by James A Ross
“When his shift was over, he went back there. The house was empty… or at least dark. No one came to the door. Joey said that he walked around the house to see if there were any lights upstairs and while he was in the back he heard a boat pull away from the boathouse. He went down to look. There was no one inside except that fool bird that bit him. He didn’t say if it had both feet. The Chris Craft was gone and so was Billy.
“Your brother says he tore over to the marina and raced out to Wilson Cove in the patrol boat to see if he could catch whatever might still be there. He found the Pearce boat right away and Miss Pearce on board. Alone.”
“Running lights?”
“Dark as sin. The story Miss Pearce told your brother was that she came home when he called, but that her brother seemed to be better and wouldn’t hear about any doctor or hospital. She told Joe that she went down to the boathouse later with some food, and found her brother gone and the place a wreck. She said she could hear the sound of a boat heading out into the cove, running dark. So she took the Chris Craft and went after it. She said she didn’t find it, but thought that whoever it was, was still in the cove somewhere playing possum. So she turned off the boat lights and waited. That’s when your brother showed up in the patrol boat and put the spotlight on her—not on that other boat she says was hiding out there, with Billy still on it… or not.”
Tom paced the tiny room weighing the images in his mind. “Do you believe that story?”
“Of course not. And neither did your brother.”
“I mean his story, Mom.”
CHAPTER 24
Tom handed his driver’s license to the broad shouldered young man with a military haircut whose Chevy Suburban blocked the entrance to the Pearce driveway. “I’m Tom Morgan. A CDC doctor named Dyer asked me to join him down at the boathouse.” The young man made a call on the vehicle’s two-way radio then waved Tom in.
A stubby white trailer sat parked at the edge of a granite seawall, umbilically connected to the Pearce boathouse by a thick, orange power cable. Two men in stenciled windbreakers fiddled with a pair of satellite dishes on the trailer roof. Tom ducked beneath the strip of yellow tape and found the CDC toxologist inside the boathouse watching a periscope of black snorkel make slow figure eights in the shallow end of the empty boat slip. “You must be Tom Morgan,” he said. “I’m Doctor Dyer. My people picked up your brother about a half hour ago.”
“Is he going to be all right?”
Dyer frowned. “Since he’s not dead already, he’s got a good chance. Thankfully, he had the foresight to ask your local hospital to send our agency the medical reports on the fellow who used to live in this boathouse. My colleague recognized a compound in the deceased’s blood as something used by tanners to kill cows in the country he grew up in. It’s called abrin. Your brother is getting the standard course of treatment for ricin exposure, which is the closest compound that we have a protocol for. The next step is to find out where and how he got exposed.”
“I’ve got some ideas on that.”
The doctor gestured toward a stone bench above the seawall. “Let’s sit where I can take notes.”
Tom struggled to organize his thoughts and suppress everything else fighting for space inside a brain that did not have enough juice left to power the processor that was supposed to handle it all: murder, aborted romance, poisoning, impending financial ruin. His head hadn’t touched a pillow in thirty hours. “You’re going to want to talk to a man named Dave Willow,” he heard himself say. “He owns a bio-research company called NeuroGene out on Route 6. Also his former partner, Mike Sharp, and a Dr. Hassad who teaches at the University of Quebec at Montreal.” Tom gave the addresses as best he could remember. “Bring some muscle when you approach Dr. Hassad, if he’s still around.” He explained Hassad’s connection with NeuroGene, his facilitator role in the informal, cross-border dissemination of biological materials and Billy Pearce’s presumed role as an occasional courier.
“This Pearce fellow didn’t work at NeuroGene?”
“No. The NeuroGene owner claims he found Pearce in the company mail room late at night about two weeks ago. He says Pearce refused to explain what he was doing. My guess is he was there to send something out with the rest of the NeuroGene deliveries, or he was picking something up.”
