Conspiracy Theory(22)

Now it was not the middle of the night, but the early morning—6:45 in the morning on November 13, to be exact. Gregor finished shaving in front of the enormous vanity mirror Bennis had installed in his bathroom and reached for the toothpaste and his toothbrush, feeling as disoriented as he ever had in his life. He could still remember, with perfect clarity, the first time he had ever seen a dead body that wasn’t laid out in a casket for a wake. It was his first year at the FBI and he was the junior partner on a kidnapping detail, the kind of thing that usually required nothing more from the agents but sitting by a phone and recording ransom demands from half-demented fools who hadn’t realized how difficult it would be to actually collect a large amount of money in small bills. That was why he had been assigned to that particular case. You didn’t send brand-new agents out of Quantico into one of the nastier situations, even if you thought you had no choice. This time, though, the half-demented fool had been a manic-depressive, or maybe stoked out on the kind of drugs that made mood swings behave like roller-coaster rides. Every time he called to give instructions about the ransom, he got crazier—and unlike most kidnappers, he called a lot, over and over again, apparently heedless of the fact that it was going to be possible, eventually, to trace those calls. Still, that was a long time ago and the technology hadn’t been as good then as it was now. He might have gotten away with it if his only problem had been a desperate need to talk. Instead, he’d also had a desperate need for validation, or absolution, or something that was so mixed up in his brain he couldn’t put it into words and he couldn’t live without it. During the fifth phone call his voice began to squeak and soar. The experienced agent on the case was as tense as Richard Nixon at a press conference. The kidnapper was losing it, and even Gregor had been able to understand that. He might have been inexperienced as an agent, but he’d spent his time in the army. He knew the sound of panic when he heard it. He also knew the sound of gunfire when he heard it, and that was what came next. The explosion was so loud that the woman whose daughter had been kidnapped screamed and dropped the phone. A second later, she was holding her ear, doubled over in pain. Gregor held his breath. If the phone went to dial tone, it would mean the child was dead. The phone did not go to dial tone.

They found the child, and the kidnapper, two and a half hours later. With the phone line open and nobody to hang it up, it was easy to trace. The child was locked in the bathroom, sitting in the bathtub in tears, but not otherwise hurt. The kidnapper was lying half-on and half-off the big double motel bed he’d been sitting on when he made the call and put the gun to the side of his head. If you’re going to shoot yourself, never shoot yourself in the side of the head, Gregor’s instructor at Quantico always said. Shots to the side of the head often didn’t work, and what happened was that you were left alive but worse off than before, brain-damaged, immobile, a walking vegetable. In this case, the man had been lucky, if you could call it that. He was most certainly dead. The side of his skull on the far side of the shot had exploded outward, splattering blood and skin and bone all over the motel bed’s bedspread and the window in the wall beyond it. His eyes were wide open and caught in a paralysis so profound, Gregor couldn’t shake the feeling that they were trying to communicate something. It was the first time he’d realized that the newly dead did not look dead so much as hyperalive. Their eyes tried to catch and hold you. If you were there at the critical moment, their arms reached out for you. Gregor had always wondered if they were trying to hold on to life or trying to drag you into the tunnel along with them.

He wiped the froth of toothpaste off his mouth. He washed his face again. He gave a little consideration, but not much, to Bennis’s suggestion that he might look good with his hair cut short enough to almost look shaved. He put the towel back on the rack and went down the hall to the living room. Bennis was standing at the big front window, doing what he himself had been doing during the night for days: twisting sideways to see if she could see what was left of Holy Trinity. She was as “dressed” as she was going to get for the day, meaning a turtleneck and flannel shirt and jeans. She was having no more luck than he did when he tried to see the church. In the first two days after the explosion, crews had come out from the city to clean up the mess. The entire facade of the church was gone. What was left was something like a stage set, with the pews and aisles and altar exposed to anybody who wanted to come by and see what they were like. Bennis had her arms wrapped around her body so that she could twist more easily against the glass. If this had been a year or two ago, she would have been smoking.