Her car door opened. It was completely expected, she'd even watched the driver walk around the SUV, but Riley still flinched.
The agent gave her a tight smile. "Wheelchair's on its way."
Riley didn't smile back. She simply unfastened her seat belt, grabbed her significantly lightened backpack, and slid off the bench seat onto not quite steady legs. He reached out to catch her, and Riley held herself stiffly upright. The hand dropped back before it touched her.
"Ms. Davis—"
I'm fine.
"I'm not getting in the fucking wheelchair," her mouth announced instead.
Riley blinked, almost as startled as the other agent looked, and then stalked on her ever so odd-feeling legs to the elevator. It was only four strides; the driver could not have physically parked the SUV any closer. Apparently Riley was able to call the parking garage elevator before the medical staff could, because when the double doors opened, they revealed an empty cab. Riley stepped in, deliberately not reaching for the walls to steady herself as she chose the correct floor, and watched the silver doors close on the somewhat resigned face of her chauffer.
Her luck held; she managed to bypass Medical again on the way up, and far too soon, the doors were opening and Riley realized the elevator was stationary even though her stomach still felt like she was lurching upwards.
The hallway was not empty.
Still, while a few analysts acknowledged her, they were all on their own mini-missions. The War Room door might as well have been propped open given the amount of traffic moving through it. In fact, she didn't even have to badge in; the analyst who shot out of it just as she arrived there held the door open for her.
And did a double-take that Riley chose to ignore.
So at least some of them had seen her 'trailer.' Murdoc had sent it to Phoenix—and texted her her very own link with a smiley emoji—thirty-two minutes ago, after all. Plenty of time for them to have watched it on a loop.
There were seven or eight people in there, she didn't finish counting before one of them shot around the couch and wrapped himself around her. Again, she held herself stiffly, but this agent didn't take the hint. In fact, he only squeezed her harder.
"Hey," he murmured soothingly in her ear. "It's gonna be okay."
Riley ruthlessly fought down the lump in her throat, but she couldn't prevent her hands from edging away from her sides and finding his.
I don't think it is, Boze.
"You find him?" her mouth translated.
The arms holding her never faltered. "Not yet."
Not no. Just not yet.
Riley pressed a little into Bozer's warm arms. "You can let go now."
"No."
Apparently not yet was off the table for that request.
"...unless you want me to?" Those rock-steady arms loosened a little, suddenly unsure, and it was Riley's turn.
"No."
They tightened up a little, but not restrictively. Bozer always did give the best hugs. "If that guy wasn't already dead I'd kill him. I'm thinkin' about killing him again anyway just on principle."
The lump came back with a vengeance, and Riley pulled her face away from Bozer's collar, just enough that she could see his eye in the corner of her own.
But you saw what I did.
"Jack's been rubbing off on you," her mouth decided.
"Yeah, well, sometimes he's not wrong," Bozer continued, a little heatedly. "Riley, whatever you need, whenever you need it—I'm here for you."
"I didn't see—what Murdoc did to Mac, I didn't see that then," her mouth said, and Riley honestly started to wonder if she was having an out of body experience. How could Bozer be hugging her when he knew what she'd done? "I didn't know he'd done that, he almost—"
Almost strangled him. Murdoc had almost strangled Mac. In many ways it was worse than what had happened to her, Murdoc had choked her out several times but he'd always been in control of himself, it had never been...intimate like that. And Mac hadn't even been aware that it happened, not unless that was the picture show Murdoc had been showing before the warehouse went up—
The lump in her throat got the better of her, and she never knew how her mouth was going to finish that one, because it couldn't.
Wilt's arms tightened around her again. "Lotta that goin' around," he told her thickly, and Riley winced.
"Bozer, escort Riley back down to Medical, she can—"
"No." This time Riley's brain and her lips were on the same page, and she managed to pick up her head and push herself away from one of her best friends. The other agents and analysts in the room were doing their level best to pretend they weren't paying attention, but Matty was looking directly at them both. Riley hadn't seen her face to face since she was discharged from the hospital, and nothing in the woman's stern expression gave her a hint how Matty felt about what she'd just seen.
What they'd all seen.
"I analyzed the phone recording." Riley let her backpack slip down her shoulder, ignoring Bozer's attempts to help, and bent down to unzip the bag. That was a very stupid decision; the stitches in her back pulled and she instantly became lightheaded, and Riley tried her best to make it look like she'd just decided to sit on the armrest of the chair, rather than it being necessary. "It's not definitive, the audio quality wasn't good enough—"
"...was it Mac?" Bozer's hand on her shoulder was far stronger than his voice.
Riley had to blink whitish spots from her vision while her rig came back up. "...I don't think so," she said, when she was sure it would come out steady, and then she tossed the analysis up on the big screen. Matty was still looking right at her, and Riley did her best to ignore her boss.
There was no point in getting pulled out of the safehouse if all she was going to do was lay in a bed downstairs. If she was here, she was going to work.
"Mac's phone responded to a remote wake command roughly fourteen minutes before the warehouse blew, and we were able to get audio." It wasn't news; she'd had the audio streaming when the heat flare had appeared on the satellite image. "Most of it is too muffled to make out, but..." She fast forwarded it towards the end of the fourteen minute clip, where jagged lines showed the audio volume had increased. When she hit play, it was like being back in the car. She knew what she was going to hear, it wasn't a surprise, but the muffled, ragged scream still made her flinch.
Riley tapped a button and paused it, then regretfully brought up another window.
"In the...the hospital footage, I was able to get a couple audio samples..." She trailed off, letting the analysis speak for itself. The scream that the phone had picked up, compared to two more audio files that looked similar. Reluctantly, she played the first one, and after a beat there was a pain-filled yell, also muffled, but this time by the person yelling.
Mac was the person yelling. When the patient in the gymnasium hit him in the knee with a pipe, and he'd tried to stifle his cry because he knew she'd been listening.
The program did a comparison of the two audio clips and showed a sixty-four percent match.
"Given the audio quality from the phone, this would typically be a pretty good match, but..." Riley trailed off, still not looking at Matty. "It doesn't sound like him," she finally said. "I heard him—I've heard him before. I don't think it was him."
The room had gone quiet, and Riley toggled her analyzer to compare the last scream, but she didn't play it aloud. The sound Mac had made when he'd been carrying her, and fell onto the glass coating the hallway floor. The match there was even less impressive—forty-seven percent.
"Okay..." Bozer tried tentatively into the silence. "...so if it wasn't Mac...then who was it?"
"The fire's out, but the two bodies recovered from the vehicles have yet to be identified." Matty's tone was neutral.
Meaning it was possible the two bodies were Mac and Murdoc, and that he'd deliberately built an IED in those few minutes he'd parked out of sight at the gas station, and triggered it when he realized that he wasn't getting away.
Or, like the 'video game,' it was just two unfortunate innocents staged there for ambiance. And the scream could have come from either one.
Matty raised her voice. "Everyone, take five. Riley, you stay right where you are."
Riley blanched, her stomach dropping again in panic, and once more, her mouth spoke for her, the very first thing she could think of. "We don't have time to take five, Jack—"
"We haven't had active eyes on the limo for over ten minutes," Matty cut her off flatly. "We're playing catch-up now, and the algorithms you wrote can handle it for the next five minutes."
The 'you can't' went unspoken but not unheard, and only her constant fatigue enabled Riley to sit absolutely still on the arm of the chair as everyone filed out. Even Bozer; he squeezed her shoulder reassuringly, then closed the door behind him.
He didn't insist on staying.
Of course he didn't, she chided herself. You literally told Murdoc that you'd give Mac up if he'd let you go. And even though she hadn't meant it, out of context in that trailer, how was he supposed to know that?
Matty didn't keep her waiting. "Riley, we are going to do everything we can do to get Mac and Jack back in one piece. I don't believe for a second that Mac would sacrifice himself to get Murdoc if he wasn't absolutely certain that Jack was safe, and there's no way Murdoc would give him that assurance. He's not one of the bodies in that warehouse, and even if we can't intercept that limo, Jack is currently alive and will keep himself that way."
