Lost Lake

CHAPTER FOUR

“Best giant rat story I’ve read since the Enquirer piece about the prehistoric rodent that was terrorizing that island near Borneo.”

It was almost five, and Patrick Gorman was standing over Vanessa’s desk with a grin plastered on his face. Gorman was a fat man with heavy jowls and an alcoholic complexion. He was usually fun to work for because he didn’t take himself or the paper seriously, but he could be demanding. For Gorman, UFOs and the Loch Ness monster were commodities, like sneakers for Nike. Produce, and Gorman loved you. Adversely affect his bottom line, and there was hell to pay.

“Stuff it, Pat,” Vanessa said. She glared at her boss. “You owe me.”

Gorman laughed. “You could have gone with the alien abduction.”

Vanessa averted her eyes. “That didn’t work out.”

Gorman noted her rapid change of mood but didn’t say anything. He respected his reporter and he wasn’t going to ask her what had happened if she didn’t want to tell him. Gorman knew that he was lucky to have someone as talented as Vanessa on board. Most reporters with her brains and ability fled to legitimate newspapers as soon as the chance presented itself. He knew why she couldn’t move on, but he never held that up to her. Vanessa appreciated his tact.

“I’ve got something I want you to look at,” Gorman said. “It’s all over the news. There was a brawl at a Little League game in Oregon. A coach decked a cop and another cop shot him.”

“You’re kidding.”

“That ain’t the good part. The coach who got shot, he almost killed the parent of one of the kids by ramming a pencil into his throat.”

Vanessa’s mouth dropped. “You sure this is Little League? It sounds more like pro wrestling.”

“I just caught a little of it on talk radio when I was driving in. Check it out and get back to me if you think there’s something we can run with. Everyone’s got an opinion. It’s the Little League parent thing, too much pressure on the tots to excel, parents living vicariously through their kids.”

Gorman walked away, but the phrase lingered in Vanessa’s head. Parents living vicariously through their kids. No chance of that problem with her parents, she thought angrily. Charlotte Kohler had never had a chance to see her daughter grow up. She was dead, murdered, when Vanessa was thirteen years old-although Vanessa was the only one who had dared to accuse her father of murder publicly, and much good that did her.

And her father didn’t need to live through her. He had his own plans. Her father had never shown much interest in her except when he destroyed her life. Then he had been very focused.

Vanessa shook off these bitter thoughts, knowing full well what would happen to her if she dwelled on them. She swung back to her computer and punched up the Little League story on the Internet. After reading a few accounts, she concluded that Gorman hadn’t been kidding. An overbearing parent had been stabbed in the throat with a mechanical pencil, but quick work by an EMT had saved him. One of the cops had a broken collarbone and the assistant coach was in the hospital with two gunshot wounds. Vanessa decided that if she ever had a kid who wanted to play Little League she’d talk him into joining the Marines. It sounded safer.

Vanessa logged off her computer at eight and dialed Sam’s extension.

“The Smiling Buddha?” Vanessa asked, naming a Chinese restaurant two blocks from the paper.

“You’re on. Meet you in the lobby in ten.”

Vanessa walked to the ground floor. As a practicing paranoid, she scanned the street outside while she waited near the front door. Two men were talking in a doorway across the way. They did not look threatening, but Vanessa didn’t trust anyone. Inside her oversize purse with her cosmetics, address book, and tissues was an unregistered.357 Magnum loaded with hollow-point rounds. One advantage of being an army brat was her ability to shoot anything, anywhere. Her father had taught her about guns from an early age. She’d hunted deer and even bagged big game in Africa on a safari as a teenager. The togetherness had stopped when her mother died, but the skill remained.

“What did Gorman think of the rat tale?” Sam asked as they walked toward the restaurant.

“Loved it. He’s such a prick. But he did put me onto something interesting. Real news, for once,” Vanessa said, filling him in on the Little League massacre as they walked.

“Oregon is nice this time of year,” Sam said. “See if you can wheedle a trip out there. Maybe ask him to send a photographer along.”

“Sounds good,” Vanessa said as they passed a clothing store. She stopped for a moment, apparently to look at the dresses in the window, but really to check the reflection from the other side of the street. The men from the doorway were a half-block back. One was tall, the other short and stocky. Both wore windbreakers and jeans. Vanessa’s heart started to pound, but she didn’t say anything to Sam, who tolerated her paranoid fantasies but never encouraged them.

An hour later, Vanessa and Sam were reading their fortunes. Sam was coming into big money, but Vanessa was supposed to be wary of strangers. It was after nine and there was a hint of rain in the air when they left the restaurant. They had taken separate cars to work, and they reached Sam’s car first. He gave Vanessa a peck on the cheek and said he’d see her at home.

Vanessa looked for the two men who had been waiting outside the office, but the streets around the Exposed building were empty. A page from a newspaper flew down the street until the wind plastered it against a chain-link fence. Over the fence were the remnants of an abandoned warehouse that was destined to become some upwardly mobile couple’s dream condo. Vanessa thought she saw someone moving through the rubble and hurried to her car.

