The Glass House (2 page)

“Want to tell me about you and Mr. Roberts?”

“Nah—I think I'd prefer not to.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“No—but if you undo these cuffs I'll find him.”

“Pretty sure of yourself, aren't you?”

“I'm more than able to track down a felon, yes.”

“You didn't track him down, you tracked down his son.”

“Seth.”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “Seth Roberts.”

She'd only had information lately on the son, while she'd been accumulating data on the father for years. “So you found the boy and waited for the father to show up. Did you case the place?”

He nodded.

“What did you find?”

“A charlatan; a big-assed fake! I mean dream healing—”

“You mean the guy who ran it was a charlatan?”

“Who else?”

“Name?”

Garreth paused.

“What?”

“Couldn't find a real name. Couldn't find dick-all about him, really. Strange that. All I ever got was initials for him—assuming those initials were even for his name. Fuck, they could have been for his astrological sign for all I know.”

“Initials?”

“Yeah, but I didn't care. I wasn't after him. I was after Decker Roberts.”

“The one you claimed was a child murderer?”

“Bingo, lass.”

Something about the curl in his voice annoyed her—that thing that said women have a place and the place wasn't here. She closed the folder, clicked off the light and left the room and Garreth Laurence Senior, still chained to the bed, in complete darkness.

• • •

In the modest kitchen she saw Ted Knight making coffee while Mr. T sat at the Formica-topped table and ate something that could clog the arteries of an entire city block.

They both looked up as she entered.

“Coffee, boss?” Ted Knight asked.

She shook her head.

“He giving you trouble?” asked Mr. T.

She didn't answer. Once again—as had happened so often in her dealings with Decker Roberts—she sensed that she was missing something. Something important.

She nodded at Mr. T. “A word?”

“Sure.”

They went into the small fenced-in backyard. Ted Knight did his best not to be seen eyeing their exit, but both Yslan and Mr. T saw him trace their every move.

Once they were alone, Yslan turned to Mr. T. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“You were there.”

“Yes, of course, keeping Decker safe. He's a valuable asset. That's what you called him. So yeah, when that ex-cop attacked him, I stepped in.”

“Then you let Decker go.”

“Like you told me to do.”

A line from one of Decker's lectures to his acting class popped into her head: “We are never so messed up as when we mess up ourselves.” She nodded, went to apologize, then shelved the idea and said, “Fuck it.”

“What exactly is it that I'm supposed to fuck?”

She knew that either this guy or Ted Knight back in the kitchen reported her every move to Leonard Harrison, her boss at the NSA, but she didn't know which one.

“Something else, ma'am?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“You call me ma'am again and I'll have you transferred to the Skagway office.”

“We have a Skagway office?”

“Yeah. And I hear the four days of summer they have up there are delightful.”

• • •

When she returned to Garreth's room, she was not surprised to see that the man was relaxed and ready to do battle.

“So,” he said as soon as she clicked on the lamp, “which kind of fed are you? CIA, NSA . . .”

Before Yslan could answer, Garreth Senior snarled, “What are you, Decker Roberts' protector or something?”

“Let's leave it at ‘or something.' ”

“You know that he's a fucking murderer. You know that, right?”

After a pause she said, “Sure, we know that.”

“You're a bad liar. A very bad liar, lass.”

She thought about that. Before she spent those three days with Decker in this very safe house she could lie with the best of them. It was part of her survival kit. But now evidently she had lost that skill.
Could it have something to do with Decker? He was able to tell when someone was telling the truth, but he was a terrible liar himself. An irony,
she thought, then quickly a second thought followed:
Since when had that word “irony” become an important part of my vocabulary?
But she knew the answer to her question—since she'd had those three days with Decker.

She noticed the old cop's lips were moving again.

“A little girl. A six-year-old.”

“What about a six-year-old?”

“That's who he murdered—a six-year-old girl.”

“Please—”

“You ever notice him close his eyes then seem to scrape something off his hand? Ever notice that?”

She had but wasn't about to say so.

“I have no idea what the eye-closing rigmarole is, but wiping the hand? That's blood he's wiping off. A little girl named Kristan Ray. When he was a kid he cut her with a garden trowel and she bled out beneath the weight of the snow of the igloo they'd built.”

She didn't say anything.

He shifted on the bed, his back resting comfortably against the wall, and said, “That's who you're protecting. A damnable child murderer.”

But Yslan wasn't listening. She was remembering Decker wiping something from his hand—over and over—almost every time after she'd seen him close his eyes to find out if a person was telling the truth. He'd close his eyes. His breath would shallow, then he'd wipe his hand—his right hand against his pant leg—as if he were wiping away blood from his fingers.

The older man's lips were moving again.

“So I thought about your Mr. Decker Roberts, off and on, for years. There was something about him—something odd, and it just got odder as he got older. In his twenties he came on my radar again. You seen his website?”

Yslan had but didn't nod.

“Whatthefucksthetruth dot com. Well that, you might say, piqued my interest. You know that he rented himself out to rich corporations as a kind of human lie detector, don't cha?”

“A truth detector,” Yslan said.

“What by all that's holy is the difference?” he shot back.

Yslan knew in her heart that there was a serious difference but didn't say so.

“Well, I followed him to a few of these little sessions of his and got the videotapes of him from the jerks who hired him. And every time right before he made a notation on the transcript, he
closed his eyes, then rubbed his right hand against his pant leg.” Garreth Senior paused, clearly pleased with himself. Then he added, “That right hand—like he was wiping blood from his right hand. Like the boy coming out of that damned igloo did—like the fucking child murderer he is.”

