Excerpt: 'In Golden Blood' by Stephen Woodworth

By M&C News Oct 9, 2005, 2:19 GMT

Natalie Lindstrom has a gift: the power to speak to the dead, to solve crimes by interviewing murder victims. But now Natalie wants to escape. Escape from the voices that fill her head. Escape from the organization that has used her as a crime-solving tool…and now wants to recruit her daughter. So Natalie takes a job as far from crime and punishment as she can get: with an archaeologist in ...more

Chapter 7 - Living the Part

AUGUST TRENT BENT OVER THE BASIN IN THE MEN’S restroom of Chef Champignon—one of San Francisco’s best vegetarian restaurants, according to the Zagat guide—and washed away the sweat that had condensed on his brow and upper lip. Dabbing himself dry with a paper towel, he winced at the ghost he saw reflected in the mirror.

It hadn’t bothered him to wear another man’s face before. As an actor, he was used to changing his hair color and style, covering his features with makeup and latex appliances, even gaining or losing weight when appropriate. Plastic surgery was only a step beyond that and everyone in Hollywood did it anyway, so Trent had let Nathan Azure’s surgeons pin back his ears, trim his nose, and sculpt his eyes into their present almond shape before he went to Peru. It had hurt like hell, but if De Niro could pack on a hundred pounds for a role, then he, too, could suffer for his art.

Ever since he’d seen Wilcox murdered in the Andes, however, the archaeologist’s visage had begun to feel like a death mask that Trent could not remove. Every time he looked at his reflection, he expected it to spit blood at him, the way the professor had spat on Azure.

Focus, he told himself. Don’t break character.

Using the yogalike Alexander technique he’d learned as a drama major at UCLA, he straightened his spine, inhaling through his nose, exhaling from his mouth. After he’d centered himself, Trent put on his prescriptionless wire-framed glasses and practiced one of Wilcox’s smiles. It struck him as funny that his job was the same as Natalie’s, for he, too, had to channel a dead man.

August Trent was his stage name, not his real name. That had been buried a decade ago along with his parents. Later, when Azure gave Trent the million he’d been promised, he would return to Hollywood and change his face again, along with his name. He was thinking about “Lance” something or other but hadn’t decided yet.

He’d tried Hollywood before, of course, along with about a billion other wannabes. Relentless hustling and auditioning had garnered him enough walk-ons and extra work to earn him a SAG card, “SAG” in this case standing for “Starving Actor’s Gullibility.” By the time he was old enough to start lying about his age, he was still waiting tables and spending nights on a friend’s sofa.

It was while he worked at Su Casa, a Mexican place on the Santa Monica Promenade, that he finally got “discovered.” He was serving lunch to a man he’d never seen in the restaurant before, a bigwig executive type who dyed his hair on top but left a dash of silver at each temple for an air of authority. When Trent handed him his check at the end of the meal, the suit eyed him through sepia-tinted glasses.

“Hey, kid ...you’re an actor, right?”

“Yes, sir.” Pushing thirty, Trent wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or insulted to be called “kid,” but he had conditioned himself to smile at the condescension of his customers. You never knew who might be a producer or director.

“You interested in some work?” the man asked.

“Always. If the role fits, I’ll wear it. What’s the project?”

“It’s corporate. Nothing glamorous, but it’s easy money. I don’t have time to go into detail here, but give me a call if you’re interested.”

He handed Trent a business card with the company logo of Bilderburg Associates and a telephone number on it. The man’s name was absent, unless it happened to be Bilderburg. The card had a paper clip on it, and Trent flipped it over to find a folded hundred-dollar bill on the back.

He gave a genuine smile. “Thank you, sir. I look forward to working with you.”

Trent was excited. Some of his friends made big bucks doing voice-overs and industrial films. But the job turned out to be a live performance: Trent would “play” a company executive as he went to a bank and set up an account for one of the firm’s subsidiaries. “Our staff’s time is too valuable to waste on this kind of paper-shuffling formality,” the man who hired him said by way of explanation.

Trent doubted that rationale but didn’t much care. The gig paid two grand for a single afternoon—in cash, under the table, and wonderfully tax-free. He never found out what the bank account was really for and never saw the man from Bilderburg Associates again.

