Chapter 11
ArkNet. Written in blood. Why?
Detective Butcher of the Stone Mills police force stared at Frank and waited for an answer. It was a good question, one that Frank had asked himself while waiting for the police to arrive.
“ArkNet is an online architectural journal,” Frank told the detective. “I don’t know why he wrote that.”
Detective Butcher, forty-four, with tired eyes, powerful arms, and a crew cut so even that the top of his head looked like it had been surgically removed with a high powered laser, had arrived on the scene wearing bowling shoes, a sweat stained bowling shirt advertising Ralph’s Seafood Palace, and a scowl.
Leaning against his truck, Frank had watched Butcher get out of his car, the detective’s shadow -- long and lean and thrown by one of the work lights set up around the driveway -- racing ahead of him across the gravel as he walked to the front door and spoke with the uniformed officer guarding the entrance. He’d glanced at Frank, held up a finger as if to say, “I’ll be right back”, and entered the house, emerging fifteen minutes later with a notepad and the question for which Frank had no answer.
“Strange thing to write,” Butcher said.
“Yes.”
If Barry had had the strength to scrawl one word, why had he chosen the name of an online architectural journal? Why not write something that would help the police identify the killer? Then again, Frank had never had his intestines scrambled, so he couldn’t imagine the pain Barry must have been feeling. Did ArkNet mean anything, or was it the final, incoherent burst of a dying mind?
“What do you think it means?” Butcher asked.
“I don’t know.”
“If you had to guess?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say it means Barry had lousy taste in architectural journals. When can I go home?”
A uniformed officer appeared and handed Butcher a printout. The detective scanned the document. “Are you an angry person, Mr. Sullivan?”
“What?”
Butcher tapped the printout. “Says here your wife has a restraining order against you.”
Frank glanced at the uniformed officer, who stood five feet away and watched him as though Frank might, at any moment, conjure an Uzi out of thin air. “It was a misunderstanding. What are you getting at?”
“What I’m getting at is that you seem to have trouble controlling your temper.”
Frank’s jaw muscles tightened. Soon the tightness would spread to his neck, his shoulders, his chest, and then the steam building deep in his gut would surge up and out, an explosion that usually took the form of something vulgar and highly insulting.
He crossed his arms and was surprised to hear the voice of Ian, his anger management councilor, in his head, a gentle whisper urging him to “Remember the cape.”
The cape exercise had been a favorite of Ian’s.
“This cape represents your anger, Frank,” Ian had said, tying a thick velvet cape adorned with tiny weights around Frank’s shoulders. “I want you to close your eyes and feel the weight of the cape. Feel it pressing down on you, feel the muscles in your neck and shoulders and back straining against the weight. Pulling you down. Rooting you in place. Now…” He untied the knot at Frank’s throat, and the cape puddled around Frank’s feet. “Feel that? That’s your anger slipping away. The weight is gone. You feel lighter. Better. Happier. I want you to remember this feeling. When you get upset, when you feel your anger building, I want you to think back to this moment and picture the cape slipping off your shoulders and the lightness you’re feeling at this very moment. Now open your eyes.”
Frank had opened his eyes, had gazed down at the cape bunched around his ankles, thought this was pretty much the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard of, and fired Ian for being a total hack New Age jerkwad who could take his incense, his Buddha statue, his hippie sandals, and his cape, and Zen right off.
Frank briefly considered telling Detective Butcher that his line of questioning was pissing him off, and could he please have a moment to try out a very silly anger management technique that his kooky ex-councilor had taught him because he really didn’t want to say anything he might regret later.
He inhaled deeply instead.
“My anger is an aspect of my personality I’m not proud of, and I’m working on it,” Frank said. “And I’ve never hit my wife, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Did you and Mr. Watts get along?”
“He was about to make me a partner.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Yes. We got along. When can I leave?”
Detective Butcher checked the printout. “Still live in Hanford?”
“Yes.”
“I bowled in a tournament there once. Someone smashed my windshield and stole my hubcaps.” He handed the printout to the uniformed officer. “I’d appreciate it if you stuck around until my men have had a chance to conduct a thorough search of the entire area. Officer Collins will keep you company.”
He turned and walked back toward the Egg, the soles of his bowling shoes gnashing gravel. Silhouetted against the bright work lights, with the Egg looming above him under a star-filled canopy of purple and black, Butcher looked like an alien returning to his spaceship.
“How long is this going to take?” Frank asked Officer Collins, who had stopped staring at Frank like he was going to conjure an Uzi out of thin air, and now looked like a man who’d drawn the short straw.
“Relax, Mr. Sullivan.” He motioned toward Frank’s truck. “Take a load off.”
“Is it the policy of the Stone Mills police force to treat everyone as a suspect, or am I special?”
“You interrupted his bowling game. His team is in the finals.”
Frank opened his mouth to reply.
Collins stared at him, one eyebrow arched as though daring Frank to argue with him.
Frank closed his mouth. He choked down the insults forming on his tongue, walked around the hood of his truck, opened the driver side door, and climbed into the cab.
Don’t say anything. Don’t say anything. Just sit here until those idiots let you leave.
He closed his eyes, and thought of Ian and his stupid cape. It was worth a shot; he’d paid enough money for the sessions with that quack.
