CODEX
A Psychological Thriller
Copyright © 2024 by Lisa Towles
First Publication June 2024
Indies United Publishing House, LLC
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblances to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this publication may be replicated, redistributed, or given away in any form without the prior written consent of the author/publisher or the terms relayed to you herein, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
ISBN: 978-1-64456-712-8 [Hardcover]
ISBN: 978-1-64456-713-5 [paperback]
ISBN: 978-1-64456-714-2 [Kindle]
ISBN: 978-1-64456-715-9 [ePub]
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024902248
indiesunited.net
The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows.
- Stephen King
To Lee – my love, my North Star, and my home
Other books by Lisa Towles
Terror Bay
Salt Island (E&A Series)
The Ridders
Hot House (E&A Series)
Ninety-Five
The Unseen
Choke
And published under the name Lisa Polisar:
Escape: Dark Mystery Tales
The Ghost of Mary Prairie
Blackwater Tango
Knee Deep
Chapter 1
Present
I shouldn’t be here. I know I shouldn’t. But sometimes the decisions of the heart immobilize the brain and body. While my conscious intentions might challenge the tenets of logic, a more wicked part of me decided long before today that Wendell Peters must die. Exhausting all possible alternatives, in some twisted full circle, I’d been chosen for this karmic payback. Or maybe I chose myself.
Of course to those closest to him, those who reported the incident, he was already dead. I knew differently.
To see a billionaire like him living in this smelly shack filled with dying spider plants and moldy bread reminded me of all the glossy trappings I’d been avoiding. Shiny cars, new clothes, ideas that gleamed with promise at first, then faded into one of those hinged boxes we keep in the basements of our minds, dusty reminders that we’ve forgotten how to live. But as my favorite singer Sam Tinnesz says, the things you avoid have a way of hunting you down. Truth, he calls it. So be it.
“Hey, tighten up. Twenty seconds.”
The house technically belonged to his mother, and my associate determined that she’d be gone today, all day, at a medical appointment. Bad for her, good for us. Fat beads of perspiration slid down my forehead from too many layers of clothes, or maybe too much adrenaline. The low humidity of this part of California, most parts for that matter, meant nothing inside the confines of this stagnant sweat box. Only mid-May, it had to be close to a hundred by now. Blame everything on climate change, right? Counting down, twenty seconds till we busted through Wendell Peters’ tri-level encryption. I heard the click of the front entry door, which looked like you could blow it over with one breath. But he was like that, wasn’t he? A broken stereotype full of surprises. A sheep and wolf all at once—you just never knew which.
“Copy that,” I said into the earpiece. I touched the side of the house and crept under the eaves to the back, ready for the escape my partner said would happen. But no, I knew him. Wendell Peters looked like a street waif but that was his con. “You know he’s not here, right? E? You hear me?”
“I hear something coming out of your mouth, just never quite sure what it is.” Even her snippy British elitism still appealed to me, funny in a demeaning sort of way that I’d never minded. How could we be so different and emerge from the same womb? E - Elaine Mariner, born and raised in England and me, two years later, born right here in Northern California. Same father, different mothers.
The floorboards creaked under our weight as we moved through the dark interior now, informed by the night goggles and a spill of moonlight outside in the grassy yard. I took the back half of the house, rummaging through cabinets and stacks of papers, palming the undersides of kitchen drawers.
“We’re never gonna find it here,” I said.
I heard the weight of her heavy sigh in my earpiece. “And why not? You said yourself it was the last place anyone would look. Wouldn’t that make a clever hiding spot?”
“Reverse psychology, then. The old man lived twenty minutes ahead of everybody else.”
Elaine’s silhouette darkened the kitchen doorway. “Meaning what?” “He was a finance guy.” I shrugged like she would get it. “He dealt in futures.”
“I thought you said he was a doctor.”
“Dr. Mengele, maybe. He spent his career forecasting the future. Studying trends, statistics, history, to make predictions. I’m sure he knew we’d be coming.” I watched her roll her backpack off her shoulder and onto the floor, one hand on her hip. “Do you know how many hours it took me to get here? Yesterday, Heathrow at bloody four o’clock in the morning, emergency landing in Gatwick, boarded a different plane to JFK, then Atlanta, and I flew into LA, not SFO. That’s a five-hour drive.”
“E, listen…”
“You asked for my help, Angus. What are we doing here? And why’s it so bloody hot? Northern California’s supposed to be cold.”
“You’re whining. I hate that.”
“I’m here. We’re looking.”
“I know,” I said. “But we’re not gonna find it here. Or him.”
“You never used to be like this. Do you believe in conspiracy theories now too? Flat earth, fake moon landing?”
“I’m ignoring you.”
“Angus, I know what this is.” Her know-it-all voice. “Refusing to acknowledge one death points to a larger inability to—”
“Stop analyzing me. We’re on a mission.”
