Infected

69.

On Dew’s twenty-second birthday, he’d been getting piss-faced drunk at a small bar in Saigon with his three closest friends, all members of his platoon. The bar had white walls, Christmas lights across the ceiling and plenty of working girls. Hell of a party that turned out to be. Dew had stumbled to the bathroom to take a piss, and in midstream heard a bone-thumping explosion followed by a scream or two. He wasn’t quite sobered up by the blast, but what he saw when he came out of the bathroom obliterated his buzz completely.

The white walls were streaked with chunks of bone, bits of hair and bright-red trails slowly dripping down the wall like living Rorschach blots. The blood and bits belonged to his buddies and the seven-year-old suicide girl who’d entered the bar wearing the latest fashion in homemade explosive backpacks.

That incident, that hated memory, was the first thing to enter his mind when he walked into Perry Dawsey’s apartment. So much blood-on the walls, on the floor, on the furniture. The kitchen floor looked like a pattern of brown and red rather than the original white. There was even blood on the kitchen table, some of which had slowly spilled over the edge and dried in a thin, brittle-brown stalactite. The apartment crawled with Ann Arbor cops, state troopers and men from the Washtenaw County coroner’s office.

“It’s really something, huh?”

Dew looked at Matt Mitchell, the local coroner who’d escorted him to the crime scene. Mitchell had a crooked smile and a glass eye that never seemed to look the right way. His face held a small smirk, almost an expectant look, as if he were waiting to see if the gore would make Dew blow chow.

Dew nodded toward the body. “You got an ID on the couch-potato Jesus over there?”

“Couch-potato Jesus?” Mitchell looked at the body, smiled, then looked back to Dew. “Hey, that’s pretty frickin’ funny.”

“Thanks,” Dew said. “I’ve got a million of ’em.”

Mitchell flipped through a small notepad. “The victim is William Miller, a coworker of Dawsey’s and apparently a friend-they went to college together.”

“Isn’t this an awful lot of blood to come from one victim?”

Mitchell gave Dew another quizzical look, but this time it held a bit of surprised respect. “That’s pretty observant, Agent Phillips. Not many people would have noticed that. You seen stuff this intense before?”

“Oh, maybe once or twice.”

“We’re still typing all the spills. There’s more in the bathroom and even some in the bedroom. I’ll tell you right now it’s not all from the victim. You hit that nail right on the head.”

Mitchell walked into the kitchen, being careful not to disturb the cluster of evidence for technicians gathering samples from the floor and the table. “I think there’s another victim we haven’t seen yet,” he said.

“Another victim? You mean Dawsey had another victim and he took the body with him?”

Mitchell gave the apartment a sweeping gesture. “How else could you explain all this?”

“Ever think it might have come from Dawsey himself?”

Mitchell laughed. “Yeah, right, from the perp himself. I’d like to see someone lose this much blood and keep on kicking.”

“Find anything else?”

Mitchell nodded and pointed to the kitchen counter. An evidence bag held a wrongly folded map. “Maybe something, maybe nothing. That map was on the kitchen counter. There were some tacky, bloody fingerprints, not dry yet, so he was looking at it not very long ago. He’d circled Wahjamega.”

“That a town?” Dew asked as he picked up the evidence bag holding the map. The bloody fingerprints were still wet enough to smear the plastic. The words This is the place were scrawled on the map in handwriting so bad it was barely legible.

“Yeah,” Mitchell said. “About, oh, ninety minutes or so from here.”

“You notify Wahjamega police to be on the lookout?”

“They don’t have any-town is too small-but we let the Tuscola County Sheriff ’s department know, yeah. Hell, every cop in the state is on the lookout anyway.”

Dew nodded approvingly. Maybe something, maybe nothing, as Mitchell had said. Dew leaned more toward the “something” side-it didn’t take a genius to figure out Dawsey hadn’t circled Wahjamega on a whim. The map didn’t show much in the way of civilization around the town. In fact, it looked like there might be a shitload of trees.

Trees.

Deep woods, even.

As soon as he got out of this apartment, he’d have Murray’s boys focus the satellite coverage on Wahjamega instead of Ann Arbor.

The brown-polyester-wearing Bob Zimmer wove through the crowded apartment, dodging the photographer and another cop before stopping in front of Dew and Mitchell.

“This just gets better and better, Phillips,” Zimmer said. “I just talked to the governor. Again. FBI says Dawsey and the Vietnamese kid were working together-they found a bunch of emails. Homeland Security raised the alert level to fucking red, to ‘severe.’ Dawsey has knowledge of a bomb.”

Dew nodded. “I told you someone else might be involved in those murders. We figure it was Dawsey.”

“To think there’s a cell right here in our midst,” Zimmer said. “And why didn’t someone bother to pick up a fucking phone and let us know there’s terrorists in town?” His eyes showed doubt, as if his bullshit meter was going off, but they also showed he’d follow through. Bullshit or no bullshit, Bob Zimmer wasn’t taking any chances with the safety of his men or his town.

“Nguyen was what we call a sleeper, Bob,” Dew said. “He’s just another foreign college student. He stays quiet until he’s needed, then boom. Only we don’t think he’s operating under directions, we think he just snapped. Somewhere along the line, he or his buddies recruited Dawsey.”

“Why the hell would a white-collar American fall in with terrorists?” Mitchell asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Dew said. “Maybe he was bitter at ‘the man’ because he worked some shit computer job and didn’t pull in millions in the NFL. It doesn’t fucking matter. Dawsey might know about a bomb-we don’t know where it is, we don’t know what it is. We have to get to him and fast.”

Zimmer stared at Dew. “I’ll tell you right now, I don’t like this,” he said. “We’ve got nine people dead, at least one killer is on the loose, and there’s a goddamn bomb out there somewhere. I can’t help but think we could have prevented this if you’d let us know you were watching this Vietnamese kid.”

“We had to see who would contact him, who would supply him,” Dew said. “It was a sting, Bob, but it went bust. The key thing to remember is we don’t want anyone else getting killed. And if you want to save lives, just make sure your men know exactly what they’re dealing with. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make some calls.”

Dew walked out of the blood-splattered apartment, leaving Bob Zimmer to grind his teeth in frustration.