Dead Man Running Read online

  “Holy fuck,” he said.

  Still holding the scrapbook with the towel, I opened it to the first page.

  “I’ve got agents on the way,” Larkin said. “We’ll wait for them outside.”

  I saw a face.

  My face.

  It was a photograph of me from my high school yearbook. I flipped the page, not even bothering to be careful now. One page after another, it was all here.

  My whole life.

  There were old photographs from the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, some of them reprints done on modern paper, some of them originals on yellowing newspaper stock. My entire career as a high school baseball player—high school tournaments, all-star teams, year-end awards. On the next page, my minor league career began. More pictures. Team statistics. Even box scores. This was where he got my .249 average at Toledo. This was where he got Gene Lamont’s name. And Tim Hosley’s.

  I kept going, feeling another stream of ice water run down my back with every turn of the page. After baseball, my time in college. My official portrait from the Henry Ford College yearbook. No surprise, he’d actually gotten his hands on a copy of my college yearbook, too—just to cut out my picture and paste it into this book.

  Another page and I was looking at the coverage of my engagement in the newspapers. Then my wedding. This was back in the day when the papers would actually send a photographer to take pictures at weddings, especially if the groom was a semi-famous local athlete. All of those clippings were here.

  Then my career as a cop. My graduation picture from the police academy. And finally, what I knew was coming next . . .

  The front pages of both local papers, showing my partner’s picture next to the grainy image of me being carried on a stretcher into the ambulance.

  TWO OFFICERS SHOT

  One Dead, One in Critical Condition

  I felt Larkin grabbing my arm, trying to pull me away from the scrapbook. But I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to go outside, into the light, into the fresh air. I didn’t want to move until somebody explained to me why this was happening.

  “Who are you, you crazy piece of shit?” I said. Because there was no explanation coming. No answers. Not yet.

  “Who are you?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CREEPIEST CUSTOMER EVER.

  Irene Murphy texted these three words to her best friend, Sarah. Still trying to laugh it off, but her hands were shaking as she keyed in each letter. She kept looking out at the darkness just beyond the windows, wondering if he’d come back, this man who had seemed kind of interesting and mysterious at first, until she had looked into his green eyes one time too many and had seen something else there. Something that scared her. Something that made her keep the phone in her hand while she counted down the last few minutes.

  But he never came back.

  She texted Sarah again, asking her about the next practice for their band. Still no response. She pictured her standing behind the bar, mixing a half dozen drinks at once, the phone buzzing away on the bar top, drowned out by the noise.

  When the clock hit nine, she went to the front of the store and flipped the sign to CLOSED. Then she locked the door and spent the next half hour running the receipts. She activated the alarm, turned out the lights, then opened the door again, just long enough to step outside. She locked the door behind her and walked through the parking lot. There were a dozen cars in the lot, but that wasn’t unusual. Not when your store was next to a restaurant that stayed open until midnight. Still, she made a point of looking through every windshield as she walked by. Her car was parked on the far side of the lot, beneath the last light.

  She hurried to get in the car and lock her door. Letting out a breath, almost laughing to herself. It felt like when she was a kid, and she’d run up the stairs from the basement after she’d turned off the lights, trying to outrun the tentacles that were coming up after her.

  She drove home to her apartment on the other side of Amarillo. Not much of a place, but she’d be able to move soon, maybe, if the band ever got some gigs. Or if she just found a better job, the kind where she didn’t have to deal with creepy customers.

  At one point, she saw a pair of headlights behind her. They were still there when she made one turn, then another. For a moment, she thought about driving right over to Sarah’s bar. Running inside and telling her to call the police. Then she made another turn, and the car behind her kept going.

  She let out another long breath.

  When she got to her apartment building, she heard her phone beep. She picked it up, saw the text back from Sarah, finally.

  are you okay? come to the bar!

  She texted back, Home now, call me when you get off. Then she got out of her car and went inside. She went up the stairs to the third floor. Her apartment was the first one on the left. She took her key out and put it in the lock, just as she heard something behind her.

  Before she could even turn, she felt a hand closing around her right wrist. The scream had barely formed in her throat when another hand came across her mouth. She tried to kick at the man’s legs, but he was already pushing her inside her apartment. Her arm was twisted painfully behind her back, until she tried to scream again, biting at the hand on her mouth and tasting blood. As he cursed and let go of her, she spun and tried to rake his face with her keys. A self-defense lesson she had practiced in her head a thousand times, walking through that empty parking lot. But he caught her wrist, and his other hand shot forward, fast as a snake striking, to latch around her throat. He stood with his face close to hers.

  It’s him. The man from the store.

  He still had the same dead-calm expression with the strange half smile, even as he tightened his grip on her neck. She tried to suck in air, to fill her lungs with just enough to scream one more time, but he slammed her against the wall. She felt the impact on the back of her head and then everything went out of focus.

