Fatal (30 page)

The second message, recorded yesterday evening, was from Hal.

“Everything’s set, Matthew. Fred Carabetta will see us at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon at his office in D.C. Call me for details.”

Hal answered on the first ring.

“Hey, Matt. Are you okay?”

“No.”

Quickly, Matt reviewed the events of the previous night.

“God, that’s just awful,” Hal said. “And where are you calling from?”

“Newark. Nikki’s in with the FBI right now, filing a report.”

“Well, I think you’ve got to get her out of there,” Hal said. “I was just going to leave another message on your machine. Grimes has an APB out for your arrest—both of you.”

“I was afraid he might do something like that. What’s he charging us with?”

“Murder.”

“What?”

“Grimes called me early this morning, then came by and drove me out to view a body and bring it back to the morgue. Big man, what’s left of him.”

“I think I know who he is,” Matt said, feeling the acid in his stomach beginning to percolate. “Name’s Larry. He worked for Grimes.”

“Extra crispy. From what I could tell he was shot in the head in a cabin off Tall Pines Road, then incinerated when it was burned to the ground. Quite well done, the man was. Then, while we’re driving back to town, Grimes casually tells me that you and Dr. Solari are wanted for the guy’s murder. Wants to know if I might happen to know where you are.”

“How does he get off making me a suspect?”

“There are hospital medications and supplies in the woods near the cabin with fingerprints on them, and motorcycle tracks all around. Grimes is speculating that the big man was working for you when he kidnapped Dr. Solari and that you killed him to keep him quiet or from squeezing you for more money.”

“Slick. He’s setting both Nikki and me up to die, Hal. Maybe a murder-suicide by this deranged doctor who became obsessed with his patient to the point where he had her kidnapped. All Grimes has to do now is get his hands on us. Hal, I’ve got to get to Nikki before she speaks with the FBI people. I’ll call you later.”

“We’re expected at Carabetta’s office at three this afternoon. Constitution Avenue.”

“We’ll be there,” Matt said.

He sped around the block and dismounted the Harley across the street from the office building.

“FBI, please.”

“Twenty-second floor,” the uniformed security man at the lobby reception desk responded, glancing up from his magazine only long enough to ensure that the questioner wasn’t encased in dynamite and brandishing an assault rifle.

The six elevators were all between floors ten and fifteen of the twenty-four stories. Their descent was so painfully slow that Matt actually gave passing thought to sprinting up the twenty-two flights. He was the only one in sight as he stepped into the car, but predictably, three others—a man and two women—materialized just as the doors were about to close, and pressed buttons for floors five, nine, and seventeen. Matt tapped his toe and drummed his fingers over the upward journey, which seemed to take an hour. The elevator opened directly into the waiting room.

Thank God!

Nikki was there, seated opposite a receptionist, thumbing through a copy of
People
. A wizened Asian woman occupied one of the other chairs. Just as Matt stepped off the elevator, a darkly handsome young man with a Hollywood chin emerged from one of the offices, crossed to Nikki, and introduced himself as Duty Officer Sherman. Nikki, clearly startled by Matt’s sudden appearance, didn’t respond immediately to the agent. The hesitation was all Matt needed. He moved quickly to her side, slipping his hand around her arm, and applying as much force as he dared. Nikki looked momentarily shocked, but then came through and handled the assault coolly, her expression saying,
This had better be good.

“I’m sorry to bust in like this, Officer,” Matt said, “but we’re going to have to come back a little later. There’s been a death in the family.”

“
NOW, YOU JES
listen here, Sara Jane Tinsley. You gotta stop actin’ up an’ let me get some damn work done. There ain’t no one followin’ you an’ there ain’t no one tryin’ to hurt you. Now go on out an’ find somethin’ to do or someone to play with. If’n you can’t occupy yerself, then jes get out back an’ start pickin’ corn.”

“Corn ain’t ready, Ma, an’ you know it,” Sara Jane snapped.

“It’s plenty ready.”

“Besides, you jes want me out there so those men can have me. You hate me. You hate how ugly I done become. You think it’s my fault. You think I’m staying up all night jes to git under yer skin. You don’t understand that I cain’t sleep. No matter how hard I try, I cain’t sleep.”

She was twelve, tall and willowy, but yet to show any outward signs of becoming a woman. Right now, she thought, she really didn’t care if she became a woman er not. She cared about the men who had tried to git her into their car as she ’uz walking down the road. First they called her by name an’ offered her a big stuffed panda to come with them. Then one of them—the thin one with the cowboy hat—got out of the car with a fist fulla money an’ held it out for her. At the sight of him, Sara Jane had whirled and taken off through the woods. The man came after her, but there was no way in hell he ’uz gonna catch her. Those were her woods. No one caught her out there less’n she wanted ’em to.

