Salem's Cipher Read online

  He glided forward and held her. His touch was gentle. She recoiled from it. He tightened his grip, slitting her arm with his blade so she’d know not to waste his time. “What else can you tell me?”

  When she didn’t answer, he punched her once in the base of her neck. She crumpled. He tossed the fresh corpse of her friend over the side. It hit the ground three stories below with a wet crunch. He heard a scream on the other side of Grace Odegaard’s apartment door, muffled but still clear. They’d found the body of the neighbor and her dog, were surely calling 911 this very moment. He hoisted the unconscious woman over his shoulder and climbed down the metal stairs, loading her into his waiting car.

  He grabbed a tarp from the trunk, lifted the corpse onto his shoulder, and tumbled her into the back of his car. Before he could think twice, he sliced off her pinkie, certain that this would be the time he’d have the courage to do it. That impulse lasted until he closed the car door. He tossed the finger into the dumpster, disgusted with his cowardice, and drove away.

  Still no sirens. This was good.

  He drove straight to the Gopher Munitions Plant, an abandoned, isolated tangle of crumbling monoliths and grasping brown weeds, which he’d selected for exactly this purpose. The woman awoke shortly after they arrived. He’d placed the corpse of her friend next to her as an incentive, and he asked her again, “What else can you tell me?”

  He’d asked her this many times over the course of the evening. Despite his persistence, she never spoke another word. He’d started a fire to keep them warm through the night as he sliced and cajoled, cooked his breakfast over it as she bled, and finally, once it was clear he wasn’t getting any information from her, he’d wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and called Barnaby.

  He admired her for all she’d withstood. If she truly was an Underground leader, she was worthy of the role, as good at her job as he was at his. He massaged the locket in his hand. The silver was warm from gripping it. He never took jewelry from the women he headhunted, had completely ignored the flimsy half-heart charm at her neck, but this trinket felt different. The word mercy was etched inside.

  He shouldn’t keep it.

  It was not only against the rules, but out of character. He’d already gone too far by cutting off the finger. Yet, he couldn’t help but drop the locket into his pocket before he stepped outside into the brisk October morning and slid behind the wheel of the rented Chevy Malibu. He updated his face as he drove, the motions automatic, his appearance returning to its normal dimensions. It wasn’t magic. It was biology and a trick he’d learned after the first time his mother had broken his nose. He’d been six.

  One punch.

  The blood had gushed, drowning him in hot liquid. To save his own life, he’d instinctively put his hand to the meat of his nose and pushed.

  It’d popped back into place, thinner than before.

  The bleeding slowed.

  Curious, he worked on the cartilage of his nose like a muscle, moving bits, suspending them in place, moving others. It hurt a hundred times worse than any punch, but it was worth it when he discovered that he could change the shape of his nose as readily as other people could crack their jaws or blink.

  With repetition and a growing tolerance to pain, he learned to alter the shape of the skin around his eyes and mouth and raise or lower his cheekbones as needed. At the time, he figured it was some rare double-jointedness. When he was old enough, he researched it. As near as he could tell, he had sentient Sharpey’s fibers, the microscopic fingers of collagen that connected bone to muscle to skin. If he’d been born a hundred years earlier, he’d have ended up in a traveling freak show, next to the Bigfoot Lady, the Man with Three Eyes, Camel Girl, and two-faced Edward Drake.

  Fortunately, he lived in modern times.

  The ability to modify his appearance at will made him uniquely suited for this job, the one he’d been handpicked for, trained for, practiced two decades for. With wigs, colored contacts, a variety of clothing, and his fingerprints shaved off, he was impossible to trace.

  He glanced at his watch, a gift from Carl Barnaby. He estimated it would take him a half an hour to reach the airport. He was Christmas-morning excited to be so close to the Crucible, the ultimate target.

  He was the one who would make history, not her.