A man was standing in the shadows of a doorway across the street. He wore a hooded sweatshirt and looked homeless, but people engaged in surveillance often used disguises. Vanessa locked her doors as soon as she was in the driver’s seat. A face pressed against the glass of the passenger’s window. Vanessa reached into her purse without thinking. She saw messy red hair and cheeks covered with stubble. Bloodshot eyes stared in at her. The man knocked on the window. Vanessa extended the Magnum. The man jumped back, his eyes wide with fright. Vanessa gunned the engine. Her car fishtailed down the street. She cut the wheel and raced down a side street, putting a building between her and the derelict. Just before she turned, she looked in her mirror. The man was standing in the middle of the street watching her.

Vanessa zigzagged through town until she was certain she wasn’t being followed. The adrenaline was starting to wear off when she pulled into the dark end of a parking lot. Her hands were shaking. Who had sent the man after her? Had he been after her? Panhandlers had accosted her many times. That was an occupational hazard of working in the Exposed building. Had she overreacted? And what about the two men who had followed her and Sam to the restaurant? Maybe that was innocent, too. But what if it wasn’t? What if they were spotters who kept the man in the hooded sweatshirt aware of her movements? And if there were three men working together, there could be more.

Sam! She had to warn him before he arrived at the apartment. They might be waiting for her. She pulled out her cell phone. Not Sam. If anything happened to him…She dialed Sam’s cell. It was turned off. He would be home in minutes. Vanessa dialed 911.

“There are men at my apartment,” she screamed hysterically, hoping the urgency in her voice would spur the dispatcher to action. “They’re killing my boyfriend.”

The dispatcher tried to get her to calm down, but she gave her address and disconnected the phone. If the cops got there fast enough, Sam might be okay. She started to tear up and gulped down air. She couldn’t afford to be hysterical. She had to think.

Vanessa couldn’t go to the apartment, but she didn’t dare use a credit card at a motel or hotel. The people who were after her would trace her if she charged her account. Vanessa had just been to the ATM and had two hundred dollars less the price of her dinner. She started the car and drove into Maryland to a large motel run by a chain. She paid cash and gave the desk clerk the phony ID she always carried with her. Vanessa also carried real and counterfeit passports. As soon as she was in her room she called Sam.

“Thank God,” Vanessa said when she heard his voice. “Are you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be? Has something happened?”

“I can’t talk now. Has anyone searched the apartment?”

“Searched the…Vanessa, what’s going on? There were cops here when I got home. They said a woman told 911 I was being attacked. Was that you? Did you make that call to the cops?”

Vanessa was about to answer when she heard a voice in the background.

“Who’s that?” Vanessa asked.

“One of the policemen. He wants to talk to you.”

“I can’t.”

What if her cell phone call had been intercepted and the men at the apartment weren’t really cops? She wanted to tell Sam to run, to leave town, but another man took the phone and started asking her questions. Vanessa cut the connection.

It seemed as if hours had passed since her meal with Sam and her flight to the motel, but it was only a little before eleven. She slumped down on the edge of the bed, exhausted. She had gotten a kit with a toothbrush and toothpaste from the front desk when she checked in. She brushed her teeth, washed up, stripped off her jeans, and crawled under the covers. When she closed her eyes she thought of Sam.

Vanessa had taken few lovers since getting out of the institution. Most men ran after learning that she’d been in an asylum. Those that thought screwing an ex-lunatic was kinky ran when they learned the depth of her obsession. Until she met Sam Cutler at a bar near her apartment three months ago, Vanessa had not been with a man for a little over a year. Sam was a freelance photographer who had worked all over the world. She had been reluctant to let him get close to her at first, but he had persisted and she had dropped her guard.

Sam could tell great stories, in bed he was creative and had endurance; but the best thing about him was that he was not judgmental. It had not fazed him when he learned that Vanessa was an ex-mental patient. When Vanessa told him about the Unit, he had calmly accepted its existence as a possibility. Vanessa had talked Patrick Gorman into giving Sam a job, and she had started to believe that she might find happiness at last. What if something happened to him now? What if he died because of her?

Vanessa felt empty inside and tired of her life. The people who were after her had so many resources and she had so few. She couldn’t run forever. If they were hunting her, they would catch her eventually. She started to cry in the dark. After a while she drifted off to sleep.

Vanessa opened her eyes and jerked up, startled by the strange surroundings. Then she remembered where she was and why she was hiding in a motel instead of waking up in her apartment and getting ready for work. She felt sick. Had she panicked for no reason? Had she made a fool of herself? She recalled the events of the previous evening. While waiting for Sam she had noticed two men talking in a doorway across from her office, but were they talking about her? Did they even know that she existed? The men had walked slightly behind her in the same direction as the restaurant, but were they following her? And what about the bum who had knocked on her car window? Did she have any evidence that he wasn’t just a homeless man looking for a handout? In the light of day her actions seemed absurd.

Vanessa felt so stupid. What would she do now? She couldn’t go to work. She would have to face Sam. Would this be the last straw? Would he leave her? He had always tried to understand, but how much could he take? And what about the police? Would they arrest her for making a false report? No, the police would have no further interest in her. Sam would have seen to that. She flushed with shame as she imagined him explaining that his girlfriend was a former mental patient who imagined that people were plotting against her. The cops would have been angry at first, but their anger would have turned to sympathy for the poor bastard who was living with this loony. They would have shaken their heads as they left. The incident probably provided a few good laughs back at the station house.

