Strong Darkness Read online

  “We meet again, Detective Finneran,” Caitlin greeted. “I’d call you by your first name, but I don’t remember it.”

  “That’s because you were too busy telling me all the things I had wrong about the investigation into the mass murder you committed here last spring.” Finneran’s gaze locked onto Cort Wesley, as if realizing he was in the room for the first time. “Maybe you and I should talk alone.”

  “Why,” Cort Wesley started, “the lady scare you?”

  Finneran looked back toward Caitlin. “She has no part in this investigation and I have no intention of sharing information in her presence. You want to, be my guest. But this conversation is over until she leaves the room.”

  Silence settled between them, the steady hum of the machines wired to Dylan the only sound in the room.

  “Then I guess you might as well stop wasting your time here,” Cort Wesley said finally, breaking it.

  “I’m sorry about what happened to your son, Mr. Torres,” Finneran resumed, caught off guard.

  “It’s Masters, Detective. Torres was the name of the boy’s mother. She was murdered six years back now. My son witnessed the whole thing. The woman you want to leave the room saved his life that day. I’d say that gives her a stake in whatever you have to say.”

  Finneran’s gaze rotated between the two of them, trying to figure out his next move.

  “You got a superior we can talk to, Detective?” Cort Wesley continued. “Somebody who can help sort out how the investigation into a kid nearly getting beaten to death in your city should be handled.”

  “Don’t tell me how to do my job.”

  “Then start doing it by picking up where we left off before you told a fellow law enforcement official to leave the room. What can you tell us about what happened to my son?”

  Finneran made a sound that started as a sigh and ended as something low and guttural. “He was found by another student on a street near the Brown campus who called nine-one-one,” he said, turning so his back was to Caitlin. “The first officers and paramedics on scene found his pockets emptied. No wallet, money, just his Brown University ID that was found by itself in a pocket.”

  “What about a cell phone?” Caitlin asked him.

  Finneran shook his head, still not looking at her.

  “Because we believe the boy received a text message maybe not too long before he was attacked,” she continued, leaving out the part about Dylan leaving his friends in order to take care of something. She could pretty much figure how Finneran would react to that, based on their last encounter.

  “It would be helpful to know who that text came from,” Cort Wesley said, when the detective didn’t respond to Caitlin’s suggestion.

  “Give me his phone number and provider and I’ll get the info dumped. Might need a warrant, but they’re pretty easy to come by in these parts.”

  “That’s a relief,” said Cort Wesley, as if he needed something or somebody at which to lash out.

  “Your son was in a bar last night, Mr. Masters. Were you aware he’d been drinking?”

  “Dylan’s football coach told us they had some meetings and Dylan left with a few teammates,” Caitlin told him.

  Finneran turned back toward her slowly, as if the mere motion pained him. The room’s dim light left him bathed in shadows and Caitlin realized for the first time since they’d arrived that the sun was long gone and night had taken firm hold of the sky.

  “And afterward they must have gone to Spats.”

  “Spats?”

  “The bar where Dylan was drinking. Underage. Were you aware he had a fake identification?”

  Caitlin unconsciously sidestepped to place herself between Finneran and Cort Wesley. “How could you know that if his wallet was missing?”

  “The staff at Spats remembered him.”

  “From last night?”

  “And numerous others.”

  “Did they recall him drinking last night?”

  Finneran looked down, then only halfway up again. “Not specifically, no.”

  “Then why are we talking about this?” Caitlin interjected, unable to hold back.

  “Because alcohol and college kids, especially football players, leads to fights. You can do the math as easy as I can, Ranger.”

  “So can I,” Cort Wesley said, coming forward but stopping even with Caitlin as if struck by an invisible barrier before he could reach Finneran. “Enough to know it doesn’t add up.”

  “He’s right, Detective,” Caitlin echoed. “Whatever happened didn’t start in that bar. It started with that text message Dylan received. What I care about is finding what that text said, where it took him, and what happened when he got there.”

