Secret of the Seventh Son (22 page)

He'd never read a screenplay before. Its shiny brass brads reminded him of the last time he'd laid eyes on one, a month earlier at Mark Shackleton's house. He turned the cover page and waded in--the format confused him with all the interior/exterior jazz.

After a few pages he had to start over, but then he got into the swing of it. Apparently, the character he inspired was named Jack, a man whose sparse description seemed to fit him to a tee: a brawny man in his forties, a sandy-haired product of the South with an easy manner and a hard edge.

Unsurprisingly, Jack was a high-functioning alcoholic and womanizer. He was in a new relationship with Marie, a sculptress who knew better than to let a man like him into her life but was powerless to resist him. Jack, it seemed, had left a trail of women in his wake, and--painfully to Will--one of them was a daughter, a young woman named Vicki. Jack was haunted by flashbacks of Amelia, an emotionally frail woman whom he had beaten to a metaphysical pulp before she set herself free with vodka and carbon monoxide. Amelia--a thinly veiled homage to Melanie, Will's first wife and Laura's mother--was a woman who found the waters of life too difficult and complicated to navigate. Throughout the script, she appeared to him, cherry red from the poison, rebuking him about his cruelty to Marie.

Midway through the script, Will found himself too sober to continue, so he poured a fresh three fingers. He waited for the drink to anesthetize him then carried on till the bitter end, to Marie's suicide, witnessed by the sobbing presence of Amelia, and to Vicki's redemptive decision to leave her own abusive relationship and choose a kinder, though less passionate man. And Jack? He moved on to Sarah, Marie's cousin, who he met at her funeral, the wrecking ball still swinging away.

When he put the script down, he wondered why he wasn't crying.

So this was how his daughter saw him. Was he that grotesque?

He thought about his ex-wives, multiple girlfriends, the conga line of one-nighters, and now Nancy. Most of them pretty nice gals. He thought about his daughter, a good egg tainted by the sulfurous bad-egg smell of her father. He thought about--

Suddenly, his introspection braked to a screeching halt. He grabbed at the script and opened it to a random page.

"Son of a bitch!"

The screenplay font.

It was Courier 12 point, the same as the Doomsday postcards.

He had forgotten his initial puzzlement at the postcard font, an old standby from the days of typewriters but a more uncommon choice in the computer/printer age. Times New Roman, Garamond, Arial, Helvetica--these were the new standards in the world of pull-down menus.

He jumped onto the Internet and had his answer. Courier 12 was the mandatory font for screenplays, completely de rigueur. If you submitted a script to a producer in another format you'd be laughed out of town. Another tidbit: it was also widely used by computer programmers to write source code.

A mental vision slammed into his thoughts. A couple of screenplays authored by "Peter Benedict" and a few black Pentel pens sat on a white desk near a bookcase filled with computer programming books. Mark Shackleton's voice-over completed the imagery: "I don't think you're going to catch the guy."

He spent a short while contemplating the associations, odd as they were, before dismissing as absurd the notion there might be a connection between the Doomsday case and his college roommate. Schackleton, the grown-up nerd, running around New York, stabbing, shooting, sowing mayhem! Please!

Still, the postcard font was an unplumbed clue--he strongly felt it now--and he knew that to ignore one of his hunches would be foolhardy, especially when otherwise they were at a complete dead end.

He grabbed his cell phone and excitedly texted Nancy:
U and I are going to be reading scripts. Doomie may be a screenwriter.

S
he felt the smooth, cool fourteen-carat links of the wrist-band and ran her fingertip over the rough border of diamonds around the narrow rectangular watch face.

"I like this one," she murmured.

"Excellent choice, madame," the jeweler said. "This Harry Winston is a popular choice. It's called the 'Avenue Lady.'"

The name made her laugh. "Hear what it's called?" she asked her companion.

"Yep."

"Isn't that perfect!"

"How much?" he asked.

The jeweler looked him in the eye. If the man had been Japanese or Korean or an Arab, he'd have known the sale was in the bag. As it was, Americans in khakis and baseball caps were a tough call. "I can sell it to sir today for $24,000."

Her eyes widened. This was the most expensive one. Still, she
loved
it, and let him know by nervously touching the bare skin of his forearm.

"We'll take it," he said without hesitation.

"Very good, sir. How would sir like to pay?"

"Just put it on my room. We're staying in the Piazza Suite."

The jeweler would have to pop into the back room to confirm the sale but he was feeling solid. The suite was one of their best, fourteen-hundred square feet of marble and opulence, with a spa and sunken living room.

She was wearing the watch when they left the shop. The sky over St. Mark's Square was perfectly baby blue with just the right assortment of fluffy cumulus clouds. A gondola ferrying a rigid, unsmiling Swiss couple glided by. The gondolier launched into song to stir up some emotion in his charges, and his rich voice echoed off the dome. Everything was perfect, her companion thought. The non-Mediterranean temperature, the absence of brackish smells from real canals, and no pigeons. He hated the dirty birds ever since his parents had taken him to the authentic St. Mark's Square as a shy and sensitive boy and a tourist lobbed a handful of bread crumbs near his feet. The pigeon swarm nightmarishly overwhelmed him, and even as an adult he recoiled when he saw flapping wings.