He took a deep breath.
The cape: the pressure on his shoulders, smothering, pulling on the back of his neck, the base of his skull starting to ache.
The cape: thick, heavy, hot.
The cape: sliding down his back, the sudden relief, the rustle of fabric and the muted thud of the weights on the carpet. The pressure on his neck and shoulders: gone.
Frank opened his eyes.
Nope. Still angry.
He looked out the passenger side window, saw Collins watching him, and gave him the finger.
#
The beams from the pickup’s headlights slashed the garage door as Frank’s truck wheeled into the driveway. It was midnight. He had to pee.
Frank jumped down from his truck, ran into the house, and fifteen minutes later, his bladder no longer threatening massive internal trauma, booted up his computer and opened his email.
He smiled when he saw the link.
Inspiration -- having never seen the need to perfect its sense of timing because, frankly, when it did arrive, it was usually the hit of the party -- had slammed into Frank exactly one minute after he called 911. It had cut through the confusion to allow a single clear thought to rise to the surface: ArkNet? Written in blood. Why? Because the website was important. Because Barry had found something on there, information he didn’t want to take to his grave. And what did people do when they came across websites they wanted to keep track of? They bookmarked them.
Frank had bolted from the kitchen, narrowly avoiding the pool of blood, which would have added a nice, complicating sheen of evidence to the soles of his shoes. He’d scrambled up the stairs to the second floor and found Barry’s iMac. A smooth white rectangle on a glass-topped desk, it practically glowed in the moonlight piercing the dark office.
He rounded the desk, his finger punching the power switch on the back of the computer. It hummed and chimed, the screen flickered, and the desktop appeared. His hand clamped down on the mouse, and the pointer jumped across the screen, first to the web browser, then up to the bookmarks menu, each click of the mouse cracking the stillness.
The ArkNet link topped the list of recently bookmarked websites, and at the sight of it, Frank grinned and gave the top of the desk a little victory slap. He mashed the mouse button and loaded the page, glimpsed words (shopping mall, fifty-two dead), but forced himself to move on; there would be time to read it later. He switched off the computer and nearly made it to the door before turning back and wiping down the mouse and keyboard.
A minute later, he was outside, leaning against the hood of his truck and watching a row of flashing red and white police lights race up the hill toward the house.
#
Frank clicked on the link, and a headline popped onto the screen: SAN FRANCISCO SHOPPING MALL COLLAPSES. FIFTY-TWO DEAD.
He skimmed the ten-year-old article, which blamed the collapse on an architect named Paul Hyatt and the structural engineer with whom he’d colluded. Corners had been cut. Money pocketed. Lives lost. Paul Hyatt couldn’t be reached for comment, as his whereabouts were unknown.
Frank scrolled down the page, skimming the article. He stopped on a headshot of the missing architect, a fat-faced, sharp-nosed man with wavy brown hair that swooped down over his forehead, and a full beard that started at his cheekbones and ended in a neat line under his chin.
Frank squinted, then zoomed in on the image. The birthmark was difficult to make out, but it was definitely there under a thin patch of beard on his right cheek: deep red, almost purple, like wine splashed across a tablecloth.
Frank opened a new tab, brought up Gleason and Watts’ webpage, navigated to the staff photos under the “About us” section, and scrolled down the list until he reached Roy Harper’s picture.
“Son of a bitch,” Frank said, leaning forward in his chair. Roy Harper’s eyes were blue, not brown, his hair blond and gelled stiff, the tip of his nose round, not sharp, and the beard was gone. His face was lean and tanned, his left cheek turned toward the camera, hiding the birthmark that Frank knew stained the right cheek.
He studied the deep-set eyes in the two pictures. Both sets were almond shaped, both sets widely spaced. He may have changed their color, but the shape of the eyes didn’t lie.
The birthmark didn’t lie.
Frank pushed back from the desk and stared at the two images on the screen. This is it, he thought. The fork in the proverbial road. Would there still be an axe in his future if he kept his mouth shut and minded his own business? He doubted it. But would he be able to live with himself? He doubted that, too. Which fork had Barry chosen? His guess was that Barry had confronted Roy, and Roy had shoved a knife in his gut to protect his secret. No. Sitting back and taking the safe route would mean a victory for Roy, and if there was one thing that really got under his skin it was a successful asshole.
He picked up his cell phone, switched off caller ID, and dialed a number.
Roy Harper picked up after five rings.
“Hello?”
He sounded awake and alert. Frank checked the time on the computer. It was quarter to one in the morning.
The bastard is probably trying to get the blood out of his clothes, he thought.
“Hello?”
Frank cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and whispered. “Hi, Paul.”
“Wrong number.”
“Fifty-two people died in that mall collapse, Paul. How do you sleep at night?”
Soft breathing filled Frank’s ear for a long moment before the line went dead.
Frank felt the steam begin to build, felt his shoulders tighten. He didn’t try the cape exercise again; he didn’t want to calm down. He welcomed the anger, would draw strength from it, and in the morning, he would unleash it on Mr. Paul Hyatt, a.k.a Roy “The Axeman” Harper.
And then he would pay a visit to the shooting range. He was going to need the practice.