"Now," she continued, not giving Riley even a moment to argue with her, "did you deliberately help Murdoc set Mac up in exchange for some guarantee of safety?"
Riley had already opened her mouth to address the previous statements, but the subject change robbed both her brain and her lips of a smart-ass reply. Instead, the horrified truth came out. "I—no! Of course I didn't—"
"So you didn't know that using the laptop would trigger something to happen?"
The second 'of course not' was halfway out before Riley caught herself. "Absolutely n-no! I—" She faltered. "...I should have," her lips bit out, more angry now than startled. "I should have guessed it was something else, wouldn't be that easy—"
"Riley, there was nothing easy about what happened to you!" Matty's voice was incredulous. "Are you seriously telling me that this is what's been chewing on you all this time? That you tried and failed to get the upper hand? After you had been dosed with God knows what, assaulted, tied to a bed—"
Riley found herself on her feet. She didn't remember standing, and wasn't sure how long she could. "That—no, Matty, what it—that didn't happen—"
"You had the ligature marks to prove it," her boss countered, then lowered her voice with effort. "We found the restraints and some of your blood on the sheets. You received a full physical, Riley. I know what did and did not happen."
And Riley knew that, knew that the Phoenix psychologist who'd been talking to her twice a week knew that at minimum Brandon had tried something, but the way the trailer made it look—
"Murdoc didn't—" But then her mouth failed her, and she stopped. Didn't what? Film her in the shower? Make her wear that ridiculous costume, that was torn halfway off her by mentally ill men who would have finished the job Murdoc said was beneath him?
"...he said he didn't have to," her mouth betrayed her. "That—that rape was the 'blunt tool of a slow mind' or some bullshit. It was just to titillate Brandon and get to Mac."
"It was not." Her boss's voice was hard, harder than she expected, and Riley actually looked at her in surprise. Matty's expression matched her tone.
"It was to get to you, Riley. He needed you to play the part of the damsel in distress, and you and I both know that you are no damsel." Matty exhaled sharply, as if the mere thought infuriated her. "He deliberately used your fears against you so you wouldn't be able to escape. And he's doing the same thing, right now." She waved a hand in the direction of the big screen, where thankfully her trailer was nowhere to be seen.
"He has no hacker, Riley. He needs you off the board in order to finish the game he's playing with all of us. That's why he sent it here. This is about sending a message, Riley, not just to law enforcement, but to us. To you. You turned his technology against him in the junkyard. Of course he's going to repay the favor."
Riley just stared at her boss, not quite sure what to say. "...but if he wants me off the board, why are you benching me—"
"Because right now you think you have something to prove. Just like Bozer, just like Mac—just like me," she added, more softly. "He told us that he was going to take my agents, and despite all my power and training, he's succeeded every time."
Riley found herself shaking her head—and sinking back down on the arm of the chair. "No—"
"Yes," Matty contradicted her. "The difference is I know what he's doing. You don't seem to."
"...but if I hadn't taken the bait, he couldn't have—"
"Agent Davis, I need you to hear me." Riley was stunned into stillness as Matty reached up and actually took her face between her small hands. "Murdoc would have forced you both into that institution regardless of any action you did or did not take. That is no one's fault but his. If you feel like you made a mistake I can't stop you, but do not let one mistake lead to more."
The two women stared at each other a moment, and Riley finally managed a dry swallow, and a tiny nod. Her boss nodded with her.
"Okay?"
"...yeah. Okay," Riley whispered, and Matty gave her a rare, soft smile, and stroked her cheek before dropping her hands, becoming their hardened boss in less than a blink.
"In that case, go down to Medical and get whatever you need to get comfortable, because this furniture is not that. We're going to run down every lead we have, but I want you working under the assumption that Jack and Mac are now in Murdoc's custody and he's going to put them into a scenario that will expose their worst fears. Murdoc left us clues for every one of these tests, and he's no doubt done it for this one. We need to find those clues."
There was something wrong with the hallway.
Mac couldn't put his finger on it, and he was reluctant to say anything until he had it figured out, but the...proportions were somehow off, and as they cautiously continued down the hallway, that innate feeling of wrongness got progressively stronger.
"...so where the hell are the stairs?"
Mac slowed with Jack, pressing his ear to the nearest door after checking it for any obvious traps. There was no sound from inside. "For all we know this is an elaborate set. I doubt Murdoc was worried about building it to code."
His partner snorted, and Mac was honestly surprised when he actually replied. "That may be true, but he hadda get up here somehow."
Which...was also true. The elevator and shaft had been quite real, and it didn't smell of new concrete in there, so this wasn't a new construction. At least not all of it. And if they couldn't find internal stairs, maybe they could find external?
On a whim, Mac waved his keycard at one of the doors, but it gave him a red LED. He was just considering bypassing the lock the same way he'd done for Jack's room when there was a heavy strike and the loud crack of a wooden doorframe giving way.
Mac whirled to find Jack had indeed just kicked down a door; splinters were still settling as Jack peered around the doorframe perfunctorily before striding baldly inside.
"Jack!" Mac hissed, hurrying as quickly as he dared, eyeing the frame for any traps or wires. "Any of the rooms could be rigged!"
"All these rooms are rigged," Jack shot back, and by the time Mac got to the doorframe, Jack had crossed the guest room—one that looked just like theirs—and ripped aside the thick curtains.
No mural painted on this one, and no window. Just solid wall. Jack tapped it where the window should have been, then glanced around the room before his eyes settled on the wooden chair in front of the secretary.
His train of thought was clear. Find out if the wall was really as solid as it looked. Not wanting to get snapped at again, Mac held the weighted room door open with his foot and simply watched as Jack smashed the chair into the drywall.
The chair shattered and the drywall dented, but held. Which indicated there was a much more substantial wall behind it, something Jack used a piece of the wooden chair to confirm. There were wooden studs where he'd expect them to be, mounted to cinderblocks. Potentially a load bearing wall, but again, the cinderblocks didn't look new.
This wasn't a window recently boarded up. There had never been a window there at all.
"What the fuck?" Jack demanded.
"I don't know," Mac shook his head, rubbing his brow in frustration. "Might just not be an exterior wall."
Jack hurled the piece of broken chair across the room, and Mac couldn't quite suppress his flinch. "What the fuck is this place? How did he—"
"Jack," the blond man pulled his attention, "we should go. We'll never find the stairs in the rooms."
"At this rate we'll never find the stairs at all."
"Well they've gotta be somewhere. I sincerely doubt Murdoc's grand finale is locking us on a maze floor until we die of starvation; he couldn't have known what floor we would end up on, so he wouldn't have bricked any of the floors in."
His partner glared at him, but to the blond man's surprise, didn't snap at him, and instead shook his head and stalked past him, continuing on their way. Mac scrambled to keep up. With no real way to determine where they were or where they needed to go, they made their choice of turns at random. They'd already realized that the room numbers were not reliable; they jumped around, evens and odds switched sides at random, and in some halls they went neither up nor down, instead alternating out from the center. Mac couldn't hear any ice machines or vending machines anywhere, nothing to indicate a direction that they were supposed to go.
"What the hell is this guy's angle, here?" Jack demanded bitterly. "If he wants us to play his little game then why all this song and dance?"
"To hear us fight about it," Mac replied before he thought, and Jack actually stopped in his tracks.
"...yeah, that sounds about his speed." It was as close to agreement as he'd heard from his partner in a while, and then Mac realized that he was absolutely right.
This was just to wind them up. And if Murdoc was winding them up, he'd want to watch it happen.
Any one of the peepholes in the room doors could really be cameras, so that wasn't overly helpful, but there was no way Murdoc drilled through solid concrete floors in every room to run individual wires—and thanks to the less-than-pleasurable trip through the elevator shaft he took, he was very confident the floors were concrete. So at some point, in one of these rooms, there had to be a utility closet. A trunk in the building designed for electricity, water, and hopefully the AV necessary to record all this. Typically next to stairwells, since those were ready-made holes through the concrete anyway.
