Springboard

He carried the rest of his supplies and the body into the woods. He laid out the drop cloth and unwrapped the body onto it. He removed the clothes and put them into a trash bag.

It took a couple of hours to get the body reduced to packages of five pounds or less, fifteen minutes alone to saw the head into small bits and knock all the teeth out. Each part was wrapped in plastic, then in butcher’s paper and marked with a crayon: steaks, roasts, ribs, chops.

When he was done, he rolled the bloody drop cloth up and put it into a plastic bag, cleaned the saws and machete carefully, then loaded these into three different plastic bags. He removed the coveralls, gloves, and shoe protectors, and put them into another bag.

He packed up and left.

Back at the industrial site, which was a recently emptied building, he parked in the back where he’d had the freezer delivered. He picked the lock on the door, and used the hand truck to move the small freezer into the building. He removed the freezer from its corrugated cardboard box, and took the styrofoam packaging out. As the real estate agent had told him, the electricity was still on, and was supposed to stay on for at least a month, because there was a new tenant due to move into the building then. He found an outlet and plugged in the freezer.

He transferred the packages from the van and put them into the freezer, all except the bits of head and fingers, closed the freezer, relocked the door, and drove away. It wasn’t recommended, to load a freezer that way before it got cold, but if the meat was burned a little, that didn’t really matter. Eventually it would go solid.

At a Dumpster behind a butcher shop, he put the leaf bag with the drop cloth in it.

At an apartment complex eight miles away, he got rid of the bag with the dead man’s clothes. He kept the wallet, watch, and keys, along with a ring.

The freezer’s packaging went into a different trash bin.

The wallet, empty, and the watch, ring, keys, and saws went into a lake in a park, heaved far enough from shore that nobody was apt to step on them if they went wading, which they probably wouldn’t, since there was a sign that forbade swimming. He tossed the teeth into the water, too. Even if somebody found any of them with the fillings, there was no way to put them into context to match a dental chart.

The rest of the supplies went into trash bins or Dumpsters in four different locations. The last bags, containing his coveralls and gloves and the contents of the dead man’s wallet, he set afire in an old oil drum behind a junk yard, using the paint thinner to get them flaming good. He made sure the gloves burned — no fingerprints left there.

He drove to a cemetery and found an open grave awaiting a new tenant. He remembered the old joke about grave-yards: Why were there fences around them? Because people were dying to get in. He put the bag with the chopped-up head and fingers into the empty grave, covering it with enough dirt so that it wasn’t visible. He very nearly was discovered at this by somebody visiting nearby, but managed to finish his chore before they got close enough to see him. He had considered finding a dog kennel or going to an animal shelter and feeding the bits to the dogs, but he remembered the old urban legend about the choking Doberman, and while the brains and skull bits wouldn’t give anything away, a finger would, since government security guards had their prints on file.

He returned to the airport lot, put the minivan back in the same slot it had occupied before, switched the license plates to their original vehicles, and left.

As he drove toward a different motel, he considered what he had done. Yes, it had been a lot of work — he could just as easily have buried the headless/fingerless body in the woods, It might not have lain there undisturbed forever, but it probably wouldn’t have been discovered for weeks or months, if not years. And once it was found, the authorities probably wouldn’t have been able to ID the corpse — most people did not have DNA records on file.

But when the new tenants of the industrial space opened the freezer, they would either toss the packages of meat, or somebody would take one home for supper. If that happened, unless that diner happened to be a cannibal, there would be an immediate uproar. Such a heinous crime could only be the work of some twisted sociopathic psychotic, a real loon, and the FBI profilers would have themselves a fine time.

And what they would come up with wouldn’t bear any resemblance to Jack Locke…

He smiled. He had given them a show, and they would buy it, because they wanted to buy it. Locke was, he felt, an artist, and this kind of thing was part of his art and craft. The last person they’d be looking for would be a Hong Kong businessman.

A simple sleight of hand. And clever, too, if he did say so himself.

Meanwhile, he still had to deal with the issue at hand, Net Force and CyberNation, and while that shouldn’t take any violence, it was always an option…

18

Space, the Starship Enterprise

Jay was studying the holographic projection on the bridge of the Enterprise with Bretton when the alert light and Klaxon began flashing and blaring.

“All hands, Red Alert!” came a stentorian voice.

Jay nodded at his VR companion.

“I’d better take this.”

George just nodded, and Jay stepped back into an alcove to take the call, muting the scene with a privacy screen. He could see out, but Bretton couldn’t see in. Only Saji and Thorn could intrude on one of his scenarios with this level of urgency, so he knew it had to be important.

“Jay?”

It was Saji. She sounded worried. All of his calm curiosity disappeared when he heard the tone in her voice.

“Yeah, babe?”

“It’s Mark.”

A bolt of fear stabbed through the VR jock as the words registered.

Mark.

Was he dead? Had someone kidnapped him? Jay had thought his imagination fairly good, but parenthood thus far had shown him that he had entirely new realms of worry to discover.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know!” Her voice rose on the last word.

He was unnerved. In all the time he’d been with her, Saji had never sounded like this. She maintained her calm, had held her center under the most severe stress. She hadn’t even sounded this bad when he came out of the coma.

“We were playing in the living room, and suddenly he started coughing and acting funny. I got worried and called the on-duty nurse, and she said we ought to bring him in.”

She paused.

“And then he seemed fine, but he started jerking around like he was having a seizure, and we’re stuck in traffic, and he’s not getting better!”

Oh, God!

“Where are you now?”

“I’m on — on Sherman, heading towards the Children’s Hospital. Traffic is jammed!”

Jay stared through the privacy screen at the quiet bridge of the Enterprise, stars flickering on the main viewscreen, the hologram of the Dyson sphere floating in the center of the space. His emotional distance couldn’t be farther from the calm scene — it seemed like hours had passed since he’d taken the call. He looked over at the chronometer readout and noticed it had only been a minute. Less.

For a moment he just sat there. Saji’s terror and his concern for his son froze him. But only for a moment. He hadn’t gotten where he was without being able to work under pressure.

Come on, Gridley, let’s get something rolling here!

First Saji: “It’ll be okay, babe,” he said, not having any clue that it would be. But he had to say