Fiduciary Duty (12 page)

“Don’t hurt me,” she blubbered, “Please, don’t hurt me.”

I motioned her toward the cabin. She started to walk, shaking and crying and looking backward at the gun. I kicked Frangulyan’s body. He didn’t react. About a third of the bolt was sticking out of his chest, having gone through his torso. If he wasn’t dead, he was doing a great imitation of it. In any case, he certainly wasn’t going anywhere. I followed the blonde up the driveway and into the cabin.

It was nice and toasty in the cabin – the lady’s coat I had brought from Pittsburgh wouldn’t be necessary. A pity, as I was looking for a reason to unload the awful thing.

The cabin had an open floor plan, with the kitchen, dining area and living room all flowing into one another. I looked around. The industrial grade refrigerator would be perfect. I motioned her in its direction.

When she got to the refrigerator, I pulled out the restraints and gestured to her to lie down. She started to cry. I realized things could get very messy very fast, so I put the gun in her face again. She meekly lay down. I put the restraints on her legs and handcuffed her hands behind her back. Being hogtied wasn’t comfortable, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Then I chained the restraints behind her back to the refrigerator handle with the long set of handcuffs that had a timer at one end. The timer was placed at the small of her back. In that position, she wouldn’t be able to see it, much less manipulate it. I set the timer for 24 hours.

When everything was done, I spoke for the first time.

“The lock on the chain that will release you from the refrigerator in exactly 24 hours. After that, you will be free to go. But for the next day, I suggest you repent your sins and accept the One True God into your life. You don’t want to end up like that heathen out front.

Then I turned. I walked through the cabin, looking around. I took the woman’s cell phone, Frangulyan’s cell phone, and cut the cord on the one landline I found in the cabin. Then I pulled the batteries out of the cell phones and rummaged around until I found the keys to the Maserati. Finally, I turned out the lights and closed the door.

I walked up the driveway until I got to Frangulyan’s body. He hadn’t moved since I had kicked him a few minutes earlier. He didn’t react when I grabbed his legs and dragged him into the clump of trees. I checked for breathing. There was none. Ditto his pulse. Frangulyan was definitely dead.

Next, I returned to the top of the driveway. I briefly flicked on my flashlight. There was some blood which I covered over with dirt and leaves. Nobody would be able to tell something had happened in that driveway from the street.

I walked back to the clump of trees. I removed the cross-bow bolt from Frangulyan’s back and rolled him over. I closed his hand around the bolt so he was clasping it. Then I took the stopper off a little vial of acid and poured the acid into the hole in his chest. Like exhorting the woman in the cabin to find God, the acid, and having Frangulyan grip the bolt that killed him, were fake symbolism, a touch of misdirection. I was giving myself a 24 hour head start by keeping Frangulyan’s lady friend chained to the refrigerator for a day. In fact, I was giving myself more time than that since she wasn’t about to head down in the middle of night. The misdirection should buy even more time, enough to ensure there was never any trail back to me.

When Frangulyan’s body was ready, I disassembled Floyd and the cross-bow, took my ski-mask off, stuffed everything back into the large backpack, and got back onto my bike. An hour and ten minutes later Floyd and I were two counties away. Part of the cross-bow dropped into a river and both cell-phones fell into another river. The keys to the Maserati were left under a rock somewhere in rural Pennsylvania. I imagine they’re still there. The blanket was left in a dumpster behind a truck-stop. By dawn, Floyd and I were back in Canton.

Chapter 2. Reflection

When I got back to Canton, I tried to sleep but I was too keyed up. So I unpacked the van and then, with some regret, disassembled Floyd and destroyed his skirt. I cleaned what was left with bleach, particularly the wheels. I did the same to the tires of the bike and the boots I wore at Frangulyan’s cabin. I even bleached down the tires of the van. After that I went through a long jog in the snow to clear my mind and think.

I always used to think people fell into five categories, five S’s if you will. They were either saints, sinners, sociopaths, psychopaths or sadists. The saints are the few people out there who live their lives entirely for other people. I imagine that most people who are called saints are, in fact, nothing of the sort.