If the peephole cameras were wireless, this was going to be a bit harder.
But it didn't have to be.
Mac walked up to the nearest guest room, once again checking it for traps, and then held up a firm hand as Jack stalked towards it. "Wait," he half-ordered, half-begged, and Jack gave him an irritated eye-roll but let him break out his SAK and bypass the lock. A quick check of the cracked-open door revealed no obvious traps, and Mac pushed his way inside, again noting the room was a replica of the one he'd woken in.
"This has to have been a real hotel at one point," he muttered, almost to himself as he circled the bed—without touching it—and went for the replica lamp on the end table. Sure enough, the bulb was incandescent, and Mac made quick work of dismantling the entire thing.
"And that helps us how?" Jack demanded, trying one of the dresser drawers. Unlike in their room, the furniture opened easily.
"It means we can make basic assumptions about the space." Mac tried to keep his impatience out of his voice, but he wasn't sure how successful he was. "If we can find the utility room on this floor, the conduit in the wall should be what was already there when this was a functioning building. Conduit typically runs up and down the elevator shafts or stairwells—"
"Yeah yeah spare me the lecture," Jack interrupted. "Lemme guess, you're makin' a utility room doohickey finder. If it ain't a light saber then I don't really care what it is or how it works."
Mac clenched his jaw until he was sure he had a handle on his irritation, but having something in his hands, something to do, was a major help. "Make yourself useful and see if you can find a remote control. I need the batteries."
"Course you do." It would have been familiar banter if Jack's voice had held any of the usual fondness. Which it did not. Still, Jack rifling through the drawers kept him out of Mac's hair, and by the time he came up with said remote control—looking suspiciously like it had never been used—Mac had disassembled the lamp body, ditched the weighted bottom, and now had a light bulb still attached to its metal rod, with its power cord stripped down to wire and wrapped securely around said rod.
Jack popped the batteries out of the remote and frowned at them, and Mac was about to ask him to quit messing around and just pass them to him when he heard the crinkle of plastic.
The batteries hadn't even been unwrapped.
"You were sayin' something about this being a real hotel?" Jack asked acerbically, tossing the batteries to him without warning, but Mac had been watching and managed to catch them both against his tux vest.
Pointing out the fallacy in the snarky logic—that the wrapped batteries meant the building had never been a hotel, despite everything else indicating it had—wouldn't be worth the time and aggravation, so Mac simply ground his teeth and connected the batteries to the circuit. The bulb came on weakly, and without waiting for his partner, the blond man ventured back out into the hall, looking left and right. It was hard to tell, but he was pretty much certain the light got a little brighter when he pointed it to the left. He started walking, vaguely aware of Jack trailing behind him, and the longer they walked, the more certain he became.
Three turns later—two rights and a left—brought them to a door bearing the number 237. A number he'd seen at least five times previously. Swinging the device in either direction made the light grow marginally dimmer; it was at its brightest when pointed at this door. Jack tried to push him aside, rearing up to kick it in, but Mac pushed back.
"For fuck's sake, Jack; Murdoc has used explosives several times already so maybe don't keep tempting fate, yeah?"
Jack glared at him, and drew a breath as if to argue, but after a beat or two, he just rolled his eyes and waved his hand, telling his partner to get on with it.
Getting the door open took no time at all, and after opening it a crack and making sure there were no obvious traps, he threw it all the way open, expecting to see the same layout as they'd seen every time before.
Except that this time, the door opened into a stairwell.
And it was clearly part of the original construction of the building. Wide enough for both of them to go down side by side, metal pipe railing and concrete treads. For whatever reason, Jack didn't crowd him, and Mac carefully inspected the visible floor for any traps, pressure plates, or tripwires before he stepped warily into the space.
The stairwell went both up and down, but as Mac looked towards what he assumed was the third floor, he found a gray cinderblock wall closing off the half-landing above. While the cinderblocks themselves didn't look new, the mortar between them did. Checking the downward running stairs, the half-landing was clear.
They could go down, but not up.
Mounted on the newly installed concrete wall was the wireless access point for the cameras—and whatever other equipment Brandon had run for Murdoc before he'd been killed. It was that wireless signal that he was converting with the magnetized coil on the lamp into electricity, brightening the bulb as it got nearer to the source.
Mac used the lamp to point out it out to Jack. "Probably wired to electricity from the floor above, so that if I disabled power on this floor, we wouldn't take out Murdoc's eyes and ears."
His partner only grunted, glaring upwards in irritation before shouldering past him and heading down. Mac honestly wasn't sure if Jack was taking his normal position as lead, or if he was just that eager to get on with it. With no traps visible, Mac quietly followed. Their leather-soled shoes whispered on the concrete, and once they hit the half landing, they found the stairwell actually ended on the ground floor. It looked innocuous enough, no window and with a push-bar rather than a handle, and was helpfully marked with a stylized '1'.
Jack did a perfunctory scan for wires—which Mac also didn't see—and lightly tapped the touchbar. When it apparently didn't deliver a shock, he glanced over his shoulder, and Mac gave him a tense nod. Then he carefully pushed it open, to reveal a wall about five feet directly in front of them. Far closer that it would be in a normal corridor.
Jack glanced to his left, and then he let out an irritated scoff and stepped into the small space, giving Mac room to follow.
His partner was standing right in front of a guest room door. The inside of one.
Mac stepped up next to him—uncomfortably close—and let the stairwell door swing shut behind him. When it did, it revealed to them the rest of the guest room. A mirror image of theirs. They were standing in front of what should have been the bathroom door.
"What was that about not finding the stairs in the rooms?" Jack asked mockingly, and Mac rolled his eyes.
Same procedure with the door. Mac walked towards it first, checked it for traps, but when he tried to reach for the handle, Jack grabbed him and pulled him back. Mac blinked in surprise, but his partner didn't even glance at him, taking point and easing the door open. Then he stepped into the hall, looking left and right before finally looking back and jerking his head to tell him to follow. Mac trailed behind him.
"Gimme that knife of yours," Jack ordered, holding his hand out. Mac hesitated a second before complying, and the former Delta selected a blade and then carved an X into the wall beside the door, holding onto the knife as he started walking. Mac debated demanding it back, but he held his tongue. To their left was a dead end, so they headed right, and when they reached the end of the hall, Jack took the knife and carved an arrow pointing in the direction of the door they'd just exited. Mac took a breath, and caught a faint scent in the air that made him stop.
"You smell that?" he asked suddenly, and Jack looked at him, then took a deep breath.
"Chlorine," he nodded. Mac gave him a shrug.
"Pool's usually close to the lobby."
Jack simply scoffed, but it didn't feel antagonistic, so Mac said nothing, and they were once again on their way.
The pair turned left, then right, then right again, following the scent, with an arrow carved at each corner pointing them back the way they came, until finally, they came to a set of glass doors. Looking through them, sure enough, there was the lobby. Jack carved one more arrow beside the doors, then closed the knife and shoved it back into Mac's hand.
Mac gave him a look but accepted it, checking the double doors for traps, and though he found a magnetic lock at the top of both the doors, the fact that they were glass indicated that was more to slow them down than to be any kind of significant obstacle. Besides, if it were a lobby in any other hotel—
Once again, Mac fished his room key out of his pocket, and the badge scanner turned green. With a last check on his partner, Mac pushed one of the doors open.
The first thing that hit him was sound. Until he heard the faint strands of classical music, he hadn't realized how quiet the first floor was. No sound of cars or planes. Not even the hum of the ice machine on this floor. Someone went to a lot of trouble to isolate noise.
The second thing he noticed was that the lobby had been designed by someone who wanted to make it grand, but had been limited by the existing architecture, like the ceiling height. Whoever had painted the murals in their rooms had definitely painted the walls here, using a perspective trick to make it look like the ceilings were higher than they actually were. It wasn't a new trick, either; the same had been used in places like the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna over two hundred years ago, but it had been done well.
That being said, it was still a pretty large space.
