Tampa Burn (31 page)

I was tempted to open the new e-mail first. Instead, I forced myself to read them in the order they arrived:

I kept the e-mail as new and saved it to my filing cabinet, wondering about the photographer's carrying case. Why was that so important? When Lourdes mentioned it on the video, I'd considered a couple of vague explanations, but didn't linger long enough to think them through. Maybe the pick-up man would be posing as a photographer. Or . . . a camera case was rugged, durable, which made it ideal if they intended to bury the money until they were sure law enforcement wasn't waiting to nail them. The cases were also shockproof. They could send us down some lonely road and have us throw the case out the window on command.

Tomlinson would be a good one to ferret other possibilities—if he and Pilar ever resurfaced.

I opened the second e-mail.

Maybe because I'd just gotten off the phone with Lourdes, I could hear his voice as I read:

A list of several drugs then followed. I was familiar with only a couple of the names. Because he demanded relatively small quantities, it seemed to support his story that they were needed for a specific operation.

Lourdes' e-mail ended,

I thought to myself:
Lake had to know it's not true. That I said it only to get leverage.

I kept the e-mail as new, then forwarded it to my own business address at Sanibel Biological Supply. If I wanted to send him a question about the drug list, I wanted to be able to do it without going into Pilar's account. As I did, I told myself that Lake understood, hoping the boy was secure enough and smart enough to know I had to play it tough from my end. Even so, it made me feel sick inside—and furious, too.

I'd thought about it before, but now I thought about it again: Praxcedes Lourdes would one day feel a tap on his shoulder and turn to find me standing there, the two of us off all alone.

Imagining the moment displaced the anger, made it fade.

 

 

I began to write a note confirming that I'd received his e-mail, but then stopped. Lourdes wanted a fast response, but it didn't have to be that fast. Why not take a little extra time and maybe think of a way to make my reply work for me? Use it to my advantage if I could.

I knew nothing about several of the medicines he'd demanded, had no idea if I could get them—but Lourdes didn't know that. I decided to do some cursory research. If I sounded authoritative, if I convinced him I knew what I was talking about, maybe it'd give Masked Man a little extra incentive to keep me happy.

There were several common antibacterials on the list. I didn't bother with them. I went to work looking up the medicines that were less common. One was cyclosporine. He wanted five hundred 100 mg capsules, plus 50 mg of cyclosporine for intravenous infusion, packaged in 5 ml sterile ampules.

Another was prednisone. He wanted five hundred 20 mg capsules. He also wanted drugs named ATGAM and Thymoglobulin, and something called OKT3, all in intravenous infusion bags or ampules, plus the needles and tubes required as delivery systems.

Maybe one or all three of these were the experimental medicines he'd talked about.

My impression of Lourdes was that he was vicious and shrewd but poorly educated. This was an extremely sophisticated and detailed list of supplies, and he'd put it together very quickly. Who was he fronting for? Or who was supplying him with data?

Using internet search engines, I began to research the drugs one by one. I started with what might be the experimental types first.

In a medical journal, I read an article about OKT3:

Cadaveric renal transplants? Lourdes wanted the drugs for someone who needed a kidney transplant?

Well . . . not necessarily.

I ran the names of the others. Except for the more common drugs on the list, the rest were antirejection or immunosuppressant drugs. They were medicines administered to patients either during or after receiving a transplanted heart, limb, liver, or lung, a skin graft, or any other procedure where a foreign organ is introduced.

Someone was getting a transplant. Soon, apparently. He needed the most powerful immunosuppressants available.

Ruined organs and lost limbs are not uncommon among battlefield casualties.

But something about the scenario bothered me. I've spent much of my life dealing with the military, and military people. For Lourdes to tell me, an American civilian, that one of their top military people had been wounded and was about to undergo a serious operation seemed to be a terrible breach of security. What kind of army was Balserio running?

If the story was true, not a very good one, I decided.

 

 

 

AT ten minutes until three in the morning, I wrote a note to Lourdes confirming I'd read his demands. I wrote it in English to see how he'd react. If I could get him to reply in what I suspected was his native language, I'd learn a lot more about him:

I read the thing over more than a half a dozen times, wondering if it was too tough. Decided it needed to be tough.

