He opened the can of white latex paint and poured it into a pan. He'd tried scrubbing graffiti off the walls before. The wall paint had come off with the spray paint, and he'd had to recover the entire wall anyway. Waste of time. Waste of paint. Fool kids. He draped a drop cloth over the tops of the urinals and had run the roller up three feet of wall, dulling but not obscuring a big letter S, when the mobile phone in his back pocket jangled.
A dozen calls later, Hunter had nothing. He'd spoken to a mother in Denver whose infant son was on the list; a sixteen-year-old girl in Dallas who was late for her waitressing job and didn't want to talk; a father in Chicago who wanted to know why a stranger was asking about his seven-year-old daughter; and two women and three men, all of whom had no clue why they'd be on a list sent to a news reporter. Of course he'd encountered wrong, unlisted, and disconnected numbers; busy signals; unanswered calls; and answering machines. But none of those counted. No journalist worth his press pass let that stuff deter him from a story. Problem was, he wasn't sure he had a story. Just a list of names.
He had called a Times entertainment reporter in LA to ask about the celebrities on the list, but she had nothing to report. Biggest news was that the workaholic director Lew Darabont, also on Hunter's list, had failed to show up for a script read-through—the first time in his career. A studio publicist announced that Darabont was suffering from exhaustion and would take a few days off.
Hunter then reached a senator at his Washington office. No news there, except that he was furious over a narrowly defeated tort reform bill he had helped draft. He ranted for three minutes, then apologized, saying he hadn't gotten much sleep the night before. "Fighting a cold," he'd explained. "It's got me down, and I think it wants to be the flu."
That was another thing Hunter had discovered. There seemed to be a high percentage of people with colds. Hunter didn't know when cold season was and wondered if it was at different times of year in different parts of the country. He made a note to check it out.
He'd talked about or to five kids and twelve adults, nine males and eight females, six well-known people and twelve nobodies. Scattered around the country. No rhyme, no reason. No story.
A cub reporter appeared at his desk. The kid was helping him research a story on transit cops making a sport of beating up vagrants in the subway tunnels. He was excited about interviews he had conducted and wanted Hunter to listen to the MP3 files. Hunter took a last look at the mysterious list of names. He closed the document. Just another WAS story—wait and see. He had eighteen others like it.
eighteen
Julia Matheson checked into a downtown motel under her married sister's name and paid cash. It was the kind of place that didn't ask for identification or a major credit card, and couldn't care less who you were or what you did in the room, as long as you didn't destroy the property and you paid in advance. She requested a room on the back side of the building, out of sight of people cruising the boulevard.
The room had brown indoor-outdoor carpeting, a chipped Formica table bolted to the wall next to the bed, a threadbare bedspread, and a hand-printed sign on the back of the door that read NO cooking in room. The smell of fried hamburgers tinged the air.
Julia dropped her purse and laptop case on the bed, along with a big bag from Wal-Mart containing a change of clothes, a gym bag, and other items. She went to the window and opened it, then fell onto the bed beside the bags. Most of the acoustic spray had come off the ceiling, probably a little here and a little there for the past thirty years. There was a big brown-rimmed water stain in one corner. She tried identifying the other splotches: ketchup, coffee, a smashed insect. She sighed and closed her eyes.
What was she doing here? She should have been back in her duplex in Atlanta, cleaning up the dishes, helping her mother to the tub. She needed to call her. It wasn't that her mother's MS rendered her completely helpless, but more that she'd be worried. Julia rarely came home late, and when she did, she always called first. She didn't know what she'd say. Not anything that would make anyone tapping the phone decide to stake out the house and wait for her or anything that would give away her location.
Listen to her: tapping the phone!
But that was her reality right now. Someone with loads of intelligence and highly sophisticated technical capabilities had attacked them and killed Goody and Vero. They had intercepted the SATD signal, which this morning she would have said was impossible. And Goody had recognized one of the assailants, an undercover cop. What did that mean? Was a government agency involved in the hit? A rogue director? Or was the guy freelancing?
Now that Vero was dead, was it over? She didn't know, but she remembered something Goody had said during the investigation of a serial killer: "There's no end to evil."
She wondered if Jodi Donnelley knew that her husband was dead. Probably Edward Molland, the LED's director of domestic operations, had told her. Julia wanted to be there, to hold her, to comfort the boys. At the same time, she wished there was no reason to comfort Donnelley's family. She opened her eyes, turning her mind away from what she wished. It all hurt too much. She needed to keep her head straight, her thoughts on the problem.
She sat up and scooted back to lean against the wall, the nearly disintegrated foam pillow propped behind her lower back. She pulled her knees up and hugged her legs. Her heart felt wedged in her throat.
Okay . . . Goody called a little after six. Despesorio Vero showed up at CDC. What kind of name is that? What was that accent? Mexican? Did he travel to the States, or did he live here? Why did he want to see Mark Sweeney? National Center for Infectious Diseases . . . National Center for Infectious Diseases.
Pressure behind her eyes. She wanted to cry . . . and she didn't want to.
What are the five stages of grief? Or are there six? Denial . . . anger . . . depression . . . No, bargaining, then depression . . .
Ahhhh! Goody went into the Excelsior. The SATD was working. His wire was working. Some white noise, maybe the hotel's AC. He ordered orange juice, then Vero came in, asked if he was Sweeney.
Her top teeth found a ridge on her bottom lip, the scab from having bitten into it earlier. She bit down, feeling the pain, letting it move her away from her grief. She tasted blood.
He said Vero didn't look well. Then . . .
She remembered the gunfire, how loud it was through the ear-piece. Goody had yelled. People were screaming in the background.
She closed her eyes, pinching out a tear. She bit harder on her lip, swallowed against the lump in her throat, fought the flood at her eyes.
If Julia had distracted herself by stepping outside and
looking north, she would have seen in the distance the shape of Missionary Ridge. It was discernable at that time of evening by the lights radiating from the large homes perched on it. If it had been pointed out to her, she could have seen, near the very peak of the mountain, a light glowing in the study of the recipient of Goody's last mortal words.
Dr. Allen Parker sat at his desk, a fire roaring in a nearby hearth, Mozart's Requiem streaming through ceiling-mounted speakers. He was torn between two piles of books and papers. One pile contained everything he needed to finish an article he was writing for the Journal of the American Medical Association on the benefits of partial liquid ventilation for patients with severe respiratory failure. It was already three days overdue.