The enormous, tasteful carpet was covering highly polished tile ubiquitous to the western United States. The same dark mahogany from the guest rooms was everywhere; the columns in the room, the main reception desk, and the various intimate gathering areas of two or three chairs with a small table amongst them. The reception counter was easily twenty feet in length and made of a highly polished hunter green marble, and the same replica lamps as the one he still held in his hand dotted the countertop and all the little side tables.
Glass chandeliers that did a decent job at looking like crystal hung at nearly—but not quite—every thirty feet or so; they'd been placed to match the paint job in making the ceilings look taller—
And then Mac finally understood what about the hallways had made him feel so uneasy.
"That look like natural light to you?" Jack took off towards some small, arched windows over what were clearly painted-on entry and exit doors, and only after his six foot partner was relatively close could Mac tell that the arches over the 'doors' were in fact quite a bit higher than they'd looked. The perspective painting again. Jack gave the wall an experimental knock.
"It won't be that easy, Jack." Not to burst the older agent's bubble, but even if that was real sunlight filtering through the translucent glass, there was no way the lobby doors hadn't been bricked in like the stairwell. And the arched windows were pretty small, decorative mostly. Mac thought he had a shot at squirming out one of them, but Jack's shoulders were too broad.
Also, the fake 'doors' were painted to show the same plaza that his mural had, and even accepting that the maze of nonsensical hallways had screwed with his sense of direction, hadn't the fake 'windows' in his room been facing the way they'd just come?
Jack made a production of dragging an ornate wing-backed chair towards the arched windows, and Mac left him to it and headed to check out the reception desk instead.
There was an ornate silver bell, that looked like it might actually be a real period piece rather than a replica, and Mac very deliberately didn't touch it. Instead, he studied the otherwise pristine marble, glancing over the elbow-high counter to see relatively modern computers with their monitors sunk into the marble so that no modern tech spoiled the illusion of the time period. The ones he could see had a bouncing hotel logo as their screen savers, and Mac felt his eyebrows draw up.
"Hotel Satori," he sounded aloud. The word had a Japanese root, yet nothing about the hotel seemed even remotely Asian. There was no visible mouse or keyboard, and Mac suppressed a grunt as he vaulted over the counter.
Sure enough, there were keyboards on pull-out trays under the counter. He experimentally tapped a few keys, but the screensaver stayed irritatingly in place.
Another part of the 'game', then, that he hadn't triggered yet.
A bang echoed across the lobby, followed by a few very colorful words. Jack had tried—and failed—to break the arched glass. He was using one of the bracelets of the handcuffs, which certainly should have done the job, but even as he banged on the surface again, Mac could hear that it wasn't traditional glass.
"Probably polycarbonate. Same thing they use in government—"
"I know what polycarbonate glass is!" Jack snarled, giving it another powerful strike with the steel handcuffs, and achieving the same effect.
No way Murdoc would make it that easy.
Mac put his attention back on the reception area. There was an aged, elegant guestbook resting in the middle of the counter, complete with a feathered pen perched neatly in an inkwell. After cautiously tapping the pen, Mac plucked it up to find it was simply a normal ink pen cartridge inserted into the calamus of the quill. The inkwell was just decoration.
The blond agent set it down and flipped the book around, ignoring the sound of Jack taking his anger out on the wingback chair he was still standing on, and read down the guest list. His stomach dropped as he recognized not just names, but signatures.
Matilda Webber.
Riley Davis.
Wilt Bozer.
The dates by their names indicated that they had arrived today. Or at least, the day that he'd driven willingly into Murdoc's trap. He had no way of knowing how long he'd been out, and whether that light coming in through the unbreakable windows was real sunlight or just a light bulb.
Mac flipped the page, feeling the texture of the thick paper for any indication that signing it might trigger something to happen, but it was simply paper. He glanced back at the previous signatures, scanning the list for clues. Murdoc had outdone himself; just like Matty's and Bozer's signatures were replicas of their actual signatures, every signature on every page was in a different handwriting. Mac turned a few more pages, picking out one that was larger than its allotted line, in printed capital letters like a child.
BENJAMIN BLAKE
For some reason, it rang a bell. Ben Blake. B. Blake. Benny Blake.
Mac's eyes widened as he remembered the name on the inpatient file he'd looked at not three days ago. Benny.
He scanned the pages, more certain now, and other names popped out. Other patients that Murdoc had kidnapped from the institution. Other Phoenix agents, too; Mark Kyser. Ricardo Ramirez. Grant Simmons. Jada Navarro. And between them there were more names. Robert E. Phelps. G. Howell. Horace Williams. All were familiar to him. He turned another page, and the neat, looping signature of Dr. Henry Howard Holmes stared back at him.
H. H. Holmes.
"Who?"
Mac flinched; Jack was right on top of him and he hadn't even noticed. "H. H. Holmes," he repeated, then cleared his throat, trying to play it off. "He was a serial killer in the late 1800s. One of America's first."
Jack scoffed and grabbed the guest book out of the younger agent's hands, flipping it around so he could see. "Yeah, so what?"
Mac felt irritation flare deep in his core, tensing his muscles and grinding his teeth together, before he reached out and snatched the book back, slamming it down on the counter between them. Jack glared at him, and Mac worked hard to keep himself from snapping.
"So," he said pointedly, "if Murdoc's pulling from Holmes' MO, that's very, very bad for us."
"Why? What the hell was this guy's schtick?"
"He built a hotel specifically designed to creatively murder people. Mazes to nowhere, gas chambers, acid vats, torture rooms, trap doors, hidden rooms—he even had his own crema—" the blond agent deliberately stopped himself. Holmes had built his own crematorium in the basement to dispose of the bodies.
"Phoenix, fire; you have to admit it would be almost Wagnerian. Oh, and the screams..."
Mac shook his head quickly. If this place had a basement, he was avoiding it at all costs.
"Anyway, Boze fell down the rabbit hole while doing research for one of his scripts. Safe bet Murdoc's pulling inspiration from Holmes, considering the disorienting layout."
"And I'm back to 'so what?'" Jack said with an annoyed sigh. "Murdoc made that hospital a goddamn hellscape; what's so different about this?"
"The difference—" Mac broke off, forcing himself to take a deep breath. "The difference is that in that hospital I had to worry about people inside the building more than anything. Sometimes things inside the building. This time, the actual building itself is designed to kill us, Jack, on top of whatever other surprises he put in to go with whatever narrative he's trying to tell. So maybe stop trying to kick in every door, okay?"
Jack's eyes flashed, but he made an obvious effort to control his reaction, taking a deep breath.
"Fine," he agreed curtly. "Well if you know so much, then what's his big plan, here? What's the storyline he's going for? Matty was replicating that grad student—"
"Zoe Kimura," Mac supplied quietly but firmly, and Jack mercifully didn't snap at him about it.
"—Bozer was on a cooking show or a game show, Riley was in a video game, so what's this?"
Mac shook his head slowly. "I don't know. But I think it might have something to do with...with the Riley double—look," he quickly flipped back to the page with all of their names on it, purposefully not giving his partner time to dwell on the thought of his ill-fated, unwilling companion. "According to this, 'they' all checked in today. Or, at least, the last date I remember it being; I have no idea how long we were out."
Or what was done to them in that time.
"...so you're saying there might be more people in here somewhere," Jack said slowly, pulling the blond man's focus. "Maybe still alive."
It was hard to read his partner when he said that, a strange mix of hope and dread in his voice. Mac swallowed, considering it.
"Maybe," he allowed at last. He looked around the lobby again, this time noting a few things behind the counter. There was a small, framed picture on the left hand side of Murdoc, labeled 'Our Founder', and on the right, there was another framed picture that bore a striking resemblance to the sketch Riley came up with of Brandon, this one labeled 'Employee of the Month.'
Jack glanced up and saw him staring, then followed his gaze. When he did, his eyebrows shot up.
"Wait a second, I know that guy," he muttered, moving to walk around the front desk.
"Yeah, it's Brandon, I think," Mac confirmed with a nod. Jack blinked at him.