As Dyer scribbled notes, a bandy-legged man wearing a diver’s wet suit waddled up from the boathouse holding a clear Plexiglas box with a pair of rubber gloves fit into one side of it. “Found this next to one of the pilings,” he huffed. “There’s a bunch of cement blocks down there. This was under one of them.”
“How deep is the water where you found it?” asked Dyer.
“Waist high, maybe.”
“That would be about right. Box it up and get it off to the lab.”
“About right for what?” asked Tom.
“For taking something used to kill a single cow and turning it into something designed to kill thousands.”
“Cows?”
“People.” Dyer explained, “One of the reasons there isn’t a lot of data on abrin toxicity is that the compound isn’t toxic in its natural state, which is inside the shell of the rosary pea. The pea is ornamental, and it’s often used in cheap jewelry. The toxic part is inside the shell, and its lethal use to date has been limited to killing cows, one at a time. But if the toxin in the rosary pea can be aerosolized, it could be a mass killer. The manufacturing challenge is that abrin, like anthrax or ricin, is nearly impossible to work with safely outside of a lab environment. It has to be mixed with some sort of carrying agent, and in the process the person doing the mixing and packaging has to be careful not to inhale, ingest or let any of it come in contact with an open cut.”
“And that box solves the problem?”
“If it’s what I think it is, Pearce probably received the ingredients in sealed containers, placed them in the box, immersed the box in water and opened the containers under water inside the box, using the rubber gloves fitted into the side. That way nothing could escape into the air for him to breathe during the mixing and repackaging process. Low-tech, but effective.”
“So how did my brother get exposed?”
“Perhaps Mr. Pearce didn’t fully appreciate the danger of what he was working with. Maybe once or twice he decided to skip the cold swim and do his work inside. He wasn’t a trained scientist, I take it.”
“He barely made it out of high school.”
“If he didn’t follow the procedure and use that underwater mixing contraption, and if he did some of his mixing up there in that boathouse loft, then anyone who has been in there since then could have become infected by any residue that remained there. Your brother told me that he investigated the premises shortly after Pearce’s body was recovered.”
“There’ve been a few people up there since then.”
Dyer eyed Tom’s bandaged head and hands. “You?”
“Last night, or early this morning. I’m not sure of the exact time.”
“Anyone else?”
“Pearce’s sister.”
“The woman who owns this property?”
“Who also works in the NeuroGene lab.”
“I see. Wait here.” Dyer walked over to the trailer and spoke to one of the men standing outside. When Dyer returned, Tom asked, “So you’re saying Pearce could have done all this mixing and packaging down in the boathouse, either under water in that box, or if he got lazy and didn’t follow the procedure, up in the loft?”
“That’s right. And from the autopsy report, it’s obvious he did get lazy.”
“Okay. But he didn’t die from abrin. He drowned.”
“So the autopsy said. But he was a very sick man when he did. Your brother told my colleague who escorted him to the hospital that he saw Pearce just a few hours before he died. The visible symptoms your brother described are consistent with abrin toxicity.”
“Did you find anything that might help identify who killed him?”
“‘Who
,’ is not why I’m here.”
Tom stiffened. Maybe it wasn’t Dyer’s job or nature to care who killed Billy Pearce. But Billy’s Montreal pal was right. No one should die the way Billy did.
“Look, I know that sounds harsh. But person or persons unknown have almost certainly been using this location to assemble lethal compounds for the purpose of committing mass murder. I’m here to find the source of their raw material and seize it.” He folded his notepad. “By the way, a message came through for you up at the command post a few minutes ago. Your brother wants you to call him at the hospital. He says it’s urgent.”
* * *
Tom walked up to the main house, avoiding the two men in stenciled windbreakers guarding the front door. Retrieving a brass house key from a hiding spot that had apparently not changed in a decade, he let himself into the house by the side entrance near the kitchen. Away from prying eyes and ears, he called Joe.
