Rapture

Chapter Two

Mels Carmichael was alone in the newsroom. Again.

Nine o’clock at night and the Caldwell Courier Journal’s maze of cubicles was all office equipment, no people, tomorrow’s issue put to bed from a reporting standpoint, the printers now doing their work on the far side of the great wall behind her.

As she leaned back in her chair, the hinges let out a squeak, and she turned the thing into an instrument, playing a happy little ditty she’d composed after too many nights like this. The title was “Going Nowhere Fast,” and she whistled the soprano part.

“Still here, Carmichael?”

Mels straightened up and crossed her arms over her chest. “Hey, Dick.”

As her boss oiled his way into what little space she had, his overcoat was draped across his arm, and his tie was loose at his fleshy neck from yet another postgame wrap-up at Charlie’s.

“Working late again?” His eyes went to the buttons down the front of her shirt, like he was hoping the whiskey he’d sucked back had given him telekinetic powers. “I gotta tell you, you’re too pretty for this. Don’t you have a boyfriend?”

“You know me, all about the job.”

“Well…I could give you something to work on.”

Mels stared up at him, nice and steady. “Thanks, but I’m busy right now. Doing research on the prevalence of sexual harassment in previously male-dominated industries such as the airlines, sports…newspapers.”

Dick frowned as if his ears hadn’t heard what they’d been hoping for. Which was nuts. Her response to this act had been the same since day one.

Well over two years of shutting him down. God, had it been that long already?

“It’s illuminating.” She reached forward and gave her mouse a push, clearing the screen saver. “Lots of statistics. Could be my first national story. Gender issues in postfeminist America are a hot topic—course, I could just put it on my blog. Maybe you’d give me a quote for it?”

Dick shifted his raincoat around. “I didn’t assign that to you.”

“I’m a self-starter.”

His head lifted as if he were looking for someone else to harass. “I only read what I assign.”

“You might find it valuable.”

The guy went to loosen his tie like he needed some air, but surprise! It was already open. “You’re wasting your time, Carmichael. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

As he walked off, he pulled on that Walter Cronkite raincoat of his, the one with the seventies lapels, and the belt that hung loose from loops like part of his intestine was not where it should be. He’d probably had the thing since the decade of Watergate, the work of Woodward and Bernstein inspiring his twenty-year-old self to his own paper chase…that had culminated at the top of a medium city’s masthead.

Not a bad job at all. Just not a bureau chief for The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal.

That seemed to bother him.

So, yeah, it didn’t take a genius to ascribe his inappropriateness to the ennui of a balding former coxswain, the bitterness from a lifetime of not-quite-there intersecting with the almost-out-of-time of a man about to hump sixty.

Then again, maybe he was just a prick.

What she was clear on was that with a jawline more ham sandwich than Jon Hamm, the man had no objective reason to believe the answer to any woman’s problems was in his pants.

As the double doors clamped shut behind him, she took a deep breath and entertained a fantasy that a Caldwell Transit Authority bus ran tire tracks up the back of that anachronistic coat. Thanks to budget cuts, though, the CTA didn’t run the Trade Street route after nine o’clock at night, and it was now…yup, seventeen minutes after the hour.

Staring at her computer screen, she knew she probably should go home.

Her self-starter article wasn’t actually on leering bosses who made female subordinates think fondly of public transportation as a murder weapon. It was on missing persons. The hundreds of missing persons in the city of Caldwell.

Caldie, home of the twin bridges, was leading the nation in disappearances. Over the previous year, the city of some two million had had three times the number of reported cases in Manhattan’s five boroughs, and Chicago—combined. And the total for the last decade topped the entire Eastern seaboard’s figures. Stranger still, the sheer numbers weren’t the only issue: People weren’t just disappearing temporarily. These folks never came back and were never found. No bodies, no traces, and no relocation to other jurisdictions.

Like they had been sucked into another world.

After all her research, she had the sense that the horrific mass slaughter at a farmhouse the month before had something to do with the glut in get-gones…

All those young men lined up in rows, torn apart.

Preliminary data suggested that many of those identified had been reported missing at one point or another in their lives. A lot of them were juvie cases or had drug records. But none of that mattered to their families—nor should it.

You didn’t have to be a saint in order to be a victim.

The gruesome scene out in Caldwell’s rural edges had made the national news, with every station sending their best men into town, from Brian Williams to Anderson Cooper. The papers had done the same. And yet even with all the attention, and the pressure from politicians, and the exclamations from rightfully distraught communities, the real story had yet to emerge: The CPD was trying to tie the deaths to someone, anyone, but they’d come up with nothing—even though they were working on the case day and night.

There had to be an answer. There was always an answer.

And she was determined to find out the whys—for the victims’ sakes, and their families’.