“You’re making a big mistake,” the man had called after her as he gave up chasin’.

Sara Jane reported the incident to her ma, but it ’uz clear she didn’t believe her. All she said was that Sara Jane wouldn’t be gettin’ in such trouble if she’d jes stop runnin’ off ever’ chance she got an’ stayed closer to home. Seven kids an’ Sara Jane was the only one actin’ out the way she was. Stayin’ up all night. Makin’ up stories. Havin’ tantrums. Screamin’ at her ma. Gettin’ into fights with her brothers and sisters. Racin’ off into the woods.

It were the bumps on her face that were poisoning her an’ makin’ her do bad things, Sara Jane had tried to explain. The bumps. The doctor in Ridgefield disagreed. He said she ’uz jes becoming a woman an’ doin’ it harder ’n most. The lumps’d go away as soon as her monthlies started. Maybe so. But this mornin’ she had found another one, this one jes above her eye—nearly as wide as a dime an’ hard as a knuckle. It was the sixth one, plus two right on the top of her head. Them monthlies had better come soon or there wouldn’t be nothin’ left of her face.

It was clear that her ma had said all she was of a mind to say on the topic of Sara Jane Tinsley.
Well, to hell with her
. If she wanted the corn picked so damn bad, her fav’rite daughter would pick it.

Sara Jane stormed from the house, slamming the torn screen door behind her, and grabbed one of the plastic baskets. Takin’ in laundry an’ ironin’ was her ma’s main source of money, but the corn, half an acre of it, helped. Only this year had been dry, real dry, an’ many of the ears was runted. Well, she wanted ’em, she was gonna get ’em, runted or not.

Furious, Sara Jane marched to the end of the farthest row and began tearing off all the ears she could find and throwing them into the bucket. The bending and shaking stalks made a sound like a thresher was going through them. The noise and her own wild movements kept her from hearing the man stealthily approaching her from behind, or sensing his presence until it was too late. Simultaneously, one of his strong, bony hands pinned her to him across her chest, while the second one clamped a cloth over her mouth and nose—a cloth soaked with something that smelled sickly sweet. Sara Jane tried to fight and bite, but he pulled her down to the ground and smothered her with his hand and his body. She knew it was the man with the cowboy hat, but there was nothing she could do. Quickly, her struggles lessened.

I told you, Ma. . . . I told you they ’uz after me. . . .

Her head began to spin. Then, just as she thought she was going to throw up, peace and darkness settled over her.

 
CHAPTER
27

ELLEN SAT ALONE, NESTLED IN THE WELL-WORN 
leather easy chair in Rudy’s pine-paneled den, a barely touched avocado and Swiss sandwich on the TV tray in front of her, a nearly drained glass of Merlot—her second—cradled in her hand. She had never been much of a drinker and couldn’t remember if she had ever drunk wine in the morning. But the Omnivax “documentary” she was watching, put together by the Marquand campaign, coupled with the letter in her purse that she had yet to deal with, had generated a level of tension that simply could not go untreated.

It was just after twelve noon on the day following her remarkable interview with Nattie and Eli Serwanga, and a few hours after that, with Lassa victim John Gendron, a thirty-seven-year-old schoolteacher from Baltimore.

It was a frantic dash, with some luck from the traffic gods thrown in, but Ellen managed to catch a return flight from Chicago to BWI Airport. Her car was at Reagan International outside of D.C., so she rented one and drove to Gendron’s place—a modest town house on Fayette, several blocks from the sparkling Baltimore waterfront.

Before his infection with the Lassa virus, Gendron had taught English in an inner-city junior high school. He was now eighteen months past his close brush with death, and believed he was too disabled ever to teach again. Ellen’s conversation with him was limited by his hearing, which was 70 percent gone in one ear and 100 percent in the other as a result of his illness.

“I went to Sierra Leone to visit my sister, who is a nurse with an international aid organization,” he said. “About a week after I returned, my throat began to burn when I swallowed anything—even water. Within three days, my temperature was spiking to a hundred and five. Blood was coming out of my nose and rectum.”

The man’s eyes began to glisten, and Ellen could see that, however gracious he had been about inviting her to his home, this exchange was exquisitely painful for him.

“Mr. Gendron, please feel free to send me packing if this is too hard for you,” she said. “I live close enough to come back another time.”

“No. No, I’m okay. You promised to tell me what it is you’re working on.”

“And I will,” Ellen said.

