Snakes and Ladders Read online

  Louise smiled mirthlessly. “I’m not in the habit of losing interest once my interest has been piqued.”

  “Yeah,” said Millard, “I know that about you.”

  She shot him a look, which Millard returned with a bland gaze.

  She sighed. “I need you here until Brashear’s taken care of,” she said, “and I don’t know how long it will take before I can get Mitchell ready. If Ballard and McNally are settled down in Sedona, it makes things easier, and I think we can assume that they are as interested in staying out of the public eye as we are. After all, she is a murderer.”

  7

  Despite her concern about what might be happening back in Pennsylvania, Lizzy couldn’t deny the attractions of Sedona—not least the fantastically gorgeous hiking trails: Courthouse Butte, Boynton Canyon, Thread-the-Needle. Some trails were too far from the house where she and Uncle Owen were staying to reach on her bike, so she had to rely on him to drive her.

  Today he was tied up on a conference call with another Penn professor to discuss a class they would be co-teaching in the fall, so she decided on a pleasant alternative that was within walking distance of the house: the Sugarloaf Trail, whose attractions included a glorious view of Coffeepot Rock.

  The day was cool, with the temperature falling and rising as ranks of gray clouds hid and revealed the sun. It was odd to walk on a trail that looked so wild in places, but in others provided vistas not only of the desolate red rocks, but also of a valley filled with tidy neighborhoods of small houses and tiny shopping centers peopled by even tinier shoppers. Occasionally the hoot of a car horn or a chorus of dog barks—quickly triggered but less quickly quieted—drifted up to her on the trail.

  She was looking down on such a view, idly trying to identify the Sedona streets with which she was quickly becoming familiar, when a loud snort startled her out of her reverie. She looked up to see two javelinas on the trail in front of her, one larger and one smaller. A mother and baby? Lizzy knew better than to disturb a mother and baby in the wild. The animals seemed unconcerned with her presence, gazing at her with placid eyes, then turning to root among the prickly pear. But even at twenty paces, Lizzy could see the sharp teeth protruding from the larger one’s jaw. She couldn’t remember anything in her hiking books about whether javelinas were dangerous, but it seemed smart to step off the trail to give them some room.

  Stepping off the trail was hardly a hardship since, as was the case in many sections of the Sugarloaf Trail, the small bushes growing throughout the area were separated by convenient widths of red dirt. Oftentimes the only noticeable difference between on- and off-trail was the wire-enclosed stone cairns that marked the official route. She passed the snuffling javelinas at what seemed a safe distance, then turned to join up again with the trail.

  In a few minutes, the path that she thought was the trail dead-ended at a line of wooden privacy fences, on the other side of which were the back yards of the homes that backed onto the trail area. As she stood with her hands on her hips, contemplating her options, the sun passed behind a cloud and the temperature dropped a degree or two.

  Irritated, she retraced her steps and cast about for a bit, but could see no sign of the trail. She looked up, trying to judge if the weather was going to hold out. If it was, she’d keep looking for the trail without the help of technology. If not, she’d check the map on her phone, which she had discovered on previous hikes displayed trails as well as roads.

  The sun made what looked like one last appearance ahead of solid ranks of clouds, and she stepped into the shade of a short, bushy tree to better see the screen. At that moment, a bike rounded the curve where the path skirted the tree, headed right for her.

  “What the hell—” exclaimed the rider, as Lizzy jumped back to avoid being run down. Her arms pinwheeling, she fell back into a patch of thorny bushes. She heard the skid of bike tires on the path, and then the whoosh of expelled air as the biker hit the ground.

  She tried to get up, but thorns snagged her clothes and skin. “Ouch!” she said, trying ineffectually to free herself. She looked toward the biker. “Are you okay?”

  The biker had climbed to his feet. His pants were torn and a trickle of blood was beginning to seep from an ugly scrape on his forearm. “What the hell were you doing?” he sputtered.