She was wearing the watch as they strolled arm in arm through the lobby of the Venetian Hotel.

She was wearing the watch in the elevator, cocking her hand at an angle to catch the attention of the three ladies riding with them.

And she was wearing the watch and nothing else up in the suite when she gave him the best sex he'd ever had.

He let her call him Mark now, and instead of Lydia, she let him use her real name, Kerry. Kerry Hightower.

She was from Nitro, West Virginia, a river town founded at the turn of the century around a gunpowder plant. It was a gritty place notable for little except that Clark Gable once worked there as a telephone repairman. Growing up poor, she watched old Clark Gable movies and dreamed of becoming a Hollywood actress.

In junior high she discovered her acting skills were not abundant but she doggedly tried out for every school play and community production, landing small supporting roles only because she was so earnest and attractive. But in high school she discovered a higher talent. She loved sex, was extremely good at it, and was completely and charmingly uninhibited. In a revelation, she settled on a new amalgamated calling: she decided she would become a porn star.

A fellow cheerleader, two years older, had moved to Las Vegas and was working as a card dealer. To Kerry, Vegas was nine-tenths on the way to California, where, as she understood it, the adult film business flourished. A week after graduation from Nitro High, she bought a one-way ticket to Nevada and moved in with her old chum. Life there wasn't easy, but her sunny disposition kept her afloat. She bopped around from one low-paying job to another until she landed, if not on her feet, on her back at an escort agency.

When she'd met Mark at the Constellation, she was on her fourth agency in three years, finally accumulating a little money. She only worked for higher-end outfits where her non-pierced, nontattooed, girl-next-door persona was valued. Most of the men she dated were nice enough fellows--she could count the number of times on one hand when she felt abused or threatened. She never fell for any of her customers--they were johns, after all--but Mark was different.

From the start she found him nerdy and sweet with no macho pretenses. He was wicked smart too, and his job at Area 51 drove her crazy with curiosity because, when she was ten, she was certain she'd seen a flying saucer one summer night, darting high over the Kanawha River, as bright as a jar of lightning bugs collected on the riverbank.

And in the past few weeks, he had dropped the pseudonym and started buying up all of her time and lavishing presents on her. She was starting to feel more like a girlfriend and less like a call girl. He was getting more self-assured by the day, and while he was never going to be Clark Gable, he was beginning to grow on her.

She was unaware that with $5 million sitting high and dry in an offshore bank account, he was feeling more confident about the accomplishments of Mark Shackleton. Peter Benedict was gone. He wasn't needed anymore.

Even the bathrooms in the suite had flat-screen TVs. Mark got out of the shower and started toweling himself. There was a cable channel on. He wasn't paying attention until he heard the word Doomsday and looked up to see Will Piper on a replay of the weekly FBI press conference, standing tall at a podium speaking into a crop of microphones. The sight of Will on TV always made his heart race. He reached for his toothbrush without taking his eyes off the screen and began brushing his teeth.

The last time he'd seen Will at a media briefing, he looked lackluster and dispirited. The postcards and killings had stopped and the wall-to-wall coverage was no longer sustainable. The long unsolved case had drained the public and law enforcement alike. But he seemed more energized today. The old intensity was back. Mark pushed the volume button.

"I can say this," Will was saying. "We are pursuing some new leads and I remain completely confident we will catch the killer."

That irritated Mark and he said, "Oh, bullshit! Give it up, man," before turning off the TV.

Kerry was snoozing on the bed, naked underneath a thin sheet. Mark cinched his bathrobe and retrieved his laptop from his briefcase in the suite's sunken living room. He went online and saw he had an e-mail from Nelson Elder. Elder's list was longer than usual--business was good. It took Mark the better part of half an hour to complete the job and reply via his secure portal.

He went back to the bedroom. Kerry was stirring. She waved her adorned wrist in the air and said something about how great it would be to have a matching necklace. She threw off the sheet and sweetly beckoned him with a finger.

At that precise moment, Will and Nancy were having the opposite of sex. They were sitting at Will's office plowing through a mind-numbing mountain of bad screenplays, completely unsure of the object of their exercise.

"Why were you so confident at the news conference?" she asked him.

"Did I overdo it?" he asked sleepily.

"Oh, yeah. Big-time. I mean, what do we have here?"

Will had to shrug. "A wild-goose chase is better than doing nothing."

"You should've told the press that. What are you going to say next week?"

"Next week's a week away."

The wild-goose chase almost didn't happen. Will's initial call to the Writers Guild of America was a disaster. They lit into him about the Patriot Act and vowed to fight till Hell froze over to prevent the government from getting its mitts on a single script in its archives. "We're not looking for terrorists," he had protested, "just a demented serial killer." But the WGA was not going to give in without a fight, so he got his superiors to sign off on a subpoena.

