13
Freddy Hagerman stared out his second-floor window, in what should have been his spare bedroom but was now his home office, watching the first drops from the approaching storm splatter on his driveway. Christ, what a dump. Well, what could he expect? He was a forty-six-year-old, three-time divorcee, ex New York Times reporter who now tried to meet his alimony, child support, and rent digging up gossip for the Kansas City Star. Funny how the dreams of his youth had faded. And as much as he loved New York, the cost of living had driven him to the Midwest.
Why they called this the Midwest was a mystery. Mid-dead-center would have been more appropriate since the exact center of the country lay near Salinas, Kansas, a good couple of hours to the west of where he now stood. Didn’t really matter. The Mid-fucking-west was where he was stuck.
When the UPS truck pulled into his driveway, Freddy almost didn’t answer the door. Anything someone thought important enough to send to him via a special carrier meant trouble. No doubt one of his ex-wives’ attorneys had found some way to dig deeper into Freddy’s pockets. Legal paperwork was something he expected, things being the way they were.
There was no avoiding it though. If he didn’t answer the door today, they would just come back the next day and the next, finally resorting to delivery by an officer of the law. Best to just get it over with.
As he opened the door, the UPS man handed him a package roughly the size of a shoe box before having him sign his name on the computerized clipboard, which would immediately uplink the delivery status to the World Wide Web. The damn attorneys would probably be smiling before the truck was out of his driveway. Wasn’t technology grand?
Freddy tossed the box on the coffee table in preparation for making his way back upstairs, but it missed. The package caught the edge of the table and then tumbled to the floor. Freddy paused. The sound it made as it bounced off the floor wasn’t right. Certainly not a sound you would expect from a box stuffed with legal forms and documents. And despite that he had been demoted to the role of backwater gossip columnist, Freddy had once been an investigative reporter with instincts second to none. The only thing that had kept him from the acclaim he had thought himself destined to receive was his piss-poor judgment in women. Thrust a couple of nice tits in his face and he thought he was in love. He should have been an ass man.
When he bent down to retrieve the package, Freddy felt the contents shift. Definitely not packed by any legal office. Eschewing the couch, Freddy moved to the kitchen table where the lighting was better. The box was wrapped in plain brown paper. The “From” label on the shipping slip was so sloppily printed that he couldn’t make it out, although his name and address on the “To” label were clearly legible.
Freddy turned the box over, carefully examining every crease and fold in the wrapping. Absolutely nothing unusual about it. So why was he suddenly as nervous as a kitten?
Taking out his pocketknife, Freddy slipped the blade under a fold, slicing a straight, clean cut along the corners of the paper that covered the box. As he pulled the wrapping away, he saw that it did indeed cover a shoe box. Nike. With another couple quick slices, he severed the tape that secured the lid to the shoe box.
The reason for the rattle became immediately apparent as he lifted the lid. The box contained a sealed envelope and a small locked jewelry box. The packing around the jewelry box was insufficient to keep it from sliding back and forth in the shoe box, at least if dropped on the floor.
Freddy Hagerman rubbed his chin. Damn odd. The envelope was a white velum of intermediate quality, the type used for thank you cards. Across the seal, two capital letters had been printed: AA. Freddy slit the envelope along the upper edge, extracting the folded card with two fingers. The pre-printed “thank you” was the only writing on the outside of the card.
His first glance inside startled him so badly that he almost dropped the card. The note was short:
Dear Mr. Hagerman. My name is Abdul Aziz. Since you have received this package, I am already dead.
This means I have failed to deliver my message to the world, so I must rely on you, postmortem. I picked you because you are too talented and have access to too many unusual resources to be where you are today. I need your desperation.
As you are no doubt aware, I have come into some information about the Rho Project. Unfortunately, if I told you what I have learned, you would be obliged to immediately hand over the classified information to your government. Instead, I will provide clues that should allow you to discover the story for yourself.
In the small jewelry case I have placed two items and an address. The first of these items is a specimen slide. Take it to a medical examiner you can trust.
The second item was in the possession of one of the Rho Project’s experimental subjects, a man who called himself Priest Williams. The effects of the Rho Experiment on his mind will become self-evident. Go to the address. There you will find the answers to all your questions. There you will find your Pulitzer Prize. Inshallah.
At the bottom of the note, a small key was taped to the card with a piece of tape. Freddy stared down at the key, his eyes moving to the locked jewelry box, which now sat on the kitchen table. The whole thing was probably a hoax, something designed to humiliate him. Perhaps one of the enemies he had made from his gossip column had come up with an ingenious way for him to make a fool of himself. Of course, he couldn’t really make that judgment unless he looked in the jewelry box, now could he?
Removing the tape that held the key, Freddy slid the key into the small lock and twisted. The catch released with a click. For a moment, he considered the possibility that the box might contain a bomb. But that made no sense. If the sender had wanted to kill him, he could have done so when he opened the outer box. And why take the trouble to write the note?
Despite the logic of the thought, Freddy found his hands shaking as he raised the jewelry box lid. Inside, a scrap of yellow paper wrapped a microscope slide, held in place with a red rubber band. Unwrapping the paper, he noted that it contained a New Mexico address and a set of latitude and longitude coordinates. Although he did not have a microscope to examine the contents, Freddy held the glass slide up to the kitchen light. A thin slice of translucent red material lay sandwiched between the plates.
Disappointed, Freddy turned his attention to the last item in the jewelry case, a black plastic bag, the top tied into a knot. Since the knot seemed unlikely to yield to gentler measures, he grabbed the sides of the plastic bag and pulled, spilling the contents out onto the tabletop as the bag ripped open.
Freddy scrambled backward, knocking over his chair in his sudden panic. There on his kitchen table, sprawled across his white tablecloth, lay a necklace of severed female fingers, the nails all neatly polished in red.