Kill Switch Page 4

  “It figures,” Deirdre Ross had said quietly to Chris. She was sitting across from him, holding a skull in one hand and making notes in her lab notebook with the other. “And her father is probably the Duke of Norfolk.”

  Chris chuckled, and looked down so that Mary wouldn’t see.

  “I’m looking forward to some home cooking, too,” Gavin McCormick said. “I’m tired of cold canned ravioli, which is about the best I can manage most nights.”

  “It keeps body and soul together.” Glen Cederstrom smiled in his quiet way. “But it’s nothing like home-cooked. How ’bout you, Elisa? You going home?”

  Elisa smiled. “No, I think I’ll stick with the ravioli.”

  “Wow,” Deirdre said. “I’ve never heard you be sarcastic before.”

  Elisa looked up. “It’s not sarcasm. I’m not going home for Thanksgiving.”

  There was a brief, awkward silence.

  “That’s too bad,” Glen said, sounding embarrassed.

  “No, it’s not,” Elisa said, her voice steady. “I’d rather be here, that’s all.”

  After class, Chris approached her. “Sorry if all that put you on the spot.”

  Elisa gave him a grateful smile. “It’s not a problem. I’m completely at peace with what I’ve got to do. It sounds worse than it is.”

  “If you want to talk about it…” Chris started, and then stopped.

  Elisa reached out and touched his upper arm. “It’s sweet of you. But I’ll be fine. I wish I could get my brothers to come out here, that’s the only problem. But they’re strong, they can look after themselves.”

  “How many brothers do you have?”

  “Two. They’re half-brothers, actually. Jay and Dennis. Still in high school. They’ll be free soon.”

  “Free from public school?”

  “Free from my stepfather.”

  —

  The memory of the conversation faded from Chris’s mind, and he returned to the present. That was it. There had been two half-brothers who Elisa cared about, but she had been afraid enough of her stepfather that her half-brothers made her promise not to come home. So she’d stayed in her apartment on the university campus for Thanksgiving. And for Christmas, too, Chris recalled.

  And after that, they’d lost touch with each other.

  What was the last name of Elisa’s stepfather and half-brothers? Had he ever known? She might have mentioned it, or might not. If she had, it was buried under thirty years’ worth of memories. Who might know where she was? Of the seven, she’d been closest to Deirdre, but he doubted they’d kept contact after they graduated. Their paths had simply been too divergent. Deirdre was an upwardly mobile academic headed to medical school, Elisa an artist headed to—where?

  That was the question, wasn’t it? Who knew where she had gone?

  They’d gotten Deirdre, though. If Deirdre had known where Elisa went, it was too late to ask her. But surely someone else had to know what happened to Elisa Howard.

  Another memory tripped in Chris’s brain, and he remembered a different conversation. Elisa had had a roommate for a time. He’d met her once, when she’d come to meet Elisa after class. They were headed out together, to a party or dinner or something.

  “This is my new roommate.” Elisa gestured to a diminutive Asian girl with a broad, cheerful smile.

  Chris shook her hand. “Nice to meet you,” he said. “I’m Chris Franzia.”

  “I’m Yee-Lin See,” she said. “But my English name is Peggy See. Sort of like Peggy Sue, but not quite.”

  Chris laughed. “Nice to meet you, Peggy.”

  Peggy See, “sort of like Peggy Sue.” He’d thought that was a really funny line, and wondered at the time if she always used it.

  Where had that memory been lost, all these years? Chris looked at his computer screen, brought up a browser window, and entered “Peggy See” in a Google search.

  Do you mean ‘Peggy Sue’? came the inevitable response.

  Chris sighed, and looked down the list of hits. The first three pages’ worth were all of the type, Will Peggy see her novel reach a broader market? Nothing with See as a last name.

  Had she stayed in Seattle all this time? Maybe she’d gotten married and had a different last name now.

  He searched for “Peggy See Seattle.”

