Indestructible Read online

  “A risk-taker,” she said bitterly. “This is different. I’m not trying to hold you back.”

  “Yeah, you are.”

  “You could be killed, and I don’t want to be telling our child bedtime stories about what his father was like before he died. I want our child to know you, to see your smile, to hear your voice. I want you to be a real father. Not a memory.”

  And he wanted the same thing. Drew knew what it was like to grow up without parents, and his child deserved better. But he couldn’t back down and hope that law enforcement would catch Sykes. He had to go after Harlan. “We’re leaving now to prepare for the meet at seven. It’s all going to be all right. We’ll return by eight.”

  She stripped off her Swiss Army watch and handed it to him. “Your watch is broken. You might need this.”

  “It was a gift.” When he first gave her the watch, he’d planned to leave her. The watch was supposed to be something for her to remember him by. “Don’t you want it?”

  “Bring it back to me. At eight o’clock.”

  He slipped the watch in his pocket. If he didn’t survive this meeting, it would be best if she forgot all about him.

  Chapter Nineteen

  On the drive to Lead, Drew tried not to think about Melinda. Her anger bugged him, but he could handle hostility and rejection. No big deal. He was a lone wolf, didn’t need anybody else. But he couldn’t forget her tears. She cared enough about him that she’d wept.

  And how did he respond to her? To the mother of his child? He turned his back and went ahead with his plan.

  It had to be this way. He had to find Sykes.

  Setting his jaw, he focused one hundred percent on setting their trap for Harlan. Though he recalled every inch of the house where he’d grown up, he’d left ten years ago. The place would be different now. Apparently, no one was living there. Harlan never would have chosen that location for their meeting if someone else had been in the house. Other families must have come and gone.

  In the passenger seat of the Range Rover, Jack stared through the windshield with alert curiosity as though memorizing the rugged mountain terrain. He remarked, “Claudia still hasn’t found proof that Harlan was taking money from Sykes.”

  “He admitted to it.”

  “I’d feel a lot better about confronting him if we had more evidence to lay in front of him.”

  “We have a witness,” Drew reminded him.

  “But Harlan can come up with another excuses for why he talked to the librarian. If we’re going to use the threat of FBI charges to make him cooperate, we need something that’ll stick.”

  “He told me that he got cash from Sykes when I was living at his house. He—” Drew hesitated, recalling that Harlan had said something more.

  Jack looked toward him. “What else?”

  “He said it wasn’t about the money. But what else could have motivated him to work for Sykes? Harlan isn’t a scientist, so he wouldn’t have cared about the research per se.”

  “He could have a grudge against the FBI.”

  “I don’t think so. He’s not a man ruled by his passions. He’s Joe Average. The kind of guy who likes to have a beer and watch sports on the tube.” What would cause an average guy to betray his work and participate in the heinous crimes perpetrated at The Facility? “It’s got to be money.”

  Driving through the small town of Lead, Drew clicked through memories. The drugstore on the corner. The Elks Lodge. The gas station. A couple of storefronts on the main drag were vacant, but the town seemed to be doing okay. A good number of cars and trucks parked at the curb outside the café.

  Lead was smaller than he remembered, as though he was looking back through the wrong end of a telescope. He took a left at the square brick grade school, where a couple of kids were shooting hoops on the asphalt playground. “The house is only a couple more miles.”

  Jack startled as if waking up from a dream. “At the house, we need to look around. I see you making an important discovery. Something that’s going to nail Harlan.”

  “Is this a pre-cog vision?”

  “You could call it that. I see us going down the stairs into the basement.”

  “This object that we find,” Drew said. “Do you know what it is?”

  Jack shook his head. “Sorry.”

  Drew drove past the house without stopping. The exterior of the ranch-style house had been painted a cheerful yellow, but otherwise the surroundings hadn’t changed too much. At this time of year, there were no flowers or leafy shrubs in the yard. He continued into the forest. The house Drew grew up in—the Andersons’ house—was secluded, separated from the other residences in the neighborhood by an acre of land on one side and wild forest on the other.