  17

  Chappaqua, New York

  Senator Gina Hayes held her first and only grandchild, the plush of the infant’s costume soft against her hands. Ten-month-old Tia was dressed as a ladybug and intent on capturing her own antennae, which bobbed just out of reach. One veered close enough to tickle the Senator’s nose. Hayes sneezed. Her grin was broad and easy. The photographer snapped several photos in a millisecond.

  “Don’t sell those to the Enquirer,” Senator Hayes joked. In the next moment, the baby spit up on her suit. Hayes glanced down. “Now especially don’t sell those.”

  Her daughter rushed in with a wet wipe. Together, they cleaned up the spot. The baby giggled. Senator Hayes held the infant a minute longer, nuzzling her neck, inhaling her sweet milk-and-honey scent. “Nothing better than the smell of babies.”

  Her assistant was signaling her from the doorway. Gina Hayes had never had what could be called a normal life, not since her father had been elected fortieth president of the United States thirty-five years earlier, but at least she used to have stretches of hours alone with her family. She missed that since she’d declared her own run for the presidency. She handed her granddaughter back reluctantly, planting one last kiss on her plump, warm cheek.

  “You’ll stay for dinner?” It was a plea more than a question. “Dad is grilling. Probably the last outdoor meal of the year.”

  “Of course. Baby Tia and I wouldn’t miss handing out candy at the old homestead.”

  Gina Hayes was caught off-guard by the wash of relief. She attributed it to the demands of her global schedule. She wasn’t seeing her family enough.

  Numerous times on the campaign trail, she’d been asked why she was running for president. She delivered the canned answers—she was inspired by her father to a life of public service, it was a calling, she knew she could make a difference—but sometimes, a version of the truth leaked out: she was running for her daughter.

  Catherine wasn’t beautiful, but she was smart and she was kind, and Gina Hayes was proud of her in the deepest marrow of her bones. When Hayes had found herself unmarried and unexpectedly pregnant three decades earlier, however, the future had not looked rosy. She’d thought about and dismissed the idea of an abortion. Instead, she chose single parenthood. Knowing she’d have two mouths to feed, she worked twice as hard to make partner at the law firm where she worked, putting in more hours and acquiring and winning more cases than any of her colleagues.

  Not only didn’t she make partner, but she also discovered her salary was $20,000 less a year than the man who did. He’d been working there a year less than Hayes. She knew about his salary because he proposed to her after having known her only eight weeks, aware she was pregnant with another man’s child. The man moved fast.

  She said yes, and she and Charles Hayes entered the world of politics together.

  Her life wasn’t a straight trajectory from there, nothing worked that way, but she always kept close to her heart the fact that being born female was still a handicap in parts of this country.

  She would change that for her daughter.

  “See you outside?” Catherine pecked her mother’s cheek and disappeared through the French doors leading toward the manicured backyard, carrying the baby. The Secret Service detail stepped aside to let Catherine pass. Hayes’s lead bodyguard, Theodore, broke from the group of men to stand nearer Hayes.

  Gina Hayes watched her daughter and granddaughter through the floor-to-ceiling windows. It had been an unusually warm fall. Still, most of the leaves had given up the ghost in a windstorm last week. All that wa
s left were trunks with branches like skeleton hands rising out of the ground. Clouds obscured the afternoon sun and backlit the landscape like a daguerreotype photograph.

  Perfect for Halloween, Senator Hayes thought, inhaling woodsmoke and the melancholy of fall before stepping into her study. She loved this time of year in Upstate New York.

  “You look tired.” Matthew Clemens had been her assistant since her days as a district court judge. He served as her memory and, some days, as her sanity.

  “That’s because I am,” she responded cheerfully, letting Theodore close the door behind them. The muscled, suited man never let her out of his sight except to use the restroom, and even then, he waited outside the bathroom door. “What’s the latest?”

  Matthew glanced at his iPad. “You’re ahead in the polls. Four points. It doesn’t hurt that Americans are growing fond of healthcare.”