It was also time to distinguish herself. She’d come here at the age of twenty-seven, transferring out of Manhattan because it was expensive to live in NYC, and she hadn’t been getting anywhere fast enough at the New York Post. The plan had been to transplant for about six months, get some savings under her belt by living with her mother, and focus on the big boys: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, maybe even a network reporting job at CNN.

Not how things had worked out.

Refocusing on her screen, she traced the columns she knew by heart, searching for the pattern she wasn’t seeing…ready to find the key that unlocked the door not just to the story, but her own life.

Time was passing her by, and God knew she wasn’t immortal….

When Mels left the newsroom around nine thirty, those lines of data reappeared every time she blinked, like a video game she’d played for too long.

Her car, Josephine, was a twelve-year-old silver Honda Civic with nearly two hundred thousand miles on it—and Fi-Fi was used to waiting at night in the cold for her. Getting in, she started the sewing machine engine and took off, leaving a dead-end job. To go to her mother’s house. At the age of thirty.

What a player. And she thought she was magically going to wake up tomorrow morning and be all Diane Sawyer without the hair spray?

Taking Trade Street out of downtown, she left the office buildings behind, went past the clubs, and then hit the lock-your-doors stretch of abandoned walk-ups. On the far side of all those boarded-up windows, things got better when she entered the outskirts of residential world, home of the raised ranch and streets named after trees—

“Shiiiiiiit!”

Ripping the wheel to the right, she tried to avoid the man who lurched into the road, but it was too late. She nailed him square on, bouncing him up off the pavement with her front bumper so that he rolled over the hood and plowed right into the windshield, the safety glass shattering in a brilliant burst of light.

Turned out that was just the first of three impacts.

Airborne meant only one thing, and she had a terrifying impression of him hitting the pavement hard. And then she had her own problems. Trajectory carried her off course, her car popping the curb, the brakes slowing her momentum, but not fast enough—and then not at all as her sedan was briefly airborne itself.

The oak tree spotlit in her headlights caused her brain to do a split-second calculation: She was going to hit the goddamn thing, and it was going to hurt.

The collision was part crunch, part thud, a dull sound that she didn’t pay a lot of attention to—she was too busy catching the air bag solidly in the face, her lack of a seat belt coming back to bite her on the ass. Or the puss, as the case was.

Snapping forward and ricocheting back, powder from the SRS got into her eyes, nose, and lungs, stinging and making her choke. Then everything went quiet.

In the aftermath, all she could do was stay where she’d ended up, much like poor, old Fi-Fi. Curled over the deflating air bag, she coughed weakly—

Someone was whistling….

No, it was the engine, releasing steam from something that should have been sealed.

She turned her head carefully and looked out the driver’s-side window. The man was down in the middle of the street, lying so still, too still.

“Oh…God—”

The car radio flared to life, scratchy at first, then gaining electrical traction from whatever short had occurred. A song…what was it?

From out of nowhere, light flared in the center of the road, illuminating the pile of rags that she knew to be a human being. Blinking, she wondered if this was the moment where she learned the answers about the afterlife.

Not exactly the scoop she’d been looking for, but she’d take it—

It wasn’t some kind of holy arrival. Just headlights—

The sedan screeched to a halt and two people jumped out from the front, the man going to the victim, the woman jogging over to her. Mels’s Good Samaritan had to fight to wrench open the door, but after a couple of pulls, fresh air replaced the sharp, plasticky smell of the air bags.

“Are you okay?”

The woman was in her forties and looked rich, her hair done up in a thing on her head, her gold earrings flashing, her sleek, coordinated clothes not matching an accident scene in the slightest.

She held up an iPhone. “I’ve called nine-one-one—no, no, don’t move. You could have a neck injury.”

Mels yielded to the subtle pressure on her shoulder, staying draped over the steering wheel. “Is he okay? I didn’t see him at all—came from out of nowhere.”

At least, that was what she’d meant to say. What her ears heard were mumbles that made no sense.

Screw a neck injury; she was worried about her brain.

“My husband’s a doctor,” the woman said. “He knows what to do with the man. You just worry about yourself—”

“Didn’t see him. Didn’t see him.” Oh, good, that came out more clearly. “Coming home from work. Didn’t…”

“Of course you didn’t.” The woman knelt down. Yeah, she looked like a doctor’s wife—had the expensive smell of one, too. “You just stay still. The paramedics are coming—”

“Is he even alive?” Tears rushed to Mels’s eyes, replacing one sting with another. “Oh, my God, did I kill him?”

As she began to shake, she realized what song was playing. “Blinded by the Light…”

“Why is my radio still working?” she mumbled through tears.

“I’m sorry?” the woman said. “What radio?”

“Can’t you hear it?”

The reassuring pat that followed was somehow alarming. “You just breathe easy, and stay with me.”

“My radio is playing….”