Bone Music
“How’d you trigger?”
“If I never have to run across another highway again in my lifetime, it’ll be too soon.”
“Which highway? The 101? When did you guys do this?”
“Night before last. We told you we were getting ready. People honked but none of them even grazed me this time. Probably thought I was a ghost. But it was enough to trigger; that’s for sure.”
“I figured you were looking up directions and stuff.”
“Marty had a sponsee who went and helped a newcomer clean out his house of a bunch of prescriptions he didn’t exactly need.”
“Newcomer?”
“That’s what they call them in AA.”
“Gotcha. So Marty got his hands on a bunch of pills and thought, Hey. Let’s see if we can make Charley overdose while she’s on Zypraxon.”
“Not exactly that, no. If this guy’s a medical professional and he’s really pulling off these abductions in public, chances are ten to one he’s using some kind of tranquilizer or anesthetic. Something to subdue his victims long enough to get them into a vehicle.”
“What other pills did you try?” Luke asks.
“Well, he also had Percocet and OxyContin. Oh, and Ambien.”
“How many did you take of those?”
“Ten.”
“Each?”
She nods.
“And you didn’t feel a thing?”
“No. It’s like it just burns up in my system.”
“Jesus. Not to be too blunt, but I don’t understand how you can take this stuff without your heart exploding.”
“Neither can the people who made it, apparently.”
Luke fastens both tablets into the mounts to make sure they fit. When it’s clear they do, he pulls them out again, sets them aside, huffs out a deep breath, clearly in search of another place to focus his nervous energy.
Bad news.
The text appears on both their burner phones at the same time.
Charlotte types: ???
His computer bores me to tears.
“No pictures of murdered women on Pemberton’s computer, and my brother calls that bad news,” Luke says.
You finally got in? Charlotte types.
With help.
Luke makes a low sound in his throat; the same sound he’s started to make every time Bailey references the other hackers he may or may not be working with and they’ll never know because he doesn’t discuss procedure and they should stop asking already or they’ll risk sounding like tools of the establishment.
But it’s what’s not there . . .
Luke types, What would that (not) be?
No porn.
“Well, that’s suspicious,” Luke says.
“Seriously?”
“A man with no porn on his computer? That’s full-on weird.”
“Uh-huh. Maybe you have a porn problem and you’re projecting?”
“Single man, living on his own. I’m just speaking truths; that’s all. The only men who don’t have some form of porn on their computers are superreligious or they share a computer with their wives.”
“So wives can’t have porn? Wait. Does Tumblr count as porn?”
“If you have to ask . . . Wait a second, though.”
Did you check his web history? Luke types.
Do you think I started doing this yesterday? I’m wanted by the FBI, genius.
“I guess that’s a yes,” Charlotte says. “So why are we talking about Pemberton and porn?”
Luke points to the phone to indicate he wasn’t the one who raised the issue. Good point. She asks Bailey the same question.
Makes me want into that country house more, but there’s no way in . . . yet.
What about his office? Charley types.
Harder. More secure. Probably because of patient info. Not impossible, but harder.
“So he’s not volunteering to hack his office,” Luke says.
“I’m still not sure on the etiquette here. Should I ask him? Offer to send him a fruit basket?”
“He hacks satellites, but suddenly a doctor’s office is hard.”
“Maybe he’s getting tired. And cranky.”
“Tell him what a good little hacker he is and how he’s changed your opinion of hackers forever and ever and you promise to be less hackerphobic in the future.”
Charlotte laughs.
There’s a ping from one of the tablets.
“Doc’s on the move,” Luke says.
She studies the map.
“He’s not headed home.”
“Maybe the gym?” he asks.
Bailey had sent the name and address of the doc’s favorite fitness club before they left Altamira. They’d cruised past the place that morning after it became clear Pemberton was going to be in surgery for a while. It’s one of many businesses inside an upscale corner mini-mall with big walls of glass and escalators traveling all four floors.