  Championing universal health care and uniting the Senate vote behind it made the US one of the last but not the last developed countries to provide health care to all of its citizens. It had also painted a bright bull’s-eye on Senator Gina Hayes’s back for her entire legislative career. Now it seemed the tides were turning. She’d been in the game too long to be surprised.

  Matthew continued. “Other than that, Israel peace talks are in the shitter, Afghanistan is a morass, Syria’s on fire, and we’re running out of oil. Oh, and the media doesn’t think the world is ready for a female president of the United States.”

  Gina Hayes stepped to the window, watching her husband and daughter play with Tia. She appreciated Matthew’s attempts at humor, even if he usually missed the mark. He reminded her of Stephen Stucker’s Johnny in Airplane.

  Johnny, what can you make out of this?

  This? Why, I can make a hat or a brooch or a pterodactyl …

  “So, nothing new, then?” she asked.

  “Just one thing.” Matthew’s tone was serious enough to make her turn. “The Secret Service wants to up your security detail. With the election eight days away, there is a whole new wash of threats rolling in.”

  Theodore, who must have had at least one ancestor who was a statue, made no sound.

  Hayes nodded.

  “That’s it?” Matthew asked. “You don’t want to know about any of the threats? No specifics on the gun-toting loonies who are scrabbling to make history? Not even a peek at the wackadoodle plans to annihilate the ball-crushing she-bitch with the audacity to run for ruler of the Free World?”

  Hayes peeked again at her family. Charles was scrubbing the grill’s metal grate, and she could almost smell tonight’s dill-marinated salmon that was his specialty. Nearby, Tia was clutching her mom’s fingers and trying to stand, her black ladybug antennae bouncing in the breeze. Charles turned to laugh at their antics. He’d raised Senator Hayes’s daughter as his own.

  She turned back to Matthew, smiling softly at his kind, round face. “I can either walk through life looking over my shoulder, or I can do my damn job. It’s an easy choice when you look at it that way, don’t you think?”

  18

  Minneapolis

  “What the hell, Lemming!” Connor Sawyer jumped away from Salem. “Did you piss yourself?”

  Salem stood in the warm puddle of her pants, fear mashing with shame to create a horrible, throat-clogging paste. She turned slowly so she was facing him. Her face was on fire.

  Connor laughed, shaking his head in disbelief. He was a beefy man, blond, with the kind of face that would be hard to describe to a police sketch artist without making him sound like a Johnny Fabulous cartoon character. When Salem had first spotted him at the Law Library two years earlier, she’d blushed. He hadn’t even glanced her way. A week later, he finally noticed her when he checked out some books. He’d invited himself over that night.

  “How’d you get in here?” Her voice was high and squeaky. She wanted to run to the bathroom, strip her clothes off, burn them, never show her face again.

  He was still smiling, staring at the drops dangling from the hem of her jeans before joining the pool on the floor. She saw him parsing the words in this head, deciding how he would tell this story to his friends for maximum humor. “The stoner next door let me in. I was heading to a friend’s Halloween party up the street. Thought I’d stop by while I was in the neighborhood.”

  The fear subsided enough for her to notice his costume. He had nickels taped to the back of his t-shirt. He caught her glance. “My favorite band.”

  In that moment, she saw their relationship for what it was—she was his booty call, plain and simple. He wasn’t stopping by to ask her to tonight’s party, or to any party. He’d never once appeared in public with her, which was her fault as much as his, but it still hurt. He would never take her to the doctor if she was sick, ask her about her day, or care which of the Jordan neighborhood kids she’d helped or what computer program she’d written.

  They didn’t have a relationship, never would, no matter what she hoped for or tolerated from him. What was even more painful was the awareness that she still cared what he thought, cared desperately, and here she was standing in front of him drenched in her own urine.

  The scraping sound of the hallway fire door made her yelp. Bel was coming! Salem tossed an afghan over the puddle on the floor and leapt toward the bathroom.