“Right after you left,” Joe rasped. “Called. Wants… to talk to you … about a Gérard Le Pak… , a. k. a. Gérard Bonnefesse.” The words came in groups of three and four, followed by shallow intakes of breath. “Claims… he’s an ‘officier de paix… from the ‘Montreal… Commissariat,’” adding unnecessarily that they meant ‘police inspector’ and ‘police department,’ respectively.
Tom felt a wave of cold seep from his chest and spread through his limbs. “That’s the friend of Billy’s you sent me to see. The one who owned the sex shop and who claimed Billy had found happiness.”
“Found his maker,” Joe wheezed. “He’s dead. One of your cards in his pocket.”
Tom pulled the receiver from his ear, but his brother’s gravelly voice snapped it back like a rubber band. “Grogan and his posse … left here a few minutes ago… looking for you. If you can tell him… how I killed… Bonnefesse… from my hospital bed… he’ll be… grateful, I’m sure.”
Tom started to speak, but Joe kept talking. “Call this ‘officier… de paix’… first before you do… anything else. I don’t need… the Dudley Do-Rights… down here on top… of everything else.”
Tom slumped on the stairs that led from the pantry to the third floor bedrooms, and sat there trying to collect his thoughts. Joe sounded like hell. Worse than even a few hours ago. But he had been gone from the hospital since yesterday evening. Doing what? And from then until he ensconced himself in his office in Town Hall a few hours ago, no one had seen him. That was more than enough time for a round trip to Montreal. Though he didn’t seem to be in any shape to make that kind of trip, or if he did, to do anything strenuous once he got there. And why would he kill Bonnefesse? Frankie, sure. But what motive could Joe have for killing the little Canadian sex shop owner? The unexplained threads through the Coldwater Sheriff had become a web. But unless the story he told to Mary was true, which seemed doubtful, then he’d been lying about almost everything.
Without knowing why, or what he intended to do when he got there, Tom started up the stairs toward the family sleeping quarters. A dozen plus years ago, Susan’s bedroom had been at the end of the doglegged corridor that ran the length of the upper floor. Her parents’ and Billy’s rooms had been in the south wing on the opposite end of the house. Tom was surprised and pleased that he could still navigate the steep passageway without turning on a light or stepping on a creaky board.
Moving quietly along the uncarpeted hall, lined on one side with built-in bookshelves and on the other with six pane, waist-to-ceiling windows, he looked outside and spotted a pair of state troopers pacing the gravel circle. If either of them had looked up, they would have seen him.
The short spur at the end of the hall and the door at its end opened onto the familiar, daisy yellow bedroom with a crow’s nest view of the lake. Three occupants of the White House had come and gone since Tom had last been in this room. He stood for a moment wondering if he might have acted differently on his last visit, if he had known it was going to be so long before he returned.
The room had changed, of course. Gone were the rock star and Women in Science posters, replaced by delicate watercolors and spare ink drawings. But the ambiance remained the same: piles of books and music disks lay everywhere around the overstuffed chair by the dormer window. The sagging four-poster bed gave a familiar wood and metal squeal when he sat on its edge. He picked up the volumes piled on the wicker nightstand: Kipling, Nabokov, a biology text titled Mean Genes and behind them a small pen and ink drawing—almost certainly in Susan’s own hand—of an altar-like rock surrounded by trees and grass.
Tom stared long and hard at the drawing, then lifted it to his face. A strip of blanket peeked from behind the rock and several immature plants fronted it. A stiff, brimmed Smokey the Bear hat anchored the blanket. Tom’s heart accelerated and his breath shortened. You son-of-a bitch, brother.
After a hurried inventory of the room-–looking for what he didn’t know, he pocketed the drawing and hustled down to the library.
Dr. Pearce had been meticulous in his organization of that part of the family book collection that most interested him. Fiction, being largely his wife’s preserve, was scattered among various shelves in the sun room, main sitting room and in the upstairs hallways. Non-fiction, scientific and reference works were gathered in the library and music rooms and organized there by subject and author.