  He turned down a small, winding road that doubled back in the direction they’d come. At the end of the road, he turned the vehicle around for a quick escape and parked. “We’ll leave the car here so Harlan won’t see it when he arrives.”

  Jack drew his automatic. Drew did the same. Not knowing what they might find in the house, they needed to proceed with caution. From the back of the Range Rover, they each grabbed a duffel bag filled with weapons.

  Moving easily through the forest, Drew found a winding path that he’d walked a thousand times when he was a kid. At the edge of the trees, he signaled Jack to stop.

  Dusk had already begun to settle. Long shadows from the pine trees reached into the backyard. He watched the windows and saw no lights from inside. No sign of movement.

  When he set down his duffel bag, Jack did the same. Until they were sure there were no surprises inside the house, they needed to be able to move fast, unencumbered by their weaponry and equipment.

  As they approached the back door, his heart beat faster. How many times had he walked through this door? How many times had Belle yelled at him not to let it slam? She never allowed him to come through the front and track up the carpet.

  Standing on the concrete stoop, he reached for the doorknob. Locked, of course. Drew automatically looked to the left. Beside a rose bush, he spotted a fake rock. When he picked it up, he found the door key hidden inside. After all these years?

  He unlocked the door and stepped into the kitchen. To the right was a beige counter, oak cabinets and appliances. To the left, a round table with four chairs. On a lazy Susan in the center of the table were cut-glass salt-and-pepper shakers, half-full. Plaid half curtains and a matching valance covered the window. The kitchen matched his memories—exactly matched.

  This place was a time capsule. From the rose-colored trivet on the counter to the burn mark on the linoleum in front of the oven, nothing had changed. On the counter were the three glass figurines of bear cubs that Belle liked so much. Each wore a different collar in red, blue and green.

  While Jack searched the rest of the house with his gun drawn, Drew stumbled through the arch into the front room. A layer of dust covered every horizontal surface, but the furniture was the same. And he remembered…

  He had been lying on the flowered sofa. His eyelids had been half-closed. A sharp, driving pain radiated from his heart. His limbs were numb. A man with white hair hovered over him. Sykes. Harlan and Belle stood watching. Her eyes were hard and angry. Harlan said, “He’s had enough.”

  Harlan had been there.

  Drew shook off the memory. Harlan knew. He hadn’t kept a distance from Sykes. He was a coconspirator, as guilty as Sykes himself.

  Jack came into the room with his gun in one hand and a cell phone in the other. “Nobody here. I’ll tell Claudia.”

  Harlan kept this house. He hadn’t sold it or rented it out. Why? Drew had to know.

  Ignoring all the other rooms, he went to the basement door. Jack had a vision of him finding a clue down here. Like the upstairs, the finished basement was the same as it had been ten years ago. In the family room, the worn sofa still faced the boxy television set where he and Harlan had sat for hours watching football.

  In the laundry room, he spotted
two new sets of utility cabinets with wide double doors. These built-in closets were painted green to match the other walls in the room, and they went from floor to ceiling. A huge storage space. When he pulled at the handle, he noticed locks at the top and bottom of the cabinet door.

  Jack stood behind him. “This is it. I saw you pulling on the handle.”

  “What comes next?”

  “You tell me.”

  Though Drew could have been careful about picking the locks and opening the doors that stretched across fifteen feet of wall space, he didn’t give a damn. The answers were here. Harlan might have stashed the money here.

  Drew stepped back. With a steady hand, he shot off one lock, then the other. He opened the doors.

  Inside was a pine coffin.

  MELINDA RUBBED the place on her wrist where her Swiss Army watch had been. Her last words to Drew had been angry, and she regretted them. She wanted to be with him instead of stuck here in the cabin with the walls closing in on her.

  Claudia sat in front of the computer, searching for evidence that could be used against Harlan.

