Ice Lake (19 page)

Honigwachs was appalled. Both his hands fell to the tabletop with a thump. “He’s a cop!”

“Exactly. But he’s my cop.”

“No way, Camille, are you mad?”

She again leaned forward to drive her point home. “Wiener, if Lucy knows what I think she knows, sooner or later she’ll bring information to the cops. Better we do it in a situation I control. I go to Charlie. I tell him that Lucy can’t go down for the crime, because if she goes down, I go down. I work it so Charlie’s protecting me. You’re already protected. You’re so well insulated you have nothing to worry about. No one can link any aspect of this to you.”

“Andy can,” Honigwachs put in.

“How come?”

“I sent him down with new stock for Lucy. I arranged that with him.”

“You twit! You bonehead!”

“All right, a mistake, but Andy is on our side.”

“That doesn’t matter! You don’t give anybody a job to do that can be traced directly back to you! That’s
basic!
It’s your own damn rule!”

“I made a mistake. Now drop it.” He put his hands up as though to physically repel any countervailing argument.

Camille crossed her legs under the table, folded her hands on top of it, and straightened her posture. She seemed quite prim. She wanted to be the calm one. “Something happened in New York that you don’t know about. At first, I didn’t think it mattered. Just some strange New York thing.”

“What do you mean? What happened?”

She cleared her throat. “One of our patients was murdered. Smothered with a pillow.”

Honigwachs offered back a quizzical expression. He seemed unimpressed. “He had a friend, I’m guessing. It was a mercy killing.”

“Well, whoever the
friend
was who snuffed him, also took the trouble to sew his lips together with a needle and thread.”

“What?”

“I’ve been going over it in my head. Andy was in New York then.”

“What are you saying? Come on, Camille. You’re getting out there.”

She lowered her voice so that he had to lean in to hear her. “How much do you really know about him? That’s all I’m asking. If you think about it, you don’t know Andy from Adam. He’s a hooligan, with the charm of an angel. But what do you know? So think about it, Werner. At the very least, be careful around him.”

He slumped back in the booth, and exhaled. “Oh God,” he murmured.

Placing her elbows on the table, Camille crossed her arms. “This is what I’m thinking. We’ll have our little playgroup to get to the bottom of all this. Me, Lucy, Charlie, Andy. By bringing in Charlie, I get Lucy to trust me. Because I’m bringing in a cop, it’s a sign of my commitment, it proves that I want to know the truth just
as much as she does, that I’ve got nothing to hide. Charlie will be anxious to defend me, but clueless. He’ll let me know everything that comes through from the cop side of things. Me and Andy, we’ll be on your side in all this, only Andy won’t know where I’m coming from, so I get to keep an honest eye on him. Meanwhile, Lucy will be fighting her little fight, not knowing what’s really happening. It’s the only way, Wiener. I know Lucy. She’s a demon! We can’t let her take things out of our hands. Don’t forget, I’ve got exposure here. I can be identified. I’m looking out for myself, not just you.”

Werner Honigwachs studied her awhile. “You’ve been thinking about this.”

“Somebody has to.” She sipped her coffee.

“We need to know what they know.” He spoke as though the course of action being suggested was his own.

“That’s right. And if they learn more, we need to know that, too.”

Honigwachs nodded. “There’s a point—” he began to say.

“I know,” Camille said softly. “I just can’t bear to think about it. I won’t think about it.”

“If Andy is working for them against us—”

“No, please, don’t think that way. Andy would cause such trouble! You know what I’m talking about.”

Honigwachs engaged her eyes. “There’s no immunity here. None. If someone needs to be removed from the scene, I won’t hesitate.”

“Please, don’t talk that way. Would you even have the guts to do it?”

Honigwachs narrowed his gaze, continuing to nod, a rhythmic, menacing bob of his chin. “We’re not there yet. But Andy would have to be finessed, if it came down to that.”

