Dark Tiger (9 page)

“I can't stay but a minute,” she said, getting that issue out of the way right off. “I just wanted to talk a little bit.”

“I still got bourbon and coffee,” he said.

“Bourbon, I guess,” she said, and then she came over and started up the stairs.

Ralph waited at the top of the steps with his stubby tail wagging. Calhoun went inside and poured an inch from Kate's bottle of Old Grand-Dad into a tumbler, added two ice cubes, and took it back out onto the deck.

Kate was sitting in one of the wooden chairs. Ralph had his chin on her knee, and she was scratching his muzzle.

Calhoun handed the glass to her.

She took it. “I didn't want to leave things that way with you gone for a month.”

He sat down and said nothing.

“The way—I mean, how I was acting—I thought about it. Thing is, Stoney, you've never given me any reason not to trust you. I should trust you, that if you say you can't tell me what you're doing, it means you can't, and who am I to tell you you're wrong. This doesn't mean I'm not mad about it, because I am. I mean, it makes no damn sense. If you can't tell me what you're gonna be doing for six weeks, and where you're gonna be doing it, the least you could do is tell me why you can't tell me.”

She looked at him with her eyebrows arched.

All Calhoun could do was shrug.

She took a big gulp of bourbon. It was pretty obvious she was working herself up. “Dammit all to hell, Stoney,” she
continued. “You know, it ain't just about do I trust you. It's about sharing our lives. People who share their lives together aren't supposed to have secrets. Not to mention, I don't like being left by myself this way. I don't know how I'm going to manage for six weeks without you. I've come to depend on you, damn you. At the shop . . . well, I can handle the shop, I guess. Adrian's good. We'll be all right. It's the rest of it, Stoney. Who'm I going to talk to about Walter when he gets all nasty and abusive, or when he's doing so bad it looks like he's about to die? Who's going to hug me when I need it? Where am I going to go when I need a night of lovin'?”

Calhoun held out his hand. Kate narrowed her eyes at him for a minute, then got up from her chair, came over, and sat on his lap.

“You don't need to say anything,” he said into her hair. “I don't blame you for being upset.”

“I
am
upset,” she said. “I'm not spending the night with you, either. I just wanted you to know that I love you anyway, and I'll be all right. I'll get by. And whatever you're doing, you damn well better be careful and come back in one piece. You hear me?”

He enveloped her in his arms. “Yes, ma'am. I hear you.”

“I have the feeling it's dangerous,” she said.

Calhoun said nothing.

“If something happens to you, Stonewall Jackson Calhoun, you'll have to answer to me.”

“I'll be careful,” he said.

She snuggled against him for a minute.

Then she sat up straight. “Don't think I'm not mad,” she said.

“I understand,” Calhoun said.

“Tell me this,” she said. “How long did you know before you told me?”

He shrugged. “A few days.”

“A few days?” Kate shook her head. “So what the hell were you waiting for?”

“Working up the courage, I guess,” he said.

“Courage? You? Men have shot at you with the intention of killing you, and you, you just hunched your shoulders and plowed straight ahead. No, Stoney. I'm not buying that. It ain't courage that you're lacking. Consideration, I'd call it.”

“Courage or consideration or whatever,” he said. “You've just got to accept it.”

“Accept it?” She shook her head. “You telling me I've got a choice?” She glowered at him for a moment, then abruptly she got off his lap, turned, went down the stairs, and got into her truck. He followed along behind her and stood there beside her vehicle while she started it up.

She shifted into first gear, then leaned her head out the window. “I'm mad as hell at you, Stonewall Calhoun. Don't forget that. I got a feeling I'm just going to get madder, too. I don't know why I came here tonight. I guess I expected something out of you that you can't give me. It ain't fair, what you're doing. I know you know that. That's why it took you so damn long to tell me.” She glared at him. “Anyway, whatever it is, good luck with it, and you better be careful. If you don't come back safely to me, I'll never speak to you again.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Might not even if you do.”

Then, with a little spray of gravel, she pulled out of the parking area and headed up the driveway.