  “What was I doing? You almost ran into me!”

  “You picked a hell of a place to decide to stand on a busy trail!”

  “You’re blaming me for standing on a hiking trail?” said Lizzy, her voice rising. She glanced around. “And it’s not busy—you’re the first person I’ve seen in at least ten minutes!”

  “You teenagers, always on your phones, always texting,” said the biker.

  “I wasn’t texting, I was looking at the trail map!”

  “That’s a five thousand dollar bike! If you think I’m going to let some smart-ass girl—”

  But she didn’t hear the rest of what he was saying, because she sensed the dreaded flush rising from her neck to her cheeks, suffusing her whole body with the heat of anger. In a panic, she tried to remember the yoga classes—breathe out the bad energy breathe in the good energy breathe out the bad breathe in the good breathe breathe—but the anger had the upper hand.

  She had to get away. She started to thrash, not caring that the thorns were tearing her skin as well as her clothes. She tried to concentrate on the pain, thinking perhaps it would distract her from her anger at the biker, but then the thought that he was the person responsible for the pain intruded.

  The biker’s rant was cut short.

  Lizzy stopped thrashing, watching round-eyed as he clamped his hands to his temples.

  “Goddammit,” he rasped.

  “Go away,” she said in a hoarse whisper.

  He looked at her, his eyes squinted in pain. “What?”

  “Go away or I’ll scream and say you attacked me,” she said, her voice louder with her rising panic.

  “You’ll do what?” he said, incredulous. “But—”

  She sucked in a lungful of air. “Run away!” she yelled. “Do it now!”

  The biker snatched his bike off the ground, mounted it, and retreated rapidly down the trail, fighting a wobble caused by the bent front tire.

  Lizzy watched until he disappeared around the curve in the trail, then wrenched her arms out of the grip of the thorns and clamped her hands over her ears, her head between her bent knees. But she couldn’t block out the sound that was tormenting her—it was the sounds of her mother’s fear-riddled voice from a decade earlier: Lizzy, run away and hit your pillow! Do it now!

  Eventually she became aware of the cold shock of raindrops. She lifted her eyes. The clouds had darkened, the sky lowering so that it looked like it rested on top of the mesas. She looked around frantically for the phone, which she had dropped when she fell, and spotted it under the bush. She snatched it up and pushed it into her jacket pocket just as the rain morphed from droplets to a steady stream and the dusty ground began to turn slick.

  She began the painstaking process of extracting her torso and legs from the bush, tears mixing with the rainwater that now dripped down her face.

  She had almost freed herself when she heard a grunt from a dozen feet away. When she looked up, her eyes were even with those of the two javelinas, their hairy faces registering surprise, then caution. The larger one shuffled between the smaller one and Lizzy and gave a menacing snort. A mother for sure. A mother ready to protect her child.

  Lizzy froze. A half minute ticked by, then a minute, and finally the larger javelina turned away and led the smaller one into the brush.

  Lizzy scrambled out of the bush, turned in the opposite direction, and ran.

  She didn’t know where the trail was, and didn’t want to take her phone out in the drenching rain. She looked for the landmarks that had only recently begun to become familiar to her, but nothing looked familiar in the dim light of the rainstorm.

  Suddenly, in one of those transitions from se
eming wilderness to settled suburbia that seemed common to trails near the city limits, she found herself on a road of carefully rolled black gravel, the tiled roofs of million dollar homes just visible beyond gates and walls.

  She looked up and down the road, but couldn’t orient herself. She got out her phone and, shielding it as best she could from the rain, pulled up the GPS. She was a mile and a half from home. More like two thousand miles, she thought with a twist in her stomach.

  She thought briefly of calling Uncle Owen to come get her, but she didn’t want to spend even a short ride in the car with him, having to explain, or to hide, what had happened.