Sinners constitute the majority of the population. These are the people who live normal lives, try to do right by others, and have a conscience. Nevertheless, despite their intentions, sinners still occasionally fail to do the right thing. Like the old saw goes, the mind is willing but the flesh is weak.

Sociopaths are more flawed than sinners. Perhaps in part due to upbringing or some trauma in their life, they develop a lack of conscience or feeling toward people outside their immediate group. Though sociopaths may be loyal to friends or family, those outside the select group are fair game and can be cheated or harmed with impunity. Psychopaths are even more flawed – they are willing to cheat and steal even from family and friends. They simply have no empathy, conscience or remorse whatsoever. The only way to deal with sociopaths or psychopaths is not to get between them and the cookie jar.

The last group, the sadists, actually derives pleasure from other peoples’ misfortunes. Not being between a sadist and the cookie jar won’t help you. A sadist will go out of his way and forego the cookie in order to hurt someone else.

I started to wonder where I fit into the classification now, if at all. I had always been, like most other people, simply a sinner. I tried to do right by others, and like most people was generally a good person though not without failings. But that was then. In the last two months I had killed two people and was contemplating the deaths of quite a few more.

I looked inside myself, and could see no remorse. The murders – and there was no point in shading that point – of the Prince and Frangulyan didn’t bother me in the least, though killing them or anyone else for that matter would not even have occurred to me before H and Jeremy died.

What I saw in myself was a dedication to a cause, a just cause. I was doing the right thing, and I was doing it well. Like a professional. Granted, I was new to the killing world, but I was good at it. Yes, in retrospect the Prince operation was more complicated than it had to be, and it should have had more fail-safes. That said, the Prince wasn’t an easy man to find, much less kill, and he had been my first. But I was planning things out, looking at all the angles, and executing (pun intended) well. Just as importantly, I wasn’t leaving behind collateral damage, nor, as far as I could tell, any real clues for law enforcement or anyone else who might be interested. As I had my entire life, I was paying very close attention to details: removing the battery from my cell-phone, paying cash for purchases, and parking on pavement rather than leaving tire tracks on dirt.

In the end, ticking names off my list was a job, a job all signs indicated I was good at, a job I took pride in, a job that gave me purpose. And frankly, I enjoyed it. It gave me by turns a frisson of fear, an adrenalin rush, and a sense of accomplishment. There were even moments of boredom, but on the whole, it beat working for the Man.

As I thought about it more, I realized there was also a difference between the Prince and the Frangulyan jobs. Other than Floyd, who was more of an accessory than another character, I hadn’t used an alternate persona in the Frangulyan job. Not that I needed a character to do the job, but switching between characters made the job fun. It was clearly a piece of my repertoire I should make more of an effort to use.

Still, even though there was purpose, and even fun, back in my life, there was something wrong with me. On one level, I knew H and Jeremy were dead. The void that was left in their place was with me all the time.

But there was another level, like another floor on a building, where H and Jeremy were still with me. I would catch myself thinking of them at random times. Over the years I had learned to spot the little vignettes that H appreciated hearing, little events and stories and observations about life. So when I heard a clerk making an odd statement, or saw a hawk swooping down and just missing a squirrel, I filed it away as something to mention to H in the next day or two. I would buy H’s favorite brand of butter and wonder why it wasn’t disappearing. I’d buy milk for Jeremy – always the organic stuff – and there was nobody there to drink it. And then there were the gifts – I had bought presents for both H and Jeremy in Brazil and New York. I knew Jeremy would never open the presents I was buying him, but all the same, I couldn’t wait to see his eyes light up when he unwrapped the gifts.

I realized that by keeping things on two levels, by maintaining some ambiguity, I was doing something that helped me move forward. Because when I first lost my wife and my son, I lost my will and my purpose. My goals became unimportant and disappeared altogether, leaving an empty hole. Every morning, I got up, went for a jog, did my abdominals, fed the cats, cleaned the litter box, paid the bills as they came in and then stared into space. When I ran out of supplies, I went to the store, and I ran the occasional errand as the need arose. There was nothing more.

