Devoted(81)
The fugitive let go of stone and brick, dropped on Fenton, and dragged him out of the window. Together they fell from the third floor, through a wind that buoyed them not, the pistol slipping from the deputy’s hand, Shacket crying out in triumph. Thad Fenton landed on his back, on concrete, and all the breath blew out of him. Pain tore along every neural pathway in his body, as if a thousand knives had been thrust through him. But the agony was brief, a cruel flare of torment and then no pain at all below his neck, only in his head, his face. Paralyzed.
Gasping with excitement, making eager wordless sounds, seeming no worse for the fall, Shacket crouched upon his prey.
The deputy felt a ribbon of warm blood unraveling from a corner of his mouth and down his chin.
Murmuring like an enraptured lover, Shacket licked up that red essence. He lowered his mouth to the deputy’s throat and bit away his ability to scream or speak, and then bit away his ability to breathe.
For Thad Fenton, there was nothing but the chilly wind and tossing trees and extreme terror—but only for a moment.
86
At first with astonishment and pride in her son’s initiative, but soon with growing alarm, Megan paged through “The Son’s Revenge: Faithfully Compiled Evidence of Monstrous Evil,” while Ben Hawkins asked Woody about the Dark Web and the site calling itself Tragedy.
Sitting in Woody’s office chair, Megan felt a little dizzy. In one hour, she’d had her mind opened to the possibility of dogs with enormously enhanced intelligence, witnessed her son ascending from high-functioning autism to very-damn-high-functioning autism, heard him speak for the first time in eleven years, and learned that some murder-for-hire outfit on the Dark Web might be seeking him. Wonder was rapidly darkening into confusion and dread.
Because Jason had been disturbed by Dorian Purcell’s passionate interest in transhumanism, not merely by the financial risks being taken by the billionaire to fund research, but by the nature of the research itself, he had made plans to leave his position at Parable. When he had died in the helicopter crash, suspicion had simmered in Megan, although not for long. When the initial shock of his death passed, she decided that suspicion was merely part of the anger that gripped her upon receiving news of the loss—anger at the injustice, at fate, at God. When anger gave way entirely to grief, and when grief became sorrow, and as she bootstrapped herself out of sorrow for Woody’s sake, the suspicion gradually faded. Anyway, it made no sense that a man of Dorian’s wealth and fine reputation would risk everything to remove a subordinate by violence, unless that had been part of his successful modus operandi from his earliest days. But no evidence of such a dark side existed.
Except that evidence had existed, after all, so deeply hidden that no one but an obsessive-compulsive autistic genius, motivated by acute grief, could possibly have the time and the focus to devote to the uncovering of it.
For all of his formidable brainpower, however, Woody was a naif. He lacked the street smarts to realize the risk he was taking by penetrating Dorian’s cover as Alexander Gordius and by snooping around on the Dark Web.
To the boy, Ben Hawkins said, “So . . . what was the last thing you saw on the screen before you backed out of the Tragedy site?”
Woody looked at the dog rather than at the man. He said, “Four words came up. They said ‘We will find you.’ I crawled under my desk and unplugged the computer, unplugged everything, even my work lamp. I was scared. I’m still scared. I did a stupid thing. I’m sorry I did such a stupid thing.”
Listening to him, Megan found it remarkable that he spoke now as if he had always spoken, as if he’d already forgotten that eleven years of silence had been lifted from him.
Ben said, “Listen, Woody, you didn’t do a stupid thing. You did a brave thing, an amazing thing. Any time you do a brave thing, see, there’s always a possibility of pushback from bad hats who don’t like people with courage. Now that we know what we’re dealing with, we can handle them. Putting bad hats in their place is easier than you think. It can even be fun.”
As the boy stared intently at the dog, Megan watched Ben—until she realized the retriever was watching her and wagging his tail.
She reminded herself that the dog wasn’t just a dog. Kipp was also . . . a person. She had to get her head around that. He saw how she was watching Ben, and he was perceptive enough to guess what she must be feeling.
Abruptly, Kipp slipped away from Woody and padded across the room to the open door and stood staring into the hallway.
The doorbell rang. It was a quarter past three in the morning, and the doorbell rang. It rang again.
87
After his interview with Lee Shacket in Room 328, Carson Conroy was discomposed, too agitated to go home, even though he was strung out on caffeine and bad news, eyes burning from lack of sleep. He drove the town, seeking something, but not sure what he sought.
He’d fled Chicago for Pinehaven, left the madness of metropolis for the comparative sanity of the Sierra Nevada range. But the truth of contemporary life was that distance no longer insulated anyone from the cancers of calculated modernism. Gangbangers like those who killed Lissa for sport had begun showing up in small towns. Social-media mobs could as easily destroy the life of a schoolteacher in rural America as that of a celebrity, for transgressions either real or imagined. Dorian Purcell, working with a federal agency, funded a reckless research project into the engineering of the human genome and sited the work in rural Utah—but now people were dying here.