So she uttered the words that would change her life.
“Could you tell him Paige Stephens called? He has my number.”
***
“Yeah.” Del didn’t look up from the scattered paperwork on his desk. “Come in.”
“This one bothers me, Del,” Sol Hirshtein, the county coroner, said as he stepped through the office doorway. He and Del had shared a lot over the past years – decomposed bodies well gnawed by coyotes, traffic-accident dismemberments, and the one that had brought them both to tears, a three-year-old suffocated in a freezer whose forehead was swollen black from his attempts to head-butt his way to fresh air.
“I’d say something is up,” Del leaned back in his chair, webbed his fingers behind his head. “Otherwise you’d have just faxed in the report. What is it?”
“First of all, it wasn’t a heart attack. Like you figured, he’d been juiced by scorpions.”
Del snorted. “Find a couple of crushed scorpions in his sleeping bag; says enough.”
Sol shook his head. “That’s where it gets interesting.”
“Yeah?”
“Not so fast, Del. Just for kicks, tell me what you know.”
By this time, Sol was sitting opposite Del’s desk. Sol didn’t look like he belonged in a chair. Skinny to the point of angular with dark eyes and beard just beginning to gray, he had a permanent stoop from his years over the autopsy table. Unlike Del, Sol leaned forward, anything but casual. The faint smell of formaldehyde filled the space between them.
“Well, his ID checks. Fellow by the name of Roberto Enrico. Dr. Roberto Enrico. From the address book in his gear, it didn’t take much to track down his only living relative. An aunt. She lives in North Dakota. Says he’s a research doctor. Wasn’t exactly sure in what – something to do with worm’s genes.”
Sol lifted an inquiring eyebrow.
“Yeah, I wondered too. This old bat rambled a lot. Like she was glad for the excuse to talk to someone. By the time we got through all of this, I managed to decipher that Enrico had spent the last year in South America, researching at some university in Rio. One of his letters – and she was going to read each one word for word over the phone – mentioned something about a vacation in this area. It fits with the airline tickets we found in his knapsack.”
“Hmmph.”
“Hmmph?”
“I went over his body real close, Del. Once I got the hang of what I was looking for, they weren’t difficult to spot.”
“They?”
“Puncture wounds. Scorpion flicks its tail, jabs the stinger just below the skin. Near as I can tell, he’d rolled through an entire nest. And you only found two scorpions.”
Del was silent for the several moments it took him to clue in to the significance of his colleague’s statement. “What got you looking him over so close?”
Sol smiled. “Knew you’d pick up on that. I found abrasion marks on his wrists. Or what might have been abrasion marks. If someone had tied him, and I couldn’t swear to it in court, it was someone who did his best to hide the fact. Maybe used wide strips of soft cloth.” Sol paused. “One other thing. It may be insignificant. Two of Enrico’s toes showed multiple fractures and fresh healing – like they’d been crushed in the last six months.”
“Interesting,” Del said.
“It’s your call,” Sol told him. “You’ll see all of this in my report as speculation. It could have just as easily happened the way it seems. Maybe all those scorpions did nest in his sleeping bag. He crawls in at night, thrashes around, crushes a couple, and the rest escape. You’d have to first convince me scorpions travel in packs. I’m no expert, but I thought they were solitary creatures.”
***
Del was reading through Sol’s report – the odor of formaldehyde hadn’t yet cleared the office – when his phone rang.
“Five, eight, three, four,” the voice said.
Del straightened. The code was right. But the voice was wrong. Careful. Modulated. Not strained and hoarse. Del hesitated.
“Five, eight, three, four,” the new voice repeated. “Confirm immediately.”
Del spoke the last four digits of his phone number.
“Good. What have you to report since the last sighting?”
“Nothing.” Del had been prepared to give this answer. It helped that the hospital list truly had given him nothing.
“If something arises, you will keep the media away.”
What gives? Del wondered. He’d already been through this with the freak. Had spooksville’s chain of command been compromised?