“I’m trying to help you.”
I widened my eyes, visually telling her to fuck off.
“Fine.” She heard me. Jessica was the last thing I wanted to think about right now, but that was so like Elaine, wasn’t it, bringing up the past to avoid the present, or future.
“How’s Miguel?” I asked of her drug-dealing love interest, knowing at any given point they were likely “amicably separated.” See how she liked it. “No comment.”
We completed the task and searched each room of the abandoned safe house, wasting almost thirty minutes. Putting my night vision binoculars to use, I took pictures of random files and pieces of mail with the camera feature, while sliding my hands under mattresses, the pockets of jackets in a bedroom closet. Nothing so far labeled ADS or even BA-Vi, if those letters were actually a code. In my haste, something stopped me—my reflection in a full-length wardrobe mirror. I slid the goggles up to my forehead and took a step towards it like on a dare, an inch at a time to meet the reflection I’d so cleverly avoided for the past year. It was dark but my pupils had dilated. Same ragged crop of hair, mostly brown, lighter during summer. Same pointy nose, which Jess used to call my singular British feature, meaning the rest were Scottish from my mother’s side. It wasn’t a bad face, all things considered, and probably not so necessary to have hidden it from view all this time, except for the ugly truths your eyes can’t help but tell you.
“Are we done now?” my sister asked with the patience of a toddler. “This isn’t my idea of a good time.”
“Almost. One more thing.”
She moved beside me and swiveled the mouthpiece up to her left ear so we could talk quietly. I liked how her fairy blonde hair kicked up at the ends, an almost friendly gesture on an otherwise rigid exterior. I was staring at it and pointed.
“What?”
“I like it, your hair. It’s a nice look for you,” I said, careful with my tone, knowing she always cut her hair when a relationship ended. At least she didn’t shave her head like last time. I couldn’t help wondering what she was really doing here. Maybe she was running. Again.
“I don’t feel like talking about—”
“I didn’t ask you to. Touchy a bit?”
“Finish up. I want to get out of here,” she clipped, and stood guard inside the window from behind a tweed curtain.
I moved past her to the back bedroom. “Can you hear me?” I whispered. “Unfortunately, yes.”
“Remember The Second Stain?”
“The second what?”
She’d heard me. It was her condescending way of repeating things to make it seem like you were talking out of your ass, wasting her time and irritating her more than usual. We’d grown up watching those episodes together, each of us living in different countries but spending every summer in enchanted Half Moon Bay, staying up late watching the BBC Granada versions of Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett in the title role. Favorite Holmes conversations were as polarizing as James Bond but it was the one thing we always agreed on. As a ten-
year-old boy, I thought he epitomized human intelligence in a way that indelibly shaped my conception of the world. Dig dig dig. And even if something seems like it fits, keep digging.
Imagining Holmes in his Dorchester tailcoat and pipe, I remembered the TV episode and the short story on which it was based. Dying to flip the light switch, I carefully moved two small tables to the hallway, then gently slid the bed over a few inches. A square rug remained on the floor—undetectable under the bed and too small to be considered decor. What the hell? I stared down at it feeling Elaine’s prickly presence in the doorway. Her arms were probably crossed, one finger tapping the outside of her arm.
“Looking for blood on the floor, are you?” she asked.
“Ha, you do remember.” The episode, and the story, referenced Sherlock Holmes noticing a blood stain on the floor without any blood on the underside of the rug that covered it. I pulled up the rug and tossed it onto the bed, then spread myself on all fours with my hands grasping for anything out of place. There could be a floorboard that wasn’t nailed down, a trip wire, or a trap door. The heavy varnish on the boards surprised me, slick to the touch. Was that… Wait. I stopped moving.
“What is it?”
“I thought it was something…wet.” I pulled back my hand and rubbed my fingers together, then touched them on the inside of my wrist. “Not wet. Cold.”
Elaine crept down beside me, palming the spot I’d felt, one small patch of floor that felt at least ten degrees colder than the rest.
“Get me my—”
I heard breaking glass first, then the “pop” of a bullet hitting the wall of the bedroom six feet above my head. Jesus.
“Shit,” she hissed. “How could he have found—"
“Get down.” I waited a full ten seconds before moving again. I thought I’d heard the door after the shot was fired but wasn’t certain. “Quick, help me get the room back together.”
We fumbled getting the rug on the floor, dragging the bed back over it, then we each took one of the small tables from the hall and put them back, careful to keep our heads below the window. She’d said “he”. Who…and found what? Found her? There was no time. God Elaine, who are you running from now?
I motioned for her to follow me to the next bedroom, which had a tree outside the window.
“And how do you suppose we might get out of here?” she asked. “Alive you mean?”
As we slipped into the bedroom, the “chi-chick” of a round chambered into a semi-automatic handgun in the hallway reached our ears just before the voice boomed. “You won’t.”