Yet the man must have given his performance a glowing review, for Trent soon found himself inundated with offers from an invisible network of string-pullers and mountebanks. One week he posed as the CEO of a dummy corporation designed to hide the parent company’s debt from its shareholders. The following week he starred as a cutting-edge biochemist at a venture-capital presentation. The pay and risk increased with each job, as did the adrenaline rush when he carried it off. The improvisation of illegality thrilled him with its high-wire defiance, its dance on the edge of disaster.

Within the past year, that dance had become more precarious than ever as Trent made his debut in corporate espionage. An attempt to steal the latest drug data from a biotech firm had gone awry when his inside man at the company got cold feet and wanted out. Although the guy swore up and down that he wouldn’t turn him in, Trent couldn’t trust him, so he created “Nick.”

Nick was a hard case—a coolheaded, dead-in-the-eyes professional, like Edward Fox in The Day of the Jackal. When Trent needed to do a job for which he lacked the stomach, he went into Nick. Nick, not Trent, had killed the potential stool pigeon. Nick, not Trent, had burned the corpse’s hands, feet, and face with acid and pulled its teeth with pliers to prevent identification of the victim, then bagged the naked body in a plastic garbage sack and dumped it in a sewer culvert.

After that ordeal, August Trent was only too happy to let Nathan Azure change his face and take him to the remote mountains of a foreign country. But with Azure as his boss, Trent knew that he would soon need Nick again.

Perhaps sooner than he had anticipated.

That was the thought that had nagged him all during the three-hour drive from Lakeport as he chatted with Natalie and smiled, smiled, smiled. It was the thought that had bedewed his forehead with sweat during dinner, requiring him to seek out the men’s room to refresh himself. A problem had arisen that he had not foreseen and that might prove fatal.

He liked Natalie Lindstrom.

Of the people he had victimized in the past, Trent honestly believed that the rubes had only themselves to blame. Rich bastards suckered in by their own greed who could well afford the fleecing he gave them. Not so single-mom Lindstrom, whose financial desperation he had known—and counted on—when he approached her for the Pizarro job.

If only Natalie hadn’t looked so normal—so beautiful, in fact—with the long brown hair of her latest wig and the warm cocoa color of the contact lenses she wore. And he was going to spend so much time with her . . . more than he’d spent with any woman in years. His career had not been conducive to relationships of any duration.

He’d managed to keep her talking mostly about herself during the drive to the Bay Area. Although he had researched Wilcox thoroughly before taking on the role, Trent wanted to answer as few questions about the archaeologist’s background as possible, so he gently pried open Natalie’s shell of reserve with casual questions about her art, her family, her interests. He had perhaps succeeded too much, for the more she prattled about her cute little daughter, the more he dwelled on the fate that awaited her once Azure had finished with her.

Focus.

He smoothed his hair, smiled again at his Wilcox reflection, and left the restroom.

“You okay?” Natalie asked when he returned to their table, which sat beneath a hippie-psychedelic mural of a sunflower. “I was about to send in a search party.”

Trent chuckled and patted his stomach. “Still a bit carsick, I’m afraid. How is the portobello?”

“Fabulous!” She forked another piece of roasted mushroom into her mouth. “Best meal I’ve had in years.”

“What did I tell you? I drive all the way from Stanford just to come to this place.” He indicated the remains of his ratatouille. “Alas, I’m sorry to report that such vegetarian delights are almost unheard-of in Peru’s northern sierra. But we’ll keep you fed.”

“I’m sure the local food can’t be any worse than what I eat every time Callie badgers me into taking her to McDonald’s.” Natalie took a sip of her mineral water and cupped the glass in her hand. “Um... I’m embarrassed to admit that I haven’t had a chance to read your book yet.”

“That’s okay. No one else has, either.”

She giggled as he had hoped, but her expression soon became shadowed with worry. “Can you tell me what to expect from Pizarro? Is he really the genocidal monster I remember from high-school history?”

“Well...I wouldn’t invite him to an intimate vegetarian dinner, if that’s what you mean.” She laughed, and Trent grinned, grateful now that he’d had plenty of time to read about the conquistador during the weeks he’d spent with his face bandaged from surgery. “He was really quite a remarkable man, in many ways. He was the illegitimate child of a peasant girl and an Extremaduran captain. Legend has it that his mother abandoned him on the steps of the church in Trujillo and that his first nursemaid was a sow.”

