Glass Tiger (22 page)

But he ran up against an iron-faced, iron-haired night supervisor named Marlena Werfel, who took no prisoners.

‘If an ex-patient named Janet Amore is missing, it doesn’t concern this hospital. Or you.’

Regretfully, Thorne shoved his FBI commission card under her nose.

‘Yes it does. I need to know when she checked out, what her financial arrangements were, and the name of her physician.’

She stared at the credentials for a moment, her little pig eyes snapping with indignation.

‘Patient information is confidential. You’ll have to come back tomorrow when the administrator’s office is open. And I’ll be reporting your unprofessional behavior to your superiors.’

If he’d been a real FBI agent, he could have forced her to go into the computer and get him what he wanted. But he didn’t want her to carry out her threat to call the local FBI office. If it got into the system, it would get back to Hatfield.

‘Sorry if I seemed rude, Mrs. Werfel. Just doing my job.’

‘Badly.’

As a frustrated Thorne stalked down the corridor toward the elevators, a rotund African-American nurse carrying a tray full of items covered with a towel fell into step beside him. She spoke out of the side of her mouth without looking at him.

‘Doctor Walter Houghton. You didn’t hear it here.’

She turned in at an open doorway and was gone. Thorne kept on walking without any reaction. But he could feel Werfel’s BB eyes drilling into his back down the length of the corridor.

Hatfield spent the morning at the firing range, focussing on requalifying with the Hostage/Rescue team’s various weapons. He barely qualified because he couldn’t get
Thorne out of his head. The man seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth. Since Corwin couldn’t have come back from the grave to do him in, then just as he’d told the President, it had to be a setup engineered by Thorne himself. But why? Hatfield suddenly cursed aloud in sudden comprehension.

Someone had leaked to Thorne what would be waiting for him when he got back to Kenya. Not any of his men. Even if they’d known exactly what he was planning, they wouldn’t have said anything about it. They were a close-mouthed lot.

So, someone in Nairobi. Maybe one of Muthengi’s men. Or maybe that magistrate, Kemoli. Told Thorne his arrest was planned. That’s why he had disappeared! He was going to try to get to the President in person to tell him who really had stopped Hal Corwin.

Hatfield had to find him first. He went out to his car and from the spare tire well got the throw-down piece he’d taken off a dead bank-robber the year before. It was a World War II Colt .45. Back on the firing range, he fired a clip through it, leaving it uncleaned so ballistics testing would show it had recently been fired. He returned it to the trunk of the car.

When he walked into his office in the Hoover Building, his phone was ringing. He snapped into it, ‘I told you, no calls!’

‘Didn’t tell me,’ said a male voice in a twangy, down-home accent straight out of Maine.

Sammy Spaulding. They’d been classmates at Quantico. Hatfield had qualified for Hostage/Rescue, Sammy had ended up as AIC of the LA Field Office. Adrenaline shot through Hatfield. An hour after he had left the Oval Office, he had e-mailed a BOLO marked HIGHEST PRIORITY to major FBI FOs around the country:

‘Talk to me, Sammy. Tell me you’ve got something I need.’

‘What I’ve got is an irate call this morning from a night administrator at Cedar’s-Sinai Hospital. Seems some guy claiming to be one of our agents interrogated her last night concerning a former patient. She thought the i.d. was fake, so she memorized the number on the commission card. A real pain in the butt.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Hatfield impatiently. ‘Whose credentials were they?’

‘Your buddy’s. Brendan fucking Thorne’s. She shined him on to the day people, but he never showed. You want me to—’

‘No!’ In a quieter voice, Hatfield said, ‘I’m under orders to handle this one personally. I’ll be out there tomorrow a.m.’

‘I’ll lay in some barbecue ribs and grits and water-melon.’

‘Up yours,’ said Hatfield.

Thorne got a room for the night in a run-down motel below the Sunset Strip, next door to a bar that closed at two a.m. and opened again at four. When he did get to sleep, sometime around three a.m., he woke from his already horribly familiar nightmare, drenched in sweat and yelling, ‘You missed,’ with Corwin’s reply, ‘Did I?’ following hard upon it in his memory. He had to stand under a cold shower for twenty minutes before he could face the day.

Walter Houghton, MD, had his practice in a medical office building on Doheny a few blocks from Cedar’s-Sinai. Thorne told the receptionist that his name was
Brendan Thorne. ‘I don’t have an appointment, but if the doctor could spare me just two or three minutes…’

But she was already nodding brightly at him through the sliding glass panel separating her from the waiting room.

‘Have a seat, Mr. Thorne. Doctor will see you directly.’

He sat down, alarm bells ringing. Houghton had the sort of upscale practice that usually meant days or weeks before getting an appointment. Had Werfel phoned the doctor an early-morning heads-up? Was the FBI on its way? He had to chance it. He didn’t have anything else.

Ten minutes later, he was shown into the crowded office of a handsome, lean, erect black man of about his own age. Houghton had beautiful liquid eyes and stern features. His white smock was crisp and he had a stethoscope around his neck.

As he shook Thorne’s hand, he said, ‘I hear the dragon lady over at Cedar’s worked you over pretty good last night. The nurse who gave you my name put in a good word for you, but I feel protective about Janet. She was brutally beaten with feet and fists. At least no knives, clubs or soda bottles. Ended up with a broken arm and broken collarbone, a cracked shin, a permanent metal pin in one wrist, two cracked ribs, and a bruised but not ruptured spleen. If you’re bringing her more trouble…’

‘I just want to ask her about a friend of hers.’

‘Can I believe that?’ asked Houghton almost to himself. ‘Well, we’ll see. If your friend was involved in any way…’

‘No friend, I’ve never met him. I’m just looking for him.’

They locked eyes. Houghton looked away first.

‘Okay. All the evidence of sexual assault was there, but no oral, anal, or vaginal penetration took place. She was gutsy and stoic at the same time. Never a word of
complaint. Not even a groan out of her. She just took it. A couple of days later, a quiet, tough outdoorsman in his fifties talked with me at the hospital. He said he’d like to kill the man who did it. I asked if he was a tough guy, and he said No, just an angry one.’

‘Did he give you a name, address, anything?’

‘Nothing. I never saw him again. He left a cash deposit here when I was at the hospital that more than paid for her medical and doctor expenses. He’s even got a refund coming.’

‘Did Janet leave an address with you?’

He evaded a direct answer by saying, ‘She checked herself out of the hospital before she should have, saw me twice here at the office, then never came back. Thanks for stopping by.’

Dismissal. Without even thinking, Thorne said, ‘There’s a psychiatrist in D.C. named Sharon Dorst.’ He rattled off her number. ‘Call her. Ask her about Thorne.’

Houghton hesitated, then handed Thorne a card with his office phone and fax on it.

‘Give me a day to think about it,’ he said.

Thorne knew he should get out of LA as soon as possible. Right now the FBI could be putting an intercept tap on the doctor’s phone. But he couldn’t leave empty-handed. Janet Kestrel was who he was looking for. He had no other possible leads. Maybe Houghton had believed him. Maybe he even would call Sharon Dorst.

So, a day for Houghton to think, a day for Thorne to kill. He decided to start at the Los Angeles Main Library at Figueroa and Flower, a venerable place with mosaics around the interior of the rotunda depicting the founding of the city by Spanish priests. At the main reference desk on the second floor, he paid five dollars for access to one of their computers, used a key word search to call up the post-nomination press coverage of Wallberg’s campaign that he’d barely glanced through before being forced to abandon it at the Mayflower Hotel.

He found a filler item he’d missed in D.C. A man had tried to rob one of Wallberg’s media consultants in the gift shop at the El Tovar Hotel on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. The consultant’s name was Nisa Mather.

Since Flagstaff and Phoenix were the population centers closest to Grand Canyon National Park, Thorne brought up their papers’ coverage of the event. The candidate, Gus Wallberg, was hiking down on the canyon floor when a grey-haired, uniformed man mopping the gift shop floor spoke to Nisa Mather for a minute or so, then tried to grab her purse.

She screamed for security, the man fled with what one fanciful reporter called a wounded-wolf lope, and jumped into a dark green SUV driven by a woman. Another Wallberg aide, Kurt Jaeger, ran after the 4x4 but couldn’t get the license number.

Corwin? Asking why she betrayed him? Maybe threatening to kill her husband? So she screamed for security, then said he’d tried to snatch her purse. In a way, gave him enough time to escape, with Janet Kestrel driving the get-away vehicle?

Back in the Post’s coverage, he found an even more provocative item. Two weeks before election night, Wallberg was relaxing for a day at the posh Desert Palms Resort and Spa in California’s Mojave Desert. While taking a midnight dip alone in the spa’s natural hot springs pool, he was accosted by a naked man. Secret Service agents fired shots, the assailant fled.