  The first page of hits was similar to the previous ones—The personal side of Peggy, see photographs of her family in Seattle… and the like. But on the second page, there was a listing for a Facebook page for Peggy See Liu in Seattle.

  Chris clicked on it. The page popped up, with the usual warning that Peggy only shared certain information with her friends, and did he want to become Peggy’s friend? But there was a photograph. She was a lot older, standing next to a teenage boy and girl Chris guessed were her children. Older, but definitely Elisa’s roommate. He looked to see if her location was listed. It was. Seattle, Washington.

  Chris stared at the photo for a moment, then reached for his cellphone, dialed information.

  “What city?”

  “Seattle, Washington.”

  “What listing?”

  “Peggy Liu. The last name is spelled l-i-u.”

  “One moment.”

  “We have a listing for a Peggy Liu in on 148th Street Northwest.”

  “That’s it.”

  There was a pause, and the operator recited the number. “Would you like me to connect you, sir?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Another pause, and then the sound of the number dialing, and a ring tone.

  A male voice picked up. “Hello?”

  “May I please speak with Peggy Liu?”

  “Just a moment.” Then, a muffled call of, “Mom! It’s for you.”

  Chris swallowed. His heart pounded. Would this woman remember him, or would she be suspicious and hang up?

  “Hello?”

  “Peggy?”

  “Yes, this is Peggy.”

  “You probably won’t remember me. My name is Chris Franzia. I was a friend, years ago, of Elisa Howard’s. Elisa and I were in class together, and I met you once. I’m trying to get in touch with Elisa, and remembered you two had been roommates, so I thought I’d call and see if you’d kept up your friendship with her.”

  “I think I do remember you.” There was a smile in her voice. “Elisa talked about you a lot.”

  “Are you still in touch with her?”

  “Not really. We send each other Christmas cards. That’s about it.”

  “Do you have a current address for her?” Chris asked, and then added, “I mean, if you’re comfortable telling me. I know this is out of the blue.”

  “No, it’s no problem. Like I said, I know you and Elisa were friends. Let’s see…” there was the sound of rummaging, “I have it right here. Do you have a pen?”

  “Yes.”

  “She isn’t Elisa Howard anymore. She’s Elisa Reed.”

  “She’s married, then?”

  “Was. She and her husband parted ways about a dozen years ago, but she never went back to Howard. Anyhow, she’s Elisa Reed. She lives at 422 North Benton Street, St. Cloud, Minnesota, 56301.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  “Wow,” Chris said. “Thanks so much. I really appreciate your giving me this information. It’ll be nice to get in touch with her again.”

  “I’m sure,” Peggy said warmly. “And it must be the season for renewing old acquaintance.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes,” Peggy answered. “It’s a weird coincidence, but this is the second time in a week one of Elisa’s old college friends has called me asking about where she is these days. Is there a reunion happening, or something?”

  Chapter 4

  “You’ve reached the home of Elisa Reed, and Orion’s Belt Art Gallery. I’m sorry no one’s here at the moment, but please leave your name and number and I’ll return your call as soon as possible. Have a beautiful day.”

  Chris hung up be
fore the beep came.

  Could they track his cell? Was the mere fact of his making the call putting Elisa at risk? They’d found the others easily enough. It was all too easy to think of the killers as omniscient, as having no limits to their ability to strike. Once Chris knew where Elisa lived, finding her phone number had been child’s play. If the killers were one step behind Chris, it was surely no more than that.

  However they’re doing this, they’re still human. They can’t do magic. Don’t make them more powerful than they really are.

  But that was the problem. An unknown enemy grows in the mind by virtue of being unknown. And Chris knew nothing about who he was facing—who they were, where they were, why they were picking off his college friends one by one.

  He felt a sudden hatred of his own inactivity, his own complacency. Once again he considered how he’d changed since college. His current life seemed to him no more than treading out the steps toward retirement, spending off hours watching television and reading. Taking no chances, risking nothing.