Screenwriters, Will learned, were a squirrelly lot, paranoid about producers, studios, and especially other writers ripping them off. The WGA gave them a modicum of comfort and protection by registering their scripts and storing them electronically or in hard copy in case proof of ownership was ever required. You didn't have to be a guild member--any amateur hack could register his script. All you did was send a fee and a copy of the screenplay and you were done. There were West Coast and East Coast chapters of the WGA. Over fifty thousand scripts a year were registered with WGA West alone, a tidy little business for the guild.

The Department of Justice had a tricky time with the probable cause section of the subpoena. It was "fanciful," Will was told but they'd give it the old college try. The FBI ultimately succeeded at the Ninth District Court of Appeals because the government agreed to whittle down its request so it was less of a fishing expedition. They'd only get three years' worth of scripts from Las Vegas and a halo of Nevada zip codes, and the writers' names and addresses would be suppressed. If any "leads" were developed from this universe of material, the government would have to go back with fresh probable cause to obtain the writer's identity.

The scripts started pouring in, mostly on data disks but also in boxes of printed material. The FBI clerical staff in New York went into printer overdrive, and eventually Will's office looked like a caricature of the mail room at a Hollywood talent agency, film scripts everywhere. When the task was done, there were 1,621 Nevada-pedigreed screenplays sitting on the twenty-third floor of the Federal Building.

Without a road map, Will and Nancy couldn't skim too hastily. Still, they quickly found a rhythm and were able to slog through a script in about fifteen minutes, carefully reading the first few pages to get the gist, then flipping and scanning the rest. They steeled themselves for a slow, laborious process, hoping to wrap up the task within one painful month. Their strategy was to look for the obvious: plots about serial killers, references to postcards, but they had to stay vigilant for the nonobvious--characters or situations that simply struck a responsive chord.

The pace was unsustainable. They got headaches. They got irritable and snapped at each other all day then retreated to Will's apartment to make cranky love in the evenings. They needed frequent walks to clear their heads. What really made them crazy was that the vast majority of scripts were complete and utter crap, incomprehensible or ridiculous or boring to the extreme. On the third or fourth day of the exercise, Will perked up when he picked up a script called
Counters
and declared excitedly, "You're not going to believe this, but I know the guy who wrote this."

"How?"

"He was my freshman roommate in college."

"That's interesting," she said, uninterested.

He read it much more thoroughly than the others, which set him back an hour, and when he put it down he thought, Don't give up your day job, buddy.

At three in the afternoon Will made a notation into his database about a piece of dreck concerning a race of aliens who came to Earth to beat the casinos, and grabbed the next one in his pile.

He gently kicked Nancy's knee with the tip of his loafer.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey," she replied.

"Suicidal?"

"I'm already dead," she answered. Her eyes were pink and arid. "What's your point?"

His next one was titled
The 7:44 to Chicago
. He read a few pages and groused, "Christ. I think I read this one a few days ago. Terrorists on a train. What the fuck?"

"Check the submission date," she suggested. "I've had a few with multiple submissions. Writer changes it and spends another twenty bucks to register it again."

He punched the title into his database. "When you're right, you're right. This one's a later draft. I rated it zero out of ten for relevance. I can't read it again."

"Suit yourself."

He started to close the script then stopped himself. Something caught his eye, a character name, and he began frantically paging forward, then sat upright, flipping faster and faster.

Nancy noticed something was up. "What?" she asked.

"Gimme a second, gimme a second."

She watched him make frantic notes, and whenever she interrupted to ask what he had, he replied, "Would you please just wait a second?"

"Will, this isn't fair!" she demanded.

He finally put the script down. "I've got to find the earlier draft. Could I have missed this? Quick, help me find it, it's called
The 7:44 to Chicago
. Check the Monday stack while I check Tuesday."

She crouched on the floor near the windows and found it a few minutes later, deep in a pile. "I don't know why you don't tell me what's going on," she complained.

He grabbed it out of her hands. In seconds he was shaking with excitement. "Good Lord," he said softly. "He changed the names from the earlier draft. It's about a group of strangers who get blown up by terrorists on a train from Chicago to L.A. Look at their last names!"

She took the script and started reading. The names of the strangers floated off the page: Drake, Napolitano, Swisher, Covic, Pepperdine, Santiago, Kohler, Lopez, Robertson.

The Doomsday victims. All of them.

There was nothing she could say.

"The second draft was registered April 1, 2009, seven weeks before the first murder," Will said, kneading his hands. "April Fool's Day--ha, fucking ha. This guy planned it out and advertised it in advance in a goddamned screenplay. We need an emergency order to get his name."

He wanted to envelop her, lift her off the ground and swing her in a circle by her waist, but he settled for a high five.

"We've got you, asshole," he said. "And your script pretty much sucks too."

Will would remember the next twenty-four hours the way one remembered a tornado--emotions rising in anticipation of the impact, the blurred and deafening strike, the swath of destruction, and afterward the eerie calm and hopelessness at the loss.

The Ninth Circuit granted the government's subpoena and the WGA unmasked the writer's personal data.

He was at his PC when his inbox was dinged by an e-mail from the Assistant U.S. Attorney running the subpoena. It was forwarded from the WGA with the subject line:
Response to US Gov v. WGA West re. WGA Script #4277304.