The man being naked, far from branding him as a nut in Thorne’s eyes, suggested that the intruder had been Corwin. At night in unknown terrain, you could move much more quietly naked.

He Googled the Desert Palms Resort and Spa, then used one of his phone cards to make a one-night reservation for Benjamin Schutz. Yes, mid-week, they had a single available.

Uniformed guards checked his i.d. at the resort’s front gate before letting him through the high enclosing adobe wall into the compound. Supposedly the place had been built by Al Capone; there was even a Capone suite hewn out of the native rock, all antique furniture and art deco, where Wallberg had stayed when he had been there.

Thorne’s room was in a tamarisk grove down by the picnic area. There was a tennis court surrounded by rare California clump grass; there was an exercise pool
flanked by ornate teaberry bushes; there were ‘sun bins’ designed for solo nude sunbathing. The gambling casino of Capone’s day had been converted into the Casino Restaurant, with plush draperies, a huge fireplace, and a chunky refectory table that should have been gracing a medieval monastery. Perhaps it once had.

He bought swim trunks at the gift shop, draped a big woolly bath towel over his shoulders, and padded up the walk past the mud baths and sauna and massage rooms to the hot pool. It was a blue, smooth-bottomed concrete cup, going from one foot to five feet in depth, shielded by decorative rocks and shrubs. At one end, the hot natural mineral water boiled up at regular intervals to spill down a man-made cliff into the pool. The closer to this overflow, the hotter the water.

Thorne drifted in the hundred-degree velvet half-darkness, waiting for just the right security guard to stroll by. Had him! In his fifties, with a lined, leathery face, hard eyes, thinning sandy hair, a flawless uniform, and a military bearing. Perfect.

‘Vietnam?’ asked Thorne, dog-paddling to the side of the pool. ‘You can always tell a guy who’s seen action.’

‘Twenty-five years as an MP, stateside and overseas.’

‘Ex-Ranger myself. Panama. Desert Storm.’ He shook water out of his eyes and hauled himself up on the side of the pool. ‘They were telling me about that crazy nut jumped the president last fall. Were you working here then?’

The guard glanced around, then sat down on a lounge chair.

‘I gotta tell you, there was something screwy about that whole thing. Hell, this naked guy, he was just talking with Wallberg, and then the feds showed up. He shoved Wallberg underwater and took off. They started shooting. They found blood but didn’t find him.’ His thin,
hard lips curved in contempt. As Thorne had hoped, this ex-MP had no respect for civilian security forces. ‘They couldn’t find him, so they claimed he crawled off into the desert and died.’

‘Did they even hit him?’

‘Hell no. That guy took off like a scalded-ass ape. No way did he take a round. I think he scraped his head on the rock deliberately to give ’em the blood. I didn’t see his face, but he was about the President’s age. Rangy and quick even though he had a limp. Wouldn’t surprise me if he was ex-military.’

At seven a.m. the next day, Sammy Spaulding met Hatfield at the unobtrusive corner of LAX where the FBI landed its jets. He whistled softly when he saw the Gulfstream.

‘And you thought I was blowing smoke,’ grinned Hatfield.

‘I thought you were covering your ass on some screw-up.’

‘Never happen, my man.’

Sammy was one of the few people outside his own team whom he actually trusted, but Hatfield drove alone to keep his appointment with Marlena Werfel at Cedar’s-Sinai. She met him behind her bastion desk in the admin office.

‘First,’ he told her, ‘I want to apologize for any inconvenience or distress our man might have caused you.’

‘He was extremely rude.’

‘He has that reputation.’ Hatfield focussed on her. ‘You see, he’s supposed to be undercover in Chihuahua, Mexico. That’s why I flew out here from D.C. to talk to you in person.’

‘I knew it! He was asking inappropriate questions about a patient we had here last November. Janet Amore.’

Who the hell was Janet Amore? But if Thorne wanted her, Hatfield wanted her. ‘What was Amore being treated for?’

‘She was mugged and beaten badly in an alley.’

‘And you couldn’t give Thorne an address for her?’

‘Could have. Didn’t. Her sister’s. But she’s long gone from there. He also wanted to know what sort of financial arrangements she made with the hospital, and her doctor’s name.’ A satisfied sniff. ‘I wouldn’t give him either one.’ She lowered her voice. ‘But he might have gotten the doctor’s name from one of our nurses who’s a talker and a trouble-maker.’