  “It’s normal to lose bladder control when you’re scared, right?” Salem asked as they dropped off Bel’s duffel at the Delta counter. When Salem had gotten herself all cleaned up and worked up the courage to leave the bathroom, she’d discovered Connor and Bel on opposite ends of the couch, paging through magazines, not talking, Beans knitting mittens on Bel’s lap. While Connor and Bel had never before met, and in fact Salem had never even mentioned him to Bel, they’d clearly struck up an immediate and lasting dislike for one another.

  Connor had left shortly after.

  It had taken Salem the rest of the evening and the entire drive to the airport to tell Bel that she’d been “seeing” Connor for over a year and that he’d scared the living daylights out of her.

  “You need to dump that asshole,” Bel stated unequivocally. They’d both packed light, but Bel was checking her bag so she could haul her Glock 19. “Here. You can use my phone.”

  Salem didn’t take it. “Not now. Maybe later.”

  “How’d he get in?” Bel asked, watching her bag ride the belt out of sight.

  “Said Skanky Dave let him in. That’s the first time Dave has ever done that.”

  “You should have kneed him,” Bel said, accepting her luggage receipt from the attendant. “That’s exactly what he deserves for breaking into your apartment and scaring you like that.” She led the way through the crowd, raising her voice to be heard. “Actually, if I read his douche meter accurately, he’s earned a good kneeing simply by being Connor Sawyer. But damn, Salem, a decent guy doesn’t jump people. Ever. I’m going to bone you up on the Krav Maga.”

  Salem jogged so she could walk alongside Bel. “You know the weirdest part? When I was walking him out, he offered to watch Beans. He’s never offered something like that before.”

  Bel rolled her eyes. “What a hero.”

  The security line loomed ahead. As horrible as Connor’s surprise had been, it had distracted her from much of the worry about leaving Minnesota. After that wore off, she had let the Ativan and her rational mind convince her that this wouldn’t be so bad, Bel was by her side, the worst had already happened when her dad had died and Grace and Vida had disappeared, and it was time to take action and stop being afraid.

  If she passed through security, however, she’d be committing to leaving, to tempting Fate, the Universe, God, whoever, demonstrating to them that she didn’t respect their power to rip her world into twitching shreds. That’s why she had never left Minnesota, hadn’t left the Twin Cities since her dad’s suicide, had lived her quiet life in its prescribed track. />
  Chaos lived beyond.

  Salem knew she had to walk through security to save her mom and Gracie, but a fear so raw it burned like shame churned the fourteen-year-old memory to the tiptop of her consciousness: Daniel Wiley wading into the cool abyss of Nelson Lake (Mom, where was Mom), Salem on shore, twelve years old and wearing her first bikini, so proud of its rainbow colors, of her flat belly, of the way the shadow of her hips curved on the movie screen of the dirty brown beach.

  When she looked up, her dad had disappeared, had been underwater far too long, but she was too scared shocked this can’t be real it’s happening to someone else to save him, to even scream for help. A family from Iowa, renting the cabin next door, had found her on the shore, unconscious, bleeding from her left cheek, a cut she sustained when she fainted.

  Her dad’s body surfaced later that evening.

  She had never told anyone, not even Bel, that she hadn’t tried to rescue him.

  She weighed and measured that reality every day of her life.

  “You okay?” Bel asked.

  Salem was twirling a chunk of hair with her finger. Twirling, pulling, twisting. Suddenly, the lock was in her hand, loose, something you’d find in the drain. A man wearing a trench coat and pulling a wheelie suitcase pushed against her to get into line. Bel shoved him back. A TSA officer was striding toward them. Salem was breaking into so many tiny pieces that she’d never be whole again.

  “Salem.”

  Bel gripped her hands. Salem saw the gesture but could not feel it.

  “It’s okay to be scared. I’m scared too.”

  Salem looked into her eyes, her teeth chattering. She’d stared into those blue pools more than she’d looked at anything except a computer screen.

  “You remember the baby ducks?” Bel asked. “You were eight. Nine, maybe. I was sleeping over. You and I snuck to Powderhorn to break into the wading pool, except you heard something.” Bel squeezed her hands. “Remember?”