Sudden sweat.
If something had happened to the first spook, where were the photographs that hung over Del’s head like a piano from a thread?
“Have the instructions changed'?” Del asked.
“No. Definitely not.”
“Then the media will be kept away. All other steps will be followed.” Del took what satisfaction he could from the insolence he could project.
A long silence followed. So long Del wondered if he’d pushed too far. Or if the connection had been broken. There was no hiss to betray a cellular phone on the other end.
“Your department may find a dead tourist in the desert,” the voice finally said. “There was no foul play. You do understand.”
“I’ve already been given official paperwork that says otherwise.”
“Too bad for you,” the precise voice said. “You will find a way to shuffle it out of sight.”
“It’s not that easy,” Del said. He noticed he was arguing, something he’d never dared with the freak,
“It will be easier than dealing with certain other files. Or photographs. Remember that.”
The phone went dead.
Del set the receiver down very carefully.
He loathed this situation. Not only did he have to find a way to waive a murder investigation, but this also clearly showed that spooksville was behind it.
If he could pull himself away from the blackmail...
He picked up the receiver and punched in a number.
“Silverton here,” he barked. “It’s been three hours. Don’t you have anything yet on Slater Ellis from Montana DMV?”
***
Zwaan didn’t like heat. Or clamoring noise. Or dust. Or people. Or sickness and disease. The African refugee camp had it all.
He felt punished by jet lag. His trip had begun with two hours from Los Alamos back to San Diego to rid himself of the doctor. Well over five hours from there to D.C., babysitting the general’s iced liver. Zwaan had then hitched a ride on a military flight from D.C. to a U.S. Air Force base in Germany, then on to Goma here in Zaire.
Little more than a hundred yards away, confiscated guns, grenades, and ammunition – taken from Rwandan government soldiers as they fled into Zaire – lay stacked in piles at the border crossing. Within the border, in all directions, fly-ridden bodies were bunched in small mounds, as if there was some comfort in shared death. Some had died from thirst and exhaustion. Others had fallen to mortar shells lobbed from the Rwanda side only hours earlier or had died in the ensuing stampedes. All of the bodies had been pushed aside to clear paths through the refugee camp.
Zwaan walked past dazed survivors, kicking through the remnants of their meager belongings, hoping little dirt would collect in the cuffs of his pants. Around him, refugees picked through the debris for anything of use. Spilled beans from a broken pot. High-top shoes from a twisted, dead body. A dented canteen.
Distant, sporadic rifle shots broke through the wailing, screaming, crying, and begging – U.S. troops could not be everywhere, and away from them, Zairian soldiers and police were methodically robbing the more prosperous refugees at gunpoint, Firing into the air to intimidate.
During any chaos and discomfort, Zwaan would gingerly reach into his mind, as he did now, for the one fantasy he occasionally permitted himself. Someday, his face would be unblemished, his vocal cords replaced. How would it feel, then, to sit among people and
not feel like an object of horror or pity or disgust? To look in a mirror and not feel the urge to turn away? He needed to be whole in appearance, and that would only happen with Van Klees’s help. So he would drive himself to help Van Klees in return, even if it meant subjecting himself to this squalor.
Two U.S. soldiers trailed Zwaan. Neither was more than a teenager, barely out of boot camp. Rwanda was a peacekeeping gig. While they did watch carefully for Zairian soldiers, neither expected trouble from the people who reached out for them, clawing air with arms and fingers reduced to bones covered with loose skin. They did, however, keep an instinctive uneasy distance from Zwaan. Unlike them, he was not carrying a .45 caliber M3 machine gun, yet each soldier, if forced to admit it, felt edgy around the monster.
Later, out of his earshot, they’d trade comments and nervous laughter, but for now, they would do as he requested. Not only did they have verbal orders from their commanding officer to help him, but the frightening man was also part of the International World Relief Committee. In their first days here, they’d seen and learned enough about human pain and hopelessness to age them a dozen years. Helping the monster, futile as it might be in the face of tens of thousands of refugees, still provided them a salve.