But now I had a just cause. It gave me a motivation for going on, but really, I was doing it for H and Jeremy. I wasn’t delusional, mind you. I knew it wouldn’t bring them back, but it was the right thing to do and H had been a stickler for doing the right thing. I knew in my heart that H would have been proud of me for doing just that, and for taking pride in doing the right thing well. More importantly still, it set an example for Jeremy. It was so important, and remains that way still, that he grow up to be a good man.

I know it all sounds corny. It sounded corny to me as I was telling myself that, and it still sounds corny now. It was also very tenuous, a stone fortress floating on gossamer. But it was all I had and all I was. And for the time being it was enough. For the time being. After a bit, I realized I probably shouldn’t keep poking at it or I might destroy the little thing that had put the broken pieces of me back together again.

With that, I got back to the house sweaty and exhausted. Canton, Ohio, isn’t a town where a lot of people jog, and fewer still jog in the snow. I had gotten a lot of stares, but I was used to that. I took a shower, and then fired up the computer. I had a few more things to check before I went after the next victim.

Chapter 3. The Nerd

With his coke bottle glasses, pants that appeared a size or three too small, and a guayabera shirt that looked like it belonged on a waiter at a cheap Cuban restaurant, Steve Zhou looked like a nerd. That wasn’t a surprise – he was a nerd. He had dropped out of the Master’s program at San Jose State University in time to become one of the first ten employees at Netscape. That had netted him a small fortune. Then he went back to school, this time to get an MBA. He never finished that either, getting hired away by Enron to build software for their trading programs. He left Enron, and, not incidentally, cashed out of his stock options half a year before the company imploded. That had netted a second small fortune. He used his two small fortunes to buy put options, betting that Enron’s shares were going to plummet. He rode those put options all the way down until the company went into bankruptcy. That made him a big fortune.

I wondered about that. What had he seen? The Securities and Exchange Commission apparently had also wondered. He had been mentioned in press reports from the time as a “person of interest” and no doubt had been questioned thoroughly. In the end, Zhou walked. He wasn’t even fined. His kid glove treatment probably came in exchange for information given against some of the bigger names like Jeff Skilling and Andy Fastow, but Zhou himself never testified. After that, he spent the next year travelling across Europe and Asia.

According to a where-are-they-now interview I found on a blog for techies, in the subsequent years, Zhou had gotten addicted to drugs, then found Jesus and lost his addiction. Later he lost his faith in Jesus and moved on to the study of UFOs. Eventually, he concluded there were no aliens either. He filled the little green void with deep sea diving. To stay close to the ocean, he settled down at a beachfront estate in Montecito, a little to the south of Santa Barbara, California. According to Zillow, he had bought it for just shy of fourteen million dollars. Despite the collapse of the real estate bubble, Zillow currently valued the house at over 23 million dollars. Zhou’s midas touch continued unabated.

In the last five years, deep sea diving had morphed into an interest in marine biology; in particular he wondered why sharks rarely develop cancer. Zhou’s interest led him to apply to the graduate program at UCSB, the University of California at Santa Barbara. However, despite his success in the business world, Zhou had a few things working against his chances of being accepted in the program. The first was his age – most schools are more than a little reluctant to take on new students in their mid-forties, particularly if they were new to the field. Worse still, Zhou had a history of dropping out of graduate school. On the plus side, Zhou was smart and motivated. He knew just how to grease the system and he had the resources to make things happen. Over the past three years, he endowed two chairs, provided money for a scholarship, and then, to be safe, added a cherry on top by funding the construction of a new laboratory two hundred yards from the waterline. Needless to say, he was admitted to the program.