Calhoun watched her drive away.

“I guess we better be careful and come back safe,” he said to Ralph. “I can't hardly stand it when she won't talk to me.”

 

 

 

 

Calhoun was supposed to meet the bush pilot, Swenson, at the dock in Greenville at the foot of Moosehead Lake at two o'clock on Thursday afternoon. Greenville was a little more than two hundred miles north of Portland, and narrow, meandering secondary roads covered the last third of that distance. He figured it would take close to five hours of driving. He left at eight that morning to give himself an hour's cushion.

The first leg of the trip was a straight shot north on the Maine Turnpike. Ralph rode shotgun. Calhoun found a classical music station on the truck's radio, and when it faded away, he trolled the dial until he found another one. He was trying to keep his mind from wandering to Kate and not having good luck with it. The music didn't help. They often played the Portland classical music station on the shop radio, and the symphonies and sonatas and concertos all reminded him of her. It made his stomach feel empty and twisted.

They were still south of Augusta when he noticed that the clouds ahead of him to the north were thickening. A few minutes later a light mist began to appear on the windshield.

He wondered if the float plane would fly in the rain. He thought about being grounded in Greenville for a few days. The idea did not appeal to him.

He exited the turnpike north of Waterville and stopped at a gas station to fill the truck's tank. Now the mist had turned to a soft steady rain.

When he went inside to pay, he bought three plain doughnuts and a big cardboard cup of black coffee. Back in the truck, he gave one of the doughnuts to Ralph and ate the other two himself between sips of coffee. When he finished eating, he took his cell phone from his pocket. He was hoping for a message from Kate, though he honestly didn't expect one. He wasn't surprised to see the
NO SERVICE
message on the phone's window.

They pulled into Greenville a few minutes after one o'clock. The rain had stopped, but the low clouds hung dark and foreboding overhead.

Greenville's main road followed the contours of the foot of Moosehead Lake, and pretty soon Calhoun came to Balsam Street. He turned onto it, and as expected, it ended up behind a row of stores in a big open area on the shore of the lake. Some vehicles, mostly pickup trucks, were parked behind the stores, and a wide wooden dock stretched into the water.

Moosehead was the biggest lake in Maine, and today a northerly wind was chopping its surface into little whitecaps. The lake lay gray and hostile-looking under the black overcast. Good weather for trolling flies for landlocked salmon, actually, and Moosehead was one of the best salmon lakes in the world. Calhoun rolled down the truck window to get a better look. A low bank of mist hung over the water so that the far shore was a blur. It smelled like a rainy afternoon on the ocean, damp and organic and salty.

Parked in the water and tied off on the pilings down toward the end of the dock sat a big float plane, a de Havilland Twin Otter, if Calhoun wasn't mistaken. The Twin Otter was the workhorse of float planes. It had two turboprops and could carry ten or a dozen men and hundreds of pounds of gear. This was the plane that they used to transport lumber and generators and woodstoves when they built cabins and fishing lodges on remote Maine lakes.

Calhoun parked his truck among the other vehicles behind the row of stores and fished his cell phone from his pants pocket. When he flipped it open, he saw that there was service here in Greenville.

He had a voice mail message waiting. It came from a number he didn't recognize. He called up his messages and a woman's voice said, “Hello, Deputy Calhoun. This is Ella Grimshaw calling you on Thursday morning from the medical examiner's office here in Augusta. When I saw you yesterday, I promised I'd let you know when I heard from the CDC. Their report just came in a short time ago, and I'm relieved to tell you that those two victims from St. Cecelia, who we determined were not killed by gunshot wounds, appear not to have died from some rare mutated virus or some insidious new strain of influenza, either. I don't know if you're interested in the details, but they are public record, and I'd be happy to share them with you if you want. You may call me here at the office or on my cell phone.” She recited two numbers, and Calhoun knew he'd remember them without writing them down.

He tried Dr. Grimshaw's office number and reached a receptionist, who asked his name and put him through.

A moment later Dr. Grimshaw said, “Deputy Calhoun. Hello.”