  “Please,” she said with her last breath. “Don’t.”

  “You brought this on yourself.”

  The voice echoed in her head as she felt the grip tighten around her neck again. She clawed at the hand with her fingernails until she started to feel herself sliding down the wall. Lower and lower.

  Until she had fallen all the way into nothing.

  * * *

  —

  SHE OPENED HER EYES AGAIN. It took her a moment to realize where she was. Lying on her stomach, but somehow raised above the ground, looking down at the carpet. She tried to speak, but her mouth wouldn’t open. As she moved her arms, she felt a sharp pain in her shoulders. Her wrists were bound together, behind her back. Her feet were bound, too. She couldn’t lift her head more than a few inches. She turned as far as she could, to see what he had done to her.

  I’m on the coffee table, she said to herself. He’s tied me down.

  No, he’s taped me down.

  The tape was looped across her mouth, then wrapped several times around her neck. She felt it against her back, against her legs and her ankles. From one end of her body to the other, the loops disappearing under the table. She even saw the empty roll, discarded a few feet away. As she strained to see the rest of her apartment, she didn’t spot him anywhere. A full minute passed. She fought down the panic, made herself be still. Another minute.

  He’s gone, she thought. He left me here. I have to get free.

  She worked against the tape, rocking back and forth and nearly turning the table over. She screamed inside her head, losing the battle against the panic, fighting and fighting until she had used up the last of her strength. She made herself be still again, made herself breathe.

  Then the door opened, and the man came back inside. He was carrying a large shopping bag.

  “Don’t make this worse for yourself,” he said, coming close and setting down the bag.

  You don’t ha
ve to kill me, she thought, willing the words to life, trying to transmit them through the air to him. You can do anything you want. Just don’t kill me.

  “You will not scream,” he said as he bent down even closer and started to pull the tape from her mouth. “You will say exactly what I tell you to say. Do you understand?”

  When her mouth was free, she gathered in her breath, but the scream died in her throat as he pulled her arms away from her back, igniting the dull ache in her shoulders into a white-hot blast of heat.

  “That’s approximately ten pounds of force,” he said to her. “From this angle, it would take twenty to dislocate the shoulder. Do you want to know what thirty pounds feels like?”

  She shook her head frantically. He repeated the words he wanted her to say, then he pointed the phone at her face and told her to start speaking. She strained to hear them, to remember them. Then she said the words, one by one, not even knowing what she was saying. None of it made sense. But she didn’t want to feel that pain again.

  When she was done, she closed her eyes and started to cry.

  This is really happening, she said to herself.

  I am going to die.

  He said some words of his own into the phone, more words that made no sense to her.

  I am going to die.

  He put the phone in his pocket. Then he bent down to the shopping bag and took out a small combination safe. He set the safe on the floor, directly in front of her. She could see that the door was slightly open, but she couldn’t see what was inside.

  I am going to die.

  She had already given up when he reached into the bag one last time.

  I am going to die.

  I am going to die.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I HAD BEEN A SPLIT SECOND too late to save my partner, back on that hot summer night in Detroit. Now I was God knows how many days too late to save this woman in the refrigerator. I stood there trying to imagine what she must have gone through in her last hours as I watched them take her out in a body bag, along with everything else from that metal shed at the end of that desert road.

  They took down over a hundred ropes. Why had he boiled so many of them? Maybe it had become a ritual for him. What was more interesting to the techs was the chemistry set, the electronics, everything he had used to build his explosives.

  They took the torture books, bringing each one of them out into the daylight. Some of them looked old. Rare, probably worth a lot of money to a collector, if there were such people in the world. Which I was sure there were.

  They took down the wall hangings, brought out the glass cases with the bamboo and the rat cage. All of the parchment, every last piece of Livermore’s life.

  And then, in the midst of all this madness, for reasons I still didn’t understand . . .

  My life.

  They took the Alex McKnight scrapbook to the FBI offices to be held and processed as evidence. I spent an hour in the lab, watching them go through every page. When they got to the end and I had to see the clipping from the Detroit newspaper again—from the night I watched my partner die—that was when I’d had enough.

  I left the place without bothering to tell anyone, went outside, and walked down the street. The sun was down, the air cooler. It was the first time I’d been truly alone since I’d arrived in Arizona, and somebody was probably already looking for me, but I didn’t care anymore.

  The FBI office was right next to the little regional airport on the north side of town, so I went into the rental car office and drove off the lot in the car I’d been threatening to rent all day. I made my way across town for a while, not even sure where I was going. Until I saw the gun shop.

  It was lit up bright and cheery and it occupied half a city block, as only an Arizona gun shop could. There were full-color pictures of guns showcased in the windows as if they were fine pieces of jewelry, everything from handguns to assault rifles. I went inside and saw enough firepower to arm a small country, in glass cases that ran along three sides of the store, with more guns hanging on the walls.