Finally, I inserted the sentence
“Natural history is a familiar topic”
just before the sentence that began,
“This is nonnegotiable . . .”
I hoped Lake would see it; that it would give him the hint he needed.

If he could get outside, or see outside, there were ways for him to tell me where he was geographically. Narrow it down, at least.

I sent the e-mail unsigned.

 

 

I got up, stretched, walked through the breezeway that separates the lab from my house, and peeked through the screen door: Ransom and the black cat were curled up in the chair, dozing. She'd transferred the concoction she'd been creating into a clear glass beaker. It was my smallest Pyrex boiling flask from the lab. A boiling flask has a bulbous bottom and a tubular neck. Filled with the turquoise potion, it was as exotic-looking as a genie's lamp. The flask sat atop my old trans-oceanic shortwave radio—a bizarre combination. Looked like it really could perform voodoo magic.

I wondered how she was going to use the stuff. Did her victims have to come in contact with the goo?

I should have been exhausted, but still felt wakeful, so I decided to make a more careful search of Pilar's e-mail. I didn't know how many times Lourdes or his accomplices had communicated with her via the Internet—I hadn't asked—so there might be more to learn. I returned to the lab, cleaned my glasses, sat at the computer, and began to scan.

Pilar is a methodical woman. She's also extremely private. I was not surprised to discover that she saved many—maybe all—of the e-mails she'd written (for her records, of course), but preserved few of the e-mails she'd received. Nearly everything in her Old Mail file had been deleted. With the exception of several messages from Lake—his
Chamaeleo
address jumped out at me—and a dozen or so others, the file was empty. None had a
Nicarado.org
address, so I went into her Mail Sent file and concentrated on studying the subject headings and addresses there.

Her replies to the kidnappers might well tell me the content of their messages to her.

On Thursday, May 1, the day she discovered Lake missing, she'd written to a lot of people. Same was true of Friday, May 2. The numbers suggested a kind of emotional frenzy. Understandable.

Judging from the recipient addresses, many of the letters had to do with inquiring about travel, contacting the Masaguan counsul general's office, and also arranging for people to look after her private affairs while she was away.

Several were to
Kahlil39.
Her correspondence with him was busy. Not as sappy from her end, but still something serious going on. Subject headings were: “One heart,” “Dear Man.” On the day that Lake disappeared, it was “Desperate!”

I was tempted to actually read one of her earlier letters to him, but that ugly voyeur-guilt stopped my hand on the mouse. I wondered how Kahlil would feel if he knew she'd vanished with one of America's horniest, most sexually active Zen Buddhist monks.

Pilar had even saved the note she'd sent to an ex-lover she now reviled—me. I saw my Sanibel Biological Supply e-mail address; saw the subject heading—“Personal/important”—and opened it so that I could re-read:

It had seemed chilly when I read it then. It seemed chillier now.

Several of the recipients had
Nicarado.org
addresses. That got me excited, but my excitement was wasted. I opened each to find that Pilar was usually replying to a teacher or a librarian who had a public account.

Now I
was
tired. Her stack of sent mail was so lengthy that I decided I'd done enough, and I'd had enough. I'd been awake for slightly more than twenty-one hours—twenty-one very active hours—and so I moved the mouse for a final quick scan of subject headings before signing off . . . and then I stopped, confused . . . then baffled.

On the afternoon that Pilar discovered Lake missing, she had written an e-mail to
[email protected].
The first two words of the subject heading were the same as on her note to me, “Personal/important.” But added to that were three incongruous words: “About our son.”

About our son?

Whose son? Lake,
our
son, was her only child.

Confused, I looked at the top of the page. Maybe I was dopey from exhaustion. I checked to make certain I was still in her Mail Sent file.

Yes, I was.

I checked to see if she was forwarding a letter from someone else.

No.

Had she actually written the e-mail and sent it?

Yes, hers was the source address. The subject heading was Pilar's: “Personal/important about our son.”

One of the first symptoms of shock can be a roaring sound in the inner ear.

Nearly deafened, I clicked on the subject line. Then I opened the e-mail to read what was inside.

IT
was written in English, and the beginning of the letter was very similar to the note that Pilar had written to me:

Its contents then changed dramatically: