Fixer (17 page)

“We didn’t think any such thing. The investigating cops had just missed it was the argument. And the camera didn’t pick it up because of a trick of the lighting or something like that. None of the answers were all that great, but they were better than anything else we had. Up until Jamie Silverman.”

Corrigan nodded. “Bathtub,” he said simply, with the expression of a man who hadn’t been able to get a certain image out of his mind.

“I was at the scene as soon as the cops were that day, and so were Hicks and Masterson and a few other people who’d started to take this seriously,” she said, cautiously omitting the fact that Hicks was actually there to try and prove Maggie was wasting federal time on the investigative equivalent of a snipe hunt. “By the time we arrived, the water was cold and so was the bathroom. But it’s a funny thing; when you put four or five people together in a small enclosed space like that, it starts to heat up. Silverman had one of those glass-paneled shower doors. They were clear when we first stepped in, but after an hour or so, the doors started to fog.”

Maggie hesitated. Even after what had happened in Erica’s apartment, she had trouble admitting something like this out loud. Finally, she said, “I saw it happen personally.”

“What happen?” he asked, although it was hard to imagine he didn’t already know what she was talking about.

“The words spelled themselves out in the fog on the shower door.”

“Kilroy.”

“Yeah.”

“You think the invisible killer is a Styx fan?”

Maggie smiled. “The ‘Kilroy was here’ messages first turned up in World War II. Whenever GIs were sent off someplace, they’d find the message scrawled and left there for them even, as legend had it, if they were the first ones to arrive. The prosaic explanation was that they were done by James Kilroy, a naval shipyard inspector, after which the practice was picked up by other soldiers.”

“Maybe he’s your killer,” Corrigan said with a slight smile. At least he was calming down a bit.

“I would think he’d be too old, provided he isn’t dead.”

“Perfect,” he said. “You’re looking for a ghost already.”

She laughed. “It’s not a ghost. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a ghost.”

“Well, when you’ve eliminated the impossible . . .”

“Sherlock Holmes? You’re quoting me Sherlock Holmes? I didn’t know you read.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” he said, offhand. “Look, call an exorcist or something. I can’t help you.”

“I think we both know that’s not true,” she said flatly. 

He stared at her. “What the hell are you talking about?” he asked. “Is this more of Calvin’s bull?”

“I saw your expression when Tanya spoke. Something there struck a chord. I need to know what that is.”

“It’s not relevant,” he said. “I already told you that.”

She’d had about enough. “I have tried to be understanding, Corrigan, because I know this kind of thing can be difficult, but . . .”

“What did he tell you?” Corrigan half-shouted.

“Fine,” she said. She reached into the leather portfolio at her feet and pulled out a thick file, slapping it on the table.

“That would be?” he asked.

“Your life.” She flipped it open, talking as she paged through. “You know, I completely understand why you don’t want anything to do with Professor Calvin. Because if someone did this to
my
life? I’d be pretty pissed off about it, too.”

“He gave that to you?” he muttered.

“Seems talking to you gave him a pretty interesting idea, only he needed to collect more data and you cut him off. Again, don’t blame you. But as he told me, truly great ideas only happen once or twice in the lifetime of a scientist—if they’re lucky—and he wasn’t about to let this one go. So he hired a couple of people to collect whatever data they could. It’s funny; he got more on you than the FBI did. I might want to look into who did his investigating for him, see if they could do some work for us.”

Corrigan, who wasn’t taking his eyes off the pages in her hand, said nothing.

“Anyway, this idea of his had legs. But all he had was a theory, and it was such an outlandish theory he figured he needed to get some testing done to see if it proved out. So he contacted Michael Offey for help with that. Offey had been working on it up until his death, using a mixture of handpicked postgrads and sharp undergrads. Seems like he co-opted half the damn school.”

She’d stopped leafing through, but had her hand down on the page, preventing Corrigan from seeing exactly where she’d stopped.