  Melinda asked, “When Jack called, are you sure he didn’t mention anything about Drew?”

  “All Jack said was that they made it to Lead and there was nobody in the house.” She rose from the chair. “I know you’re worried. So am I. But Jack isn’t going to let anything bad happen. He’s an incredibly gentle man, but he has the heart of a warrior. And Drew’s no slouch.”

  “So many things could go wrong.” She went to the door. “I can’t stand being inside. I need to go for a run.”

  “Not a good idea. We’re safe in here.”

  Melinda eyed the screens showing the views from Drew’s surveillance cameras. And she knew there were motion sensors on the road that would set off an alarm if a car approached. The precautions made her feel even more claustrophobic. “Maybe just a walk? A chance to breathe fresh air?”

  “We’re a lot alike, you and me.”

  “I wish.” She gave a self-deprecating grin. “You have it together. You’re a hundred times cooler than I am.”

  “Before Jack came into my life, I was a Web designer, living a solitary existence. He’s the most exciting thing that ever happened to me.”

  “Well, we have that in common. Drew is nothing like anyone I’ve ever known before.”

  “And you love him.”

  “Gosh.” Melinda frowned. “We haven’t talked about love. I’m pregnant with his baby. He’s changed my life, but I don’t know about love. Especially not after what I said to him before he left.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  She gazed longingly at the door. “I want to go outside.”

  “Okay.” Claudia took a .22 automatic from the table and tucked it into her jacket pocket. “Let’s walk.”

  Shyly, she asked, “Have you got a gun for me?”

  “I think there’s a rifle in the storage room, but the boys took all the other guns and stuff.”

  Because they didn’t expect a threat to come in this direction. Nobody knew about this cabin. They should be safe for now.

  IN THE LAUNDRY ROOM of the ranch-style house where he’d grown up, Drew opened the double doors to the second built-in cabinet and found a second coffin. What the hell had gone on in this house?

  He turned toward Jack, who stood all the way across the room in the doorway with his arms folded across his chest.

  “Melinda is always telling me I’m crazy,” Drew said. “She has no idea. This is what crazy looks like.”

  “You said Harlan was Joe Average.”

  “I might have misjudged.”

  These long, deep cabinets hadn’t been here when Drew was growing up; Harlan had constructed this basement burial place after Drew left. Kind of a macabre home improvement project. He imagined his foster father whistling as he gathered his toolbox from the workbench in the garage. Then, building the cabinets while having a beer and listening to the Brewers game on the radio. Why? What had he been thinking?

  The lifetime of undercover work, constantly lying to Sykes and to the FBI, must have driven him over the edge into insanity. He’d hung on to this house, kept it exactly like it was and started collecting corpses in the basement.

  The lids on both of these pine boxes were fastened with easy-to-open latches, but Drew hesitated. He didn’t really want to see what was inside.

  Jack took a step forward. “Should I?”

  “I’ll do it.” In a way, finding coffins in the basement of his foster parents’ home was fitting. His life as foster kid and the victim of genetic experimentation had always been one step away from madness.

  He opened the lid on the first coffin. The body inside was shriveled to bone. Drew knew it was a woman because the skeleton was arranged inside a blue dress with a lace collar.

  Jack looked over his shoulder. “Natural mummification?”

  “That’s an urban myth.” When he lived in New York, he’d heard stories about people who had been dead in their apartments for years and naturally turned into mummies. “She might have been buried outside before being brought in here. Or soaked in lye. Something.”

  The right side of the skull showed considerable trauma, as though someone had held a gun to her head and pulled the trigger. Laid on top of her sunken chest was a locket.

  Drew picked up the necklace. “This belonged to my foster mother, the woman I knew as Belle Anderson. Harlan told me they were divorced.”

  The silver locket was clean and shiny. Drew remembered how Belle used to hold it between her thumb and fingers, rubbing the filigreed pattern.

  He opened the locket. Inside three ovals showed pictures of young boys. The children looked identical. Maybe it was only one boy wearing three different shirts in three different colors.

