Dead Man Running Read online

  “I can’t talk about it here,” he said.

  “I get it. Top secret stuff.” She pantomimed zipping her lips shut and throwing away the key.

  “You could say that.”

  “So are you a cop? No, wait, let me guess.”

  She backed up a step, looking him up and down. Livermore waited patiently. He took a quick glance toward the front of the store, then the back.

  The place was empty. They were alone.

  “I don’t think you’re local,” she said. “You sure don’t sound like you live around here.”

  She has a good eye for detail, he thought. And a good ear.

  “So I’m thinking you’re something federal. FBI, maybe, or a marshal.”

  She’ll remember everything about me. And she’ll remember these photographs.

  “I’m going to say a U.S. marshal. That’s my guess.”

  He smiled again. “What’s your name?”

  “Irene.”

  He nodded. “So, Irene, let me guess what your job is.”

  “No, see, this is just until my—”

  “Until your band hits it big,” Livermore said. “And you can stop driving around in your little Hyundai.”

  She looked at him with surprise. “How did you—”

  He nodded to the set of keys resting on the stool behind her, next to her purse. There was a guitar pick with a hole drilled through it attached to the ring, and the Hyundai symbol was prominent on the biggest key.

  “In the meantime,” he said, “you sell electronics to people who don’t understand how they work. And you develop photographs.”

  Her smiled faded slightly. “Yes . . .”

  “And when you develop those photographs,” he said, taking a half step closer to the counter, “sometimes you break up the monotony by looking at them, by trying to imagine the story behind them.”

  “I didn’t mean to do anything like that. I was just—”

  “You do this with all of the photographs you develop. To pass the time.”

  She looked down and cleared her throat. “No. Not really.”

  “Someday a man will walk in here with some pictures,” he said. “Pictures you aren’t supposed to see.”

  She looked toward the front of the store, like she was hoping someone else would come in. But there was nothing but the darkness outside.

  “You won’t try to imagine the story behind those photographs. You’ll try to forget them. Wish you never saw them. But he’ll know.”

  “Okay,” she said, clearing her throat again. “Can I get you anything else?”

  “You need to be careful with a man like that. The fact that he’s bringing his photographs here . . . It means he has an appreciation for the finished product. He wants a good-quality print. But it also shows a lack of self-control. He’s taking a risk by letting them pass through your hands. A risk he’s prepared to deal with if he has to.”

  She looked back at him without saying a word. The entire store was silent.

  “You don’t want a man like that walking into this store,” Livermore said. “Not if you’re here all by yourself.”

  She looked down at the phone, then at the front of the store again. Then back to Livermore. “The manager is usually in the back.”

  “Usually. But not right now.”

  She didn’t answer. She put her hands together to stop them from shaking.

  Livermore checked his watch. Then he smiled at her one more time.

  “You’ll be closing the store soon,” he said. “Looks like you’ll be safe for tonight.”

  Like the man in the gas station back in New Mexico, she would remember him. She would be able to describe him exactly, re-create his face, transcribe virtually every word he had said to her. Once again, a foolish move for any other man. A tightrope act that Livermore would not trust to anyone else.

  He put the GPS tracker on the counter, next to the envelope containing the prints, and paid for it all with cash. She rang up the transaction quickly, and her hands were still shaking as she put everything in a bag.

  “Enjoy the rest of your evening,” he said.

  Then he went out to his car to wait for her.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THIS LOOKS LIKE something out of a Mad Max movie,” Larkin said as we got out of the car.

  We had driven south, past the edge of the city. No more water, no more attempts to claim land from the desert. The Sierra Estrellas loomed to the west as we went twenty more miles, until we came to a huge sand-and-gravel pit. Then another mile to a turnoff, leading down a long dusty road that seemed to go nowhere. Until we finally came to a homestead and a small cluster of buildings, all glowing in the last light of the day.

  We went to the front door and knocked. I looked around the place, at the old tractors and tools and a million other scraps of metal. An older man answered, a man wearing work pants and a filthy undershirt, with skin slightly less sun-worn than an Egyptian mummy. Larkin had his badge out as soon as the door opened.

  “Who rented the space on your property?” I said.

  “My daughter did the ad,” he said. “A man answered it.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  “He paid cash. He said he’d give me extra if I made sure nobody ever went inside.”

  “Name.”

  The old man had to think about it. I was expecting him to say Gene Lamont again. But he didn’t.

  “Tim Hosley.”

  Another old teammate of mine, from that same team in Toledo. Another young player who got a September call-up.

  It’s like he knew I’d be standing right here, I thought. Right here in this spot. Asking this exact question.

  “We’re going to have to see inside that building,” Larkin said.

  “It’s got a padlock on it. Don’t have the key.”

  “That’s what bolt cutters are for,” I said. “I’m sure you have a pair.”

  The man didn’t bother to lie. He closed the door for a moment, came back with a huge pair of bolt cutters, and we followed him down a long driveway that passed by other buildings, a few old cars, another tractor, another few million scraps of junk metal, until we got to the end.