  Finneran stiffened. “Go home, Ranger.”

  “You said that to me once before.”

  “And now you’re back.”

  “Just couldn’t get enough of your lovely city, I guess.”

  “You killed five men last time you were here.”

  “Four,” Caitlin corrected.

  “That’s right,” Finneran nodded, gloating over her having walked right into his trap. “The assault victim in that bed over there knocked the fifth into the river. So maybe you can tell me which one of you he takes after.”

  “How badly you want to find out?” Cort Wesley asked him.

  9

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  “You getting at something here, Detective?” Cort Wesley continued before Finneran could react.

  The detective started to speak, then changed his mind in midthought. “Only that the boy was clearly no stranger to violence,” he said, words aimed more at Caitlin. “By your own admission.”

  Cort Wesley started forward through that invisible barrier, stopping only when Caitlin reached out for his arm but ended up with only the fabric of his shirt in her grasp. She could feel the rigidity of his triceps muscle beneath the cotton that was damp with perspiration.

  “You mind addressing your remarks to me instead of the lady here, sir?” he said so calmly his voice didn’t sound calm at all. “You want to insinuate that both my sons are no strangers to violence, go ahead. Truth is the two of them have been the victims of it time and time again on account of the shit I keep dragging into their lives. Please don’t blame them for my issues.”

  Cort Wesley started to ease himself farther forward and Caitlin let him go, the tone of his voice telling her it was okay.

  “But what Dylan got himself into last night had nothing to do with any of that or either of us. So I’m gonna ask you as respectfully as I can to stop looking at my son through the lens of what happened before he was a student at your college here and start looking at him as the victim that he is.”

  Finneran was nodding, the gesture so routine as to appear meaningless. “We’ve got matters well under control, Mr. Masters, I assure you of that. It’s good to see the boy has the kind of family support he needs in a time like this, but I need to tell you that’s where the support needs to end.” He stopped, as if to let his point sink in before he finished making it, aiming the remainder at Caitlin. “Let us do our jobs, Ranger. Stay out of this and let us catch whoever put the boy in that bed over there.”

  “Not sure I can do that, Detective. In fact, I’m sure I can’t.”

  “It wasn’t a request. Word gets out that the Texas Ranger who shot up WaterFire is back in town and everything else will get lost in the shuffle. Might even spook the perpetrators to skip town to avoid getting shot themselves.”

  Caitlin glanced at Dylan, all the tubes and wires running from him making the kid look like something from a science fiction movie. His face seemed to glow with life in the room’s flickering shadows, but his eyes didn’t move and closer up his cheeks looked as if they’d been flushed with milk.

  “You’re missing the point, Detective,” Caitlin told him. “You’re treating this like an ordinary fight, a beating, because that’s what the perpetrators want. I’m assuming there were no witnesses.”

/>   “Not a one,” the detective acknowledged.

  “But I get the impression he was found on a public street.”

  “In the bushes slightly off one.”

  “So maybe that text he received baited him into a trap and he was jumped. You bother considering that?”

  “The investigation is ongoing,” Finneran said.

  Fresh tension made the veins throb on Cort Wesley’s temples. “What’s that mean?”

  “Just what I said.”

  “Then I’m going to assume that keeping me in the loop on everything isn’t going to be a problem.”

  Finneran eyed Cort Wesley closer, sizing him up. “And what is it you do exactly, Mr. Masters?”

  “I live in the moment, sir, which means what I do is wait by my son’s bedside to be here when he wakes up … and just in case whoever did this to him comes back to finish the job.”

  “I get the feeling you’re a man who wouldn’t mind that at all. Am I right?”

  “I believe the same thing could be said for any man.”

  “And what am I going to find when I run your name through the relevant databases?”

  “That I’m someone you don’t want to be on the wrong side of.”