“Well, I became delirious around the end of the second week, and was put in the hospital. They . . . they had to remove my intestine to keep me from bleeding to death. Even so, I nearly did. I’m divorced and live alone, so my sister flew back here from Sierra Leone and took care of me for nearly two months. My colostomy is a souvenir of my trip to Africa.”

It may actually be the souvenir of your flight home,
Ellen was thinking.

“Go on,” she said.

“As far as I know,” he went on flatly, “I infected six of my students, plus my son and one of his friends. The friend made it okay. Two of my students and my son, Steven, weren’t as fortunate.”

Oh, no.

“I am so sorry.”

“He was my only child. Every day I wish I had died and pray that I will soon.”

“I’ve had personal tragedies, too,” Ellen said. “Making any sense of life afterward is terribly hard. Therapy and time. That’s all I can tell you. Therapy and time and reaching out to help others.”

“Thank you.”

Once again, Gendron assured Ellen he was able to continue.

“Is there anything unusual you can recall about your flight back to the States?” she asked, taking pains to avoid any leading questions.

“The flight back here was uneventful. But I did meet one unusual character on the flight from Freetown to London, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“He was an American engineer—interesting and very outgoing. Specialized in inspecting bridges, I think he said.”

Ellen gripped the arm of her chair. “Can you describe him for me?”

“I think I can, although my memory hasn’t been so good since—”

“Just do your best,” Ellen said, deciding not to put the man through Rudy’s writing exercise.

“Well, first of all, he was big. Not just tall, but big. Like a football player. His hair was sort of blondish and he wore thick glasses with a heavy frame.”

“Anything else?”

“I can’t think of anything . . . except, wait, he had a scar—an unusual scar—right here above his lip.”

Bingo!

With some prompting now from Ellen, Gendron even recalled being bumped by the man while waiting in line at Gatwick Airport in London.

“He tripped, I think, and stumbled into me. It was like getting hit by a train. We both went down.”

After extracting the same pledge of silence from Gendron as she had from the Serwangas, Ellen explained her interest in the Lassa cases and the man with the scar. Then she drove to Reagan and exchanged the rental for her Taurus. She arrived back at Rudy’s cabin just after two in the morning and was relieved to find that he hadn’t waited up for her.

Now she sat in his den watching the Omnivax campaign special, breathing in the lingering, earthy essence of his pipe tobacco. His Merlot was gradually stoking the fires of her resolve to speak to him. Rudy was upstairs in his study, poring over the passenger manifests, making phone calls, and being a rock of support to a woman he considered a good friend—a woman who just happened to know that he had been in love with her to the exclusion of all others for almost forty years.

How was she going to tell him what she had done? And perhaps even more important, how did she truly feel about what he had written? There was no way to answer the first question without being ready to respond honestly to the second.

Ellen splashed in another glassful of wine. This was last call, she resolved, even as she felt warm fingers working through the muscles of her face. Three glasses were quite enough. Or had it been four? The glasses weren’t that big anyway.

Omnivax had clearly become the flagship of the Marquand campaign. With just over two months remaining before the election, the President’s camp was laying out big bucks to get their message of beneficence, progress, and commitment to campaign promises through to the public. The documentary had initially focused on vaccinations in general and now had moved on to Omnivax. The narrator—unseen at the moment—was a movie star with a voice that inspired confidence and radiated authenticity. James Garner? Donald Sutherland? Ellen didn’t watch enough movies or TV to be certain.

“And so,” the voice was saying, “estimates are that between fifty and sixty thousand cases of potentially lethal infections will be prevented by this astonishingly potent vaccine over just the next year. I am honored to introduce to you the First Lady of the United States, Mrs. Lynette Lowry Marquand.”

Marquand strolled the pediatric ward of a hospital as she spoke.

“At three o’clock in the afternoon on September second, two days from today, a four-day-old child will receive the first official dose of Omnivax. I will be there for that most significant occasion, as will Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Lara Bolton, who will administer the supervaccine using this pneumatic device, especially developed for this purpose.” She held up a small gun that looked something like a derringer with a flattened muzzle. “We are on the verge of the greatest advance in preventive medicine in our history—an advance that could signal the beginning of the end of infectious diseases as we know them. . . .”

“What about the thimerosal mercury a gazillion kids have gotten dosed with?” Ellen asked out loud, aware at the same instant that her speech was thick and her glass was empty. “What about the autism? What about the seizures and brain damage and sudden death? What about the asthma and learning disabilities and ADHD? And what about the man who’s flying around sowing disease and death to peddle his goddamn vaccine? What about all those?”

“What about all what?”

Rudy had entered the den carrying the manifests and other papers.