Ahead of them, a Red Cross jeep swerved to stop beside a bleeding boy. A relief worker – gray-faced with fatigue – lurched from the backseat, bent over the boy, then lifted him into the jeep.
Zwaan ignored the vehicle and pointed past it at a woman wrapped in a once-colorful sarong.
“Her,” Zwaan told the soldiers without looking back. “She will be the First. See if she speaks English. If not, I still want her.”
The boy soldiers looked at each other and shrugged. They had their orders.
They moved to the woman, stepping around two small girls who clung to each other, so dehydrated their weeping was without tears.
“English?” the first soldier asked. The woman stared at him sightlessly. Nothing in her eyes or slack face showed hope. “Understand English?”
She didn’t respond. Each soldier took one of the woman’s elbows and gently guided her back to the rough road where Zwaan waited.
“Let go of her,” Zwaan said. “If she cannot follow on her own, I don’t want her.”
He began to walk again. Another dozen steps and he pointed to a man who held a dead baby to his chest.
“Him too,” Zwaan commanded with an expert eye for the man’s resilience. “Force him to leave the baby behind.”
Zwaan continued, taking a zigzag path as he wandered through the refugee camp. He chose judiciously. Each refugee added to the parade was healthy enough to walk unaided, despondent enough to follow the soldiers’ motioned directions without resistance. Occasionally Zwaan pointed at a couple, but usually at single men or women, and all who joined the parade were young adults – “mature animals” Zwaan called them in his mind.
When Zwaan finished an hour later, he and the two soldiers had a chain of thirty-eight refugees – two of whom spoke English, all but three of them women – one refugee for each seat on the bus waiting for them near the relief tents.
By midnight local time, the bus had bounced through thirty miles of bush trail – held up once by a flat tire and another time by a belligerent bull elephant – to reach the only interior airport with a runway long enough to handle a heavy transport plane.
Under floodlights, Zwaan supervised the unloading process.
The refugees blinked against the harshness of the white glare, but none protested. All had been fed and watered; furthermore, the two who spoke English had served as satisfactory translators, yelling above the incessant grinding of bus gears to deliver Zwaan’s promise of a new life in the United States as sponsored immigrants.
Unloading the bus was hampered only by the slow movement of the refugees. Save for Zwaan’s briefcase, there was no luggage.
Minutes later, the bus roared into the black of night.
The refugees stood without movement, huddled against the chill. Hot as the days were, cloudless nights meant piercing cold.
They did not wait long.
The low buzzing of four propeller engines reached them, growing louder as the airplane approached. It circled twice, searching for flares.
Zwaan did nothing. He’d paid the pilot more than ample in black-market dollars. The pilot had chosen this landing spot, arranged for help to be waiting.
As if lightning had broken from a clear sky, flare after flare burst into sputtering pink halos. It would take more than a two-person crew to coordinate the sudden bursts. Zwaan looked for and saw the shadows of perhaps a dozen men scurrying back to the fields. He smiled at the certainty of how powerfully money spoke in countries like this. Over the years and across the continents, nothing had changed.
The plane swooped in, barely landing before the flares died. Timing, of course, was crucial. This was the most vulnerable part of the operation; away from the umbrella of official U.S. military, too much would be too difficult to explain to local authorities. Vulnerable as this link in the chain. was, Zwaan would do it no other way. By choosing to separate International World Relief Committee action at the refugee camp from military involvement at a UN base two countries over, he effectively compartmented the actions on each end and stopped any personnel from understanding the entire sequence of events.
The plane rolled to a halt at the end of the runway but did not cut its engines.
“Tell them to move,” Zwaan said to the emaciated refugee who had translated on the bus. “We must get on the plane.”
The directions were passed on in hurried and muted tones.
