Into the Inferno (29 page)

Later, we made love one last time. It was as gentle as a whisper at a wedding.

And then I was asleep.

I’d had a lot of stress along with a series of long days. Or maybe it was a guy thing. You had sex. You nodded off. Or . . .

Maybe my time was up.

55. HERE’S THE KICKER

Everything appeared to be shaking.

It took a few moments to realize it wasn’t an earthquake, that somebody was jiggling the bed. My ears were ringing or I would have identified the sound sooner. A woman crying.

I was on my back, the blankets tight around me, as if I’d been tucked in by a mortician. When I lifted my head ever so slightly, I spotted our baby-sitter, Morgan Neumann, hands clasped in front of her, standing at the foot of the bed, tears staining her pale cheeks. Stephanie was beside me, one arm thrown across my chest as if playing out an Elizabethan melodrama.

When I reached out and touched her hair, Stephanie stopped crying and crawled higher on the bed, kissing my cheek repeatedly. Still sniffling, she laid her head on my shoulder.

“Oh, God. I tried so hard to wake you. I even stuck a pin in you. I’m sorry.”

“You can take it out now.”

“It was just a little prick.”

“Just like me.”

“Don’t joke around, Jim. I know ten or fifteen more hours aren’t all that much, but I was counting on every one of them.”

I might have climbed out of bed, but I was naked and Morgan was watching. “Hey, Morgan. What are you doing here?”

Wiping her wet cheeks with the sleeve of her shirt, she said, “I was going to sit with the girls.”

“Sit with the girls? Where were you going, Steph?”

“Morgan, would you mind waiting in the girls’ room?” After Morgan was gone, Stephanie said, “I’m going to Canyon View.”

“Alone?”

“I thought you were . . .” She kissed me. “I talked to a librarian at the North Bend Library who said Achara had been there until closing. Know what she was doing?”

“Tell me.”

“Sitting in front of that big wall of picture windows. Sitting and staring at the mountain for hours. Does that sound like a woman researching a problem?”

“That sounds like a woman trying to make a decision.”

“That’s exactly what I thought. You don’t think she took the gasoline to your house and torched the place, do you?”

“I think she was deciding whether or not to betray her employer. Donovan must have caught wind of her intentions.
He
drove her to the gas station, gave her some song and dance about needing the gasoline can filled up, then took her out to my house and did whatever he had to do to make it happen. Knocked her out. Strangled her. Dragged her inside. Poured gas all over. Remember how surprised Donovan was when he saw us last night? He thought he killed us—or me at least—in that fire.”

“Then he’s the one who left the note on the door of the fire station. He had some woman call the fire investigators and leave those messages.”

“That’s what I think,” I said.

“I can’t believe he would do that. I can’t believe my aunt had anything to do with this.”

“Maybe she doesn’t know about it. You said she hasn’t been in charge that long.”

“When you met my aunt at Tacoma General, did you tell her about the syndrome, that there were other people who had it in addition to Holly?”

“I told her there were people in North Bend going down. She could have figured out the rest—”

“—If she already knew about the syndrome and what causes it.”

I threw the covers off and swung my feet over the side of the bed. “I’m going. You stay here.”

“You don’t know what to look for.”

“You stay here with—”

“You want to get stubborn? You’ve come to the factory. There is no possible scenario where I stay.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing . . . I already paid the baby-sitter.”

We looked at each other for half a minute. I could love this woman like I’d never loved any woman. I could love her until we were both a hundred and five. I could love her until the earth crumbled. “At the first sign of trouble, I want you out of there.”

“I never bail out. It’s my trademark.”

“At the first sign of trouble. That’s an order. As the designated guardian of my children.”

“Okay. Yes, sir. You feel strong enough to do this?”

“I’ll make it.”

56. EXCEPT FOR BURGLARS AND LOCKSMITHS

After ten minutes of driving around the wooded neighborhood, we ascertained that Canyon View was locked but empty, found a strip mall abutting the back of the property, parked the Pontiac behind a row of buildings, shimmied up a rockery, and climbed a low fence. Below us was the roof of the strip mall, which consisted of ten or twelve single-story occupancies fronting a busy thoroughfare.