  She jammed the phone back in her pocket and started down the road, the rain sending its cold fingers down the neck of her shirt. The sounds of water rushing in the gutters and the slap of her feet on the wet pavement filled her ears, but the sound in her mind drowned these out: the sound of her mother’s final scream as seven-year-old Lizzy—grumpy with a cold and angry over a puppy she couldn’t have—had squeezed her mother’s brain. All because her mother had been doing what she could to protect her child.

  Lizzy closed her fingers around the Zuni bear pendant and trudged on.

  8

  Millard glanced in the rearview mirror, to where Louise and Mitchell sat in the back seat. He had driven them to Philadelphia, and now they were parked on Race Street, near Logan Square. At this time of night, most of the main attractions in the area—The Academy of Natural Sciences, The Franklin Institute, The Barnes Foundation—were closed or deserted, and the only people on the streets were occasional well-dressed couples hurrying to one of the area’s upscale hotels or restaurants, or vague shapes hugging the shadows as the homeless made their way toward the square.

  “Do you remember what you did when you took care of the man who bullied you at work?” Louise asked Mitchell. “What force you exerted?”

  “Yes.”

  Louise waited a beat, then said, “Can you describe it? It might help you focus your efforts for the test.”

  Mitchell snapped off a loose thread from the sleeve of his coat. Finally, he spoke. “Have you ever heard of peine forte et dure?”

  Louise thought for a moment. “Strong and harsh punishment?”

  “Yes. It was a punishment they used hundreds of years ago if someone was accused of a crime and refused to plead guilty or not guilty. They would pile stones on them until they pled or they died.”

  Louise shifted in her seat. “How do you know that? And how does that relate to what you did to the person who bullied you?”

  “After Brett Ludlow died, I looked up ‘crushing death’ and that’s what I found. That’s what it felt like. It was like piling one stone on top of another, hour after hour, day after day, until he died.”

  Louise’s eyes flicked to Millard’s in the rearview mirror, then returned to Mitchell. “That man treated you disrespectfully,” she said.

  Mitchell rolled the detached thread between his thumb and finger. “I know.”

  Louise reached out and patted him awkwardly on the arm. “You just need to do that same thing again, except the effect is going to be magnified many times.”

  “Isn’t there someone you’d like me to take care of who has actually wronged you in some way?” he asked for the second time since they had left Pocopson.

  “That’s sweet of you, Mitchell,” she said briskly, “but if too many people who are standing against Vivantem start suffering unexplained strokes, especially after some of the things that the attorney general has let slip about his investigation, it will make things worse, not better.”

  Mitchell looked out the window.

  “What is it?” asked Louise, an edge of annoyance creeping into her voice.

  Mitchell turned to her. “I don’t like the idea of trying it out on some innocent person.”

  “They’re homeless.”

  “I know. But still.”

  Now Louise turned her gaze to the window. After a moment, she turned back and said, “You can pick whoever you want. If it makes you feel better, pick one you think is dangerous. One you think the world will be better off without.”

  Mitchell was silent.

  “George will go with you.” She glanced in the rearview mirror. “Won’t you, George?”

  “Sure,” said Millard.

  Her briskness returned as her new plan solidified. “It would only be dangerous if the person you chose had a gun, and that’s extremely unlikely. You don’t think I’d send you out there if it were really dangerous, do you? I’m counting on you to help me protect what Gerard created, to keep meddlers like Russell Brashear away from the company Gerard spent his life building. You don’t have anything to worry about—once I give you the injection, you’ll see. But you’ll have George backing you up, just in case.”

  Mitchell’s eventual reply was grudging. “Okay.”

  “Excellent,” she said as she pulled a small case out of the bag at her feet. She unzipped the case and removed a syringe, which she filled from a glass vial. “George scouted the area yesterday. George, where did you say Mitchell would find the homeless men?”

  “Either in the square itself,” said Millard, “or on the steps of the Basilica.”

