Dark Rivers of the Heart (43 page)

The sound of his own voice chilled him deeper than cold rain had chilled him earlier. “Couldn’t save them.”

“It’s all right.”

“Couldn’t save them.” He felt a hand upon his face. Upon his scar. Tracing the hot line of his cicatricial brand.

She said, “You poor bastard. You poor, sweet bastard.”

Saturday night, perched on the edge of a chair in Eve Jammer’s bedroom, Roy Miro saw examples of perfection that even the best-equipped surveillance satellite could not have shown him.

This time, Eve didn’t pull the satin sheets back to reveal black rubber and didn’t use scented oils. She had a new—and stranger—set of toys. And although Roy was surprised to discover that it was possible, Eve achieved greater heights of self-gratification and had a greater erotic impact on him than she had managed the night before.

After a night of cataloguing Eve’s perfections, Roy required the greatest patience for the imperfect day that followed.

Through Sunday morning and afternoon, satellite surveillance, helicopters, and on-foot search teams had no more success locating the fugitives than they’d had on Saturday.

Operatives in Carmel, California—sent there following Theda Davidowitz’s revelation to Grant that “Hannah Rainey” had thought it was the ideal place to live—were enjoying the natural beauty and the refreshing winter fog. Of the woman, however, they had seen no sign.

From Orange County, John Kleck issued another important-sounding report to the effect that he had come up with no leads whatsoever.

In San Francisco, the agent who had tracked down the Porths, only to discover that they had died years ago, had gained access to probate records. He’d learned that Ethel Porth’s estate had passed entirely to George; George’s estate had passed to their grandson—Spencer Grant of Malibu, California, sole issue of the Porths’ only child, Jennifer. Nothing had been found to indicate that Grant had ever gone by another name or that his father’s identity was known.

From a corner of the satellite-surveillance control center, Roy spoke by telephone with Thomas Summerton. Although it was Sunday, Summerton was in his office in Washington rather than at his estate in Virginia. As security conscious as ever, he treated Roy’s call as a wrong number, then phoned back on a deep-cover line a while later, using a scrambling device matched to Roy’s.

“Hell of a mess in Arizona,” Summerton said. He was furious.

Roy didn’t know what his boss was talking about.

Summerton said, “Rich asshole activist out there, thinks he can save the world. You see the news?”

“Too busy,” Roy said.

“This asshole—he’s gotten some evidence that would embarrass me on the Texas situation last year. He’s been feeling out some people about how best to break the story. So we were going to hit him quick, make sure there was evidence of drug dealing on his property.”

“The asset-forfeiture provision?”

“Yeah. Seize everything. When his family has nothing to live on and he doesn’t have the assets to pay for a serious defense, he’ll come around. They usually do. But then the operation went wrong.”

They usually do,
Roy thought wearily. But he didn’t speak his mind. He knew Summerton wouldn’t appreciate candor. Besides, that thought had been a prime example of shamefully negative thinking.

“Now,” Summerton said dourly, “an FBI agent’s dead, out there in Arizona.”

“A real one or a floater like me?”

“A real one. The asshole activist’s wife and boy are dead in the front yard too, and he’s sniping from the house, so we can’t hide the bodies from the TV cameras down the block. And anyway, a neighbor has it all on videotape!”

“Did the guy kill his own wife and kid?”

“I wish. But maybe it can still look that way.”

“Even with videotape?”

“You’ve been around long enough to know photographic evidence rarely clinches anything. Look at the Rodney King video. Hell, look at the Zapruder film of the Kennedy hit.” Summerton sighed. “So I hope you’ve got good news for me, Roy, something to cheer me up.”

Being Summerton’s right-hand man was getting to be dreary work. Roy wished that he could report
some
progress on his current case.

“Well,” Summerton said, just before hanging up, “right now no news seems like good news to me.”

Later, prior to leaving the Vegas offices on Sunday evening, Roy decided to ask Mama to use NEXIS and other data-search services to scan for “Jennifer Corrine Porth” in all media data banks that were offered on various information networks—and to report by morning. The past fifteen to twenty years’ issues of many major newspapers and magazines, including the
New York Times,
were electronically stored and available for on-line research. In a previous perusal of those resources, Mama had turned up the name “Spencer Grant” only related to the killing of the two carjackers in Los Angeles a few years ago. But she might have more luck with the mother’s name.

If Jennifer Corrine Porth had died in a colorful fashion—or if she’d had even a middle-level reputation in business, government, or the arts—her death would have made a few major newspapers. And if Mama located any stories about her or any long obituaries, a valuable reference to Jennifer’s only surviving child might be buried in them.

Roy stubbornly clung to positive thinking. He was confident that Mama would find a reference to Jennifer and break the case wide open.

The woman. The boy. The barn in the background. The man in the shadows.

He didn’t have to take the photographs out of the envelope in which he was keeping them to recall those images with total clarity. The pictures teased his memory, for he knew that he’d seen the people in them before. A long time ago. In some compelling context.

Sunday night, Eve helped to keep Roy’s spirits high and his thoughts on a positive track. Aware that she was adored and that Roy’s adoration gave her total power over him, she worked herself into a frenzy that exceeded anything he had seen before.

For part of their unforgettable third encounter, he sat on the closed lid of the toilet, watching, while she proved that a shower stall could be as conducive to erotic games as any fur-draped, satin-sheeted, or rubber-covered bed.