Natalie made a face. “Ugh! Is that true?”

“Maybe not, but an affinity for pigs might explain why he became a swineherd almost from the age he could walk. He apparently received no education whatsoever and at the end of his life could not even sign his name. Needless to say, this limited his career options, so, like many poor, illiterate youths of his day, he became a soldier. Unfortunately, his ignorance and lack of social standing kept him from being promoted. Ditto for his stint as a sailor.

“About this time, Hernán Cortés had returned from conquering the Aztecs in Mexico, bringing back with him an unprecedented fortune in gold for the Spanish crown. He became an immediate folk hero, and started a gold rush to the New World of men seeking instant wealth and fame. You didn’t need book learning or noble birth to be a conquistador. All you needed was absolute immunity to the fear of death.”

Natalie rolled her eyes. “Oh, is that all?”

“You see? Amazing, isn’t it? Particularly when you consider that Francisco Pizarro didn’t set out for South America until he was past fifty.” Trent warmed to the story, as if he really were a history professor. “Now, this was in the sixteenth century, when the average life expectancy was . . . what? Forty, maybe? Pizarro was lucky to be drawing breath at fifty, and here he was venturing into an unknown continent of malaria-infected mosquitoes and angry natives.”

Trent was pleased to see Natalie set down her fork so as not to miss a word of his story.

“If Pizarro hadn’t possessed determination and fortitude that exceeded mere greed, his campaign would have ended before it began. He and his small contingent of explorers hadn’t even reached Peru when they became trapped on a tiny island off the coast of Colombia. Lashed by storms and forced to live on nothing but the crabs and shellfish they could scrounge from the shore, they starved, shivering from fever and scurvy, for months. When a ship finally arrived from Panama to rescue them, Pizarro faced a mass defection by his demoralized troops, who hadn’t received any of the gold or glory they’d been promised.

“Drawing his sword, Pizarro traced a line from east to west in the sand at the feet of his men, then pointed across the line to the south.” Trent mimed the action, adopting the conquistador’s proud bearing and fierce stare. He’d been waiting to do this monologue for months—a role within a role. “ ‘Compañeros,’ he said, ‘on that side are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion, and death; on this side, ease and pleasure. There lies Peru and its riches; here, Panama and its poverty. Choose, each man, what best becomes a brave Castilian. For my part, I go to the south.’

“Then he stepped across the line. Only twelve men followed him, but they led the conquest of Peru.”

Trent savored the frisson of Natalie’s momentary speechlessness. He was in his element, his glory, and he did not want the dinner to end. Particularly not when he thought of what he had to do afterward.

“Wow.” Natalie shook her head and applauded. “You almost make me want to get to know this guy.”

“That’s my job.” Trent grinned. “Dessert?”

When they walked back to Trent’s rental car after leaving the restaurant, Arabella Madison’s Acura crouched in the space next to theirs like a patient Siamese cat.

“She knows something’s up,” Natalie muttered. “That’s why she’s here. If she finds out what I’m doing, the Corps will take Callie away from me.”

“I would never let that happen. I told you, I’ve made all the arrangements.” Trent reviewed those arrangements in his mind. “She’ll be gone by morning.”

“And if she’s not?”

“Then I take you back to Callie, just as I said.”

“You’d better. If you don’t, I’m walking.” Relaxed and cheerful over dinner, Natalie slipped back into tense despondency as they got in Trent’s car. Madison mugged at Natalie through the Acura’s driver’s side window, waving to her with a big, goofy grin.

Details, details, Trent thought as the agent trailed them to the Winchester Regency Hotel. He’d chosen it specifically because it was located outside the dense center of the city and therefore possessed a dark outdoor parking lot rather than a well-lit underground garage. Parking at the outer perimeter of the crowded lot, he was pleased to see Madison pull into a space not far from theirs.

As Natalie had surmised, Trent found that the Corps Security agent temporarily assigned to the day shift had been easy enough to bribe. As an extra precaution, Trent had recorded the man’s acceptance of the payoff on tape in case it became necessary to blackmail him to maintain his silence. But Trent had not approached Arabella Madison with an offer for fear she might blow the whistle on him. Instead, he had made other plans to deal with her. Plans for tonight.

To his relief, Natalie’s mood seemed to improve once they entered the hotel and checked in. A smile tinged with melancholy returned to her face.