"No it isn't," he protested. "I know what that bastard looked like, and that's not him. For starters, Brandon didn't have blond hair."
"What?" Mac's brows furrowed as he looked back at the picture. "Jack, that guy has short brown hair; what are you talking about?"
"Are you fucking blind? It's blond, chin length."
"No, it's not," Mac protested, but when he went to go walk around the front desk and looked at the picture, sure enough, there was a blond man with a pronounced nose and a beanie over his head smiling at him. The agent blinked, rubbing his eyes, but Jack was right. "What the hell?"
Jack gave him a look that said 'duh' more plainly than his voice would have, and Mac did what any rational person would do—he backed up to the place he'd been before. Where a photograph of Brandon, in all his short brown-haired glory, was smirking at him. Not even the smile was the same, just the position of the—
...eyes...
This time Mac didn't let his gaze waver from them, moving back towards Jack, who gestured impatiently at the picture. And sure enough—
"Jack, take six steps to your right."
"Why the hell would I—"
"Just—humor me," and at the last second Mac managed to temper the order to a suggestion. Jack still gave him a good hard glare, and basically goose-stepped six steps to his right. Then he turned back and threw out his arms.
"Happy?"
Now it was Mac's turn to gesture at the picture. Jack rolled his eyes so hard Mac was about to suggest they might get stuck that way before he managed to get them on the picture, his mouth already opening to protest it was the same photo he'd seen—
Only he couldn't. Jack's mouth remained open, though it curled in disbelief as the older agent then repeated Mac's move of walking back to his original position, watching the photograph transform before his eyes.
"...that son of a bitch," Jack finally managed, and for what felt like the first time since Mac had woken up here, they were in agreement.
"I'll spare you the lecture—"
"—was there the whole goddamn time," Jack continued like Mac hadn't spoken. "Right in front of us."
Mac blinked at his partner. "...what do you mean, here?" he finally asked, almost afraid to hear the answer given the way Jack's jaw was working.
"The hotel," Jack responded shortly, glaring at the picture as though he could set it alight with his gaze alone. "Kyser tracked that room key to a hotel. That guy was there, right there when Grant and I—"
He cut himself off, then slammed a fist down on the stone countertop. He didn't need to continue. Mac remembered enough. That Jack and Simmons had gone out to a hotel a couple hours from LA thinking it was a place Murdoc had stayed—close enough to spy on them, far enough away to avoid their surveillance.
Which meant—
"Jack...is this that lobby?"
It took him a few seconds to tear his eyes from the holographic photograph—one of the best Mac had ever seen—and give the room a once-over as if it had personally offended him.
"Sure as hell doesn't look like it," he denied, his eyes moving over empty space but clearly seeing something else. "It was a lot smaller. Desk was across from the door—" and he turned to glare accusingly at the painted on one that was clearly permanently walled in, "—but there were walls there and there. And an elevator there," and Jack pointed at a smooth plane of drywall.
Moving an elevator was no small feat, and Mac was about to let it go when Jack slowly shook his head. "We didn't get any evidence outta the room cause that pimple-faced fucknugget told us the place was getting gutted and renovated—black mold."
Renovation. "Jack, how many floors was that hotel?"
"Five," he answered instantly, for once on the same train of thought. "I know where we are."
Mac grabbed the guest book, flipping to the end and ripping out a page before grabbing the feather pen and slapping both down on the counter in front of his partner. "Can you sketch what you remember of the layout? Clearly he's moved stuff around, but he can't have changed all of it." Jack and Simmons had visited the hotel only a few months ago. While a lot of the renovations of the interior could have already been done, it was unlikely Murdoc had hired enough crew to significantly alter the perimeter of the building.
Jack grabbed the pen, scowling at the fluffy white feather before ripping it off the body of the ink insert. He tried to toss it aside, but it fluttered gracefully to swoop almost onto the piece of paper, and Jack actually growled at it before he managed to shove it over the side of the counter and start sketching with broad, angry strokes.
Rather than risking getting snapped at for 'supervising' Mac continued his exploration of the lobby. All the windows at normal height were painted, so he ignored that wall for the moment and concentrated on the wide hallway that led towards what he assumed were the hotel's conference spaces and ballrooms. He stuck his head around the corner, glancing to his right, where there was a poster stand in front of a pair of propped open doors. There were two large pictures featured on the poster.
Their pictures. Both of them, smiling in sharp suits, not unlike the tuxes they were currently wearing.
Phoenix stock footage.
The text between them was too small to read at this distance, but the header was not.
In Memoriam.
Every other doorway was closed. When he looked to his left, he found the same.
"Jack," he called, a little reluctantly. "I found something."
He heard the pen slapped down, and the sharp rustling of paper, and Mac made himself wait until Jack stalked to his side, thrusting a folded piece of paper into his line of sight.
"Here."
Mac accepted it before it could be shoved into his face, and then he used it to gesture down the hallway.
The older agent stared down the hallway a moment—and without another word headed right for the poster. Mac hurried after him, taking a quick glance at the sketch before folding it and tucking it into the inside pocket of his jacket. "Jack, what part of murder hotel don't you get—"
"Looks like the murderin' already happened." Even so, Jack gave the doors a once-over before he entered, leaving Mac no choice but to follow.
Given that it was supposed to be a memorial—their memorial—he wasn't sure what he expected, but this certainly wasn't it. Long rows of empty chairs filled the ballroom, with a wide aisle that made no effort to hide the urn and the full-sized casket on literal platforms, tastefully decorated with white gladioli, lilies, roses, and orchids. The only splash of color in the entire display was the American flag draped over the casket, announcing not only which of them it was meant to contain, but that this was definitely a closed casket service.
A flat panel television, once again set in a picture frame, was the centerpiece. It was currently blank. There were two floorstanding speakers, flanking the back of the room, but otherwise no other visible cameras or technology. Just the empty chairs, waiting patiently for the mourners to arrive.
Except—
Not all of them were empty.
A few rows up, a deep burgundy was visible on one of the white fabric seats. Mac approached cautiously to find it was a woman's silk scarf. The pattern was quite familiar to him, he'd seen her wearing it at least twice this year alone, and Mac fingered the corner of it for a moment before he picked it up.
Matty had a scarf just like it.
Hesitantly, Mac brought it up to his nose, and he caught the scent of the very mild perfume she sometimes wore, and just a hint of sweat.
Like the napkin in Bozer's exam. The handkerchief from the warehouse. This wasn't a copy—it was the real deal. Murdoc had gotten close enough to her to steal it. Whether from her car, her home—the Phoenix itself. It didn't matter. He'd gotten to her.
Jack was watching him, must have seen something on his face, because he turned away with a low growl, stalking towards the TV before abruptly stopping, glancing down a row on the opposite side of the aisle before reaching out and grabbing a neatly folded grey blazer.
Even from twenty feet away, Mac knew immediately who it belonged to. More importantly, he knew it was also the original. Bozer had embroidered the names of his favorite directors in silver into the decorations on the blazer's lapels. It was the one he was going to wear to the Hollywood debut of his first feature-length film.
Jack didn't know that, and he tugged the crimson handkerchief free of the front pocket, where Mac knew he would find W. B. monogrammed into it. Rather than dwell on that—and what it meant, what it might mean, that Murdoc might have Bozer and Matty as well—Mac continued woodenly down the aisle. A glimmer of light caught his peripheral vision, and Mac flinched before he realized it wasn't a camera, or anything dangerous; it was a beaded black clasp purse.
One he also recognized, because he'd made it.
Whether it was the real thing or not was moot; they knew Murdoc had been in Riley's apartment. Just like they knew he'd been in Mac's house. It was one of the purses Phoenix outfitted their agents with—in this case, it had a pop-up mechanism that would immediately supply the carrier with a taser, a can of mace, a gun, whatever the agent might need instantly on hand. Riley had loved it so much she'd taken it home and refused to return it.
But there was no chance that it meant Riley was really there. There would be no reason to have her stand-in exsanguinated and dead in the bed next to Jack if Murdoc had actual Riley.
