Chapter 30
Climbing the stairs, Len feels weak in the knees, and not just from his extra weight. His mind replays the graphic image, a cruel program director intent on making him hurl again, but he narrows the focus to the yellow gloves by sheer force of will. The gloves lead to thoughts of how little he’s done since breaking and entering to keep his fingerprints to himself, and now with his DNA all over the basement floor, it begs the question: when is he going to call this in?
He rips a paper towel from a roll mounted over the kitchen sink, wipes his mouth, and plods from the basement stairs to the more elegant spiral flight that winds up to the second floor. He pauses to sit on one of the lower steps, catch his breath, and think.
If he calls 911 now and tells the police everything he knows, there’s a chance they’ll arrest Dave before his show starts. Boston may be two hundred miles from this crime scene, but if Len can show that a murder suspect crossed state lines, then Dave’s appearance in a room full of children becomes the FBIs problem. Still, he’s doubtful the police would get here fast enough and coordinate with Boston fast enough to intervene before it’s too late.
He thinks again of the schoolteacher. Could someone like that be more effective than the police without spooking Dave? Maybe. But he would need more information to act.
Len is still winded and woozy, but he climbs the stairs knowing that time is of the essence. Dave will have brought a laptop with him for the show, but the Dell desktop computer he records and edits his shows on is probably the one he used for his dark web searches.
He wonders who the guy in the basement sink was. Someone who stumbled onto Dave’s plans before he did? A Rainblocks coder? Maybe. Only the DNA will tell unless Dave held on to the guy’s personal effects—if it even was a guy. There wasn’t enough left to tell. The idea that it could be a woman down there for some reason makes Len’s stomach do another roll, but he clenches his teeth, keeps his bile down, and makes it to the office chair behind Dave’s workstation, where he powers up the computer and monitor.
While the computer boots up, Len puts an elbow on the gel mouse pad, rests his head on the heel of his hand, and mulls over what it means that Dave tried to dispose of the body. A killer about to hit the road for what appears to be a very public suicide bomb run doesn’t need to clean up after himself at home. If Dave is about to do what Len thinks he is, what’s one more body found after the fact? Did Dave dissolve the body after Len’s last visit in an effort to reduce the odor in case anyone else dropped by the house while he was tying up the loose ends of his grand plan?
If so, he wasn’t successful.
It’s just one more thing that makes Len think Dave’s plans haven’t been carefully considered or hatched in collaboration with someone smarter. And that might be a good thing. The VR headset still bugs him because it implies that Dave might be a cog in a big wheel, a patsy for some kind of sophisticated network with God only knows what aims. But so much else—Dave’s poking around on an unprotected browser, fumbling his way toward more sophisticated methods and compounds, impulsively killing someone and doing a shoddy job of covering it up—implies that Dave is making it up as he goes along and likely working alone.
Then again… there are those conspiracy theories about the Black Flock that he dismissed as paranoid fantasy when he first encountered them.
“Dave, Dave, Dave… Why?” he mutters into his hand. He looks up at the screen doing its startup song and dance. “You had it all, you crazy bastard.”
It’s hard to imagine Dave wanting to hurt kids, never mind slaughter them. Len can’t even begin to fathom what his motive might be. If it weren’t for the body in the basement, he would likely still be suffering pangs of conscience for violating his friend’s privacy.
The log-in screen now loaded, Len stares at the blinking cursor prompting him to enter Dave’s password. Fortunately, he has provided enough tech support for him over the years that he has it memorized, assuming Dave hasn’t done the smart thing and changed it recently.
Len types: $creamTim3 and clicks enter.
He is shocked when it works. The clock on the screen reads twenty to three. The show starts at three. No time to waste.
Len goes straight to Dave’s Tor browser, the anonymous web browser that bounces its connection around the world, leaving an indecipherable tangle of IP addresses for anyone hoping to track the user’s activity. This provides enough anonymity to deter any authorities that might be watching from a distance without a warrant, but Len is relieved to see that Dave hasn’t cleared his history on the machine itself. And why would he, especially if he hasn’t even taken care to finish the job in the basement?
He clicks through a series of bookmarks. Some pages take a while to load because of all that global rerouting. He finds himself checking the time frequently, his heart rate never quite settling down after the climb up the stairs. Each new piece of information he finds gives his pulse another kick. He taps his fingers on the desk, grabs one of Dave’s pens from a coffee cup, and scribbles notes on a sheet of printer paper.
