So it was a high stakes game, after all. That was the part I hadn’t understood. That was why my thoughts had kept going back to the gold mine. The Wellex patents might be worth millions, tens of millions, who was to say? If Starry’s original, copyrighted notes were disclosed, Wellex would be sunk under a deluge of lawsuits.
Now my job was to escape these pirates, whose creed was “Dead men tell no tales.” I passed several closed doors without seeing a soul. I took a right up a short passageway that ended in a tee. I chose left and that ended in a tee. If I went left again I’d likely run in to Maas’s goons. Right was a dead end terminated by a door that said, To Animal Facility. I had no choice. The knob turned and I darted in. It was a stairwell spiraling down clockwise. I tucked my handbag under my left arm, and using my right arm on the banister as a pivot, descended three steps at a time.
I recalled seeing another access to the animals nearer the lobby. If I got to it, I’d be behind my pursuers and could escape. I burst through a double set of swinging doors and found myself in a vast laboratory. There were floor-to-ceiling shelves of chemicals, huge tables containing sinks, desks, bookcases, and long rows of animal cages. The smell took away my breath, of which I had little to spare. An orchestra of beagles began an ear-shattering dissonance of yelping, baying and howling. The screeching of monkeys joined in, as if on cue. To my frustration, no human was in sight. The racket set up by the animals gave away my presence. My pursuers would quickly figure out where I’d disappeared to and follow me in here.
I’d lost my sense of direction in the stairwell. Casting about, I saw what I thought was an exit a good two hundred yards away. I cantered toward it, stopping only to throw open cages left and right as I passed them. The prisoners didn’t hesitate. Dozens of beagles scampered out onto the cement floor. The dogs, not liking to soil their crates, took immediate advantage of their freedom by laying down a carpet of fresh feces. The monkeys that I released had taken to the heights and were pulling down bottles of reagents, which crashed to the ground, adding their pungency to the malodorous air.
Two men burst through the double doors behind me and stopped, taken aback by the teeming animals. They didn’t wait long to resume the chase. Behind me, over the animal cacophony, a man cried, “Oh shiiiiit!” I looked back. One of the goons had slipped and fallen in the gooey mess. The beagles swarmed around him. The other man had a blowgun aimed at me. I froze in terror. One of the monkeys, mistaking the blowgun for a tree limb, tried to swing from it. The dart skidded along the floor in front of my feet. I turned and ran, weaving from side to side, bobbing my head to throw off his aim.
A monkey grabbed me around the neck. I shrieked and nearly fell. At the same instant, Richard Maas appeared about twenty feet in front of me, blocking my escape. Instinctively, I grabbed the monkey with my free right arm, its weight balanced in the palm of my hand. I threw it with all my strength at Maas’s head. He jerked back with a scream, falling to his knees and covering his face with his hands. An angry monkey can tear up a lot of flesh in a short time. I sprinted past him.
It was an emergency exit. A sign warned that its use would trigger an alarm. How I wanted that alarm! I glimpsed a blinking red light on the round push-handle of the door. I felt a sting in my left arm. I had to reach the light. I focused every atom of will on that one small red undulating point, forcing it to grow larger. I was running in deep sand. The sand became oil, rising to my waist. My legs were, oh, so heavy. The red dot became a small circle. My peripheral vision went south. The circle in front of me grew. With one last desperate lunge, I threw myself at its redness. I was weightless, soaring, and falling. Like an aperture stopping down, my remaining vision spiraled and shrank into the red circle, and there was only redness, then nothingness.
Chapter 25
When I awoke, the band was playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” It wasn’t harp music so I wasn’t in heaven; and it wasn’t accordion music, so I wasn’t in the other place. Then I thought that I was back in the army—how the army band loved to play that song. But no, I wasn’t wearing khaki. It had to be good old civilian Earth.
As told to me later, I had exploded out the side of the building into the middle of the Wellex holiday picnic, and had landed unconscious at the feet of Mr. Gerald Wolfe, the company president. He was not a man to abide surprises.
An immediate investigation had revealed Richard Maas clutching his face in agony. He was only slightly better off, perhaps, than chief counsel Reginald Smith, much of the contents of whose head were found splattered on the walls and floor of his private lavatory. I had had an earlier acquaintance with the .45 caliber murder weapon.
Reginald’s files contained documents indicating he knew of the crimes of Maas and Akrich. The source was Judy Raskin, whose intent was for the Churoks to receive a just and equitable settlement.
Richard Maas had masterminded the scheme of stealing the Churoks’ knowledge. He had become aware of the contents of the notebooks during family gatherings in which Akrich had discussed his work. The promise of both academic fame and wealth had lured Akrich into conspiring with his brother-in-law. Both men had profited handsomely from Starry’s purloined notes.
At his arraignment, Akrich claimed that he had no prior knowledge of the murders, and had been shocked when he had learned about them. He pointed out that the two murderers were, after all, in the employ of Maas. He further swore that he had conspired with Lucy’s kidnappers only to save her life, which he had done by threatening to expose the conspiracy if she came to harm.
There was a ring of truth to this part of his defense, otherwise the hangman would have come for Lucy, too. My guess is that Akrich had seen too much killing and couldn’t stomach any more. Fortunately, my rescue of Lucy had cut short the debate over her fate.
An unforgiving district attorney wasn’t buying any of it. He had indisputable evidence for a grand jury showing that Akrich had trumped up his accusation of Judy’s plagiarism. He convinced them that Akrich had set Judy up, and the jury indicted him as an accessory to her murder and as an accessory to Lucy’s kidnapping as well. Though Akrich had lied to Troy to scare him away so that he might be killed, the grand jury found the connection too tenuous for indictment on charges pertaining to Troy’s murder. The murder of Starry Night was never broached.
The grand jury indicted Richard Maas and his two henchmen on three counts of murder and one count of kidnapping. Maas was allowed to undergo extensive plastic surgery while in custody. The State undoubtedly feared that his wounds would evoke sympathy from a jury.
The gold mine was indeed as valuable as the crabby assayer from Mojave Analytical had claimed. The law firm that represented the Churok Tribal Nation, acting on behalf of Tommy, attempted to locate the two partners from Guatemala. They were traced to San Diego where it was discovered that they had participated in the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide a year and a half earlier. They thought they were shedding their cloak of mortality and ascending to an alien space ship hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet. The State of California is rather prosaic about such things. It considered them merely to be dead.
Thus Tommy inherited a fortune through fake suicide and real suicide. He wanted none of it. He signed over every troy ounce of gold to his people’s government. Substantial though the gold mine income would be, it was dwarfed by the Churoks’ settlement with Wellex, a figure never released to the public, but assumed to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The firm of Jamison & Jamison submitted a bill of $2,355.78 to Lucy Navarro with a copy to Tommy Greatoak. Lucy paid to the penny, even before she learned about her $50,000 scholarship from the Tribal Government of the Churok Nation to advance her studies.
Charles and I made our own fireworks that entire holiday weekend, outshining by far the rockets’ red glare.
Epilogue
The night after writing the last words of this case, The Dream came. This time I was hand-in-hand with Charles on the beach, and I was myself as I am, not as I was
before cancer. The last rays of a coppery sunset had just sunk into the Pacific. We were strolling toward the red sky left behind by the setting sun. Charles held me, and kissed me. I awoke smiling, with the feel of his kiss on my lips.
The Dream has never returned.
The Evil That Men Do Page 23
