Poison Flower (16 page)

Maloney seemed nervous tonight. He was standing on the balcony, staring out over the parking lot, waiting for Gorman to get out of the shower so he could have his turn. Maloney wasn't a good traveler. The constant motion and long hours seemed to make him tense, and it took him a long time to unwind before he could sleep.

There was a quiet knock on the door, and Maloney charged across the room to answer it. He squinted to look through the peephole. "It's Mr. Martel." Maloney moved his head back and forth to see if their visitor had brought anyone with him, but he realized that looking gained him nothing because he would have to open the door anyway. He pulled the door open wide and said, "Welcome, Mr. Martel." Martel was about forty, but he looked younger, with smooth, unlined skin that was always so evenly tanned it looked almost unreal; thick, dark hair; and a tall, fit body.

Martel brushed past him into the room, then turned and closed the door himself, as though he didn't trust Maloney to do it. "Turn that off."

Wylie sat up and clicked the remote control, and the screen went black. Maloney closed the big sliding window to the balcony, then the curtain. Next he went to the bathroom door, opened it a few inches, and called, "Mr. Martel is here." After a couple of seconds the shower stopped. While they were waiting for Gorman to appear, Maloney seemed to feel he had to fill the silence. "I was watching the parking lot but I didn't see you pull in."

Martel looked as though he had never before realized what a moron Maloney was, and the realization was painful to him. He went and sat down in the armchair in the corner of the room. It was the only place in the room for a person to sit with any sort of dignity, so Maloney stood. After a few more seconds a damp Gorman emerged from the bathroom wearing a white terry-cloth bathrobe with the hotel's logo embroidered on the chest. He sat on the bed beside Wylie.

Martel said, "I understand that you discovered that the woman who got Shelby out of the courthouse is worth something."

"Yeah," said Wylie. "We were amazed. As soon as we realized she'd pulled it off, we grabbed her off the street. Maloney and Gorman pretended to be cops. We figured she could tell us where Shelby had gone."

"So"

"She wouldn't. First she jumped out of the car screaming for help, so all Maloney could do was act like a cop and shoot her in the leg. After the doctor patched her up we started working her over to get her to talk. We beat her up, burned her, shocked her, got ready to cut her, and she said nothing. Zero. I was curious about her, so I sent out some e-mails to guys I know, describing her and saying what she'd done. I got two answers right away, and two more a day later."

"What guys" Martel said it with a hint of irritation.

"I never let anybody know who I was working for, or what we were doing."

"I asked what guys."

"One is a private detective, only he lost his license. His name is Jack Killigan. He still works for some of his old clients, and he's done some searching for people. He gets so he knows who's worth finding. Another is Van Springer. He works as a go-between who buys things for people. One time it will be a clean car or a few guns, another time it's something else. Sometimes he gets asked to find somebody in particular. Another is a guy named Hosper, a bounty hunter."

"Okay. I get the idea. What did they say"

"That when we got this one we hit the lottery."

"Really"

"Yes. We just wanted to know where Shelby would be headed. When she wouldn't talk I thought if we found out where she was from, we could look there. But both these guys said they had clients who would pay seven figures for her. About five hours later, two more were sniffing around. Then I got an e-mail from a guy I didn't even know. He runs a big security company."

Martel said, "This is really interesting, Wylie. You amaze me sometimes. Most of the time you don't. When were you going to tell me about this woman"

"I did tell you."

"You told me after she got away. You had already started negotiating with all these buyers. You were going to sell her yourself."

"No," said Wylie. "I wasn't. I was just trying to find out what we had on our hands, so I could give you the whole story."

Martel stared at Wylie for a few seconds, not glaring, but looking at him calmly and evenly. Then he said, "We have a different situation today. You don't have him or her, and I want them both. They're probably together again by now. I assume they don't know that we've got his sister's new address-or even that we know he has a sister."

Wylie looked uncomfortable. "Well, yes. The woman knows that we know there's a sister. When we had her, I said if she didn't talk we'd get the sister to talk."

Martel slowly shook his head. "Then if you know where the sister is right now, why the fuck are you in a hotel in Chicago instead of on the way to her"

"We've been on the road for days, after cleaning up the place where we had her, and we were tired, dirty, and hungry for a decent meal. We'll do better if we feel better."

"Wylie. I want you to remember that the reason you're chasing around the country is that you fucked up. Repeatedly. Now you know the address, and here you are, resting up. I'm astonished. I'm sure you know that if you go up there and get Shelby and this woman, there will be a big payday for all three of you. I want her alive, and him dead. If you don't succeed, I'm done with you. I'm giving you a way to fix your mistakes."

Martel sat in the armchair staring at Wylie. Then he slowly moved his head to look at the other two. "Are you waiting for something"

Wylie said, "You want us to leave now"

Martel said, "Can you possibly think I don't"

The three men hurried around the room picking up clothes they had thrown on the floor, filling their pockets with keys, wallets, and change they had left on the furniture. "As soon as you're ready you can just go. Leave your room keys and I'll check out for you."

He waited in silence while they finished putting their belongings into suitcases and headed out the door. When they were gone he stood up, went to the window, and waited until he saw their blue Crown Victoria pull away from the building and drive to the exit from the parking lot onto the highway. He put the three room key cards in his pocket and went to the door.

It was these small, day-to-day decisions that made the difference between them and him. They avoided extending themselves if there was any discomfort, let themselves be distracted, stopped trying the minute they felt they'd expended exactly as much effort as they had to.

It depressed him that he had to pay men like these to solve problems for him. Eleven years ago he had started his business with the idea of never doing anything that would attract the attention of the authorities. That would allow him never to hire criminals. But here he was, years later, with not only these three but nine more on his payroll-a dozen men who were engaged in applying various levels of force to protect his interests.

