Thicker Than Blood

"Andrew?" she calls out. No answer. After three more steps, she leans down so that she can see into the basement. She inspects the rows of clutter for several seconds, then straightens up and clumps back up the staircase. But her footsteps stop before she reaches the door, and she goes back down again to where she was and looks directly into the camera. I see the confusion on her face, but it’s not yet accompanied by fear.

My mother walks carefully to the bottom of the staircase and stops before the camera. She’s still wearing that green dress, but her white hair is down now. She stares curiously into the lens, that sharp crease wrinkling up between her eyebrows.

"HI, MOM!" Orson screams. She looks behind the camera. The fear in her face destroys me, and as she shrieks and runs for the staircase, the camera crashes to the concrete floor.

After the screen turned blue again, I sat for five seconds in unholy shock. He did not kill our mother. He did…I smelled Windex. A hard metallic object thumped the back of my skull.

Lying on my back beside the couch and staring up through the windows, I saw that morning was now just a few hours away — that purple-navy tinge of dawn leeching the darkness from the sky. As I struggled to my feet, the tender knot on the back of my head throbbed on mercilessly.

The television was still on. Kneeling down, I pressed the eject button on the VCR, but the tape had already been removed.

After hanging up the phone in the kitchen, I trudged up the steps to my bedroom. I returned the Glock to the drawer and lay down on top of the covers, bracing myself for the tsunami of despair to consume me. I closed my eyes and tried to cry, but the pain was too intense, too surreal. Could this have been a new nightmare? Maybe I walked down there in my sleep and banged my head. Dreamed a fucked-up dream. That is a possibility. Hold on to that. She’s sleeping. I could call her now and wake her up. She’ll answer the phone, peeved at my rudeness. But she’ll answer the phone, and that’s all that matters.

In darkness, I reached for the phone and dialed my mother’s number.

It rang and rang.

III

18

ON a cold, clear Halloween morning, the world watched Washington, D.C., as city police, FBI, Secret Service, and a myriad of media swarmed the White House. It had begun before dawn.

At 4:30 A.M., a jogger ru

By the time the police arrived, the Secret Service was already on the scene, and suspicion immediately arose that the boxes might contain explosives. So the president was flown to a safe location, the White House staff evacuated, and the quarter-mile stretch of East Street behind the White House occluded.

In Washington, bad news travels fast. By eight o’clock, local and network news crews were camped along the perimeter that the police had established two hundred yards from the boxes. The story broke on every news cha

For two hours, cameras zoomed in on technicians in bomb-resistant suits as they utilized the robot and X-ray unit to investigate each cardboard box. When a box had been cleared, it was set inside an armored truck. Each was opened, but the cameras were too far away to determine what, if anything, was inside. There were at least a dozen boxes, and the bomb squad treated each one as if it contained a nuclear bomb. Their precision made the task tedious, and eleven o’clock had passed before the last box was cleared and the armored truck drove away.

Speculation began. What was inside the boxes if not a bomb? A hoax? An assassination attempt on the president? Rumors and unconfirmed reports swirled through the coverage until a statement was issued by the FBI at 1:30 as East Street reopened.

Special Agent Harold Trent addressed the nation of reporters, speaking into a cluster of microphones, the back side of the White House visible behind him beneath the late October sky. Twelve boxes, most between one and three cubic feet in volume, had been taken into possession by the FBI. No explosive devices had been found. Inside each box was what appeared to be a human heart and a corresponding name.

The reporters fired questions: Were the names those of real people? Would the names be released? Were there any suspects? Why were the boxes left near the White House? Agent Trent refused to theorize. The investigation had only begun, and a special FBI task force would be assembled to work with state and local police until the person or persons responsible had been taken into custody.

Agent Trent took a deep breath, his exhaustion already evident on the screen that transported his image into my living room. He looked into the cameras and spoke words that would be repeatedly broadcast as sound bites in the coming days.

"There’s a long road ahead of us," he said. "It’ll take some time to verify if these are actually the hearts of missing persons or known murder victims. I pray it’s not the case, but this appears to be the work of a serial murderer. And if it is, he’ll continue to kill until he’s caught." The sturdy black agent walked away from the microphones as reporters shouted questions that he ignored.

The nation was captivated, and the media fueled its obsession. Rampant speculation ignited as the country fell in love with its own fear. Even before the FBI confirmed that the hearts represented actual murders, the media had conceived and birthed a monster.

To the dismay of doctors, they would call him "the Heart Surgeon," the professional title marred from that day forward. No one could say the words without provoking images of FBI agents and the Washington, D.C., bomb squad loading cardboard boxes, the work of a madman, into an armored truck.

How strange it felt to be the only one who knew.

19

MIST whipped my face as my boat crawled toward the middle of the lake. I could hear nothing over the gurgling clatter of the outboard motor mounted to the stern of my leaky rowboat. The evening sky threatened rain as I glided across the leaden chop, sca

A half mile out from my pier, I cut the motor. The cold, darkening silence closed in on me, and I wondered if I’d make it home before the rain set in. Though I despised coming out on the lake, I couldn’t speak to Walter in my house anymore without fear that Orson was eavesdropping.

I heard the groan of Walter’s boat before I saw it. My nerves took over, and I regretted not having knocked back several stiff drinks to facilitate what I had to tell him. Walter pulled his equally powerless rowboat beside mine, tossed over a rope, and I tied us together.

"What’s up?" he asked when he’d killed the motor.

"You see the news?"

"Yeah."

He pulled a pack of Marlboro Lights from his brown raincoat and slid a cigarette into his mouth. From a pocket on my blue raincoat, I tossed him a butane cigar lighter. "Thanks," he said, blowing a puff of smoke out of the corner of his mouth and throwing the lighter back to me. "The media’s tickled pink," he said. "You can see it in their ambitious little faces. I’ll bet they blew their load when they got the tip."

"Think they were tipped, huh?"

"Oh, whoever planted those boxes knew exactly what they were doing. Probably called a dozen newspapers and TV stations after the drop. I’ll bet he told them there was a bomb behind the White House. Then that jogger called nine-one-one, confirming the story, and boom…media frenzy." Walter took a long drag from his cigarette and spoke as the smoke curled from his mouth. "Yeah, the only person happier about those hearts than the press is the sick fuck who left them there. He’s probably sitting in front of a TV right now, jacking off, watching the nation drool over his —"