Cut and Run

She was just past the bed, past the TV bleating out its news, when the door seemed to jiggle.

She stopped, frozen.

The door didn’t just seem to jiggle, it was jiggling. And it wasn’t the loud TV making it move.

She wanted to turn and head back to the bathroom, would have given anything to mop up the dark stain of bathwater that now loomed at the junction of the door, her wet footprints where she’d hopped across the carpet. But her legs would not move, would not cooperate.

The door came open.

Again, she screamed one of her muted screams.

It wasn’t Him.

In the blue flickering light of the television, she saw the blistered face and red dripping eye of a two-legged monster.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

By the time the morning sun set the Mississippi ablaze, broken only by the rolling brown Vs cut into it by slowly moving river barges, Larson and Hope were eating bagels wrapped in butcher paper and drinking OJ from plastic bottles in the second-floor offices of Grossman Iron and Steel, five acres of dirt dedicated to mountains of scrap metal. Beyond the yard, a massive twenty-foot wall had been erected forty years earlier by the Army Corps of Engineers to hold back the river’s spring floodwaters.

Skip Grossman was a rowing buddy of Larson’s from Creve Coeur Lake. Mike, who worked the graveyard shift and sat guard on the yard’s gate, knew Larson well enough to admit him. It wasn’t the first time Larson had stashed a witness for a few hours in this brickyard neighborhood that had risen from the Mississippi ’s banks at the birth of the Industrial Revolution.

The two ate their bagels in silence, both lost. It was a matter of waiting now, until Washington University ’s Earth and Planetary Sciences department opened. Their hunt for Markowitz was about to begin in earnest.

In its heyday, in 1904, St. Louis hosted a World’s Fair, the Olympics, and the Democratic National Convention all in the same year. Hundreds of stone mansions that had been erected during this golden era still stood in the area, including a long line of such homes along Lindell Avenue on the northern boundary of Forest Park. Immaculately kept lawns spilled down to what had once been a busy cobblestone thoroughfare.

“You can almost picture the carriages, the gentlemen in top hats, and the Victorian women with their parasols,” she said.

“Gateway to the West,” Larson said from behind the wheel of the Explorer as they made their way toward Washington University. “Anyone heading west resupplied here. It made it a very rich city.”

At the far western edge of the park, just across Skinker Boulevard, the pale stone buildings of Washington University rose in dramatic fashion, showing off a neo-Gothic architecture that rivaled the Ivy League colleges. The buildings stood amid towering oaks, maples, and a few elms that had survived Dutch elm disease. Larson had attended its night-school MBA program, though he had dropped out in the middle of a difficult protection six years earlier-a protection he couldn’t help but be reminded of, given the woman next to him.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“I was thinking back six years ago. And then I was thinking that Pe

She applied makeup to her face using the small mirror in the back of the sun visor. She slowly created the look of a hollow-eyed woman ten to fifteen years older.

“Do you want to know?” she asked.

“Of course I do.”

“Then find her. Take a good long look at her. You’ll know.”

His chest tightened as his heart ran away from him at a full gallop. “I’ve known all along,” he said softly. He wasn’t sure she’d heard him.

“And I’ve waited for you to ask.”

“And I’ve waited for you to tell me.”

“I thought it would be cheap of me. Manipulative. Unfair. ‘It’s your daughter, so do something.’ How could I say that?” She didn’t take her eyes off him. “Are you okay with this?”

His throat caught. He found himself overwhelmed with wonder. Curiosity. Anticipation. “I’m great,” he managed to whisper.

“Light’s green,” she said.

He took an enormous risk by bringing her along. But it seemed a bigger risk to leave her behind and without protection. He could easily justify her being here because of her computer expertise, but what good would justification be if something went wrong?

He drove.

“Why haven’t they called?” she asked yet again.

“What’s she like?” he asked.

She pursed her lips, looked away from him, and attempted to conceal her eyes, now glassy with tears. “Not now. You wanted to know. That’s as far as I can go right now. Please don’t push me on this. The more I think about her…”

He said, “Look… they probably don’t know what to do next. They never meant to have Pe

He pulled to a stop at the next light, the university now directly in front of them.

She fidgeted in her seat. Larson pulled through the intersection and found a place to park. He shut off the motor, and she popped open her door.

“Which one is Earth and Planetary Sciences?”

“Macelwane Hall.”

“Which one?”

“We’ll find it.”

She was out of the car. Larson climbed out, locked up, and caught up to her on the sidewalk. The neo-Gothic architecture towered over them.

Her shoulders slumped, she trudged, head bent, up the incline.

He caught up to her for the second time. “You came to St. Louis because of you and me. For Pe

“I didn’t choose it for the weather,” she said. “But do me a favor and don’t go all warm and fuzzy on me because I don’t think I can handle that right now. Okay?”

He moved closer to her as they walked. He held his hand out to her.

And she took it, their fingers interlaced. Entwined.

Larson squeezed, and she squeezed back. Just for a moment it felt as if he were floating.

“We can’t do this,” she said. “We can’t get everything all confused.”

“Sure we can,” he said. “It can’t get any more confused than it already is; it can only get better.”

“Later,” she said, increasing her pace to keep up with him.

The Earth and Planetary Sciences office was staffed with a combination of salaried assistants and graduate students. The walls were lined with photographs of tornados and satellite images of hurricanes. Dr. Herman Miller, a man in his late sixties, had sad brown eyes, wet lips, and a ru

“Why more questions about Leo?” he asked. “I spoke to someone just yesterday.”

Larson introduced Hope as Alice. “She’s our contract I.T. specialist.”

“We’re interested in reviewing your mainframe’s access logs,” Hope said. “Specifically, the past six weeks.”

“And we’ve been looking them over, just as your guy asked. ‘No stone unturned,’ ” Miller said to Larson. “That’s how your other guy wanted it.”

That was Stubby by the sound of it. Trill Hampton was too street-cool to bog down in clichés.

Nonetheless, Hope and Miller got started, talking their own language. ID log-ons, pattern recognition software, spyware, key-trackers. Hope pushed for specifics each time Miller fired off too quick an answer.

Miller asked rhetorically, “Could Leo Markowitz get in and out of the Cray and the Silicon Graphics without our knowing it? Of course he could.”