  I had carried a gun for eight years as a cop, only tried to fire it once—and that was the night I took it out a beat too slow. I had bought another gun when I got my PI license, but ended up throwing that into Lake Superior. I had sworn that day I’d never hold a gun again.

  But now, as I picked up a Glock 22, the last weapon I had carried in Detroit, I sighted down the barrel and imagined Martin T. Livermore standing on the other end of it.

  I would kill you right now if I could. I would pull this trigger without a second thought.

  I was about to fill out my ATF form 4473 and wait for the shop owner to run me through the NICS database, but when he asked me for my state of residence, I had to tell him Michigan.

  “Gotta be an Arizona resident to purchase a handgun here,” he said. I told him I was an ex-cop. He still couldn’t sell me the gun, but he did direct me to a local gun owner a mile down the road who could help me out. A half hour later, I had a similar model Glock and a box of .40 caliber ammunition.

  I bought some clothes and a bag to carry everything in, put it all in the trunk of the rental car, and drove back to the FBI office. Larkin seemed to be the only agent who’d even noticed that I had left. He didn’t ask where I had gone.

  He had a copy of the scrapbook pages to give me, and I spent the next couple of hours going through them. Every photograph, every article. If my own mother had lived past my eighth birthday, she couldn’t have kept a more complete record of my life.

  But why?

  I was still no closer to the answer.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER I DROVE BACK to my hotel room, I took apart the gun, cleaned and oiled it, put it back together again. Then I loaded it. An old ritual from another lifetime, but it made me feel better just having it in my hand.

  His words came back to me, what he’d said to me in that van . . .

  Do you think this ends today?

  No, I thought as I sat there in a hotel room with a freshly loaded Glock in my right hand. It’s not over.

  I put the gun in the bedside table drawer, next to the Gideon Bible. Then I spread the scrapbook pages out on the bed and looked at them again. I might have slept for a while. If I did, it was a shallow sleep that didn’t begin to ease my exhaustion. Then at some point in the middle of the night, I felt my phone vibrate. I turned on the light and looked at it. I had a new email message.

  I shook myself fully awake and opened the email. It was from an address I didn’t recognize—in fact, it looked like nothing more than a random string of letters and numbers. I opened the video that was attached to the email. It was hard to make out what I was seeing at first. Just a blurry, cheap video taken on somebody’s cell phone, but then the image stabilized and I saw a woman’s face. Young, maybe late twenties, with a nose ring, and even with the washed color on the video I could see that her hair had been dyed a bright shade of red. She was lying down on something . . .

  A table. Something about her arms didn’t look right. Like they were twisted behind her. I stayed right there on the edge of the bed as I watched her, my heart pounding.

  “Say it,” a voice said. A man’s voice. A voice I knew.

  Livermore.

  “Say exactly what I told you to say.”

  The woman started crying. A shudder ran through her body. I could only imagine what was going through her mind. The fear, the pain, all of it at once.

  “Alex,” she said, choking back sobs. “Alex McKnight. You have to come save me. Please. It’s all up to you. Please hurry. Please . . .”

  She started crying again. Then her eyes went wide as duct tape was pulled tight across her mouth. The video stayed focused on the woman’s face, but it was Livermore who spoke next. “Come alone,” he said. “If I see anyone else . . . anyone . . . she dies.”
/>   “Where are you?” I said to the video. “Where the fuck are you?”

  “This is between you and me,” he went on. “If you tell anyone else, I’ll know. And she will suffer more than you can imagine.”

  I kept watching and waiting, holding the phone tight in my hand.

  “Start driving to Albuquerque,” he said. “Right now.”

  Then the video ended.

  * * *

  —

  I WAS DRESSED within two minutes, in my rental car and on the road within three. It was just past four in the morning, the roads almost empty. I headed north, trying not to drive recklessly, trying to keep myself steady. It was a long way to Albuquerque.

  He sends everyone else to San Francisco, I thought. Then he brings me east. I shouldn’t be surprised.

  It really was a diversion all along.

  As I drove up through northern Arizona, into the higher elevation, the air got colder and condensed against my windshield. I started to see traces of snow. By the time I hit Flagstaff, there were piles of it on either side of the road. I stopped and got some gas, breathing in the cold air. The sun was coming up, casting a thin light that didn’t even begin to warm me.

  You have to stay alive, I said to the woman in the video. Whoever you are, you have to stay alive.

  I hadn’t heard from Livermore again. I just had to keep going. It was the only thing I could even think of doing. For hours.

  And hours.

  I was in New Mexico, driving east, pushing the rental car hard, doing ninety in the left lane. As I got close to Albuquerque, my phone vibrated and I pulled over to see what had landed in my email.

  It was another video. The same woman on the same table. She was looking up at me, her eyes glazed. Livermore’s voice came from off camera again.

  “Did I say Albuquerque? My mistake. I meant Amarillo.”