“The victims,” he said. “They were all working on something Calvin had figured out, and he’d figured it out from meeting me. Is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s what I’m saying. I didn’t know any of this until after I questioned Calvin. He recognized me.”

She held up the page. It was a copy of a photograph showing her next to Corrigan, standing just close enough to imply they were more than casual acquaintances.

“Based on my hairstyle, I think the picture’s at least five years old,” she said. “Anyway, like I said, I sympathize.”

Maggie slid the page back into the folder and continued flipping through. “He didn’t connect the project with Offey to the deaths either, not right away. But something I said made him put something else together. Something about ghosts killing people.”

Corrigan stiffened slightly. “I don’t see the connection, Maggie.”

“You do. You just don’t want to. Why don’t you tell me what happened to you at McClaren?”

“The hospital?”

“The same,” she said.

“It’s been closed for years. I remember something about a patient killing some people there a while back.”

“Of course you remember,” she said, still flipping the pages in front of her. “Vividly, I would think.”

She stopped at the appropriate page and slapped it on the table. The image was from a thirty-year old edition of the Boston Globe. The text had a basic rundown of what Corrigan had just recapped, but that wasn’t the interesting part. The interesting part was the photograph to the right of the text. It showed police escorting staff members from the building. In the foreground was a dark-haired young woman in an orderly’s uniform escorting a small boy away from the door, her arm wrapped protectively around his shoulders. To anybody who had ever met Corrigan Bain face-to-face there would have been no question who that little boy was.

Maggie said, “So now I’m asking again—what happened at McClaren that day?”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with this,” he said quietly.

“Oh bullshit. C’mon, you know the stories. There was no way one man alone did all of that killing. I’ve seen the police records, Corrigan. Three different survivors in separate statements claimed to have been attacked by someone
they couldn’t see
. Ghosts, they said. Sure, they were mental patients, but . . .”

“McClaren has nothing to do with this!” Corrigan shouted, jumping to his feet. “So you leave me—you leave my life—out of this!”

He brought his palm down hard on the top of the table, which was fortunately made entirely of metal or else Maggie would have been showered with wood fragments.

“Now give me that file,” he growled, “so I can burn it.”

For the first time she could remember, Maggie Trent was afraid of Corrigan Bain; the tightly reined man she’d known for twelve years was nowhere to be seen. So she handed over the folder, not mentioning it was a copy. Calvin still had the original and she had another copy at the office. 

He snatched it out of her hand and stormed off without another word.

Maggie sat by herself for a few minutes, long enough for her to convince herself that she wasn’t trembling.
Guess I touched a nerve.

“Well,” she said to nobody, “that went great.”

Packing up her files, Maggie realized she’d never gotten the chance to tell Corrigan the most important piece of news about this case: Erica Smalls had survived the attack.

PART TWO

THIRTY YEARS PAST

Chapter Twelve

The Fastest Boy Alive careened fearlessly down Trapelo Road at a speed that was beyond the ken of ordinary mortals, many of whom stepped aside in awe as he raced past them, past the cars also making their way down the hill, past the sound barrier even. Or so the Fastest Boy Alive figured. He’d only learned there was such a thing as a sound barrier a couple of weeks ago, and all he remembered about it was that when you broke it, it made a big noise. He figured that was how people ahead of him knew he was coming. Surely they couldn’t hear, as he did, the tires of his dirt bike as they whined a distinct A-sharp note against the wind that was also drying the sweat out of his T-shirt and whipping his hair against his ears so hard it stung. 

The tightness in his calves and thighs was also carried off by the wind along with, more reluctantly, six months of cabin fever. Spring had finally arrived, and nothing was going to stop him from enjoying this moment—not the impossibly steep climb to get to the highest point on Trapelo, and not Violet, who hated the Fastest Boy Alive and would very much rather have him pretend to be little Corry Bain all the time.

This stretch of road was more or less typical of the area—narrow, winding, and steep, with parked cars where there was no room for them. Corry was pretty sure the road was old enough to make sense back when people used horses and such to get around. Sometimes he wished he could use a horse. It’d sure be lots more fun than Violet’s Dodge Dart, which smelled like exhaust and pine. The Dart had more trouble with the Trapelo hills than he did on his bike. Surely a horse would do better than both. Maybe it wouldn’t smell any better, though.