In contrast to Zhou’s 8,000 square foot beachfront manse, the typical UCSB student shared a bedroom in a two – or three-room apartment in Isla Vista. IV, as it was known, sat on two densely packed square miles next to the university… and also next to the ocean. In order to have a reason to come and go, and for protective coloration, I adopted the persona of Dusty Klein. Like most people who never quite grow up – and a forty-something year old living among twenty thousand or so college students fits that bill – Dusty had an interest that filled the spot where other people had adult aspirations and ambitions. For most perpetual children that interest might be faith, pot, video-games, a cause like World Peace or a sport such as surfing. For Dusty, it was women of barely legal age.

Dusty definitely had a different personality than I did, and I knew I would have to use him for longer than any previous character. As a result, I was careful to flesh him out as much as I could even before leaving Ohio. I had left my wedding ring at home, and I had a stud put in my ear when I flew out to Los Angeles. Still, being Dusty continuously took a bit of adjustment. For a day or two, I kept feeling for my band or putting my finger up to my ear. Dusty didn’t leave Los Angeles for Santa Barbara until the real me was completely in storage, sort of like hibernation but without the dreams. Becoming Dusty was disconcerting because none of the personas I adopted on the job had known or ever thought about H and Jeremy, and Dusty was definitely no exception. Being away from the memory of H and Jeremy for a few months was going to hurt. Still, I had no choice in the matter.

When Dusty arrived in IV, he subleased a room in a three bedroom apartment from a former student whose parents had cut him off when he dipped below a 2.0 average. The apartment stunk of stale beer with an undertone of pot. The small balcony, on the other hand, smelled of urine and cigarettes.

Within minutes of moving in, Dusty went to work on the female residents of the building. Unfortunately, though he was constantly hitting on just about every coed who crossed his path, his roommates and neighbors quickly realized he was never, ever successful. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, but he carried with him a loser vibe that prevented him from, as one of his roommates put it, “closing the deal.” Still, he was popular among some of the male denizens of the apartment complex since he shared their interests, dressed the same way they did, and somehow had the funds to keep everyone in beer. It took them about a week to realize he never imbibed himself.

“I was in AAA for a while, man,” Dusty explained, “Ten step program, you know? But at least I get to see my buddies enjoy a brew and they say that’s good too, right?”

Dusty spent a few weeks hanging around IV and discretely following Zhou from place to place. He learned that Zhou worked all the time. Zhou usually arrived at the lab in his Porsche around 8 in the morning and he never left before nightfall. Sometimes he spent the night at the lab. On those nights he would put out a “Do Not Disturb” sign, lifted from a Ramada Inn, presumably to keep the janitorial staff from bothering him. During the day, Zhou only ventured out for lunch. His schedule scarcely varied – weekends and holidays meant nothing to him. He had no life outside of work.

Dusty tried to befriend Zhou once or twice at Freebirds, the only off-campus spot Zhou ever went to for lunch. Zhou rebuffed all attempts at conversation courteously but efficiently. The problem wasn’t Dusty. Outside the lab, in any setting that could even remotely be viewed as social, Zhou simply avoided non-perfunctory communication. Dusty had even witnessed Zhou walking right past the head of the marine biology department without as much as a glance or a grunt in response to the latter’s effusive “Good morning, Steve!”

Given Zhou’s habits, there were only three places I, or more likely, Dusty could get to him: on or around the campus, at his home, or on the drive between the two locations. Dusty wasn’t comfortable with taking Zhou out on the drive. It was too public and too hard to prevent potential witnesses. Besides, Zhou drove his Porsche too fast, and frankly, Dusty was a slow-moving kind of guy.

Zhou’s home also presented problems – the high walls of the estate and the exclusive neighborhood made reconnoitering, whether by me or by Dusty, difficult. However, it was fairly obvious that the house had a good security system, including quite a few cameras located around the perimeter.

That left UCSB as the best location to kill Zhou, and ideally, in his lab in the middle of the night when nobody else was around. And the best time would be at the end of Finals Week, just before the start of Spring Break, as most students would either have left town or would be celebrating the end of another quarter. It was always possible that Zhou himself would leave town, but that didn’t seem likely. Where would he go, after all?