“You like the place?” he asked when they arrived at the door to her room.

“Hmm? Oh, yeah.” She glanced around at the corridor’s burgundy carpet, the doors’ brass handles. “The last time I stayed in a place like this, I was with ...a friend of mine. Brings back old times.”

“Enjoy it while it lasts. I’m afraid our Andean accommodations won’t be quite so luxurious.” He handed her the room’s key card. “I’m staying right across the hall. Get a good night’s sleep, and I’ll meet you downstairs for breakfast at six in the morning.”

She wrinkled her nose, laughing. “Ugh! So early. But if you insist, I’ll drag myself out of bed.” Her expression sobered, but her eyes remained bright with amusement. “Thank you for tonight. It was fun.”

“For me, too.” The first words he’d said that night as August Trent, not Abel Wilcox. “I hope we have as good a time in Peru.”

“I look forward to it. Good night, Dr. Wilcox.”
 
“Please! Abe. I’m still on sabbatical.”

She smiled. “Right ...Abe. Night.”

“Good night ...Natalie.”

He gave a small bow and walked away.

Once he heard her enter her room, Trent’s loose-limbed nonchalance gave way to a rigid economy of movement. He marched to his own room and locked himself inside. A numbing detachment filled him as he hefted his suitcase onto the bed and opened it. The sight of the reddish brown wig, false mustache, and folded security guard’s uniform elicited no emotion, nor did the long hatpin and small glass vial he removed from a hidden pocket in the bag’s lining.

Nick thought only of work. Of the job to be done.

He swapped his striped oxford shirt for the gray button-up with the word SECURITY embroidered on the breast pocket. Next, he set aside Wilcox’s glasses and applied spirit gum to his upper lip to attach the mustache, which matched the shade of the hairpiece he then put on. A billed cap and a leather bomber jacket completed the outfit.

He checked the costume in the mirror, practiced his voice. “Excuse me, ma’am ...are you a guest of the hotel?”

Trent lowered the pitch, made the tone more nasal. He was playing Nick playing a security guard. Roles within roles.

With the easy part done, he donned his black leather driving gloves. For an instant, when he opened the vial and dipped the point of the hatpin into the viscous brown sap in the glass tube, Nick disappeared and he became August Trent again, fretful and unsure. His fingers quivered as he rotated the pin to wrap the goo around the pin’s tip. Although he could have licked the poison up like honey without any harm, a single pinprick could kill him.

Careful, he thought. A little dab’ll do ya.

It looked and smelled something like dirty model-airplane glue, and he gently blew on the syrup to dry it. Alberto, one of Azure’s Peruvian drug runners, had sold it to him. Ourari, he’d called it—a product of the nearby Amazon jungle. Trent had requested it by its more familiar name.

Curare.

Even before returning to the States, Trent knew that his attempt to recruit Natalie might cause him to tangle with Corps Security—armed agents trained in self-defense. His best chance against them was the element of surprise, and for that he needed a weapon that was quick, quiet, and deadly. Although physicians in the U.S. commonly used the substance as a muscle relaxant prior to surgery, sales of medical curare were closely regulated and monitored, and the drug lacked the potency Trent required. He needed the “flying death” that Amazonian tribes used to tip their arrows and blowgun darts, a poison that could drop a wild monkey in twenty seconds.

Nick resumed control as he gripped the blunt head of the seven-inch pin and held its length close against the right sleeve of his jacket. In addition to his costume, he had brought a flashlight and a folded industrial-size plastic trash bag in his suitcase. He shoved the bag in the pocket of his jacket, hooked the flashlight on his belt, and, with calm professionalism, checked the hallway outside his room before strolling out of the hotel and into the dark parking lot.

Although he knew exactly where Arabella Madison had parked, he strutted between each of the intervening rows of cars with an unhurried, flat-footed gait, sweeping the beam of his flashlight back and forth with methodical thoroughness, biding time until he was sure there were no witnesses around. He saw her leaning against the driver’s side of her car but let the light brush past her before swinging it back to shine on her face. “Excuse me, ma’am ...are you a guest of the hotel?”

Flinching as the beam blinded her, she took one speaker of her iPod headphones out of her ear. “Huh?”