Tom sat with the Peterson Field Guide and the Newcomb Guide to Wildflowers, flipping pages and comparing what he saw there to what Susan had recorded in her drawing. Only when he heard the sound of tires crushing gravel, did he remember Joe’s warning that Paulie Grogan’s troopers were looking for him.
Taking the drawing and reference books, he hustled back to the pantry. Footsteps crunched gravel on the other side of the wall as he passed through the music room, followed by silence as whoever it was stepped off of the path and came to peer through the window. From the game room, he watched a jacketed torso move sideways along the row of windows toward the cypress hedge.
Hurrying down the hall, he arrived back at the pantry just in time to turn the bolt on the outer door. Then retreating to the recess of the covered staircase, he watched as a pair of uniformed trousers rounded the hedge and came down the path. Backing deeper into the stairway, he listened to the sound of a handle being turned and a door shaken in its frame. Sensing but not seeing the figure appear at the window over the steel sink, he moved higher still. The figure tried the window, too. But it was cranked tight.
A torso-shaped shadow moved across the pantry floor and then disappeared in the direction of the shoreline. When it didn’t return, Tom stepped from the covered staircase and approached the window. The man had made his way down the lawn to the boathouse and stopped there to speak with someone fiddling with the satellite dishes on top of the trailer. Tom looked closely at a profile he had not seen in a dozen years, and then not often. But he was pretty sure it was Joe’s former deputy. When Grogan left the trailer and disappeared into the boathouse, Tom returned the house key to its hiding place and then slipped away to look for a half-remembered rock in the woods above Coldwater Lake.
* * *
Forests may be timeless, but they are not changeless. Small trees grow big, big trees die and fall. Grass clearings become populated by shrubs and saplings that block out the sun, kill off the grass and return the clearing to woodlot. Where Tom stopped at the end of an overgrown dirt track, nothing looked the same as he remembered it. How long had it been? Twenty years?
Two listing pillars still marked what had been almost a century ago the entrance to the Barrows estate. The main house that stood at the top of the hill facing west toward the lake had burned to the ground in a mysterious fire shortly after the 1929 Crash. He and Joe had discovered the ruins while still in grade school and had claimed it for themselves and their friends by right of conquest.
The hill was smaller than he remembered. It took less than an hour to climb, not the half day it once had. But the geography was the same. The hill still rose high above town and lake. The distant s
chool fields lay where they always had. Only they seemed closer now.
Joe had said that he ran into Susan while he was out taking inventory of the new spring plantings on Watermelon Hill. Maybe he did. Maybe he changed the locale of the story for good reason. But the rock in Susan’s drawing was here, not there—on the opposite side of town from Joe’s story and too close to civilization for illicit, commercial horticulture.
There was no mistaking the rampart of the make-believe fort where he and Joe had held off invaders with sticks and stones through endless summer afternoons… until the day Joe laid open an invader’s head with a well-aimed rock and they were forbidden to play there again. For a few years they obeyed. But in time, each had apparently made the same discovery—that a soft blanket on warm grass behind a concealing stone, with a panoramic view of the town and lake, was an ideal spot for a post-game picnic and hormone-fueled frolic.
He located the old fort without difficulty. The plants in the drawing were there in front of the long rock, their slightly increased height giving approximate date to the drawing and what it implied. He opened the Newcomb Guide and compared the plants in front of the rock to the ones in the marked pages. With the digital camera he’d liberated from the glove compartment of Joe’s truck, he took a dozen shots. Then gathering books, drawing, camera and thoughts, he drove fast and grim to Coldwater Hospital.
CHAPTER 25
Mary sat in the plastic visitor’s chair by the side of Joe’s hospital bed. A single metal crutch lay on the floor by her side. “Your brother’s not well,” she warned. “No more of this Billy Pearce business.”
Joe looked away and said nothing.
“There’s a guy at the end of the hall talking into his wristwatch,” said Tom. “He’s here to see Joe about ‘this Billy Pearce business,’ too. Little brother would be smart to try out his story here, and get it straight before he has to sell it to the pros.”