Vanessa couldn’t go home and she couldn’t go to work. She was ashamed to face Sam. Checkout time was noon. She decided to stay in the room until she was forced to leave. Maybe she would think of something by then.

Vanessa ordered room service. While she waited for her food, she turned on Fox cable news in the middle of a report on a retired general, Morris Wingate. The General had left the military in the late 1980s and stayed out of the public eye for many years. In the early 1990s, he had invested heavily in Computex, a fledgling software company headed by a genius named Simeon Brown. Wingate’s contacts in the military helped the company obtain lucrative contracts. A few years ago, Brown had died when his private jet crashed during a vacation trip to Greece, and Wingate had taken over the company. Last year, he had become a national hero by rescuing six of his employees who had been kidnapped while working on a reconstruction project in Afghanistan. The General had brought his men out alive after leading a private army into the rugged mountains on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Now he was running neck and neck with the incumbent president, Charles Jennings, for their party’s nomination.

“Terrorists must learn to live in terror of the might of this great country,” General Wingate was telling a large audience in the ballroom of a hotel in Los Angeles. The diners were elegantly dressed. The announcer said that each seat had cost a thousand dollars. “Terrorists must learn that their families, their friends, and any country that harbors them will pay dearly for their cowardly acts. We must use force against force, and we must be merciless.”

The sight of Wingate smiling down like a tin god at his wildly applauding audience made Vanessa furious. She switched to CNN, where the “Little League parent syndrome” was the topic of discussion. A bright-eyed blond listened with rapt attention while an eminent psychologist expounded on the dangers of parents’ becoming too emotionally involved in their children’s activities.

“That was fascinating, Dr. Clarke,” the blond said. “And I think our viewers will find this equally fascinating. CNN has just obtained exclusive footage of the frightening melee at the Oregon Little League game from Ralph and Ginnie Shertz, the parents of a child on one of the teams.”

The home movie had been videotaped with an expensive camera, and the picture was very clear; but Ralph Shertz was no Spielberg-the pictures jerked from one spot to another. The action started with a large bearded man shouting at a slender man with glasses. A third man with a ponytail was standing with his back to the camera. The large man threw a punch. Moments later he was clutching his throat and writhing on the ground.

When the camera refocused on the man with the ponytail, he was throwing a policeman over his shoulder. A second policeman shot him. The man with the ponytail turned toward the officer. Vanessa’s heart stopped. She ran toward the set and squinted at the screen. The man with the ponytail fell, and the policeman’s back blocked out his face. The camera moved closer to the action and tipped down. The man with the ponytail was unconscious. Ralph Shertz had gotten a close-up of his face before the policeman who’d fired the shots slapped a hand across his lens.

The tape ended and Dr. Clarke began expounding again, but Vanessa did not hear a word he said. What she’d just seen energized her. Finally, she had a chance to prove that she wasn’t crazy. First, though, she had to make certain that Sam was safe.

Vanessa took her wallet out of her purse. In one of the compartments was a yellowed business card with a number for the FBI. Many years ago, the man who had given it to her was an agent. Now she asked to be connected to the office of Victor Hobson, the executive assistant director for law enforcement services.

“Who may I say is calling?” Hobson’s secretary asked.

“Tell him it’s Vanessa Kohler.”

“Does Mr. Hobson know what this is about?”

“Just give him my name and tell him I know where to find Carl Rice. He’ll take the call.”

There was dead air for a moment. Then Hobson was on the line.

“Vanessa, it’s been years.”

“I don’t have time for chitchat, Mr. Hobson. Carl Rice is alive and I know where to find him.”

“Where is he?” Hobson asked. Vanessa could tell that he was trying to suppress his excitement.

“I’ll tell you as soon as you do one thing for me.”

“And that is?”

“There’s a man, Sam Cutler. He works with me at Exposed. He’s a photographer. I want him protected.”

Vanessa told Hobson the address of her apartment. “He’ll be there or at the paper.”

“Why do you think Mr. Cutler is in danger?”

“Some men tried to kill me last night. My father sent them.”

Hobson was quiet. Vanessa squeezed the phone in frustration. If he thought she was crazy he wouldn’t help her.

“You have to protect Sam while I make certain that the man I saw is really Carl.”

“Then you’re not sure?”

“I’m ninety-eight percent certain, but I won’t know until I see him in person. It’s been twenty years. People look different after twenty years. Keep Sam safe. I’ll call you as soon as I know it’s Carl. Do we have a deal?”

“I’ll bring him in and offer him protective custody. Where can I reach you to let you know we have him?”

Vanessa laughed. “Nice try.”

“Wait. Take down my cell phone number. I’ll keep it on. You can call me anytime.”

Vanessa wrote down the number. As soon as she hung up she started packing. She had to leave the motel immediately. Hobson might have been running a trace as they spoke. She wasn’t taking any chances, and she had to be on the next flight to Portland anyway.