“Hi,” he said. “I'm returning your call.”

“Right,” she said. “I told you I'd call when I had something new about the McNulty and Gautier deaths, right?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Well, I got the report from the CDC just this morning,” she said. “They both died of botulism poisoning.”

“Botulism,” said Calhoun.

“That's right.”

“I don't know anything about botulism,” he said. “It's pretty deadly, isn't it?”

“Very deadly,” she said. “Fortunately, it's quite rare. We have only about a hundred and fifty cases a year in the United States. The botulinum neurotoxins kill you by paralyzing your respiratory system. Not a pleasant way to die. It's actually the most poisonous substance known to man.” She hesitated, then said, “It's no wonder that we worry about terrorists.”

“You saying that stuff's a biological weapon?” He remembered how Mr. Brescia had told him that he thought McNulty was working on something involving national security when he died. A biological weapon in the hands of terrorists would certainly qualify.

“Not a weapon,” she said. “Not as far as we know. Not yet, anyway. We worry that it could be, though. Just a matter of figuring out how to package it and deliver it efficiently.”

“So how did McNulty and Millie Gautier get botulism? Not from terrorists, I assume.”

“No,” said Dr. Grimshaw. “There have been no terrorist incidents lately in Aroostook County.” Dr. Grimshaw chuckled softly. “No, so far this is good news. Most likely they both just ate the same tainted food. They apparently died at about the same time.”

“That's good news, huh?”

“If no one else ate that food, if it's not an outbreak, it's good news, yes.”

“How long between when you eat the bad food and when you die?”

“It can be as little as six hours or as much as several days,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering,” he said, though since he intended to investigate McNulty's and Millie Gautier's deaths, he was thinking that the information could prove helpful. “How do you figure it?” he said. “They were driving in their car, and both of them started to feel sick, so they pulled off the road there where they happened to be, which was in the woods on the outskirts of St. Cecelia, and they sat there in their car until they were dead? Then somebody came along and shot them both and tried to make it look like a murder and a suicide?”

“I guess so, Mr. Calhoun,” said the doctor. “It's a hard one to figure, isn't it? Frankly, right now I'm more concerned with the health of the people living in and around the town of St. Cecelia than I am with the details of these two deaths. With botulism, one fatal case is an isolated incident, but two deaths at the same time and place could portend a full-blown outbreak. That is a cause for worry.”

“Have they had any other cases of botulism poisoning in St. Cecelia?”

“So far, we've heard of none, thank God. That, as I said, is the good news.”

“If it was a terrorist incident . . . ?”

“There would surely have been more deaths, but—” She paused. “What? Oh. Excuse me for a minute, Deputy Calhoun.”

Calhoun heard her muffled voice. It sounded like she had put her hand over the receiver on her phone to talk to somebody.

“I'm sorry,” she said a minute later. “I've got to go now. Anyway, that's all the information I have for you. If I learn anything more, I'll call you.”

“Thank you,” Calhoun said. “I appreciate it.”

“If you hear anything,” she said, “I hope you'll share.”

“Sure,” he said.

After he disconnected with Dr. Grimshaw, Calhoun sat there for a minute, thinking about what she'd told him. The two of them, McNulty and the girl, dying from botulism poisoning was strange enough, but somebody shooting their corpses, trying to make it look like a murder-suicide, was downright weird. It made no sense.

Well, that's why he was here. To make sense out of it.

He got out of his truck, held the door for Ralph and told him to heel, and headed out onto the dock.

A panel truck was parked there next to the plane. When Calhoun got closer, he saw that the truck had the Stop & Shop logo on its side and that two men were transferring stuff from the truck to the plane, which sported its own logo, a fancy scrolled triple
L
with a leaping salmon and crossed fly rods.

One of the men was wearing a short-sleeved shirt covered with orange and yellow tropical flowers. He had a reddish beard with a lot of gray in it, and he was wearing a Detroit Tigers cap backward. Lanky strands of gray hair poked out from under the cap. He wore his aloha shirt untucked, which did little to camouflage his big stomach.