Finals week was only a couple of weeks away, and since Dusty was going to do all the preparations himself, he had to move with uncharacteristic quickness and determination. First, he found another apartment for sublease. The existing tenant was a coed at Santa Barbara City College who had been offered the opportunity to dance with a troupe on the East Coast through midyear. The apartment was a one-bedroom, close to downtown Santa Barbara, and there were no roommates. The problem was, subleasing an apartment to someone like Dusty was an iffy proposition, as Dusty seemed like the kind of guy who might leave behind a fair amount of damage. So I secured the apartment for him, in his name, by the simple expedient of a) looking like I belonged in Santa Barbara and not IV and b) paying the rent through the end of the lease in a lump sum in cash.

Dusty left the downtown apartment mostly untouched, which meant it contained only those items the coed had left behind. The décor was certainly more girly than Dusty (or I) would have selected, but it didn’t smell of beer, pot, urine or cigarettes. It didn’t matter much, though, because Dusty wouldn’t be spending much time there.

He brought only one item into the apartment: a $1,500 racing bike he picked up from a bike store near the beach. It was several orders of magnitude nicer than the old beater Dusty used to ride around IV. But the bike wasn’t for Dusty, it was for me. And it was the sort of bike that wouldn’t be raising eyebrows in Santa Barbara if ridden by a forty-two year old.

For the next few weeks, Dusty hung out in IV, bought beer for his boys, and watched the girls go by. Winter in Santa Barbara is chilly enough to require light coats, and Dusty complained sadly about the difficulty in discerning the precise shape of the women coming and going to and from campus.

As the quarter started coming to a halt, there was one last bash of parties. To an observer, it would seem that Dusty went to just about all of them. Uncharacteristically, he bought drugs. A lot of drugs. Half a pound, in total, of acid, coke, speed and horse. LSD, cocaine, methamphetamines and heroine. He put it all in one Ziploc bag. A doctor would have told him not to sample the random mix. Heroine is a sedative, while cocaine and methamphetamines are stimulants. Mixing downers with uppers has a tendency to cause blurred vision, confusion, drowsiness and incoherence. The heart races and slows down very quickly. The LSD would throw in a psychedelic effect for added confusion, and it too messes with the user’s heart-rate. Dusty took the hypothetical doctor’s advice and left the little bag alone, opting instead to store it behind the seldom-used stove in the kitchen of the apartment he shared.

Activity slowed to a crawl during finals week. Dusty’s ogling opportunities diminished and his usual beer buddies had become scarce. Having declined to attend class regularly, they were now trying to cram in ten week’s worth of knowledge in just a few days. Dusty, at heart a very social creature, started acting morose. It got worse once Finals week actually arrived. As the days wore on, the campus emptied out as students took their last exam and went home. By Friday, IV was like a ghost town. Ironically, it was a ghost town populated almost entirely by homeless people. Around three in the afternoon, Dusty’s last remaining beer buddy had a final, after which he was driving home to Santa Cruz.

Dusty offered him some Chinese takeout he had ordered.

“I ordered too much, dude,” Dusty said, “Dig in, my brother. Its good stuff, right?”

After they finished eating, Dusty broke the news.

“Yeah, bro, I think I’m heading out, too,” Dusty said, “No reason to stick around, ya?”

“Where to, Dustbuster?” the student asked.

“I dunno, dude, somewhere where there are girls,” Dusty replied, “I’ll come back in a week when the shorties return, yeah? Like those birds in Cupertino, right? Good luck with your final, OK?”

And with that, Dusty went to pack up a few meager belongings. Then he hopped on his crummy old bike and headed off. He rode through IV until he hit a bike path at UCSB. He took the long way off the campus, around the lagoon and past the marine biology department. Zhou’s red Porsche was in its usual spot. Only two other cars were in the parking lot.

From UCSB, Dusty got onto the bike path that paralleled Ward Memorial Boulevard and the beach. As Dusty pedaled, I pulled the stud out of my ear. Twenty five minutes later I arrived in Santa Barbara. None of his IV buddies would have confused us for the same person though I still had on the torn jeans and ratty army shirt Dusty was always wearing. I was lighter on my feet, faster moving, and a lot more determined.