Delirious (35 page)

What happened to me during that time? Charlie shuddered to think.

Sitting on the bed, with his feet set on the floor, elbows resting on his knees, and head cradled atop his knuckles, he felt like a sad imitation of Rodin’s
The Thinker.
He glanced at the small color television on the bureau at the foot of the bed, then gasped aloud. A piece of paper, recognizable as the Seacoast Motel stationery and most likely having come from a pad of the stationery on the room desk, was taped to the TV monitor.

The mattress springs creaked as Charlie rose from the bed. He kept his gaze transfixed on the television and reached for the paper. With trembling hands, he pulled the note free. To steady his shaking, he had to hold the paper with both hands. As with the other notes, this one was undeniably in his penmanship.

The only thing left for him to do was to laugh. He fell hard to the floor, both knees crashing painfully onto the thin floor carpeting. All these events, it now appeared, were meant to lead him to this final moment. His fate had been scribed in four simple words penned in his hand, written on the plain white stationery belonging to the Sea-coast Motel. The note read simply:

Look under the bed.

C
harlie shifted his body position from kneeling to prone on the floor. Without hesitation, he lifted away the bedspread and peered into the darkness underneath the bed. The stench of blood and rot was much stronger under the bed than anywhere else in the room. It made him gag, and he had to cover his mouth to keep from vomiting. The silhouette of a shoe-box-sized object was easily discernible, even in the dim room lighting.

With his chest pressed hard into the floor, Charlie reached with both hands and pulled the box toward him. The box was slick to the touch, and the palms of his hands felt wet. The box slid out easily. In the light, he could tell that the box was seeping with blood. It left in its wake a dark trail and an even wider stain around its resting place under the bed.

There was a manila envelope, similar to the one containing the kill list, taped to the top of the box. Charlie left the box covered on the floor and stood up. He stared down at it for several moments. He closed his eyes and prayed that when he opened them, the nightmare would have simply passed. He would wake up on the bed, having just had the most terrible of dreams.

Once certain that wasn’t the case, Charlie took a deep breath and held it. Reaching down, he lifted the top of the box off and dropped it to the floor.

The first thing that caught his eye was a glint of gold. It was gold from a ring that Charlie had seen too many times to count. The owner of the ring had made certain to show it off every chance he could. It featured a shield encasing three raised engravings of books.
Together the letters on the books spelled out the word
veritas,
Latin for “truth.” Below the shield was the school’s name in raised gold lettering.
Harvard.
The ring was still lodged firmly on the finger of a bloodied hand, crudely severed at the wrist and stuffed inside the box.

Another hand was in the box as well. Although both hands were badly mutilated from having been sawed off, the skin of the ringed hand was clearly that of an older man. The skin of the other hand, though of a similar deadened pallor, was certainly that of a much younger man. His breathing became uneven and his heart raced, as though he had overdosed on caffeine.

Even in his cloud of confusion, Charlie knew one thing about the contents of the box. The hand with the ring belonged to Leon Yard-ley. The other, he assumed, was Simon Mackenzie’s, his former boss at SoluCent.

Sitting on the nappy, shallow carpet of the motel room floor, Charlie stared at the box across from him. His focus shifted to the top of the box, a foot away and within reach. The manila envelope was still attached.

He felt almost no need to open the envelope. This was a pattern he had become accustomed to. A note would be inside. He would be its author. It would identify Yardley and Mackenzie as the victims. The kill list would be complete, save for one significant exception. There would be a fourth victim. The surprise.

The last victim’s name, Charlie was certain, would be revealed.
Do I know that because my subconscious is reminding me that I am the author?
he wondered. Charlie stayed quiet in his seated position on the floor and tried to recollect the night before. The last thing he remembered was sitting on the bed, glancing at the digital clock and noting that the time was nearly 6:00 p.m. He had watched the news, and the next thing he recalled was waking up, still in his clothes, some twelve hours later. He woke up in basically the same position in which he had fallen asleep—lying with his back on the bed and his feet still on the floor. There was blood on his shirt and hands. He knew whose blood it was. There were body parts under the bed.