He was astounded that anyone would have thought to invent and manufacture many of the water toys in her collection. Those devices were cleverly designed, intriguingly flexible, glistening with such lifelike need, convincingly
biological
in their battery-or hand-powered throbbing, mysterious and thrilling in their serpentine-knobby-dimpled-rubbery complexity. Roy was able to identify with them as if they were extensions of the body—part human, part machine—that he sometimes inhabited in dreams. When Eve handled those toys, Roy felt as though her perfect hands were fondling portions of his own anatomy by remote control.

In the blurring steam, the hot water, and the lather of scented soap, Eve seemed to be ninety percent perfect rather than just sixty percent. She was as unreal as an idealized woman in a painting.

Nothing this side of death could have been more fulfilling for Roy than watching Eve methodically stimulate one exquisite anatomical feature at a time, in each case with a device that seemed to be the amputated but functioning organ of a superlover from the future. Roy was able to focus his observations so tightly that Eve herself ceased to exist for him, and each sensuous encounter in the large shower stall—with bench and grab bars—was between one perfect body part and its fleshless analogue: erotic geometry, prurient physics, a study in the fluid dynamics of insatiable lust. The experience was untainted by personality or by any other human trait or association. Roy was transported into extreme realms of voyeuristic pleasure so intense that he almost screamed with the pain of his joy.

Spencer woke when the sun was above the eastern mountains. The light was coppery, and long morning shadows spilled westward across the badlands from every thrust of rock and impertinence of gnarled vegetation.

His vision wasn’t blurred. The sun no longer stung his eyes.

Out at the edge of the shade that was provided by the tarp, Valerie sat on the ground, her back to him. She was bent to a task that he couldn’t see.

Rocky was sitting at Valerie’s side, his back also to Spencer.

An engine was idling. Spencer had the strength to lift his head and turn toward the sound. The Range Rover. Behind him, deeper in the tarp-covered niche. An orange utility cord led from the open driver’s door of the Rover to Valerie.

Spencer felt dreadful, but he was grateful for the improvement in his condition since his most recent bout of consciousness. His skull no longer seemed about to explode; his headache was down to a dull thump over his right eye. Dry mouth. Chapped lips. But his throat wasn’t hot and achy anymore.

The morning was genuinely warm. The heat wasn’t from a fever, because his forehead felt cool. He threw back the blanket.

He yawned, stretched—and groaned. His muscles ached, but after the battering he had taken, that was to be expected.

Alerted by Spencer’s groan, Rocky hurried to him. The mutt was grinning, trembling, whipping his tail from side to side, in a frenzy of delight to see his master awake.

Spencer endured an enthusiastic face licking before he managed to get a grip on the dog’s collar and hold him at tongue’s length.

Looking over her shoulder, Valerie said, “Good morning.”

She was as lovely in the early sun as she had been in lamplight.

He almost repeated that sentiment aloud but was disconcerted by a dim memory of having said too much already, when he had been out of his head. He suspected himself not merely of having revealed secrets that he would rather have kept but of having been artlessly candid about his feelings for her, as ingenuous as an infatuated puppy.

As he sat up, denying the dog another lick at his face, Spencer said, “No offense, pal, but you stink something fierce.”

He got to his knees, rose to his feet, and swayed for a moment.

“Dizzy?” Valerie asked.

“No. That’s gone.”

“Good. I think you had a bad concussion. I’m no doctor—as you made clear. But I’ve got some reference books with me.”

“Just a little weak now. Hungry. Starving, in fact.”

“That’s a good sign, I think.”

Now that Rocky was no longer in his face, Spencer realized that the dog didn’t stink. He himself was the offending party: the wet-mud fragrance of the river, the sourness of several fever sweats.

Valerie returned to her work.

Being careful to stay upwind of her, and trying not to let the playful mutt trip him, Spencer shuffled to the edge of the shaded enclosure to see what the woman was doing.

A computer sat on a black plastic mat on the ground. It wasn’t a laptop but a full PC with a MasterPiece surge protector between the logic unit and the color monitor. The keyboard was on her lap.

It was remarkable to see such an elaborate high-tech workstation plunked down in the middle of a primitive landscape that had remained largely unchanged for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years.

“How many megabytes?” he asked.

“Not mega. Giga. Ten gigabytes.”

“You need all that?”

“Some of the programs I use are pretty damn complex. They fill up a lot of hard disk.”

The orange electrical cord from the Rover was plugged into the logic unit. Another orange cord led from the back of the logic unit to a peculiar device sitting in the sunlight ten feet beyond the shade line of their tarp-covered hideaway: It looked like an inverted Frisbee with a flared rather than inward-curling rim; underneath, at its center, it was fixed to a ball joint, which was in turn fixed to a four-inch flexible black metal arm, which disappeared into a gray box approximately a foot square and four inches deep.

Busy at the keyboard, Valerie answered his question before he could ask it. “Satellite up-link.”

“You talking to aliens?” he asked, only half joking.

“Right now, to the dee-oh-dee computer,” she said, pausing to study the data that scrolled up the screen.

“Dee-oh-dee?” he wondered.

“Department of Defense.”

DOD.

He squatted on his haunches. “Are you a government agent?”