Nearly to the bottom of the hill and after what had to be two or three sonic booms, the Fastest Boy Alive reached the turn before the Intersection of Doom. This was a stoplight whose timing was specifically designed to foil his goal of reaching the bottom without any application of brakes and was doubly troublesome for being hidden by a blind curve and a slight leveling of the hill. Ordinary mortals might be confounded by such a thing, but not him. 

He concentrated on the Present while chancing a quick look at the Secret Future. When he was just a little kid it took him, like, forever to figure out how to do this, but now it was as easy as . . . well, riding a bike. And his bike was a time machine, he figured, because the faster he went, the further ahead he could see, just because he got to everyplace sooner.

Rounding the bend in the Secret Future, he saw the light was just turning green. In the present, he was about to come around that corner. He swerved around the guy getting out of the car without checking first to see if there were any hell-bent bikers bearing down and went by so fast he almost didn’t hear the man utter a bad word in surprise. And then he was around the bend where the light was just turning green.

Then the Secret Future went all nutty. Corry saw and felt himself hitting the back of a car that had been turning in front of him, one he thought was going to be out of the way before he got there up until the car stopped suddenly and left its rear end right where Corry was steering the bike. Corry felt himself flying headfirst down the hill—the Fastest Broken Boy Barely Alive.

He winced and very nearly lost control of the bike. Sometimes the Secret Future was so vivid, he forgot it was a ghost future and that it wasn’t permanent. He reluctantly applied the brakes.

Of all the things he had to get used to in his life, the part about how the future isn’t really the future until it’s actually happened was the hardest. Just thinking about it made his head hurt, so he didn’t think about it too much. It was Corry’s Secret Future, and that was that. Maybe it happened, and maybe he changed stuff around so something different happened instead. Usually it was just a lot easier to go along with it because it was so much less confusing that way, especially since it took a second or two for the Secret Future to go away properly. Which was why, even as he jerked his bike around the big Chevy’s fishtail, he could still see the asphalt coming up to greet his face. Thankfully, the adjustment took just before he got a chance to feel what would have happened next.

He remembered when he first figured out how things worked with the Secret Future. It took a good year or so of experimenting with it, which involved mostly saying inappropriate things at odd moments just to see how it played out. This gave Violet no end of grief, which he felt bad about when he looked back on it. 

Corry was old enough to have developed an appreciation for the decisions his mother made in raising him and had only just recently begun to turn a critical eye on some of those decisions. A certain commune in Maine sprang to mind. And immediately sprang back out again because Violet had made him promise to never talk about it. Not that he remembered much. What he did remember was how suddenly they had left, heading out into the woods near nightfall and fully expecting to be eaten by some sort of creature until happening on a farmhouse occupied by an elderly couple named Crandall. The Crandalls, fortunately, had a god who told them they had to take in Violet and Corry. Corry wasn’t sure which god that was, but he was awfully glad this god had left instructions for their care.

And the sound of the shotgun; he remembered that, and he remembered what happened to Charlie Bluff’s leg. He didn’t
want
to remember either of those things, but they wouldn’t go away.

Once past the Intersection of Doom, there was nothing left for the Fastest Boy Alive to do but come to the bottom of the hill and coast to a stop. He could have allowed his momentum to carry him through the next intersection, but it was even worse than Doom. It was Certain Death. He didn’t need to see the Secret Future to understand that. Plus, he had to turn left from that point and head back uphill again. Not that it mattered, as it was uphill in all directions; he had come to a stop in the bottom of a bowl.

Corry looked down at his watch—a black, plastic marvel with a digital face that he’d gotten for Christmas and which, if he wasn’t careful, he could stare at for hours—and saw that it was still too early. He pulled the bike off the side of the street and walked it to the playground just to the right of the Intersection of Certain Death.