I thought I knew what they’d done. What I didn’t know was, how long had it been going on?
That, and the how, was what I was here for.
There was no point in getting into any pleasantries.
“Did you know Munro was running his own game?” I asked him.
That got his attention.
He turned to face me, and he looked even more tired than I remembered. The lines across his forehead were like furrows, and he had dark pouches under eyes that already looked like they’d had all life drained out of them.
“He wasn’t going to bring him back to you, you know,” I added. “He was going to sell him on to the cartel for fifteen million dollars. And you know what the worst part is? You probably never would have known. He’d have come up with some story about Navarro being killed out there, and you’d be sitting here thinking you pulled off your plan perfectly.”
He shrugged, impassive. “I doubt they would have kept him alive too long,” he replied.
If I still had a smidgen of doubt about Corliss’s involvement, his reaction killed it there and then. “True, but that’s not what this was about, was it? This was about revenge. You, getting your revenge. And I can’t imagine it would have been anywhere near as satisfying for you not to have him right there in front of you and be able to stare into his eyes when you did whatever you were planning to do with him.”
He didn’t reply. He just kept his tenebrous gaze on me while he breathed out slowly through a half-open mouth.
“It would have all worked out, too. If Michelle hadn’t fought them off at the house. That was the plan, right? He’d grab them. And Alex would lead you right back to him.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out Alex’s Omnitrix wristband and chucked it onto the side table by his side.
I’d had it checked.
It’s where the tracker was.
“You knew Navarro believed in reincarnation,” I told him. “You had the journal. You knew Eusebio’s story. And you knew Navarro didn’t just believe in it. He was obsessed with it, and he was obsessed with getting McKinnon’s formula back. So you decided to use that to flush him out. And what better way to flush him out than to have him think McKinnon had been reincarnated.”
I saw a reaction flicker in his eyes.
“Then you decided to load the dice,” I continued. “You decided it couldn’t be just any kid. You wanted to be sure he’d believe it, you wanted him so motivated that he’d definitely come after this kid. And who better for the job than the son of the guy who shot McKinnon? Which you knew, because Munro knew that Michelle was pregnant with my son.”
The reaction calmed, and I saw that he was already wondering about the consequences.
“Are you here to kill me?” he asked
“I should. And maybe I will. I mean, you got Michelle killed. And Villaverde. And Fugate. And Michelle’s boyfriend. And all the rest of them.” I couldn’t control my temper and my tone blew. “And you put my son at risk. You screwed with his mind and you dangled him out as bait for one of the biggest psychos on this planet.”
“None of this should have happened,” Corliss said. “The plan wasn’t for anyone to get hurt. But then . . . the best laid plans, right?”
“That’s horseshit,” I replied. “You were dealing with Navarro here. What did you think would happen?”
Corliss sucked in a deep breath through thin, tight lips, and his eyes narrowed defiantly. “You, of all people, should understand why I did this. You know what happened. What he did to my family.” He paused, as if looking to see if any of his words were striking home.
For a second, I put myself in his shoes, and I wondered about that. I wondered about what I would have done had I seen my daughter butchered in front of my eyes and had my wife end her life because of it. But I also felt like strangling him for what he did.
“And he was going to keep looking,” he added. “He was going to keep looking until he found that drug. Where would we be then, huh? How many parents would be standing there saying, ‘Why didn’t you do everything you could to stop him?’ ”
I’d wrestled with the same arguments after shooting McKinnon, so his words weren’t falling on deaf ears. But I still had a few burning questions for him.
“How’d you do it?” I asked, thinking about Alex and trying to keep the rage out of my voice. “How’d you get Alex to say the things he did, to do those drawings . . . how’s you get him to be so convincing that he’d fool someone like Stephenson?”
Corliss looked away, and for a moment, I thought I saw some regret there, some pain, something human that told me maybe this hadn’t been as cold and heartless for him as I thought.
“We brought in a spook. A guy who’d been in on MK-ULTRA back in the day.” He was referring to the CIA’s now widely known mind-control experiments, back in the sixties.
The sick bastards had brainwashed my four-year-old boy.
“Name?”
“Corrigan,” he said grudgingly. “Reed Corrigan.”
It wasn’t a name I was ever going to forget. Corrigan would be hearing from me. Real soon.
“How’d he do it?”
Corliss looked away, wearily. “We drugged Michelle’s water. She went to bed every night and for a week or so, she didn’t have a clue about what was really going on in Alex’s bedroom.”
I was really having a hard time stopping myself from reaching down his throat and ripping his heart out.
“He fed him key bits of information about McKinnon’s life. About his background, his travels, his work. He showed him photographs. He also showed him the video from the night you killed him. From the cameras on your helmets.” He winced as he said it, and I couldn’t imagine what kind of monster would show a four-year-old something like that. “But we had to be very careful,” he added, as if sensing my anger about that last reveal and wanting to move on. “We had to seed only the information that would be sure to mean something to Navarro, but wouldn’t alert Michelle as to who Alex was really talking about. And you played a part in that, even though it wasn’t intentional. You didn’t tell her what really happened that night.”
I’d been wondering about that, and it was another dagger through my heart. It was my turn to want to move on. “So Alex couldn’t know the name McKinnon?”
“No. That would have told Michelle who he was claiming to be. But he could talk about McKinnon’s past, about his life and his family and big moments in his career. He could talk about Mexico. About the journal. About Eusebio de Salvatierra. And about the tribe.”
“And Stephenson was part of the plan all along?”
“He’s the expert. The world authority. And he’s right here in California. If he gave it his stamp of approval, Navarro would believe it. We just made sure the local shrink Michelle first took Alex to see pointed her in his direction.”
“How?”
He shrugged again. “Homeland security and the threat of being branded an enemy combatant go a long way these days. No one wants to end up in an orange jumpsuit.”
I nodded. “But how’d you know Navarro would hear about it?”
“I knew what he was after. I’d read the full transcript of Eusebio’s journal. The one I asked the analyst to keep to himself. Navarro . . . he wasn’t just obsessed with reincarnation. He was beyond obsessed. It’s all he lived for. You didn’t see him that night at my house. You didn’t see the look in his eyes. I knew he had to be following Stephenson’s work. And Alex would have been a big story for Stephenson. A kid, here in the United States, reliving a past life that was so recent. He’d be talking about it with his peers, writing about it. And the odds were that sooner or later, Navarro would hear about it and come after him. We just had to make sure we had enough trackers in place to find him.”