He kept the light in her eyes. “If you’re not a guest of the hotel, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

Madison pulled the headphones down around her neck with a waspish glare. “Back off, rent-a-cop. I’m a federal agent on surveillance.” She lifted aside one lapel of her jacket to reveal her .45 pistol in its holster.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but unless you can show me some ID...”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” The agent reached into her inside jacket pocket. “I could have you arrested for obstruction of justice.”

Flicking off the flashlight, he raised the hand that held the hatpin, but his resolve wavered. What would Natalie think? Trent wondered.

This chick has caused nothing but trouble for Lindstrom and her kid, Nick answered. You’ll be doing them both a favor.

When Madison flipped open her ID, he jabbed the hatpin into her side.

“OW!” She slapped her hand on the puncture wound, fingers fluttering along the shaft of the pin. “Who the hell do you think—”

The curare cut her off. Madison’s eyelids fell and did not open, her facial muscles twitching as if she struggled to blink. One hand flopped toward her gun, then dropped, dangling. Her expression became immobile as the paralysis spread and her head dropped to her chest. Air leaked from her open mouth but she made no sound.

Trent pulled out the pin and sandwiched her slack body between his and the car, restraining her as the neurotoxin took effect. He doffed his cap and tossed it in the car just as a pair of headlights approached. Bear-hugging her to keep her upright, he fondled Arabella Madison as if making out with her, wondering if she was still conscious but unable to react. The curare had evidently already paralyzed the diaphragm muscle that drew air into her lungs, for he felt no breath from her mouth. She might not be dead yet, however, for curare did not affect the heart, and asphyxiation could take up to fifteen minutes.

Trent made sure that he did not touch her lips as he pretended to kiss her, nor did he allow himself to touch any part of her bare skin, for he didn’t want to become a touchstone for this woman. In this case, at least, he followed Nathan Azure’s example, although he thought his boss took the no-touching thing to a Howard Hughes–like extreme.

When he was again sure that no one was watching, Trent—or, rather, Nick—shoved Arabella Madison bodily back into the car and climbed in next to her, slamming the door closed behind him. Blocking the view from the parking lot, he lifted her legs over the gearshift and folded her body into the floor space below the glove compartment, then spread his black garbage sack over the inert body like a tarp.

He found the Acura’s key already in the ignition and drove the car to a run-down strip mall a few miles away. He’d scouted the location the previous day and knew that the shops would be closed at this time of night. Steering the car into the alley behind the mall, he pulled up beside a Dumpster and stopped the engine.

After a quick survey to make sure that no homeless people had camped out in the vicinity, he stretched the garbage bag over Madison’s corpse. Moving around to her side of the car, he opened the passenger door and rolled her body out onto the asphalt so he could finish pulling the sack around her. He twisted the mouth of the bag closed, knotted it, then hefted the bundle up to the lip of the Dumpster and tumbled it inside.

The waste container belonged to a Chinese take-out joint, and its contents reeked of rotting chow mein. The bigger the stench, the better as far as Trent was concerned. He climbed inside the half-full Dumpster and piled as much trash as possible over the plastic garbage sack. Someone might eventually find the body, but by then he and Natalie Lindstrom would be in Peru. Of course, there was the problem of the girl, Callie. If the Corps connected Natalie’s absence to Madison’s murder, they might come for her daughter . . . but Trent couldn’t worry about that. That wasn’t his concern.

The thought of Natalie continued to nag him, however, as he abandoned Arabella Madison’s Acura in a grocery store parking lot a couple blocks from the hotel. He’d had a great time with her tonight, and she seemed to like him. He wanted her to like him. Would she feel the same way if she saw him now? he wondered, peeling off his leather gloves before leaving the car. Or would she recoil from the touch of these hands that looked so clean?

But his hands were clean, he thought, ditching the gloves and the rest of his security guard disguise in one of the supermarket’s outdoor trash cans. That was why he became Nick. Nick had done the job.

Trent strolled back to the hotel, breathing easier, looking forward to a long, hot shower before bed. Looking forward to becoming genial Abe Wilcox again for tomorrow’s performance.

In Golden Blood will be published October 25 and is available via Amazon or Amazon UK.

Visit the official site for more details.

Excerpted from In Golden Blood by Stephen Woodworth Copyright © 2005 by Stephen Woodworth . Excerpted by permission of Dell, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.