Some of the subjects of Dave’s research are familiar to Len, while others require further searches. Combined, they point toward a devastating possibility that causes Len to break a fresh sweat, a wave of cold dread washing over him. One of the terms he doesn’t recognize is RDX, but he soon learns that this stands for Research Department Explosive, a compound more powerful than TNT, invented by the British for use in World War II and later combined with plasticizers to form the better-known Compound C explosives, including C-4. Dave has several recipes bookmarked, along with dark web sites that sell RDX and detonators for payment in Bitcoin.
Len has to shake himself from staring agape at the screen, reminding himself that the clock is ticking as he fishes his phone from the pocket of his shorts. Any thin hope that Dave was only building a stage prop for some kind of chemistry and pyro stunt to dazzle the kids drains out of him.
He needs to call 911, get the police and FBI over here. And he will. But that’s not the number he reaches for first. He never did respond to the email from the schoolteacher even though he read it enough times to have parts of it memorized. Andy Strauss from Massachusetts. The email included a phone number below the signature, and Len’s greatest hope at this desperate moment is that it’s a cell phone number and not the school landline where a teacher might keep a mailbox seldom checked over the summer months. Len isn’t a religious man, but he whispers a string of petitions to some vague and dusty notion of a childhood deity after tapping the phone number link in the email. Prayers to the same God he used to bargain with while his uncle molested him. But he tries not to think about that while he watches the seconds tick by on the screen and listens to the awful silence between the third and fourth ring.
“Hello?”
“Is this Andy Strauss?”
“Yes.”
“Andy, this is Len Lemarchand. You sent me an email a few weeks ago.”
“Yeah. I honestly didn’t think I’d hear back from you. Thanks for getting in touch.”
“I needed to look into it first. I found something very serious, and I need you to listen to me carefully now because time is tight, and lives are at stake.”
“Okay…”
“I wish this wasn’t our first conversation, and that’s my fault. I was reluctant to believe Dave would do anything to hurt kids, but what I found goes way beyond inappropriate videos.”
“Okay. Wow. You’re scaring me, Len. One of my students is at the Scream Time event right now in Boston.”
“And where are you? How close to the city?”
“I’m at home. About thirty minutes north, depending on traffic.”
“Shit.”
“What? Shit, what? You’re really freaking me out here.”
“Show starts at three, so the kids are probably still arriving and finding their seats. It’s a bomb threat, Andy. We haven’t got time to get into how I know, but I’m sure. Dave is gonna try to blow up the theater.”
“Dave? What the… Fuck, did you call the police?”
“Not yet.”
“Do it. I’m hanging up and calling Gavin’s mother. You call the police. Call the theater. Get them to evacuate.”
“Wait! Don’t hang up. I need your help. Listen. Just listen. I’m trusting you’re a fast thinker who can grasp this without a lot of detail. Calling in a bomb threat might have worked an hour ago, and I’m kicking myself right now, believe me. But I had to be sure. Now you got a theater full of kids. Maybe not a full house yet, but enough. If the management tells Dave they need to evacuate, they will spook him, and he might set it off. Do you hear me? They’ll go to him first unless I tell them he’s the threat and they will never believe that. They don’t know me. I’m just some guy on the phone. Same with the police. Best-case scenario, they take me seriously, and Dave sets it off early before the theater is full. Understand?”
“Jesus Christ. I do.”
“You can get there in time, maybe. If you leave now.”
“And do what? Rush the stage? I don’t even have a ticket. I don’t know why you called me.”
Len hopes that in spite of this protest, Andy Strauss is moving now, looking for his car keys, putting on his shoes.
“I’ve seen his plans. The kids have plastic figurines. Not all the kids, but enough.”
“Enough for what? Gavin has one of those.”
“They’re made of plastic explosives. Primitive and homebrewed, but probably effective.”
“Oh God. I have to call her. I have to tell her to—”
“No. No, you listen to me. If she is already in the theater, and she reacts, tries to warn others… I don’t care how levelheaded this woman is, if she finds out her son is holding a bomb…”
“Dave will notice.”
“Yes. If I were there, I would do what I’m asking you to do. You’re tech savvy, Andy. This would take me too long to explain to the police.”
“Tell me.”
Len explains what needs to be done and almost weeps tears of joy when Andy tells him he has the means to do it… if he can make it in time. He ends the call and runs a hand through his sweaty curls, watching the clock on the computer. He promised Andy he would call the authorities after giving him a running start. Now he just has to wait it out, doubting his own judgment every minute.
He doesn’t notice the glowing purple dock hidden in a nest of cables behind the computer tower under the desk. Or the grinning plastic lizard at its center.