  Finneran was left shaking his head. He reached back for the door to widen the opening a bit more. “Do you people ever sit back and listen to yourselves talk? You want to uphold the peace wherever your boots land, Ranger, I may not be able to stop you. But you damn well better respect the laws of Rhode Island and not the ones of where you came from.”

  “When a boy gets beaten within an inch of his life, the law’s the law, Detective.”

  Finneran’s eyes honed in on Caitlin, Cort Wesley’s presence forgotten for the moment. “In that case, I’m going to give you the rest of the day to leave this state, Ranger, out of courtesy.”

  “And what happens after that?”

  “An indictment against you gets unsealed. For unlawful possession and discharge of a weapon, and manslaughter.”

  “We both know what happened here last year was self-defense, Detective.”

  “That will be for a grand jury to decide,” Finneran told her, “if you’re not gone by midnight.”

  10

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “I’m not going to take attendance,” Guillermo Paz said to the assembled class of Mexican immigrants seeking to learn to speak English, almost all of whom spoke barely a word of it at present, “because I don’t care who you are or whether you show up or not. See, I’ve been on an existentialist kick lately.”

  The adult students were squeezed into desks in a Dorney Hall classroom of San Antonio College, featuring a clear view of the parklike setting beyond the double windows that didn’t actually open. At night there wasn’t really much to see, but Paz liked watching the wind whip through the elm and maple trees beyond, imagining the sound of the branches rustling together through the closed windows. Standing nearly seven feet tall, as high as the top of the old-fashioned blackboard in the front of the classroom, afforded him a good view.

  Right now the only sight that view provided was of his own reflection. His shoulders and chest looked so big that it seemed the glass must be warped. No shirt he could find seemed able to confine them without pinching, becoming little more than paint layered over his skin after a washing or two. His dark, oily hair glowed in the window glass, falling in a twisted tangle of ringlets just past his shoulders. His eyes were black and in the glass their reflection showed no whites at all, as if someone had painted over them with ink. His skin seemed shiny, slathered seemingly in some mysterious sheen even though it was dry to the touch. And there was a spot on his forehead, kind of a dark grainy indentation that looked like a third eye. Paz passed it off first as a smudge on the glass and sidestepped, only to find the third eye, or whatever it was, still in place.

  “I know you’re all here to learn English,” Paz continued. “But I’m not going to use that workbook they gave you; instead, you’re going to learn English the way I did, by listening and absorbing. That’s what you’re gonna do as I speak. Listen and absorb, even if you have no idea of what I’m saying. Comprendé?”

  The class nodded to a smiling man and woman, even though they didn’t comprehend him at all.

  “These existentialists I’ve been reading are mostly full of shit, but they did raise a couple good points I wanted to share with you because I think they’re especially appropriate to your situation. Specifically, I mean this existential notion that there’s no meaning in the world beyond that which we give to it. I’ve learned that firsthand and nothing could be closer to the truth. See, I used to be an asesino. In a lot of ways I still am except now I only kill who I want for causes of my own choosing. My choice, not somebody else’s, just like it was your choice to come to this country. You see what I’m getting at here?”

  The class nodded enthusiastically again, although this time a few of the immigrants seated before Paz exchanged hushed words and looked confused.

  “Here’s what you need to know, mis amigos,” Paz continued. “The philosopher Kierkegaard believed that happiness was a function of man’s ability to manage control of the external conditions transpiring around him. Not easy to handle, that much I can assure you, and I can see the whole concept has you a bit baffled, so let me give you an example from my own life.”

  Here Paz felt his mind drifting, back to the time his refusal to burn a Venezuelan village and its people had led to his exile from his home country.

  “I was a much different man before I met my Texas Ranger,” he told his students, “just like all of you today are much different from the people you’ll be next week, next month, and next year. I looked into my Ranger’s eyes and saw what was missing in my own.”

  Paz stopped as if waiting for his words to sink in. His students looked on enthralled, captivated, recognition flashing in most of their gazes as if they could somehow glean the portent of words spoken in a language they hardly understood at all.