  “But what can I do?” he said out loud. “I don’t even know where Elisa is.” It was one in the morning—midnight, Minnesota time. It was possible she wasn’t answering the phone, given the time, but he’d started calling her as soon as he’d found her number. If she had been home, trying to sleep, she undoubtedly would have picked up the phone the fifth time he called just to get it to stop ringing. So, there were only two possibilities.

  Either she wasn’t home, or else they’d gotten her, too.

  Chris kept picturing Elisa, lying in her bed, curled up, her expression peaceful in death. Just as Adam and Gavin had been. In his mind, her face was still as young and fresh as he remembered it from thirty years ago, even though he knew she couldn’t still look that way. None of them did. He’d looked up the others online. It was amazing how easy it was to find them.

  Gavin’s photo showed up on the webpage for the pharmacy he worked for. He was smiling, his round face rounder and his ruddy complexion pinker than it had been in college, and he’d lost most of his hair. But his expression still had the same buoyant good cheer Chris remembered so well.

  Glen Cederstrom he found on the website for the community college where he taught. He was still slim and blond, with a gentle smile and wire-rim glasses, but now he had lots of laugh lines around his mouth and the corners of his eyes. Like most fifty-somethings.

  Lewis was simple. He was a lawyer, worked for the EPA, and a search for his name generated hundreds of hits. The photograph Chris found was from The Seattle Times, showing Lewis speaking into a reporter’s microphone, underneath a headline that said, Landmark Settlement Reached in Toxic Spill Case. He hadn’t changed much, his black hair was peppered with gray on the sides, but his square-jawed face still looked as belligerent as it had in college.

  Deirdre showed up on the page for her medical practice, wearing the typical white lab jacket and stethoscope around her neck. Her brown hair cut in a no-nonsense way, her expression keen, penetrating, professional behind modern-looking square plastic-framed glasses. The website, like Gavin’s and Glen’s, hadn’t been updated to reflect her disappearance and presumed death. There was no way to tell from looking at it that she was gone. That any of them were gone, erased because of some mysterious link in their past that only Gavin had somehow figured out.

  Finding Mary Michaels took a little more digging, but he finally came across her on a website of musicians in western Oregon. He looked at her photograph, and smiled. Hers was the only one that clearly had “head shot” written all over it. Predictable, that. Her dark eyes were cast downward, not looking at the camera, a dramatic gesture that clearly said “I am a performer.” She was in a low-cut dress, showing deep brown skin that still had a youthful glow. Not a wrinkle in sight. The wonders of Photoshop.

  Chris chided himself for being cynical.

  On a whim, he put his own name into Google, and his photograph came up instantly, along with plenty of links—the high school website, the page for the Guildford Amateur Astronomers’ Club, for which he’d acted as nominal president for four years, a link to an educational workshop at which he’d given a presentation.

  Traces all over the place. It was impossible to stay hidden.

  Except that maybe Elisa had done it. Maybe. But now he was doubting even that, given the fact that she wasn’t answering her phone. Maybe she was gone, too, hit by a car, poisoned in her sleep, drowned in a lake, or pushed off a bridge, and the news hadn’t gotten out yet.

  Chris rubbed his eyes and shut off his computer. He dialed Elisa’s number once again. This time, when the message came, he waited until the tone, and said, quickly, quietly, “Hi, Elisa? It’s your old friend from college, Chris Franzia. Call me when you get this. It’s important.” He rattled off his phone number, and then hung up.

  Shit. That probably was the wrong thing to do. What he should have done was called Hargis and Drolezki, let them make sure she was okay. If the people who killed the others had his phone tapped, they now knew Elisa’s phone number, and it would be simple for them to track her down.

  “Too late now.” Baxter lifted his head, gave him a quizzical look. Somehow, the phrase sounded like a death knell.

  He tried to put it out of his mind, but the thought that perhaps in leaving a message on Elisa’s voicemail, he’d doomed her to follow the rest of their friends stayed with him until he finally fell asleep at a little before four in the morning.

  —

  Chris was dragged upward into consciousness out of a deep, dreamless sleep by the his cell ringing.