Stephanie produced a five-battery flashlight and other paraphernalia from a small gray bag. “Where’d you get all that stuff?” I said.

“I went to a store down the street from the hotel while you were sleeping.”

“A burglar store?”

“Yeah.”

Blundering through the darkness, we found a culvert with a small stream trickling along the bottom of it, then a natural embankment at the top of which was a Cyclone fence with a sign, red lettering on a white background:
PRIVATE PROPERTY—KEEP OUT—VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED
. The fence was far enough from the road that we could no longer hear the occasional car, nor see the glow of lights from the auto dealership across the street.

Stephanie had brought latex gloves for both of us, along with an assortment of tools: a small pry bar, flashlight, wire cutters, duct tape, and a screwdriver. I climbed the fence and used the wire cutters to sever the razor wire running along the top, cutting my thumb in the process.

Managing to get both of us over the fence and onto the Canyon View campus without further bloodshed, we worked our way through the trees and past the elephant-sized rhododendrons. I think at that point we both felt a little like Alice in Wonderland. What we were attempting was so far from our normal lives, it didn’t seem real. But then, nothing seemed real these days.

We came to the smaller building first, two dark stories with a small loading dock on one side, a shipping and receiving facility.

The next building was the size of a small college campus administration building. All the lower windows were wired for security. Stephanie tried one of the back doors while I tromped through the flower bed along the wall of the building and searched for an unsecured window.

I couldn’t shake the feeling the Redmond police were about to come barreling around the corner and arrest us.

If there was one thing I knew, it was breaking into buildings. Except for burglars and locksmiths, firefighters broke into buildings more often than anybody. An ordinary residence had a door most firefighters could kick in with their boot or, at the least, one they could jimmy with a Halligan tool. You could also take an ax and knock off the lock, remove the guts, and kick in the door. We didn’t have a Halligan tool or an ax, and the doors on this building were built to withstand an atomic blast. Even if they weren’t, there would be a security system in place that would trigger an alarm if we broke in.

I sat on a small cookie-cutter concrete curb that ran around a flower bed to think things out. After a while, I heard some clicking. I turned around and found Stephanie fumbling with the door. “What are you doing?”

“There’s a number pad here. If we could only figure it out.”

Just below the knob was a numerical code pad with ten buttons lined up vertically. “Try seven, five, four, zero.”

She punched the numbers, pushed the door open, and gave me an astonished look. “How did you know that?”

“Isn’t that your aunt’s birthday?”

“Oh, you’re a genius.” I stepped inside in front of her. “Wait a minute. She wasn’t born in July. She wasn’t even born in 1940.”

“She wasn’t?”

“No.”

“You have your cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“We get separated, go straight to the car and get out of Dodge. I’ll call you later, and you can pick me up.”

“I’m going to stick with you.”

“No dice. We’ve already been over this. First sign of trouble: run.”

“Why don’t we just both go to the car?”

“I’m telling you the way it’s going to be.”

“Okay.”

“One more thing. When I’m gone—” She touched her fingers to my lips in an attempt to stop me. “However it happens with me, I want you to open yourself up to the world. Marry if you find someone who you can love and who’ll be a good father to the girls. I want you happy. I want the girls to have a family. They deserve it. You deserve it.”

“Oh, Jim.”

“Maybe after a couple of years you could shoot some air into my veins. You don’t have to promise or anything, but it would be nice if I knew I wasn’t going to spend four decades staring at a lightbulb thinking it was God.”

On that cheerful note, we tugged on our latex gloves and commenced burgling.

57. A STACK OF LETTERS FROM A DEAD MAN

In the atrium by the reception desk a smattering of red, yellow, and violet floor lights shone from the bottom of the shallow fish pool, but most of the light in the building came from street lamps outside in the parking area.