  “Existentialism is mostly bullshit like everything else, but there are a few things we can learn from it. Take Albert Camus, for example. He was obsessed with the myth of Sisyphus, you know, the guy condemned to keep pushing the rock up a hill only to have it roll all the way back to the bottom as soon as he reaches the top. Camus’s point was that the futility of the act wasn’t as important as Sisyphus finding meaning and purpose in its completion. Why else would he continue to do something he knew was pointless? You see what I’m getting at here?”

  His students didn’t, their expressions utterly blank.

  “Okay,” Paz continued, “let me put it this way. There are going to be days where you feel the same futility that Sisyphus did. But, as was the case for him, the key for you will be to find purpose and meaning, a sense of fulfillment and achievement in the completion of the simplest task. That’s as good a definition of happiness as you’ll ever find and it’s what I want you to take from this class if you take nothing else. The language itself doesn’t matter because what matters is what transpires in your own mind. Thoughts are more important than actions because they define those actions and lend purpose to them that—”

  Paz stopped in midsentence, midthought. A curtain drew before his vision, trapping his students behind it and leaving Paz alone in a cold, dark place. It parted slowly, some mystical being tugging on a rope to draw it open again, leaving him looking straight at his reflection in the window. But he was gone, his very being erased from existence so he could see straight through the glass to the darkness beyond. Then something else began to take shape in place of his reflection. Obscure and unrecognizable and then licked at by flames that later burst into a bright inferno that utterly consumed whatever had been taking shape before him. The flames seemed so real Paz swung to see if the classroom might have caught fire. But nothing had changed, his students still in their seats, a few of them following his gaze toward the window as if wondering what it was he had seen.

  The flames continued
to lick at the world beyond the window, and Paz caught glimpses of shapes and shadows consumed within them. He squinted, hoping to better grasp the message and portent of what was unfolding before his vision. For a moment, brief and fleeting, the face of Caitlin Strong appeared amid the flames, threatened by them and yet untouched for the time being. Then the flames were gone, Caitlin Strong having vanished with them, nothing but darkness remaining beyond the window. Even the trees and campus beyond were gone, lost to a maelstrom of violence that was coming. At once, Paz felt blisteringly hot, as if the flames had found him. Just as quickly, though, he went cold, imagining the flames dying as if buckets of ice water were dumped over his person.

  “¿Son esta usted bien, Profesor?”

  “¿Pasa algo?”

  “Yes,” Paz said in English, “something is very wrong. My Texas Ranger needs me.” Then he was in motion for the door. “Clase desestimó. Class dismissed.”

  11

  NEW BRAUNFELS, TEXAS

  “Look at me and tell me if I seem convinced,” the man named Brooks said. “That’s because I’m not convinced the situation is contained at all.”

  Li Zhen studied him dispassionately, viewing him as no more than another ornament within the Chinese garden around which he’d constructed the American headquarters of Yuyuan, the company he’d built from the ground up thanks to the support he’d won from the Triad sixteen years earlier.

  “I was not aware I needed to convince you of anything,” he told Brooks.

  “This is the United States, my friend, not China. An innocent kid getting the shit kicked out of him tends to rub people the wrong way here. Last time I checked, it was called a crime.”

  “You can make your point without sarcasm or such unfortunate language.”

  “Really?” Brooks asked him. “Because you don’t seem to be getting my point at all.”

  Brooks towered over Zhen’s diminutive stature, with broad shoulders barely contained by the white dress shirt that fit him too tightly in the neck. His head too was large, his skull looking almost simian in shape beneath hair cropped so close that his scalp burned red beneath the sun, the shading exaggerated by the milky paleness of his skin. He looked like a man better suited for a military uniform, in contrast to Li Zhen’s perfectly fitted Jhane Barnes suit that elegantly covered his athletic frame. It was the only brand Zhen wore, in recognition of the fact that Jhane Barnes was the first major label to relocate its apparel manufacturing to China.