He'd had the simplest sort of business plan. He had started a medical supply company and given it a name that sounded old and established. In order to have merchandise, he would induce a young salesperson from a pharmaceutical company to sell him medical drugs. He specialized in the obvious ones-Oxycontin, methadone, morphine, Vicodin, Valium, and a few others that were in such high demand he could charge huge markups and sell them instantly. For eleven years he had been an enormously successful drug dealer without ever having to step on a dark street or deal with anyone who used drugs.

He always paid the pharmaceutical company's bill on time. That kept the salesperson in the clear and the pharmaceutical company happy. He would produce paperwork that listed small resales to a large number of genuine hospital pharmacies, clinics, medical groups, and universities. The government looked closely at every prescription written for drugs like these. The prescription had to be written by an MD personally on a numbered prescription slip that carried the doctor's medical license number. But no prescriptions were ever written. In theory, the drug just stayed locked up in these institutional facilities for years. The hospital pharmacists had never ordered or received any of these drugs, so they never wondered where the drugs went. The drugs never got onto an inventory, so they were never reported missing.

Martel's companies never had his name on them. The officers and managers were all doctors. One of his brilliant observations that made his business possible was that it was absolutely futile to go to mature, practicing physicians and present them with a scheme to make extra money. They had money. And the ones who were corruptible were already working schemes of their own and didn't need a partner.

Instead Martel sought out very young doctors, men and women still in medical school or interning. Some were still paying tuition or huge student loans. If they agreed to be on the board of one of his companies, they would receive good pay for doing very little. They might notice at some point that their names appeared on other papers-on the letterhead of company stationery, or even as a signatory of a letter. But they would not know that their credentials were being used to get the company licensed to handle narcotics. After three or four years, the young doctor might move on to another part of the country and forget the relationship, but Martel's companies would not forget him.

Martel had operated some of the companies for as long as eleven years without raising much suspicion. The only way the authorities might find discrepancies was by comparing sales data from the giant pharmaceutical manu-facturers with the records of the hospital pharmacies to which Martel supposedly had sold small amounts of a drug, a form of check that seldom happened. When it did happen, he could produce receipts or drugs on demand. He knew that given the tiny amounts of drugs involved and the age of some of the orders, the authorities would see no point in an investigation.

Whenever it seemed to him that questions were about to be asked, he would dissolve the company or have another company he owned buy it and take over. On some occasions he had even made a show of turning over unsold drugs to the local authorities to be destroyed. When he did that, the bottles were full, but not necessarily full strength. At times he had such quantities of narcotics going through his companies that he could have made a fortune just diverting the number of bottles and pills that would constitute normal breakage from shipping that never took place.

He loved the business. It not only had made him rich but it had also brought him women. Pharmaceutical sales reps were nearly all young, attractive women. To them he was a very important customer. Unlike many of their other customers he was male, unmarried, only slightly older than they were, and unfailingly interested in them. He also traveled from city to city, where he met lots of other women who knew only that he was a rich, handsome man who had something to do with medicine.

Today he had changed his itinerary to stop in Chicago because he had sensed Wylie and the others needed to be reminded to be afraid of him. He had sent them out to kill Shelby-to finish killing him, really. Shelby was only a mild concern, but Martel hadn't forgotten him. Martel had made sure Shelby was convicted of the death of his wife, but having him in a jail cell was simply not enough. Every year criminals were released on appeals, new evidence was found, lawyers were declared incompetent. There was no reason for Daniel Martel to live with that risk-or any risk. Shelby was like a bee that had been swatted but hadn't died yet. More than one bee like that had staged enough of a recovery to sting.

This woman was something else. Wylie didn't seem to have fully understood what he'd had, and he'd gotten careless enough to let her escape. If there were four people who didn't know each other but knew who she was and wanted to bid millions for her, then there might be eight, or twenty. But Wylie was a man of action-another term for a fool. He had acted to get an auction going without first thinking through all of the implications.

Martel left the hotel and drove toward Midway Airport. He felt depressed when he had to think about men like Wylie. Having just two or three of them was enough to keep all of the pharmaceutical reps and interns and bookkeepers from becoming troublesome. But he had learned that he couldn't stop there. He'd had to hire a second set of three to serve as a threat to the first set. Then he'd needed to hire another six to counter the first six. He had forced himself to stop at a dozen. But he sometimes implied to each of them that there might be another dozen, or an unknowable number, waiting for them to cause problems and be annihilated.

9.

Jane woke at three a.m. leaning against the passenger door and sat up. She looked at Shelby beside her, then at Iris lying behind her on the back seat. "Time for my turn at the wheel," she said. They traded places and she drove for a time, then looked at Shelby. "This is a great time to sleep. In a couple of hours there will be bright sunlight coming through the windshield."

"It's taking me a while to wind down. There are too many days behind me when I would have given anything to be outside and watch the telephone poles going past."

"Iris is asleep. Are you in the mood to talk"

"Sure."

"I'm sorry about bringing Iris without giving you a chance to refuse. Iris is a good person in a lousy situation, and she needs a little help. And she'll help us, too. Unlike us, she can walk in any door without fear of being recognized."

"I understand," he said. "If you trust her, I do. Things happen, and we have to adjust."

"Things happen is right. I had expected that you and I would have to elude the police. I didn't imagine that the people who framed you would be there, too. Tell me what you know about them. Who are Wylie, Gorman, and Maloney"

"I have no idea. I know the names Wylie, Gorman, and Maloney because you told me. I can only guess they must be friends of the man who killed my wife."

"What about him-the man who killed your wife"

"Almost nothing. I know that he was living with her for a while. I saw some of his clothes left in a closet."