“. . . I am proud to say that all of our major networks will be carrying the ceremony from the Anacostia Neighborhood Health Center here in Washington, where a four-day-old child will take her place in medical history as the first official recipient of Omnivax.”

“I’m watching a program that could have been written by the pharmaceutical industry’s public relations unit,” Ellen said, “but instead was written by Jim Marquand’s. There is something about that prissy wife of his that really bugs me.”

She tried to modulate her voice, which seemed like it might be too loud. Was there ever a time she had drunk like this? She followed Rudy’s bemused gaze to the bottle on the table next to her. There was, at most, two inches remaining in it. Lying beside it, the corkscrew and Merlot-stained cork, proof that, not long ago, the bottle had been a virgin.

“It’s the best Merlot I’ve found for the money,” he said, gently commenting because the situation demanded he say something.

“Rudy, I’m sorry. I’m overtired and . . . and was lost in this show and . . . and I didn’t realize I had finished so much of it.”

“Nonsense. Good wine is to be enjoyed.”

“But I really don’t drink very often,” she said thickly.

Rudy sank onto the tan leather couch. There was no judgment in his expression.

“So, what’s the status of our friendly neighborhood vaccine?” he asked.

“Day after tomorrow a little four-day-old girl will be starting the ball rolling.”

Brought to You by the Four More Years for a Better America Committee,
the final credit announced. Ellen realized that she had neglected to learn who the narrator was.

“If nothing else,” Rudy said, “I certainly expect the number of Lassa fever cases to drop dramatically.”

“You have a point. No reason for Old Scarface to fly around infecting people anymore. Let the epidemic be cured.”

“It’s a little chilly in here. Would you like a blanket?”

“No, I mean yes, I mean, you stay there. I can get it myself.”

Ignoring her request, Rudy withdrew a maroon throw from a refurbished old sea chest and floated it down over her lap.

Stop being so nice to me,
she thought.
I’m a jerk
.

“Thank you,” she said thickly. “I don’t know how I would have done all this without you.”

“Nonsense. You’re the pro. I’m just the caddy.”

“No, I mean it. Rudy, I—”

Rudy sighed. “Let there now be eternal ambiguity surrounding the phrase ‘the shot heard round the world.’ You know, before you brought me into this world of vaccinations, I more or less took the whole thing for granted. The scientists and pharmaceutical companies produce their vaccines, and their PR people make sure we know why we need their products and what horrible things will happen to us if we don’t embrace them. It seemed that simple. And after their vaccines are approved by the FDA, and the CDC tells everybody they should get them, we smile gratefully and say, ‘Thanks, here’s a clear shot at my body. Take it.’ ”

“When drug companies make a mistake, more often than not it’s a lulu,” Ellen said, still trying to direct their conversation toward the letter. “That’s what I have in common with them. When I make a mistake, it’s a lulu, too.”

“Tell me about it. I used to call myself the King of Screwupville.”

“Rudy,” Ellen said, “I don’t know what made me do what I did, but—”

“You did it because, unlike some First Ladies we know, you are a seeker of the truth. You have a granddaughter who looks as if she has been damaged by her vaccinations and you want to help determine if that is the case, and also to protect other children and parents from paying the same price.”

“I s’pose.”

Ellen looked about blearily and then emptied half of the remaining wine into her glass.

“You know, Rudy,” she tried once more, “I’ve always been a very curious person—some would even say nosy. Howard used to say my nosiness was going to get me in big trouble someday.”

“If you hadn’t been curious about all this, we would have already packed up and slipped back into our mundane existences.”

“Some things you do and the moment you’ve done them, you wish you hadn’t.”

“That’s how that creep who paid you a visit is going to feel when we get to him. Ellen, I’ve found some stuff for us to work with. We’re closer to figuring out who the guy is than you might think.”

Ellen felt dizzy, queasy, and unable to focus fully on what she was seeing or hearing. She had badly overdone the wine, and she sensed that she was in the process of making a bad situation worse.

“I’m anxious to hear about it,” she managed. “And I’ve got something I need to talk with you about, too.”

Had she actually said those last words or merely thought them?

“Well, then,” Rudy said, “I’ll tell you what I think is the significance of what you’ve found out.”

“It was a mistake,” Ellen said. “I know I shouldn’t have done it, and I really am sorry. But just the same—Rudy, are you listening to me?”

Rudy was leafing through the passenger manifests and a small sheaf of notes.

“But just the same . . . Go on, I’m listening.”

Ellen sighed. Next time, when she was clearheaded, she would try to do things right. Rudy didn’t deserve to have a slobbering, slack-jawed inebriate blubbering about how she had invaded his privacy.