“Oh, God. You would, wouldn’t you? You’d have the guts?”

Honigwachs put his two fists together, side by side, facing forward. He then made a snapping motion, as though breaking a twig in half. “I think first,” he told her. “When I act, I act. This is my time. I can feel it. I can feel how everything has been ordained. Nobody will step in my way. There’s no point being stupid, but if I have to take out Lucy, I will take out Lucy. I’d do it right now, but I need to know what she knows. I need to know who she’s talked to. Andy? Him too. Don’t doubt me on that one.”

Camille remained quiet, observing him for a while, then averting her gaze.

“It’s a rough business,” Honigwachs chided her. “You have to be in it for the whole game. Don’t go squeamish on me, we don’t have time for that.”

“Don’t speak of these things,” she whispered. “Never again. Not aloud. Not in public.”

He gazed at her coldly. “Stay on top of things, Camille. I want detailed, perfect reports of your meetings with the others. We won’t go down that road unless it’s absolutely necessary. But I need information.”

“I’m on top of it. Now, tell me, Wiener, what about the science? Have we done it? Did we find what we’re after? Have we marked the integrase enzyme yet?”

For the first time, he allowed a smidgen of a smile to sunny his sombre disposition. “I’ve talked to Largent. He thinks we’ve found the marker. He’ll write up the tests as if they were performed on rats. That requires a certain amount of translation, and after that we’ll pass the data through to Harry Hillier. It won’t be long after that. Harry’s brilliant, he’ll locate the marker and figure out how to exploit it, at least in theory. He’ll think he’s won the Nobel Prize.”

“Maybe he will.”

Honigwachs laughed. “Whatever makes him happy. As long as I come away with about eight billion or more, they can elect him Pope for all I care.”

“You’ll get the check here, rich man? I have to scoot. Carole’s in the car.”

He nodded.

Camille covered one of his hands in hers and leaned very close. “You’re the brains behind all this, Wiener. You set up the science, you set up the money end. Just remember, when the time came to get the job done properly and quickly you needed me. Hang tough. That’s your only job right now. Don’t think such dire thoughts! Everything will work as long as we do what has to be done. One little crisis with Lucy won’t wreck anything.”

She popped up from the booth then, excited by the next challenge. She wrapped herself up warmly and headed out.

She found Carole behind the wheel, pretending to drive, the keys in the ignition, the engine still running. A couple who had emerged from a Dodge Caravan were dismayed, but Camille Choquette murmured, “Lighten up,” under her breath, and rewarded her daughter with a bright, happy smile. Then she discovered that her child had locked the doors.

“Open up, Carole. Open up for Mommy.”

The little girl shook her head and stuck out her tongue.

Camille showed her the grilled cheese sandwich. “Do you want Mommy to throw it in the snow?”

Carole thought about that, and decided in the end that she’d rather unlock the front door. Her mother crawled in and commanded her to jump into the back seat. “Just for that little charade,” Camille told her tersely, “I’m eating your sandwich myself. You’ll just have to starve today.”

That brought on protests and tears, and through it all Camille Choquette, driving away from the restaurant, made exaggerated sounds of pleasure as she consumedthegrilledcheese. “Yummy,”shesaid.

“Yummy, yummy in the tummy.” The little girl pounded her fists against the back of the front passenger seat and wailed and her mother thought that that also was funny. She held up the final bite. Carole ceased her tantrum, hoping that it might be for her. Camille gave her a big smile in the rear-view mirror.
“Pop!”
She laughed, just before the bite vanished into her own mouth, and she chewed extravagantly while the child, astonished, stared at her with teary eyes, too shocked to bawl.

That week, Thursday, February j,
and Sunday, February 6, 1999

The three conspirators decided to meet at Lucy’s house.