We checked Margery DiMaggio’s offices upstairs, her old office, which was unlocked and filled with cardboard boxes, and then her new office, which was locked but which had glass in the door, an unlikely amenity for such a security-conscious company.

Knocking out the glass with the pry bar, I reached inside, unlocked and opened the door to the smell of fresh paint. The spacious office suite had oak furniture and a tall oak cabinet at one end of the room.

The cabinet turned out to be a bar. Cognac seemed to be the drink of choice here. I took a sip of soda water and looked around while Stephanie riffled through the papers in her aunt’s desk. The file cabinets were unlocked. Switching on a small lamp, I pawed through them and found routine business mail, records of meetings, financial statements, copies of letters concerning various research grants, letters to vendors, bids for work on the campus, contracts for janitorial service, letters to universities asking about various metallurgy projects and research.

“Most of this is personal,” Stephanie said, slamming a desk drawer angrily. “Pictures from her trips to Hong Kong. A boyfriend in New York City. I didn’t know she was seeing anybody. Some married guy, works for
Scientific American
. What’d you find?”

“Nothing pertinent.”

It was a luxurious office, designed to display power and ease. It even had its own adjoining sitting room and spacious shower facility with sauna, both with separate exits leading to the corridor. I went to the window and gazed out at the parking area below. The trees directly in front of the building had been cut down so that from this office and the one on either side the view was unimpeded as far out as the dark guard kiosk by the street.

“Hey. Check this out,” Stephanie said. “There’s a folder on some guy named Armitage got fired for embezzlement. He wrote them a letter about my uncle’s death. Claims Phil DiMaggio got sick downstairs in the lab and died the next day.”

“Is that true?”

“They told me he was driving down I-405, got into a road rage thing with some other driver, had a heart attack, and drove himself to Overlake Hospital. Armitage claims he got sick from chemicals he was handling. Apparently, he’s been making this allegation for a while, because he says here: ‘Despite your assurances to the contrary, I cannot help but feel Dr. DiMaggio’s demise can’t be directly attributed to anything other than the materials he was working with on the twelfth of October. Nor can it anymore be deemed a coincidence or an accident that Ms. Janet Beechler, who had been in the room when Dr. DiMaggio was handling said materials, suffered a fatal automobile accident the night following his death.’ ”

“A fatal accident? You think they were killing witnesses two years ago right here in Redmond?”

“Could be sour grapes; they’d already fired Armitage when he wrote this letter.” Stephanie glanced back at the papers. “Here’s a letter from my aunt saying Beechler’s car accident happened because she was distraught over her boss’s death. She says they had the best physicians in the Northwest caring for her husband. That he had a bad heart. I don’t know if that’s true, but why bother to answer a crank letter from a man you’ve just fired for embezzlement? The next set of letters are copies of letters to Armitage from Canyon View’s attorneys. They’d apparently threatened to turn evidence of embezzlement over to the Redmond Police Department if he didn’t go away. I wonder if Armitage was talking about Uncle Phil’s death
before
he got fired.”

Stephanie handed me a newspaper clipping. “This would have been four weeks later.”

Puyallup Man Dies in Car Wreck

Last night at 2:20 a.m. witnesses saw a tan and gray Bronco leave the roadway on I-405 and roll down an embankment, where it burst into flame. By the time the fire department reached the Bronco, it was too late to rescue the occupant, who died at the scene. The driver was William Atherton Armitage, 42, of Puyallup. Police said the vehicle had a number of empty alcohol bottles inside. It was not immediately known whether Armitage had been drinking.

A spokesperson from Canyon View Systems, Armitage’s employer until last week, said Armitage had been distraught over the death of a coworker and had recently lost his position at the company amid a flurry of charges and countercharges involving the theft of $300,000 from the firm.

“There’s more. She’s got files on five former employees who are all either dead or in nursing homes. All . . . yeah . . . two are dead and three are in nursing homes. It doesn’t say what’s wrong with them, but I have their ages. Twenty-seven, thirty-three, and thirty-five.”

“Not your normal nursing home clientele.”