The odds were that he didn't have Matty or Bozer, either. But whoever he'd chosen as their doppelgangers, they were probably here in the hotel. Maybe still alive.
Mac didn't realize he still had the scarf clenched in his fist until the TV came to life, and he felt the silk stretch taut.
The same logo that had been on the screen savers in the lobby came up on the screen, and Mac forced himself to remain still, eyes forward, as Jack stepped up next to him. Close enough to touch. "Hotel Satori. What does that even mean?"
"It's, uh, Japanese, it means—" Mac cast his mind back to the impressive collection of Japanese anime that Bozer had made him watch, all subbed rather than dubbed so they could both learn a new language while they watched. "—something like an epiphany."
Jack sucked in a quick breath and Mac was sure the older agent was about to slaughter the definition of the word. He was wrong.
"That motherfucker didn't even bother to change the name?!"
Of course. The name of the hotel Kyser had tracked Murdoc to was the Epiphany Hotel. The hotel's logo faded to the psychopath's beaming face.
"Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today—wait, that's not right." Murdoc paused, smiling as though he'd just told a fabulous joke. "You're not married. In fact, neither of you ever will be." He spread his arms wide. "Welcome to your funeral."
"You mean yours," Jack corrected acidly. The image of Murdoc didn't shift expression, but experience told Mac that didn't mean this wasn't live.
"I'm certain you both know by now that you've been beaten. This was never going to end any other way." There was an undercurrent of false sympathy in Murdoc's voice. "You both made a choice and surrendered yourselves to me. I'm eager to see if the rest of the Phoenix Foundation will accept their defeat as gracefully. I certainly hope not." His lips drew up in a predatory smile that actually reached his eyes, and Mac carefully kept his expression perfectly blank.
Jack showed less restraint. "Keep smiling, you smug little bastard, just keep right on—"
"I imagine Jack is yammering impotent threats by this point, so let me break it down for you, Angus, scientist to scientist." Even though Murdoc couldn't have known which side of the aisle Mac was going to end up on, it seemed like he was looking right at him. "You can explain it in little words to your guard dog later. Oh," and he caught himself with a smirk, "I guess he's not that to you anymore, is he."
Jack didn't say anything else, and Mac didn't dare take his eyes off the screen. Better to get it over with and done than string it along.
Murdoc disagreed.
The camera footage retreated, exposing more than just the psychopath's face, and his signature black was revealed to be the same coroner's outfit he'd worn in Riley's trailer. Mac fought to keep his expression neutral, and Murdoc's smirk deepened. Like he really could see them.
"I believe the term is dead men walking. Think of yourself like Schrodinger's cat, neither dead nor alive until someone opens up the box and peeks inside. Oh...and they will, MacGyver. Out of responsibility or guilt or just the classic need for revenge, they're going to come looking. And I..." And Murdoc made a theatrical bow. "...will be ready and waiting to lovingly prepare them for their final repose."
Jack snorted. Loudly.
The assassin on the screen sobered. "And don't look at me like that; I told you before, your grades have been subpar. Any hope you had of guaranteeing their lives died with that sweet little nurse of yours." Mac clenched his jaw but refused to react further.
"Yet even I must admit your last efforts impressed me—despite all of your many failures. It was too late in the game, of course, but you demonstrated that you were still capable of learning. Of retaining some of what I taught you. And it didn't seem fair to write you off before the final exam. No matter how well you do, you're still going to die," Murdoc added quickly, almost as an afterthought. "But I feel it's only fair to give you one final chance to redeem yourself to them. To die with a clean conscience."
"The only one dyin' here is you," Jack snarled softly at the screen. "Mebbe I don't walk away, but you sure as hell don't either."
It wasn't a voice Mac often heard from Jack, not since Afghanistan. He meant every word he'd said.
And if you know what's good for you, you'll stay outta my way about it. Jack had already made up his mind. There would be no arresting Murdoc, not if Jack got to him before Mac could.
The Murdoc on the screen was unmoved. "Your mission—your very last one—is to solve the future murders of your so-called friends from beyond the grave. If you're successful, the message will be relayed to a site I've sent to dear Matilda, and they can take precautions to avoid their fate. I'm not guaranteeing they will, of course—" and Murdoc cut himself off with a sly smile. "But I will tell you now, scientist to scientist, that I won't alter my plans. If you are able to get this message to them, and they are resourceful enough without you, it's possible they might survive me. And that's frankly more than you have any right to expect," Murdoc added, his tone hardening. "What can I say? For you I always make an exception."
Murdoc paused then, clearly anticipating some backtalk, but this time Jack was silent.
"You have as long as you need for this final exam, and feel free to do as much improvising as you want. If you attempt to leave the testing site before the end of the exam, I will kill you then and there and any progress you made up to that point will not be shared with your precious Phoenix. So you see, it's in everyone's best interest to follow the rules," Murdoc concluded, his tone reasonable. "These first two are just practice runs, to give you an idea of the format of the rest of the...examination." Murdoc clasped his gloved hands and waggled his eyebrows, as if Mac might otherwise miss the unsettling double entendre. "But do keep in mind that purgatory isn't a safe place for ghosts like yourselves, gentlemen. Try not to die too quickly, and good luck."
With a swell of empathetic classical strings, Murdoc's oddly heartfelt expression faded to the hotel logo.
Neither of them said anything for a long moment, and for the first time since he'd encountered Jack handcuffed to the bed in the hotel room, the presence beside him felt calm. Solid. Like they were truly facing whatever happened next, together.
"So," Jack started, his voice as flat as his expression. "We just gotta find two more lookalikes who may or may not be dead and...what? Save 'em?"
Solve the future murders. Murdoc's words swirled around in Mac's head, and he slowly shook it. "No. He said we had to solve them. We can't solve a murder that hasn't happened yet." Also, there was no question as to how the Riley stand-in had died. Blood loss from a slit throat. There was no way that much blood would have congealed on her—and Jack's shirt—if the wound had happened after her heart stopped.
So it wasn't going to be straightforward. The murders weren't going to be what they appeared.
"So he already killed three people," Jack continued, in the same flat voice. "And left 'em for us to find."
Mac's focus was drawn by the red on the American flag, the only real color in the room. These first two are just practice runs... "...I think it's five."
Jack followed Mac's gaze to the casket, and his upper lip curled. "What happened to 'don't open the doors, Jack'?"
He had a point. Murdoc said it was a practice, but he also warned them of the dangers lying in wait. "I think the risk is worth taking. If nothing else, it might give us a clue how he intends to—what he has planned for us." Absently the blond agent wound Matty's scarf around his hand and approached the remains he assumed were supposed to be his.
An urn meant cremation, after all.
"It's Step Three. He's telling us what we should fear."
There was no obvious trap on the urn, and the table had four legs, showing him that the space beneath it held neither explosive nor any kind of switch. Mac used his scarf-clad hand to ease the lid off the urn, half expecting spring-loaded snakes to pop out.
Nothing so dramatic as that. A little puff of dust, that was all, and Mac held his breath.
Inside the urn were indeed ashes.
"Step three?" Finally, there was a little life in Jack's voice. Derision.
Mac turned the lid over, finding nothing inside, and set it down carefully before peering into the urn itself. "His steps for a perfect murder. Step one, make your target uncomfortable." Honestly, even if the car ride hadn't been—Riley's trailer certainly had done the trick. Not to mention the months before. "Step two, tell them why they're being targeted." For challenging Murdoc, and not dying like good little agents in that junkyard. "Three, tell your target what they should fear." He dipped his chin, indicating the urn. "I think Murdoc's taken a page out of Drew's book."
Which pretty much guaranteed that Murdoc had indeed installed H. H. Holmes' incinerator somewhere in the hotel.
Jack snorted, but made no move to approach the casket. "Not much to 'solve' there."
And then the hotel logo faded away, and with a loud buzz of static, CBSN News came on, showing a fresh-faced, somber reporter Mac easily recognized as a real anchor.