  He pushed back the sheet and stood up, then stumbled out into the living room, not even bothering to grab his bathrobe.

  He grabbed the phone at the last possible moment before it went to voicemail. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Chris?” came a female voice.

  Instantly, Chris was wide awake, heart pounding in his chest. “Elisa?”

  He could hear the smile in her voice. “Yup! Did I call you too early?”

  “No! No, it’s fine. I’m so glad you called back.”

  “Of course I called back. I couldn’t believe you called, though. And that you were able to track me down, after all these years. I’m glad, though. Really glad.” She paused. “It’s so good to hear your voice.”

  “Same. You have no idea.”

  “What on earth possessed you to get in touch? I mean, it’s been, what, thirty years?”

  “Just about.” He sat down in his rocking chair. “How are you?”

  “Me? Fine. I’ve got an art studio in St. Cloud. Maybe you already know that, though.”

  “Yeah. Combination of the internet and your old friend, Peggy See.”

  “You remembered Peggy?”

  “Only with some difficulty, age and memory being what they are.”

  She laughed. “And you? What are you doing with yourself? You were headed into education, I think?”

  “Yes. Still there. Just finished my twenty-sixth year in the public schools, and I’m still sane most days.”

  Another laugh. “That’s probably pretty unusual.”

  “I don’t know. I really love teaching. Not that I don’t enjoy my summers.”

  “So, you’re on break now? What are you doing? Any travels planned?”

  Chris’s smile faded a little. “Well, no, actually. I called you because…” He fumbled, stopped.

  “What’s up, Chris? Is everything all right?”

  “Do you remember our other friends, the ones who were in Field Bio with you and me, back at the University? Deirdre, Glen, Gavin, and the rest?”

  “Of course.”

  “Elisa,” Chris said, “they’re all dead. All except for the two of us.”

  “What?” Her voice was thin, came out in a near whisper.

  “There’s something going on, I don’t know what. The FBI is involved, and it has to do with the seven of us. Gavin figured out what was going on, and he left behind a cryptic email. Otherwise, no one would
have been the wiser. I’m not sure I want to talk about this on the phone, though. It could be tapped.”

  “Seriously?” She gave a nervous laugh. “What could they want with us?”

  “I honestly have no idea. But that’s why I wanted to contact you.”

  “To make sure I wasn’t dead, too.”

  “Yes. And to warn you if you were still alive.”

  “I see.” She paused. “How did you find me?”

  “Peggy told me your address and your married name. After that, it wasn’t that hard.”

  “How did… how did the others die?”

  “Gavin and Lewis were poisoned. Glen was a hit-and-run. Deirdre went missing on a hiking trip and is thought to have drowned. Mary jumped—or was pushed—off a bridge.”

  “Dear God.”

  “I know. I was as shocked as you are.”

  “How did you find out about all of this?”

  “There are two FBI guys who are on the case. They filled me in.”

  When she spoke, her voice sounded heavy with doubt. “Are you sure it’s not, you know, coincidence? I haven’t… haven’t seen anyone around here lately, no one that’s unusual. I mean, there are people in the gallery, but they’re tourists. At least, I think they are.”

  “I know it sounds crazy, but you need to believe me. For your own safety. You’re better off not trusting anyone you don’t know. I hate to put it that way.”

  “What should I do?”

  “I’m not sure. But the first thing is, don’t use any food or drinks in your fridge. They poisoned a bottle of beer in my fridge, and it killed a neighbor of mine. It was meant for me.”

  “That’s horrible. Are you still at home? I don’t know how you don’t just pick up and run, if you think that stuff in your house could be booby-trapped.”

  “I did run. I went out camping after I first found out about it, and that’s what got my neighbor killed. The FBI wants me to stay put. They say they can protect me.”

  “What else have they told you? About the murders?”

  “That’s it. They’re still trying to find you. I should have tried to contact you sooner, but it didn’t occur to me until last night to get a hold of Peggy.”