  Gene Lamont, I thought. Tim Hosley.

  I’d been keeping myself focused on the job at hand, hunting down the leads, from one location to the next . . . But now that I was here, I could feel myself getting closer to him, to the place where the real Livermore lived. Those names from my past, they just fed the flames, made me want to find him even more.

  It felt like he was watching us. At that very moment, as we walked down that last dusty road to the place that held his secrets.

  It felt like he was laughing at us.

  “Alex,” Larkin said. “We should call the office first.”

  “We’re here,” I said. “Let’s see what’s inside.”

  The building was made of tin, every wall visibly warped from the heat. It was about five hundred square feet, as advertised, but with no windows. It looked a hundred years old, the kind of ramshackle shack that would have been claimed by rust a long time ago if it wasn’t in the middle of a desert. There was a round circulating fan positioned on the corrugated roof, but it wasn’t spinning. A horrible place to do anything in, I was sure, but I could imagine Livermore seeing this godforsaken shack on the end of a forgotten desert road and knowing he’d found the perfect home.

  We watched the man line up the bolt cutters and squeeze the handles together. When the shank was cut clean through, he pulled off the lock and yanked open the door. I had a sudden thought, a moment too late, that the man who knew I’d probably be standing here, waiting for this door to open, was the same man who could set up a remote ambush in a canyon to kill seven men.

  But when the door swung open, there was no explosion—just a wav
e of trapped heat coming out at us. I let out my breath as we both looked inside.

  The first things we saw were the ropes. Dozens of them, hanging from the rafters in two parallel rows and creating a sort of hallway that led into the room.

  “What the hell,” the man said.

  I walked between the rows, the ropes so close that they brushed against my shoulders as I passed through. Some of them were just a few feet long. Some of them were so long they had to be looped several times from the floor to the ceiling. In the dense heat, there was a strange, earthy smell to them.

  The back of the building was obscured in the darkness. That was when the man turned the overhead light on.

  “I don’t know nothing about anything that went on in here,” he said. “So whatever you find . . .”

  “Don’t touch anything else,” Agent Larkin said to him. “Just step back.”

  The light was filtered through the ropes, casting a hundred thin shadows on either side of the room. It was really more like two separate rooms, divided by the hallway. I chose the right side first, pushing myself through the ropes, into what was clearly Livermore’s laboratory. There was a metal worktable running along the wall. On top of that was a large tabletop grill, with a single iron pot that could have held twenty gallons of water. Beside that was a large bottle of mineral oil.

  Agent Larkin pushed through the ropes to stand next to me. He’d already pulled out his cell phone and started dialing.

  There were semi-clear boxes of wires stacked neatly on the workbench. Other boxes contained circuits, relays, connectors, other electrical parts too obscure for me to recognize.

  “This is where he made his explosives,” Larkin said, nodding toward the other side of the workbench, past the grill and the big iron pot. There was a set of glass beakers there, a rack of tubes, and a Bunsen burner. And several unmarked plastic containers of powders and liquids.

  I moved to the metal utility shelves that sat next to the table. On one shelf there was a large collection of iron pipes, of all different sizes. On another shelf a half dozen pressure cookers.

  “He was experimenting,” Larkin said. “Pipe bombs, pressure cookers . . .”

  I was already feeling numb, already overwhelmed by the scope of what this man had done here. All of the time and effort that had gone into these instruments of murder.

  There was a box of fuses among the pipes. Slow burn, fast burn . . . Other fuses I couldn’t identify, all homemade from matches or black gunpowder, even a few from Christmas tree lights.

  This is what he did every day. This was his hobby, finding new ways to kill people.

  “Just like the Boston Marathon,” Larkin said. “You still think he—”

  “No,” I said. “This doesn’t make him a terrorist. All this stuff, it still feels . . . too personal.”

  But then I looked at everything in front of me again, all of these lethal tools spread out on these tables. And I started doubting every gut instinct I’d ever had about this man.

  Maybe Larkin is right, I thought. Maybe we really don’t know what this man is capable of.

  I moved down to another shelf, where several clear jars sat in a neat line, all filled with a pale yellow jelly. Larkin bent down to look closely at the jars without touching them.

  “This is . . . napalm.”

  I looked at him. “Are you kidding me?”

  “He could have used this in the canyon instead, but he was probably worried about leaving it in the heat.”

  “So he blew us apart with shrapnel,” I said, looking at another shelf filled with boxes of lead shot, everything from tiny birdshot to ball bearings a good inch in diameter.

  Leaning against the shelves was a large industrial drill.

  “That’s a core drill,” I said. “With a diamond-tipped bit, he could have cut right through the rock in the canyon. Set those pipes in, like little howitzers.”

  I kept moving, to the far corner of the room. There was a full-sized refrigerator standing there. It was humming, and there was a rusty metal latch bolted onto the door to keep it closed.

  “That’s for the ammonium nitrate,” Larkin said. “You freeze it before you filter it. I can smell a little ammonia, can’t you?”