"...but the late night surprise showers also brought heartache to the Hollywood Hills." The reporter disappeared, showing the mangled and unrecognizable frame of a burnt-out vehicle, wetly reflecting emergency lights into the camera.
"Local resident Angus MacGyver lost control of his Jeep in the early morning hours and slid off an embankment less than a mile from his home. Mr. MacGyver was alone in the vehicle, and was killed instantly in the crash."
The footage moved to Mac's local fire chief, and the running footer dutifully identified the man as Anderson Blevins.
"Mac was a legend around here," the man was saying, then quickly drew a hand down his face, wiping away either rain or tears. "Even helped us troubleshoot an issue with the ladder on one of the rigs. One of a kind, that guy. Whole community's gonna be feelin' this loss."
A map of Mac's neighborhood appeared. "The accident occurred on Rodman's Bend, a narrow stretch of road known for washing out during flash floods. This stretch of road has already claimed four lives this year alone, including Andrea Tomlinson and her two young children last month."
The anchor reappeared, still projecting empathy. "The LA County Transportation Authority has already established plans to re-route floodwaters to nearby storm drains, and in the meantime, authorities are encouraging residents to avoid that stretch of road during flash floods." The anchor then focused on a different camera. "We'll have the latest weather forecasts when we come back."
The news program faded, as if to commercial, but none materialized, and the TV went back to displaying the hotel logo.
The blond agent stared at the screen for several more seconds, digesting what he'd seen. When Jack took a breath to speak, Mac raised a hand, cutting him off.
"If that's the scenario, this wasn't an accident."
He felt his partner's eyes glaring into the side of his head, and Mac ignored him, picked up the urn, and up-ended it onto the pristine white tablecloth. The ashes on the top were nearly as white as the cloth, but what lay beneath was gray and chunky. There were a few bits of bone that were blackened.
"Yeah, whatever, spare me the lecture and let's just say you're right. What are a buncha ashes gonna prove?" Jack gave the room a sarcastic once-over. "Not like you got the Jeep in here to check for cut brake lines."
Mac swallowed a sigh. So much for avoiding the lecture. "Number one, my Jeep's stripped to bare metal so I can hose it down when we take it on the beach. There's no way the interior would go up like that—nothing to burn. Two, in the rains necessary for a flash flood, the fire wouldn't have been able to consume the whole vehicle. Three, I never take Rodman's Bend in the rain, and I know you know that because you don't, either."
Using Matty's scarf to protect his hand, Mac started sifting through the ashes. The total volume was about right for an adult human body, and there were definitely bone fragments. He couldn't say if they were human remains or pig's, but they were definitely remains. No way to narrow that down short of a genetic test, and even he wasn't confident he could whip one up with what he'd already seen in the hotel.
Murdoc had only left him one option.
Even knowing what he had to do, Mac couldn't help the grimace, but there was nothing else for it and he carefully waved his hand over the ashes, wafting any scents towards his face and forcing himself not to think about Murdoc's lessons.
He wasn't really sure what human ashes were supposed to smell like, but Mac was pretty damn sure they weren't supposed to have a fragrance of gasoline.
"Oh, come on—" The disgust was thick in Jack's voice.
"An accelerant was used." Mac snorted the smell out of his nostrils and used Matty's scarf to pick through the larger chunks of bone. "And these remains weren't cremated. Cremation happens at a higher temperature. Whoever this was, they were just...burned."
His silk-covered fingers brushed against something much more substantial than a bone fragment, and Mac teased the object out of the ashes curiously. When he realized what it was, he nearly dropped it.
It was the Phoenix medallion. His Phoenix medallion. The one he and Jack had brought back from Cairo. The one that Riley had found on his deck, back when Thornton had told them they needed to rebrand DXS.
Grimly, Mac held the blackened medallion up by its flame-damaged chain. "Looks like Murdoc's sticking with his 'sending a message' schtick." And the message was obvious. Murdoc was planning to burn the Phoenix to ashes.
And Mac was apparently going to be the first to go.
Jack eyed the medallion with distaste, even going so far as to take a step back from the deformed metal. "All right, fine, no accident. Still coulda been at least a dozen things. Someone messed with the Jeep, someone ran you off the road—"
"Or I deliberately took Rodman's Bend to lose a tail. Yeah, I get that." Mac dredged his fingertips through the rest of the ash pile, but nothing else large made itself known. "It's not like I keep that medallion on me, so whoever it was would have been to the house at least once to grab that. I don't know how much more granular I can get, but at least I can prove it was murder. Maybe that's enough."
"Maybe?" Jack turned and glared at the closed casket. "You're bettin' a lot of lives on a 'maybe'."
"Well, that used to be good enough for you," he snapped without thinking, and regretted it as soon as Jack's glare transferred right back to him. "If you think you can do better, go right ahead."
The older agent's glare darkened, but after a few seconds of Mac refusing to look away, Dalton rolled them towards the ceiling in irritation and all but stomped over to the casket. Even knowing that Murdoc was watching them, and that every single thing either one of them did was a tell, was being recorded for the Phoenix to see, he still couldn't quite bring himself to simply throw the front half of the casket open. Instead, Jack's somehow-steady fingers reached out and brushed the American flag draped over the top.
Gently. Almost reverently.
And the TV burst to life once more.
Again, it was CBSN News, once more showing same brunette anchor—Jennifer something. "...in local news, a bizarre break-in at a landscaping company in Van Nuys resulted in the accidental death of the trespasser." A picture of Jack that Mac recognized from one of his partner's many driver's licenses was shown, superimposed over a map of Van Nuys.
Beside him, Jack scoffed. Mac didn't look at him.
"The victim was identified as Jack Wyatt Dalton, a local tile salesman who is alleged to have broken into Four Seasons Landscaping around eleven pm local time." The map of Van Nuys changed to a street level view of an upscale landscaping nursery, complete with crime scene tape blowing in the morning breeze. "The owner, Andrew Lansing, was working late and discovered the trespasser in the main office. According to the police report, Mr. Lansing then chased Mr. Dalton into the chemical storage section of the building, where Mr. Dalton fell from the catwalk into a mixing vat of the commercial herbicide Mecoprop."
The footage shifted to a man in a white lab coat, and the running banner proclaimed him Dr. Edward Sturges, Professor of Agricultural Study at UCLA. "Mecoprop is a very common herbicide here in the United States both commercially and in residential areas, as it selectively kills broadleaf weeds while leaving the rest of your lawn unaffected. It is sold and distributed as a liquid concentrate, and it's very common for landscapers to mix it as needed depending on the application."
The scene moved back to the CBSN anchor. "Local fire and hazmat units responded to the scene but were unable to resuscitate Mr. Dalton. City inspectors are reviewing Four Seasons' chemical storage practices and permits, but so far there is no indication of foul play." The anchor then focused on another camera. "In sports..."
And then like before, the news show faded to black.
Jack made a disagreeing sound deep in his throat. "Well that's a pile of horse shit. Why the hell would I be breakin' into some overpriced plant store?"
Mac blinked at him for a moment. "That's your problem with that scenario?"
"Oh, I'm just gettin' started." Still, the older agent hesitated before he pushed the flag to the lower half of the casket, and then ran a cautious finger along the split of the lid of polished wood.
"Just—wait, okay?' Mac quickly walked around the ornate wooden box, studying not the whorls of beautifully stained wood but the hinges on the back side, looking for anything that might indicate a pressure switch or a trigger. Just because the urn hadn't blown up in his face didn't mean this wouldn't. He even went as far as to pull the flag completely off the box, but there was no indication that it was anything other than what it appeared.
A golden oak casket, with surprisingly elegant stylized brass lions holding in their snarling mouths the metal bar that six of Dalton's friends would use to carry it from the limo to a gravesite.
Mac absently folded the flag into not the traditional triangle, but instead a square, and offered it to his partner. "Don't touch anything inside with your bare skin." If the 'chemical' scenario in Murdoc's little news story was anything to go by, he was following his MO with the irritant back in the warehouse, and the numbing agent that had made Mac's hands all but useless in the nightmare hospital. "Mecoprop concentrate is acidic and toxic. Typically the body would be washed but..."