Zwaan marched ahead of them and urged each onto the ladder that was leaned against the open cargo door. Zwaan was careful not to touch them, preferring instead to assist them upward with insistent half shouts barely heard above the spinning of the propellers.
Above him, they streamed into the plane. It was outlined against the stars, and as Zwaan’s eyes adjusted to the night darkness, he saw workers scurrying back onto the airfield to haul away the burned-out flares.
Zwaan followed the last refugee onto the plane, careful to breathe through his mouth against the body odors that he imagined clung to the air around him.
Once into the airplane’s body, he sucked air into his lungs with short, shallow gasps. Here, the stench was not his imagination.
The door was closed but not yet secured when the pitch of the propellers rose and the airplane began to move. There would only be one flare on the runway now – a beacon at the very end as the lumbering plane fought to gain momentum.
There was no light inside the airplane. As Zwaan had instructed, the pilot had not switched on the overheads. The only light for the next half-hour would be from the flashlight that Zwaan removed from his briefcase. He needed it to inject sedatives into his fellow passengers. After all, it would not do for them to see the coffins stacked at the rear of the huge transport bay.
***
About the same hour, eight time zones earlier, Slater Ellis faced the same task as Zwaan. However, where Zwaan used a carefully proportioned injection of chloral hydrate to send his charges into sleep of very specifically calculated duration, Slater Ellis made do with sleeping pills and could only guess at the results. Zwaan had the advantage of an easily verified head count; Slater had no such luxury.
Slater only knew for certain he had no intention of opening the Pandora’s box of his garage unless the savageness inside had been dulled – by any manner.
He’d been set up the night before. The kid, sitting there, waiting, unresponsive, deliberately lulled him. Someone, something, had waited at the door, maybe expecting him to open it completely at the sight of a boy holding two puppies. Slater still had no idea what had attacked his arm. His sleeve had been torn, his skin bruised and twisted. It still sent surges of adrenaline through him each time he recalled the suddenness and thoroughness of the attack. And what if, instead of sticking his arm inside, he’d opened the door complet
ely, welcoming the monster outside? He shuddered to think of those results.
He hadn’t really slept through the night. Just sat on his porch in the darkness, staring at the silent garage, holding ice against his swollen nose.
In the morning, Slater had cleaned himself up, then returned to watch the garage as the mountains heated beneath a cloudless sky and wondered what besides the boy waited so patiently for him to unlock the door.
The heat had given him his idea, thinking at first if he were inside, thirst would be driving him nuts, then realizing, of course, the kid and his companion were inside, and must be dying for something to drink.
So at noon, he had doctored a quart bottle of cola with enough sleeping pills to send two adults into extreme drowsiness, figuring that while the dosage might be excessive for one boy, it would be shared with whatever else lurked inside. As the day’s heat built, so would the temptation to drink.
Slater had screwed the bottle cap back on and tied the bottle to the end of a long pole. He’d opened the door, pushed the bottle inside as far as he could go without letting his hand enter the garage, lowered the bottle to the floor, and flipped the pole inside before closing and relocking the door.
Slater had decided to give it four hours. One hour, maybe two – if they had any suspicions – for the kid and his companion to finally succumb to the urge to drink the cola. Another hour for the sleeping pills to work, and one more hour as a safety margin.
From his chair on the porch, Slater set down a paperback that had barely held his interest during the previous hours. After gathering up a flashlight, a pair of scissors, and a small fire extinguisher pirated from his kitchen, he walked with grim resolution toward the garage. If whatever awaiting him still had some fight left, and if the CO2 from the fire extinguisher wasn’t enough of a deterrent, he could always start swinging it like a club.
At the side door of the garage, he set the fire extinguisher down at his feet and tucked the flashlight into his back pocket. With the scissors, he began to cut the bedsheet netting in two. Because this was it. Either his plan worked, or whatever was inside escaped. Slater had no intention of continuing this standoff much longer, and for that matter had wondered again and again about the sanity behind his determination to go as far as he already had to satisfy his curiosity.
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