“What did I do?” he cried. “What monster have I become?”

Charlie paced the room. He kicked the box with the mangled hands back under the bed but left the top of the box where it was.
His thoughts spiraled in every direction. He needed something to help him focus and think. He tried convincing himself that this was a delusion. He slapped his right cheek hard with his open palm and then his left. The blows stung but did not shake away any visions. The box top was still on the floor where he had dropped it. The blood on the top’s sides was unmistakable.

My God, this is for real
.

If this wasn’t a delusion, then these men, men he knew well and liked, were both dead. Their murders should be on the news. Charlie’s name would be at the top of the list of suspects. The owner of the Seacoast Motel would know just where to find him. Room 224.

C
harlie’s remaining time depended largely on the Seacoast Motel owner’s interest in the morning news. If the murders were the lead story, as he suspected they would be, it was only a matter of time before the owner called the police.

Charlie turned on Channel 5 and stood in front of the television. It was the start of the 6:30 morning edition, and the graphic accompanying the story said it all: BREAKING NEWS—MURDER IN CONCORD. Charlie turned up the volume, keenly interested in the details reported by the anchor.

“Breaking news out of Concord this morning. Police are investigating the brutal murder of SoluCent CEO Leon Yardley. He was discovered early this morning by his wife, at around 5:00 a.m. It’s unclear at this time if she was held captive during the assault, although we have heard some reports suggesting she might have been drugged. Details are still coming in, and we will provide updates on this tragic story as they become available. Meanwhile, police are asking for your help. They are interested in locating Charlie Giles, a former employee of SoluCent, wanted for questioning in connection to the murder. Police are describing Mr. Giles only as a person of interest at this time.”

Charlie’s picture replaced the “breaking news” graphic. He assumed the news desk had pulled that photo off Google; he recognized the picture as one taken by a PR firm nearly two years ago, after the acquisition. The man in the photograph was a phantom from Charlie’s past. He was strong, full of fight, and looked like a winner.

“Channel Five’s investigative team has uncovered some interesting,
but still unsubstantiated reports that Mr. Giles was involuntarily committed to Walderman Mental Health Hospital in Belmont and that he recently escaped from a secure floor, pending a judge’s ruling on the status of his commitment. We want to emphasize that Mr. Giles has not to our knowledge been charged with any crimes. However, if you do know his whereabouts, you are asked to contact the Concord police immediately. He may be armed and dangerous, so police are also urging caution should you happen to come into contact with him.”

The next stories recapped much of the news he had watched the previous night. There was no mention of Simon Mackenzie, although Charlie had no doubt the man was dead. It was only a matter of time before his body was discovered. As he thought of Mac’s corpse waiting to be found, he thought, too, of Rudy Gomes.

Was his murder imagined? he wondered. If not, what happened to the body? And who was the man on the tape Randal played for me?

The more he thought, the less he understood. The truths that remained painfully obvious were the putrid smell of death in the room and the manila envelope still unopened and taped to the box top. Charlie extracted the envelope from the top, half-expecting to hear sirens blaring and the door exploding inward as police burst in. The envelope was sealed same as the envelope that contained the kill list he found under the sofa. Charlie carefully peeled away the tape, his meticulous nature unwavering even when tested beyond limits. He saw only one item in the envelope. He pulled it out and held a photograph in front of him.

The photograph, of Charlie with his brother and mother, was the same one he had framed and put in his mother’s hospital room. The same one he had scanned and hung on the refrigerator door. Charlie and Joe stood like bookends with their mother between them. A ballpoint pen had scratched out Charlie’s face and made large, irregular circles around his mother’s head. Through tearing eyes Charlie read the words scratched into the back of the photograph, written in his penmanship.

Surprise no more. Good-bye, Mother.

C
harlie threw the photograph and envelope to the floor, asking himself one unanswerable question.

Why her?

Clearly, a deeply disturbed and divided man lurked inside him. The names on the kill list were the names of those he blamed for his downfall. Could it be that his mother represented some deep-seated anger over his lost childhood? Was this twisted retribution perhaps for the attention she’d given to Joe and not to him?