For reasons both apparent and unknown, each was wildly suspicious of the others. Andrew and Camille both believed that Lucy would be difficult to manage. She’d be obstinate in the face of any pragmatic proposal if it did not appeal to her intensely passionate nature. For her part, Lucy couldn’t understand how Camille had been able to stick to the format of her job. Yes, she was supposed to examine the lab rats in the field and report her findings, but they were talking about human beings! Found dead and dying! How had she gone about her analytical work, calm and detached, as if detailing the march of a minor flu?

In the past, they had always managed to help people. The sick had been revived. The dying had had their days prolonged and the quality of their life improved. Suddenly, their patients had failed rapidly, succumbing overnight to a catalogue of plagues that relentlessly stalked them, now successfully. Yes, there had always been risks associated with administering untried drugs, but they had always had a beneficial, or at least a benign, result. That Camille had been witness to the carnage and had simply gone on about her work, just
like always, as in the good old days of their successes, disturbed Lucy a great deal.

And Andy, why hadn’t he returned to her room in Baltimore and warned her to stop? How could he have assumed that Luc would do that job? His explanation didn’t wash.

Andy and Camille were leery of one another also. To Andy, Lucy’s passionate conviction to help people made sense, it was true to her nature, but Camille seemed a cold fish to him, aloof. He did not know her well enough to say what motivated her, nor could he evaluate how she’d hold up under pressure. From the beginning, he had accepted her because Lucy did so, he’d gone along with her judgment. That Lucy was now distrustful raised a warning flag.

In turn, Camille distrusted him. She had heard through Honigwachs that he was vaguely linked to organized crime, whatever that might mean, but she also held to a private conviction that the poor boy was in love, and love could be a dangerous tonic to antisocial, criminal behaviour. People had been known to change, go straight, mend their ways to serve the tyranny of love. Even if he was trustworthy, lust or infatuation could distract him, cause him to slip. Camille would watch for any sign of weakness in him.

As Lucy answered Camille’s knock, Andy was coming up the driveway in a rusty blue Chevy. He always seemed to be in a different vehicle. Camille was wearing a cockeyed smile and there were tears in her eyes, and at that signal Lucy did capitulate. The two friends hugged.

“Oh, baby,” Camille whimpered, “this is so terrifying! It’s so awful!” Both women wore jeans, as if their choice of clothes set the tone for the job ahead. It was time to work, to get things done, and to be practical. Nodding, the faces of dead friends they had both known vivid in her head, Lucy gave her pal another fierce hug.

Andrew Stettler was chugging up the stairs to her apartment above the garage. “Good,” he said upon entering, “we’re all here. Let’s get down to it.”

They thrashed things through. Being together proved their desire to tackle their problems as a group, but the discussion unearthed the doubts each had, and those had to be resolved.

“What Lucy’s saying, Andy,” Camille explained, “is that she doesn’t buy it. You left her alone in Baltimore without telling her that she was killing people.”

“Luc would tell her!” Andy protested, not for the first time.

“She doesn’t buy into that theory.”

“Well,” Andy reiterated, appearing contrite, “it’s not a theory. It’s the truth.”

Believing that Andy had been compromised by love, Camille encouraged Lucy to badger him, to see how he might respond. Stettler stood his ground. He had gone down to Baltimore with a job to do.

“I called Camille,” he explained for the fifth time. “Together we decided that things had gotten out of hand. I told Luc, then got on a plane.”

The explanation confirmed for Camille that Andrew Stettler was indeed the source of the leak—he had told Lucy, through Luc, about the deaths. But Camille now had to take into account the part that Luc had played in events, facts she hadn’t been in possession of before. Luc had been treated by Lucy and had quickly failed. Sooner or later, Lucy would have understood the truth for herself, whether or not Andy told her. Sooner, obviously, was proving to be a problem, but telling her had not been fatal, given that she’d had evidence travelling alongside her, in the company of poor Luc. So his indiscretion, under the circumstances, was explainable. As well, Andy had been placed in a tough position, as his own friend was being treated and so was in mortal danger.