“Neither was my sister. Neither are you.”

“A nursing home’s not a bad way to go. Especially if they serve you pudding every day.” I made an idiot face. I was getting pretty good at it.

“Stop it.”

I’d noticed industrial eyewash stations in the hallways. Also, Marge DiMaggio’s shower was no ordinary shower facility. There were three stalls, each separated by a berm and a wall, so that an individual could step from one to the next, working his or her way down the line. At the end of the row there was a stack of operating-room blues, face masks, and a box of latex gloves. It was the same type of wash-down arrangement the fire department would construct to run people through after a hazardous materials exposure.

“Check this out,” Stephanie said, calling me into the main room. Near the office door, she switched on an ultraviolet lamp. The room lit up, but not by much. “Remember black lights? What do you think this is for?”

“So they can paint each other with phosphorescent finger paints and run around in the dark nude?”

Stephanie was not amused. I was getting goosey. My time was running out, and instead of becoming more and more nervous, I was looser than I’d ever been. Almost slap-happy. It was as if I were inebriated.

Downstairs, we found enough eyewash fountains and shower facilities to clean up a rugby team. We broke into three more offices and found work areas—labs, chemicals, machinery, spectrographs, a miniature smelter in a room with concrete walls. All of it was tidy. All of it was ready for a white-glove inspection by a prospective buyer.

Stephanie found the labs fascinating, flipping through notebooks she found and examining the high-tech equipment. We broke into several locked cabinets, but they contained nothing but standard lab supplies.

If we were right, these bastards had infected innocent people from Tennessee to Washington State and now were covering their tracks like a blind cat burying shit. Ironically, there were
SAFETY FIRST
signs in every corridor.

Stephanie had turned on the lights and was peering into a microscope. I could tell by the way she gripped the dustcover, she was nervous as hell.

I said, “Let’s go back to your aunt’s office.”

“I want to look around here. This is where they work. There’s got to be something.”

Somewhere in the building a telephone rang. We looked at each other, and Stephanie stopped breathing. The phone rang eight times before it stopped. “A telemarketer,” I said.

“At eleven o’clock at night?”

I shrugged. “I’ll be upstairs. Somebody shows up, you scream. I’ll do the same.”

“Sure you will.”

Upstairs in DiMaggio’s office, I circled the room trying to figure out what was bothering me. They had to be keeping it on the premises, in either this building or the one we’d bypassed outside. They had to have a substance that turned people into zombies. A product potent enough that they maintained shower facilities on all three floors. A product that might be neutralized with something as simple as soap and water—for I’d found nothing else in any of the showers. Where would they keep this product? Better yet, where would they keep an antidote for it?

Sitting with my feet on DiMaggio’s desk, I paged through the letters Stephanie had unearthed. I’d been there a few minutes when visions of Achara’s charred corpse popped into my head. It was hard to put something like that completely out of mind, particularly if the victim was someone you’d known and liked. Achara had taken a risk giving me those numbers. The first series had been the combination to the keypad on the downstairs door, but what about the second series?

Without consciously thinking about it, I walked across the room to the liquor cabinet, went into the bathroom behind the wall, and found a void behind the cabinet. I’d seen it earlier but hadn’t guessed the significance.

It took a few minutes to figure out that the liquor cabinet was on wheels and that moving it to one side would expose a tall gray door to a hidden vault. Somehow Achara had known I might be here before the week was out.

In giving me the combination to this vault, if indeed that’s what the numbers were, she’d accurately gauged the urgency of my desperation as well as the depth of her employer’s obfuscation. There had to be something in here she needed on a regular basis, something Achara needed to access when the boss wasn’t available.

Sixteen years of memorizing Scripture finally paid off in something more meaningful than being able to take down women’s phone numbers without a pen and pad.

18-24-18-63-08-46.

I worked the dial carefully and at the end of my troubles heard nothing. If I’d dialed the correct combination, there had been no confirming click to acknowledge it.

However, when I pulled on it, the heavy vault door swung wide.