“Looks like it,” Luke said.
“Let’s go.”
A few minutes later, the tracker shows Pemberton’s motorcycle has stopped in what appears to be the dead center of Barry Fitness, probably because it’s in the parking lot below. As he closes in on the place, Luke eases his foot off the gas and gives her a long glance that tells her he’s awaiting instructions. It’s almost dusk, and she’s got a baseball cap tucked low over her head. Together with a black hoodie Luke brought, it’s a passable disguise.
“I’m gonna hop out. Circle until I text.”
“Charley.” He brakes, grips her elbow gently. “If you’re gonna use yourself as bait, he can’t see you until it’s time. It’s not time, is it?”
“No. I need a good look at him.”
Luke wants to ask more questions; she can tell. But he restrains himself. Maybe something about her tone conveyed a meaning she wasn’t aware of even as she spoke. Early that morning, they’d reached Pemberton’s high-rise just in time to see him roar out of the parking lot on his bike. But he was helmeted. Faceless. And she’d found herself disappointed that she didn’t get a chance to look into his eyes, to see if she could glimpse something that reminded her of the Bannings. Something predatory, feral.
Luke’s right. Looking into his eyes now is too much of a risk. But she needs to watch him, if only for a few minutes. Needs to observe him when he doesn’t know he’s being observed.
“Be careful,” he says.
She nods and jumps from the Jeep.
Barry Fitness is on the mall’s second floor, with giant walls of glass overlooking the street and the escalator atrium. It’s a small gym, but the equipment inside looks pricey and new. A row of flat-screen televisions hangs from the ceiling, angled down slightly so they can easily be watched from all three rows of cardio equipment.
First she tries the floor above the gym to see if that’ll give her a good vantage point through the escalator well. All she can see is the registration desk, the bored-looking attendant on her smartphone, some weight machines behind a glass partition.
The same spot one floor down gives her a better vantage point, with a greater risk of being seen. From here the gym looks like a glass bubble attached to the mall’s facade. No doubt the design of the place is intended to tap into the exhibitionist tendencies of its clientele, of which there aren’t very many at present. A few women of varying ages and sizes work themselves tirelessly on the treadmills and striders. Even fewer people are on the weight floor, which extends from the first row of cardio machines all the way to the glass wall overlooking the street.
She’s about to scan the surrounding businesses. Maybe Pemberton came here for something besides a workout.
Just then one of the men inside the gym stands up from the shoulder-press machine and rises to an impressive height of over six feet. Bike shorts hug his armor-plated thighs, leaving his carved, veiny calves exposed. A black spandex shirt accentuates his V-shaped torso, particularly the muscular swell of his upper back. Unlike some of the other men pumping iron around him, his body doesn’t have the bulbous curves of the chemically enhanced. Rather, it looks naturally sculpted by hours of grueling work.
His black baseball cap casts some shadow on his face, but she can tell it’s him. It’s the nose that clues her in—the impossibly perfect nose that doesn’t seem to match the rest of his face. Now, with the retouching on his headshot removed, she can clearly see his long mouth that doesn’t seem to close all the way over his tongue, the tiny eyes that make him appear like he’s squinting nervously even as he settles into a new machine and begins confidently hammering out a series of chest presses that sends a stack of metal plates as tall as her knee shooting up and down the cable in quick, smooth repetitions.
Against her will, she feels an almost blinding surge of pity for the man. The quiet gravity with which he expertly goes about his workout seems fueled by neither a love of fitness nor a desire to be healthy; he moves with an angry, bitter determination to be free of his own face. A face, despite his skill and his nose job, he can’t alter to his satisfaction.
Why should she view him any differently than the girls she went to high school with who were driven to eating disorders by their own insecurity about their bodies?
Because he might have killed two women, that’s why.
She realizes she’s been staring too long. Glances down at her phone. There’s a text from Luke.
Eyes on him, she writes back.