  I could only smell the ropes, but I took his word for it. I was looking at the latch, wondering why it was necessary . . .

  “They track that stuff now,” Larkin said. “Livermore went to a lot of trouble here, to stay off the grid. Or maybe he just liked making all of this stuff himself.”

  As I happened to look down at the floor in front of the refrigerator, I saw a constellation of red dots.

  Drops of blood.

  I picked up a neatly folded kitchen towel, used that to undo the latch, then grab the handle of the refrigerator and pull it open.

  “Alex,” Larkin said, “don’t open that.”

  But it was too late. The door swung open, and the cold air hit us in the face.

  Then we saw the body.

  It was a woman, curled up on the floor of the refrigerator, like she had been trying to keep herself warm. She was naked except for a pair of blue panties. There was a butterfly tattoo on her left shoulder blade.

  There were gouges all along the walls. From her fingernails.

  “That’s her,” Larkin said. “Stephanie Hyatt.”

  He pushed the door closed and got back on his cell phone. I just stood there for a while, thinking about what could possibly come next.

  Six women wasn’t enough, I thought. You had to lock up number seven in a fucking refrigerator.

  I wanted to pick up the drill and start swinging it, knock over every box, every jar, break everything I could find.

  “Easy, Alex.” Larkin stood next to me, waiting for his call to go through.

  I walked away from him, through the rope hallway, pushing my way to the other side. Where there was the worktable and all of the supplies on the first side, here the back wall was dominated by three large hanging tapestries. All Japanese art, but not like the prints in Livermore’s apartment. These depicted something else entirely: in one, a naked woman was blindfolded and tied to a chair, in another a man in an ornate robe dripped hot wax from a candle onto a woman’s chest.

  No, not wax. It’s burning right through her skin. It’s hot metal.

  On the second tapestry, a man was tied up and hanging upside down with what looked like a great iron wagon wheel around his neck. The third might have been the most disturbing of all, a man suspended over several bamboo stakes with the pointed tips piercing his body. As if to bring that image to life, there was a glass case beneath the image with a grow light shining down on a dozen short stalks of bamboo.

  I went closer to the case and looked inside, then moved to the desk next to it, where parchment paper was kept rolled up in several bins. One paper was laid out flat, with a pen and ink nearby. There were Japanese symbols drawn on the paper, which of course meant nothing to me. But I would have bet anything the meaning of the symbols was as dark as the artwork hanging on the walls.

  I felt like I had just walked from one half of Livermore’s brain to the other, from the logical, analytical side to whatever the hell you’d even call the rest of it. The creative, the intuitive . . . I didn’t know if you could even use words like those to describe the inside of this man’s head.

  Next to the desk was another glass case, this one containing an elaborate metal birdcage—except that the bottom of the cage was open and there were leather straps attached to it, as if you’d actually have a reason to strap a cage to someone’s body. I didn’t have to know anything else to know that this was something evil.

  “Alex!”

  Larkin’s voice came to me from the other side of the ropes. I went to the last corner of the room, where a bookshelf stood. I looked at the spines. More Japanese symbols. There were larger books on the
lower shelf. I still had the kitchen towel in my hand, and I used that to pull out a book and open it.

  In the dim light I could make out the elaborate ink drawings, some with text, others spread across two facing pages. A man in an ornate robe tying a woman’s wrists together. Then wrapping ropes around her body, above and below her breasts. I went through the pages quickly, each one more and more elaborate, a woman tied up and hanging in the air, then another with her legs doubled back into a painful hogtie. Yet another hanging from one leg, the other leg folded together and tied tightly, her arms trussed behind her back.

  The ropes, I thought. The ligatures found on the victim in Scottsdale, the fibers at the other kill sites . . .

  This is what he does to them.

  This is why he needs all of these ropes.

  I put that book back and took out another. Another set of drawings to see, these even more sickening. This book was more general, with no artistic rope designs, just basic human suffering inflicted by every means I could ever imagine. Men and women spread out on racks, violated with instruments, pierced with needles and stakes and barbs.

  “Alex, what are you doing?”

  I took a breath and kept paging through the book. A man’s body slowly crushed by an elephant’s massive foot. A man with a cage tied to his stomach . . .

  I looked back at the cage in the glass case.

  You tie this to your victim. Open the little door and put the rats inside.

  It washed over me in a hot, sick wave.

  This is Livermore.

  This is what he dreams about.

  I closed the book and put it back in its place. I was glad to be holding it with the kitchen towel. Never mind the crime scene, or the handling of evidence. I just didn’t want any of this to touch my skin.

  Before I stood up, I saw one more book on the bottom shelf. It was the only book without Japanese symbols. As I pulled it out, I saw that it was a scrapbook.

  I took it over to the desk so I could see it in better light. As I put it down, I heard Agent Larkin behind me. He had pushed his way through the ropes to join me on this side. He stood in the same spot I had, looking up at the images on the wall.