Finding the truth would require a conversation with a part of his mind that was unavailable to him. Nothing about the Charlie present in the room wanted any harm to befall his mother, any more than he had wanted the murders of Yardley, Mackenzie, and Rudy Gomes. But the evidence against him was overwhelming.

To follow through with that gruesome promise seemed impossible, given the manhunt to find him. Yet that notion brought little comfort. His private Mr. Hyde seemed capable of following through with any plan, even under the most challenging circumstances. Charlie picked up the photograph. He tucked it in his pants pocket. His mother’s fate, so long as he lived and roamed free, was in a peril far greater than a coma.

Charlie heard the siren wail of a police cruiser’s or fire engine’s approach. He raced to the window, peeling back the curtain to see if the sirens were headed in his direction. One police car, then another, sped past the motel on Ocean Avenue. They were heading west toward the Wonderland train station. Then something else caught his
eye. Parked out front of his motel room was a BMW. It was without doubt his car’s make and model.

Charlie hesitated before opening the motel room door. He half-expected a hail of bullets to greet him. When he realized that might just be the greatest gift of all, he threw open the door and stepped outside into the cool fall morning air. Frost from the night before encased the BMW’s windows. As a gesture of brotherly affection, Joe had repaired the broken window after retrieving the car from the tow yard. Without opening the BMW and looking inside, it would be impossible to conclude if the car was his own.

He looked around and noticed nothing unusual or alarming. The parking lot was mostly empty, as it had been the night before. No other motel guests milled about. Ocean Avenue was just beginning to fill with morning commuters.

Charlie wondered what day it was, and sighed. The day of the week, like his life, felt irrelevant.

He approached the driver’s side door and peered into the window. The car was equipped with the latest model InVision system. Charlie tried the door and found it unlocked. The interior was devoid of any papers, coffee cups, pens, or loose change. It was exactly how he kept his car. He didn’t bother to check the glove compartment. He already knew. This was his car. The key was still in the ignition.

Sitting in the driver’s seat, Charlie envisioned a scenario that held the horrifying possibility of being both plausible and true. In some sort of psychotic split, he speculated, he might have taken a cab or train back to his childhood home in Waltham. There he could have slipped inside the house, using a key hidden under a rock in the backyard. Once inside, he could have taken his car key hanging on a hook by the front door and driven to Concord or to Lincoln, where he knew Mackenzie lived. Then he would have driven back to the Seacoast Motel, parked the car in front of his room, and fallen asleep on the bed. At some point, he took the photograph from the frame in the living room, inscribed the death threat to his own mother on the back, and taped it on top of the box filled with body parts, which he slid under the bed. Lastly, a note taped to the TV would remind him to look in the morning.

Though he had no conscious memory of having done any of that, the timing would have worked. All the notes, from the very first Post-it note he found on the inside flap of his BlackBerry case, were perhaps his own personal silent alarm—a plea to stop before it was too late.

Unlike all the mysteries haunting him, the route driven by his car was verifiable. InVision would have a record of his travels. It was a product feature he himself had championed and consumers seemed to like. In a number of instances, clients had used the trip-log feature to verify infidelity and other unscrupulous behaviors. At no point when he planned the work for the current model did he ever imagine it would do the same for him.

With a turn of the key, the car came to life.

“Hello, Charlie. I hope you’re having a great day,” InVision announced in its programmatically cheery default greeting.

With a couple of keystrokes, Charlie retrieved the trip log. It showed, as he had already suspected, a thirteen-mile drive from Waltham to Concord. The next trip was an eight-mile drive to Lincoln, Massachusetts, that ended near Flint’s Pond. The trip to Concord occurred at 2:20 a.m. this morning. The trip to Lincoln started at 4:00 a.m., with the last trip logged from Lincoln to Revere. Most of that drive took place along Route 2, and it was finished just after 5:30 in the morning. Simon, Charlie knew, ran at an obscenely early hour every morning. It was part of his type A, take-no-prisoners personality.