  Louise turned to Mitchell with the loaded syringe. “If you can just bare your upper arm …”

  Mitchell pulled his arm out of his sweater and shirt.

  Louise gave him the injection. “I estimate it will take about five minutes for the drug to take full effect,” she said as Mitchell got his clothes straightened and shrugged into his coat. “And it won’t last more than about fifteen minutes, so don’t take too long to locate your subject. When it’s done, we’ll rendezvous back here. If the parked car seems to be attracting undue attention, I’ll drive around the block until you get back.”

  Mitchell nodded, climbed out of the car, and headed toward Logan Square.

  Millard and Louise got out of the car as well.

  “Just want me to keep an eye on him from a distance?” Millard asked.

  “Yes. Try to keep him from coming to any harm. I’m relying on him to extract us from this situation with the attorney general.”

  Millard nodded and began to turn away, then turned back at Louise’s voice.

  “But if things go awry, remember that the most important thing is to make sure that they can’t trace him back to us. I’d hate to lose him, but if things do go wrong, make sure he can’t tell any tales.”

  9

  Mitchell walked toward Logan Square, his head down. He pushed his hands deep into the pockets of his coat, both against the biting cold of the February night and to hide their trembling. He resisted the impulse to look around for Millard, trying to convince himself he could do this by himself—he didn’t like the idea of Louise thinking he needed a babysitter. His heart was beating fast, but whether from the drug or from the circumstances, he couldn’t tell.

  He crossed 18th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, relatively quiet at this time of night, then took one of the spoke-like paths toward the fountain in the middle of the square.

  On one of the benches facing the fountain sat a lone figure, its arm around a knapsack at its side. Glancing nervously around for any witnesses, Mitchell walked toward the figure, which pulled its knapsack closer as Mitchell approached. As if someone who slept outside in February could have anything worth protecting.

  But as Mitchell neared the bench, he saw by the glow from the streetlights that it was not a knapsack next to the man, but a dog, a brown and white pit bull poking its head out of the top of a tattered sleeping bag. The man’s eyes narrowed as he watched Mitchell approach, and he tightened his hold on the dog. The dog, also watching Mitchell, curled its lip back from its teeth and issued a low growl.

  Mitchell adjusted his direction slightly and passed the man and the dog, wondering as he did so whether this enhanced power that Louise’s drug was supposed to provide would work on the dog if the man decided to send it after Mitchell. Both dog
and man stayed on the bench.

  He turned onto the next path, the crunch of the gravel under his shoes unnervingly loud, and followed it back toward the outer walkway.

  He could hear voices raised in debate, then came upon the debaters—two destitute-looking men standing face-to-face, one emphasizing his point with a finger poked into the other’s chest. When Mitchell appeared from the path, they redirected their irritation from each other toward him, and again he turned away. Not only did he not want to get in the middle of an altercation in progress, but the walkway where they stood ran right next to the Parkway, and he needed privacy for the test.

  How much time had gone by since Louise had injected him? He looked at his watch. The hands and numbers seemed impossibly small, as if he were looking the wrong way through a telescope, but he knew he was running out of time to complete the test. He glanced around for Millard—trying to see into the shadows cast by the trees dotted through the park—but could see no one other than the two men, who had returned to their dispute.

  He recrossed the Parkway and stepped into the small Sister Cities Park on the east side of the square. Its meandering paths and somewhat more closely planted trees gave it a more secluded feel than the Circle, but as far as he could see it was uninhabited by possible targets.

  Across 18th Street stood the Basilica. Although his near vision was distorted, his distance vision seemed unusually clear—he could see several figures huddled at the bases of the four massive columns that marched across the front of the building. His heart was beating harder now, and he didn’t think it was all nerves. He felt a flush, as if a slow fire had been lit in his gut. The Basilica was where the test would take place.

  He waited for a couple of cars to pass, jogged across the street, and stopped on the sidewalk at the base of the Basilica steps.