  He dropped the locket into his jacket pocket and turned to the second coffin. He flipped the latch and opened the lid. The man inside had been embalmed; his skin was gray. He wore a suit with a red necktie. His head was shaved.

  Jack made the identification. “This man was known as Red. I saw him kill himself about two months ago.”

  Even in death, he resembled Blue. “There were three of them, right? Red, Blue and Green.”

  “That’s right.”

  The three little boys in the locket wore shirts of those colors. Drew recalled rumors that Harlan and Belle had lost their children. Three sons. If Sykes had taken Harlan’s children for his experiments, it explained his hold on the FBI agent. To protect his kids, Harlan would have been forced to do as Sykes instructed.

  “I think,” Jack said, “that we have enough proof to make Harlan talk.”

  “Proof of insanity.”

  “Why do you think he wanted to meet you here? In this house?”

  Some sort of revenge? Had he prepared another coffin for Drew? “I can’t think of a single logical reason.”

  They closed the lids and shut the cabinet doors. Drew’s natural instinct was to run. Fast.

  Waiting for Harlan’s arrival wasn’t going to be easy. He didn’t believe in ghosts, but the remains in the basement were a tangible presence.

  As he entered the kitchen, he remembered Belle standing at the kitchen sink, looking out the window. Was she watching and waiting for her own three boys to come home? No wonder she’d never showed Drew any fondness. His presence was a reminder of what she’d lost.

  He paced through the front room, trying to concentrate on how they could take Harlan into custody and eliminate the threat from Blue.

  “We can’t stay here,” Jack said.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty creepy, but—”

  “Seriously, we have to go. I’m sensing that Claudia is in danger.”

  “How do you—”

  “I can feel it.” His cell phone was already in his hand. “We need to get back to the cabin. Before it’s too late.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “Run!” Claudia snapped her cell phone closed.

  Melinda responded to
the urgency in her voice. She picked up her feet and moved. Back toward the cabin. They hadn’t gone far, only about a hundred yards away from the front door.

  Thin streaks of daylight resisted the murky gray dusk. It was difficult to see the rocks, twigs and pine cones on the path. In front of her, Claudia stumbled. She fell.

  Melinda helped her to her feet. “That phone call. Was it Jack?”

  “He said we were in danger. Told me to get in the car and drive away from the cabin. Get ourselves on the road to Lead.”

  Given his pre-cog abilities, Jack didn’t need to give detailed explanations. He saw things before they happened. If he said there was danger, Melinda believed him. “Are you okay?”

  “I twisted my ankle.”

  “Lean on me.”

  “I can make it.” Claudia had taken the gun from her pocket. In her other hand, she held out the car keys. “You drive.”

  Together, they crossed the cleared area in front of the cabin.

  Aware of the approaching danger, Melinda tried to be hypervigilent. She listened to rustling noises from the forest. She peered to the left, then to the right. Drew was good at scanning; his eyes were constantly in motion. But she saw nothing suspicious—only a shifting pattern of tree branches and shadows.

  Near the car, the solid shape of a man appeared. How had he come so close? Claudia raised her arm to shoot, but he was faster. She was hit by a fiery bolt. A stun gun.

  With a shout, Claudia went down.

  Melinda squatted beside her. She took the gun, raised it and aimed in the direction where she’d seen the man. No one was there. He’d disappeared into the shadows.

  She heard a sound from behind and whirled around.

  Before she could squeeze off a shot, a second man kicked the weapon from her hand. She scrambled after it, but he picked up the .22.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “You’re too valuable, Melinda.”

  “Harlan.” She recognized his voice from the phone call.

  “I advise you to come along quietly.”

  She wanted to run. Her legs coiled like springs, prepared to leap. But she couldn’t leave Claudia behind. What should I do? Her mind sifted through dozens of possibilities. She remembered Drew’s warnings. If they fell into Sykes’s hands, they’d never be seen or heard from again.