Desert Places (Andrew Z. Thomas/Luther Kite Series 1)

After placing the camera atop a stack of our father’s records, Orson squats down in front of it, the staircase behind him now, and the screen blackens.

The picture returns from the same position in the basement—10/30/96, 7:25 p.m. Orson leans into the lens and whispers, “You just left, Andy.” He smiles. He wears a mechanic’s suit, though I can’t tell its color in the poor basement light. “I don’t want you to worry, Andy,” he whispers. “This following you around thing is quite temporary. In fact, as you watch this now in your living room around two in the morning, I’ll be hundreds of miles away, driving into the capital of this great nation. And when I finish there, I’ll be blending back into the faceless masses for a good long while.” Orson sneezes twice.

“Because you can’t keep your mouth shut, I’m considering having a friend of mine visit Walter and his beautiful family. Would that upset you? I think you’ve met Luther.” He smiles. “He’s a fan.” Orson pulls a length of wire from his pocket. “In one minute, it’ll occur to you that you have this all on tape. Well, you had it all on tape. Remember that. Shall we?” Orson lifts the camera and continues to whisper as he climbs the staircase. “The rage you’re about to feel will liberate you, Andy. Think of it that way. Oh, one last thing—watch the news tomorrow morning.”

He opens the door to the hallway. Somewhere in the house, my mother is singing. Orson slams the door, opens it, and slams it again before rushing back down the steps. Setting the camera back on the stack of records, he moves offscreen, somewhere in the semidarkness, amid the innumerable boxes. I have only a view of the staircase now and a section of the bare concrete wall.

Silence. At the top of the steps, the door opens.

“Andrew, did you come back in?” My mother’s voice fills the basement, and I begin to tremble, my head shaking involuntarily back and forth. Descending five steps, she stops, and I can see her legs now. I’m muttering, “No” continuously, as if it will drive her back up those steps.

“Andrew?” she calls out. No answer. After three more steps, she leans down so that she can see into the basement. She inspects the rows of clutter for several seconds, then straightens up and clumps back up the staircase. But her footsteps stop before she reaches the door, and she goes back down again to where she was and looks directly into the camera. I see the confusion on her face, but it’s not yet accompanied by fear.

My mother walks carefully to the bottom of the staircase and stops before the camera. She’s still wearing that green dress, but her white hair is down now. She stares curiously into the lens, that sharp crease wrinkling up between her eyebrows.

“HI, MOM!” Orson screams. She looks behind the camera. The fear in her face destroys me, and as she shrieks and runs for the staircase, the camera crashes to the concrete floor.

After the screen turned blue again, I sat for five seconds in unholy shock. He did not kill our mother. He did …I smelled Windex. A hard metallic object thumped the back of my skull.

Lying on my back beside the couch and staring up through the windows, I saw that morning was now just a few hours away—that purple-navy tinge of dawn leeching the darkness from the sky. As I struggled to my feet, the tender knot on the back of my head throbbed on mercilessly.

The television was still on. Kneeling down, I pressed the eject button on the VCR, but the tape had already been removed.

After hanging up the phone in the kitchen, I trudged up the steps to my bedroom. I returned the Glock to the drawer and lay down on top of the covers, bracing myself for the tsunami of despair to consume me. I closed my eyes and tried to cry, but the pain was too intense, too surreal. Could this have been a new nightmare? Maybe I walked down there in my sleep and banged my head. Dreamed a f**ked-up dream. That is a possibility. Hold on to that. She’s sleeping. I could call her now and wake her up. She’ll answer the phone, peeved at my rudeness. But she’ll answer the phone, and that’s all that matters.

In darkness, I reached for the phone and dialed my mother’s number.

It rang and rang.

18

ON a cold, clear Halloween morning, the world watched Washington, D.C., as city police, FBI, Secret Service, and a myriad of media swarmed the White House. It had begun before dawn.

At 4:30 a.m., a jogger running down East Street noticed a pile of cardboard boxes stacked in the frosty grass of the Ellipse, close to the site of the national Christmas tree. Upon returning home, she called 911.

By the time the police arrived, the Secret Service was already on the scene, and suspicion immediately arose that the boxes might contain explosives. So the president was flown to a safe location, the White House staff evacuated, and the quarter-mile stretch of East Street behind the White House occluded.

In Washington, bad news travels fast. By eight o’clock, local and network news crews were camped along the perimeter that the police had established two hundred yards from the boxes. The story broke on every news channel in the country, so by nine o’clock, as a bomb-squad robot rolled toward the portentous heap of cardboard boxes, the world was watching.

For two hours, cameras zoomed in on technicians in bomb-resistant suits as they utilized the robot and X-ray unit to investigate each cardboard box. When a box had been cleared, it was set inside an armored truck. Each was opened, but the cameras were too far away to determine what, if anything, was inside. There were at least a dozen boxes, and the bomb squad treated each one as if it contained a nuclear bomb. Their precision made the task tedious, and eleven o’clock had passed before the last box was cleared and the armored truck drove away.

Speculation began. What was inside the boxes if not a bomb? A hoax? An assassination attempt on the president? Rumors and unconfirmed reports swirled through the coverage until a statement was issued by the FBI at 1:30 as East Street reopened.

Special Agent Harold Trent addressed the nation of reporters, speaking into a cluster of microphones, the back side of the White House visible behind him beneath the late October sky. Twelve boxes, most between one and three cubic feet in volume, had been taken into possession by the FBI. No explosive devices had been found. Inside each box was what appeared to be a human heart and a corresponding name.

The reporters fired questions: Were the names those of real people? Would the names be released? Were there any suspects? Why were the boxes left near the White House? Agent Trent refused to theorize. The investigation had only begun, and a special FBI task force would be assembled to work with state and local police until the person or persons responsible had been taken into custody.