle because I know you’re just a mathematical genius.’