Yslan stared at Garreth Senior. The pupils of his eyes had narrowed to tiny black pinpricks. His face was contorted in a rictus. Clearly from the moment he first met Decker Roberts he'd been obsessed with him—maybe possessed was a better description. But whatever the word, the man was sick—and the sickness clearly had started on a cold day in the Glencairn section of North Toronto when Decker Roberts emerged from a collapsed igloo while a little girl had died inside—and wiped his blood-covered right hand against his pant leg.

Without any explanation she flicked off the light and left the room.

• • •

Late that night she awoke with a start. She'd figured it out—or her dream had. She reviewed it again. Decker closing his eyes. His breath shallowing. Then wiping his hand on his jeans—his right hand. He wiped his right hand.

But he was left-handed.

If he'd cut that girl with a garden trowel as Garreth Senior claimed, then he'd have blood on his left hand, not his right. A left-handed person would only end up with a right hand full of blood if he'd used his right hand to hold the victim down and then plunged a knife or trowel or whatever into the victim with his left.

But he couldn't possibly have done that under the weight of all that snow—nor could a left-handed five-year-old boy have the strength in his right hand to do the damage that Garreth Senior claimed had been done to that little girl.

Yet there was something viscous on Decker's hand that he
wiped off—certainly something like blood. But whose blood? Who had Decker held with his right hand as he drew blood with a weapon in his left?

She tried to envision it—holding someone down. Why down? No, just holding. So the victim was still, and Decker had his right hand on his . . . chest! And the knife in his left hand—started over his head and thrust down, or out, through the heart. The aorta in shock contracted and threw blood up through the gash—and soaked Decker's right hand.

She got out of bed and threw open the curtains. A star-filled night greeted her. But she was not one for stargazing. If she had been, she'd have noticed that the stars over her head were out of place. Venus was above the moon on the eastern horizon, Scorpio was rising in the west with its tail raised and third star in its torso red and pulsing like a heart—then of course there was the four-star constellation that was so aptly named the Southern Cross. Yslan didn't know it, but she too was sliding and was now looking at the exact same sky as Decker was in Solitaire, Namibia—some seven-thousand-plus miles to the southeast.

Two worlds sliding—attempting to align.

Then her phone rang. It was the head of Homeland Security—he'd never called her before. As she heard his oddly detached voice, the hair on the back of her neck stood up and sweat popped out on her brow. “I need you to find a safe phone and call me.” He told her to follow the protocol, then hung up.

DECKER ROBERTS BRUSHED THE SUDDEN
gush of tears from his cheeks. He was pretty sure that he was now standing beside his rented Jeep and looking at a large white man blowing the Namibian dust off his hands with an air compressor more traditionally used for inflating tires.

Yet he knew he had been fully alive only a moment ago thousands of miles away with a scalpel in his left hand, standing between the lamp post and the Joshua tree, his hand on his son's chest, and blood—so much blood—and his son's terrified shriek, “Don't do this, Father. Don't!”

He shook his head to try and clear it as he thought,
Sliding, I'm sliding.

For the past three days, like Tom Hanks at the end of
Cast Away,
he had simply allowed the rented Jeep to lead him. Of course in Namibia there weren't that many choices.

He'd followed Highway 1 for days—sleeping in his vehicle with the Southern Cross above him and Scorpio rising. In the morning the Hindi people's oddly familiar mannequins appeared beside his car. In the dawn's light, with the pale moon on the horizon, he'd left money in the pouches of the statues then gotten back in his car and driven as Inshakha had instructed him to do all those months ago.

He'd been in Namibia before. It was his retreat from the world, and each time he'd been there Inshakha had, as if by magic, appeared at his side. They'd spent days and nights together—although never as lovers. When Yslan Hicks had come to drag him back to America to help her find who had planted those bombs at Ancaster College, she'd seen Inshakha and called her a whore. Inshakha had gone toe to toe with the powerful NSA agent and told her to “watch your mouth. You are a foreigner in a part of the world that takes slander seriously.” Then she had turned, with such grace, and walked away.

The last Decker had seen of Inshakha she was sitting naked to the waist on the side of their rented cottage's bathtub pressing red mud into the beauty of her face, retreating from him—from them—into the deep private reality of an African woman, a place to which he could not even consider following her.

Decker drove and ended here—at the intersection of Highways 1 and 6—at a junction that consisted of nothing more than a petrol station, a small gift shop and a bakery that emitted the unmistakable smell of fresh-baked apple pies. There were three picnic tables but nothing else—except for miles and miles of desert in every direction.

The place's tattered sand-scoured tin sign hung at an odd angle and proclaimed its name: Solitaire. Solitaire, Namibia.

The large white man clicked off the air compressor, looked up and saw Decker—and his round face turned dark and stern. Then words came from his mouth. “I've been waiting a long time for your coming. I'm glad you finally found your path.”

Decker had no idea what the big man was talking about.

“Yes, to Solitaire, to the junction of Highways Six and One.”

“There's a song.”

“Really?” the large man asked, clearly not all that interested.

“Yeah, really. But it's ‘Highway 61
Revisited.
' ”

The large white man didn't respond, but Decker sensed
something moving behind his eyes. What, he couldn't even begin to guess. Then the man turned to him. “ ‘Highway 61 Revisited'?”

“Yeah it's the name—”

“Of a song. So you've said.”

Then, not knowing exactly why he was asking, he asked, “Do you have music here?”

“Music is everywhere,” the large man responded as he scanned the vast emptiness, “but you don't hear it—yet.” Before Decker could question that, the man said, “You can call me Linwood,” then he pointed to a small door behind the bakeshop. “This way. It's time you began to learn.”

“Learn what?”

“Learn why you came here.”

“I didn't come here. I just—”

“Of course that's what you think but you've been aiming towards Solitaire for a very, very long time. And I've been waiting for you all that time.”