But there was really no telling.
Jack all but snatched the flag out of his hand, making a face before setting it over the top half of the casket, and with a deepening wince and a steadying breath Mac knew he wasn't supposed to see, Jack gingerly eased the heavy wood lid open about a quarter inch.
Nothing happened.
Mac crouched, studying the seam of the lid while Jack held it steady, and when he was sure there was no wire, he met Jack's uneasy gaze and nodded.
There was nothing left to do then but open it, and Mac held his breath. An acid bath wasn't a pleasant way to go and it wasn't like Murdoc would spare them the whole experience. He was almost disappointed when Jack hefted the heavy wood fully upright and they gazed upon nothing more sinister than a body bag, covered in biohazard warnings.
Jack took a long step backwards. "Fuck, did I just—"
"It'll be for the chemicals," Mac tried to reassure, but it came out stiffly. "That's what the black triangle with the 8 means. The body's still contaminated."
The body bag was littered with warnings—par for the course for any corrosive agent in the great state of California. Not only did it have the traditional 'corrosive' hazard, but the red WARNING label as well, proclaiming the contents were 'known to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm.'
"You know what? Fuck this. I don't give a shit what he wants us to figure out. I ain't playin' CSI: Whackjob."
Despite his own unease, Mac still had to resist the urge to roll his eyes. "It could be a clue that helps save your life."
"Yeah, or it could be a big ol' bag of Soylent Green!"
Weirdly, Mac felt a stab of hurt, that Jack had gotten it right, hadn't slaughtered the reference in a deliberate attempt to add levity, or keep his partner from spinning out. "It isn't that acidic, Jack. It takes days for even strong acids to liquefy soft tissue." Mac wasn't in any more of a hurry to expose himself to the next horror in this exam, but the fact was, waiting wasn't going to change anything. He used his scarf-covered fingers to tease the zipper pull out of the white plastic, trying to ignore the feeling of a firm substance beneath it, and this time he deliberately took a deep breath and held it before he pulled the zipper down.
Just like he had with the body in Jack's bed, Mac almost did a double-take.
Same brown hair in a faux-hawk. Same facial structure, same three-day stubble beard. White, waxy skin that showed obvious acid burns, his eyelids almost translucent and his lips basically exposed muscle. Mac forced himself to take the zipper down to the dead man's chest, where an autopsy had clearly been performed, and his gut twisted as he thought of Murdoc literally practicing on this man—whoever he was.
At least the autopsy truly looked like it had been executed post-mortem. There was no swelling around the chest incision.
It was also clear the body had been submerged in some type of acid. When Mac couldn't hold his breath any longer he exhaled, taking the most cautious sniff, and the overwhelming scent of lawn care chemicals covered literally everything else. He stepped back quickly, snorting the smell out of his nostrils with a wince.
Jack's expression was torn between complete revulsion and straight-up disbelief. "Jesus, did you just smell that guy?!"
"Not on purpose." It almost came out a gag. "The body was definitely exposed to Mecoprop."
The older agent peered into the casket from a safer distance. "Don't tell me we're supposed to open him up and figure out it was cyanide or somethin'?"
"I really hope not," Mac muttered, debating whether it was worth the effort to make a respirator. Nothing around would make enough of a particulate shield to protect him from the fumes, nor from any biological agents inside the body cavity. Not that he figured that this exam would last long enough for either one of them to fall victim to enteric intestinal pathogens.
There was a butterfly-shaped rash across the Jack stand-in's nose and cheeks, almost like sunburn, and Mac sucked down a deep breath of cleaner air before coming in for a second look. It didn't look like the rest of the acid burns, and Mac hesitated before propping open the other half of the casket.
Nothing else was inside except the body and the bag.
Careful of any pressure switches that could have been built in, Mac unzipped the bag the rest of the way. The only thing inside was the body, with no personal effects of any kind, and Murdoc hadn't bothered to protect his victim's modesty any more than he'd done for Mac himself in the footage from Riley's trailer.
"Come on, man—"
"Do you want to know how he died or not?" Mac shot back, not bothering to ask before plucking the half-folded flag from Jack's hands. "It's no worse than what Murdoc did to me."
"Y'mean what he did to Riley," Jack growled, his voice dropping half an octave in warning. "And he's gonna die for that."
Arranging the flag helped Mac hide the expression he was sure must have crossed his face. Jack really didn't care that Murdoc had—
What he did to Riley was worse. Even if it wasn't as bad as the trailer had made it look.
Mac swallowed his emotions, careful not to breathe, and forced himself to re-focus on the cadaver.
Whatever he'd been wearing was no protection from a full immersion in an acid bath, and the burns were just as obvious on the rest of his skin. There was some kind of shadowing, on the outside of the man's left thigh, and Mac scowled and moved to the foot of the casket while fishing his SAK out of his pocket. He reached into the casket to pull the edge of the body bag away, still unwilling to move the body itself, and found the shadowing quickly became livid red and purple bruising.
Mac used the flashlight on his SAK to confirm, running the light down the outside of the dead man's leg, and the same bruising—more accurately the settling of blood—was there on the outside of his left calf. When he shined the light up towards the top of the casket, he also saw it on the body's upper left arm. Lifting the flag a few inches showed that same lividity prominently on the man's left hip.
"The body was moved," he murmured. "He was lying on his side when he died."
"Gee, Sherlock, that's helpful."
"It means he was dead before he hit the acid, which frankly was probably a mercy," Mac replied tersely. "Someone dumped him in the vat to hide evidence of the real cause of death. Which would mean...some kind of tissue damage," he concluded aloud, pacing around the casket back to the man's head.
"So this isn't sunburn," he continued, leaning in to get a better look. "...it's a malar rash."
"Great. Molar rash. What does that mean in English?"
Mac didn't even respond to the mispronunciation. "It's pretty common actually, caused by a lot of things. Allergic reaction, autoimmune disorders like lupus—"
Jack snorted but approached the casket, peering at the body. "I don't got any allergies that'd kill me. An' it ain't like Murdoc could give me lupus."
He was right on both counts—it was unlikely that Murdoc could possibly predict some allergen that could cause anaphylaxis without Jack having previously experienced it. And while chemicals could trigger auto-immune disorders, it would take literal years to kill someone that way. "It could be that he was exposed to excessive heat, but..." Mac trailed the flashlight down the body. "These don't look like thermal burns. No blistering." Then again, if he'd died of less extreme heat exposure, there wouldn't be any blisters at all.
Still, if this man had been locked in a hotbox until his heart failed, there'd be no need for the acid bath to cover it up.
Jack grunted. "Don't mean he didn't die of exposure." Mac was about to reiterate his own thoughts when Jack reached into the casket.
"Don't—"
But all Jack did was grab a corner of the folded up flag and use it to turn the body's right hand. He singled out one of the dead man's fingers, angling the fingertip up. "...that look like frostbite to you?"
The fingernail had partially protected his nail bed from the acid, and sure enough, the flesh beneath the clouded nail definitely had a hue of blue towards the ends that had nothing to do with exsanguination, and the fatty tips of his fingers showed signs of mild blistering.
Mac circled behind Jack, focused on the cadaver's feet, and found the same. Blueing that made no sense as this victim hadn't drowned, and particularly on the left foot, where it would have been in contact with the ground.
The acid had done a hell of a job on the man's nostrils and ears, but now that he knew what he was looking for, there were signs of frostbite in the white, waxy skin still intact.
"He froze to death," Mac concluded. "And the body was dumped to cover it up."
Look guys I know. I know it's been forever. I am sorry. I'm doing my best lol 10+ hour days are killing me, even with the extra day off. But, no worries; this is still a priority for me, and it will be finished. It's so. Damn. Close.
Anyway, I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season. I really missed you guys lol I truly hope this was worth the wait, and I can't thank you all enough for your patience. As always, Haven126 has my eternal gratitude, because without her, none of this would be happening.