Acting as an informant without any kind of official credentials didn’t sound like a good idea to me. “I’m not agreeing to anything until I have some idea what this is all about and until I get a look at your badge.”
Nodding, she pulled a thin ID wallet out of a zippered pocket and passed it across to me. After examining it, I handed it back. “Looks legit to me,” I said.
She smiled and tucked it back away.
“So what’s the deal?” I asked.
“Have you ever heard of an organization called LITG—Leave It To God?”
“I’ve heard of ‘Leave It to Beaver,’ ” I told her.
She gave me a blank look. I had the sudden sense that once again, just as with Sue, Rachel Dulles and I were standing on opposite sides of a yawning generation gap. “You know,” I added lamely. “The TV series.”
“Never saw it,” Rachel resumed. “But you do know about right-to-lifers?”
I nodded. “I have heard about them,” I told her.
“Most right-to-lifers are perfectly ordinary and decent folks,” Rachel continued. “They also don’t happen to believe in women having abortions.”
For obvious reasons, I’m glad my own unwed mother didn’t take the then-illegal-abortion way out of her predicament. But I don’t think of myself as a right-to-lifer, either.
“But beyond those regular people, there’s the lunatic fringe,” Agent Dulles went on. “They’re the people who blow up abortion clinics and use sniper rifles to pick off abortion-performing doctors as they back their cars out of their driveways on their way to work. The Leave It To God folks qualify as the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe. They’re opposed to progress in everything from genetically bred corn to computer chips. They call themselves Leave It To God, but as far as we know, they’re not related to any church or church-affiliated organization. They refer to themselves in their manifesto as Secular Humanists.”
“What the hell is that?”
“Right-to-lifers are opposed to doctors who perform abortions. Members of Leave It To God are opposed to doctors who save lives.”
“What do you mean?”
“Their position is that God put sickness and disease on this earth as a lesson in suffering for everybody. Sort of as a device to keep us in our place. As cutting-edge techniques become available, doctors are saving lives that would otherwise have been lost. Leave It To God believes that’s wrong. Their members maintain that God and God alone should decide who lives and dies. They don’t approve of someone like Dr. Featherman, for example. He’s invented a new surgical technique that allows patients who would otherwise be crippled by grand-mal seizures to return to living productive lives.”
“Like Marc Alley,” I breathed.
Rachel nodded. “Exactly.”
“You’re telling me these Secular Humanists are targeting Harrison Featherman?”
“That’s right,” she said. “The Agency received a tip to that effect. The problem is, Marc Alley may be targeted as well.”
“Why, because he didn’t die?”
“Correct,” Rachel replied. “Marc Alley is back to living a normal life. In LITG’s book, that’s wrong. He isn’t bearing his assigned cross and serving as an example of suffering for everyone else. That qualifies him as a target, too.”
“That’s crazy,” I said.
“It is crazy,” Rachel agreed. “But it’s happened before—four times that we know of so far. Dr. Aaron Blackman was a cancer researcher at Sloan. Blackman allegedly committed suicide. Two weeks later, one of Blackman’s patients—a woman whose supposedly incurable brain-stem tumor had gone into remission after Blackman’s tumor-shrinking treatment—was fatally creamed in a crosswalk by a hit-and-run driver. And one of a team of Atlanta doctors using a new in utero surgery for spina bifida drowned in a swimming pool at a resort down in Scottsdale. His death was initially ruled accidental. Then one of the first babies he helped with those surgical techniques was snatched out of a grocery cart at a Wal-Mart in Savannah. The child was found dead in a ditch two days later. It was after that last incident that the Agency received a letter—the manifesto, as it’s called—from Leave It To God in which they take credit for all of those incidents. After the letter, the investigations into the deaths of the two doctors were reopened. Both are now listed as homicides.”
“What makes you think Featherman will be targeted?”
“A list of names accompanied the letter. It contained the names of one thousand doctors from all over the country, including six in the Seattle area—two at Swedish, one at the U Dub, and three at Fred Hutch. Featherman was one of the two from Swedish.”
“Does he know about it?”
Rachel Dulles nodded. “All the doctors have been notified.”
“And the patients?”
She sighed. “No. My superiors decided that letting all the patients know about the situation might cause wholesale panic. It would involve far too many people—far more than we could handle or protect. We’re doing what we can to keep all targeted doctors under surveillance, but even that is leaving the Agency spread pretty thin.”
“This is rich. Some smart doctor figures out a way to save people from dying or being crippled by some appalling disease and then somebody else comes along and knocks the patients off because they had nerve enough to get well?”
“That’s the way it works. Dr. Featherman isn’t exactly keeping his ground-breaking treatment under wraps. Neither was the spina bifida guy. He was in Scottsdale at the conference for the express purpose of expounding upon and expanding use of techniques that originally came from Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. And since Marc Alley is such an outspoken supporter of Dr. Featherman’s treatment, we’re assuming that makes him a likely target as well.”
“And you’re expecting the same kind of thing might happen here?”
Rachel nodded. “As soon as we learned about the shipboard conference, we tried to talk Dr. Featherman out of coming on the cruise, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He has a big grant from the National Institutes of Health riding on this conference. He was afraid if he backed out of attending, the grant sources would dry up.”
“So what are you and Alex doing about all this?” I asked.
“Starfire Cruises gave us a list of all passengers and crew members. While we’re on board, the Agency is running checks on all of them, but that takes time. So far nothing has turned up on any of them, but we did learn from the purser’s office that Margaret Featherman received two separate faxes. One was delivered to her the night before last, and another one yesterday afternoon. When the agent from Juneau comes on board, we’re expecting he’ll have a court order giving him and eventually us access to the text of those two faxes.”
“You’re thinking Margaret Featherman may have been involved in this plot to target her ex-husband?”
“There is an outside chance of that,” Rachel Dulles said. “From what I’ve learned about the former Mrs. Featherman, she could be capable of almost anything.”
That’s how she struck me, too, I thought.
Just then there was a knock on the door. I looked through the peephole and was dismayed to find Lars Jenssen standing there. “What is it?” I asked, opening the door.
“Can I come in for a minute?”
I glanced back at Rachel Dulles, who shook her head. I have a feeling Lars got a glimpse of her at the same time. “It would probably be better if you didn’t,” I told him.
Lars gave me a lopsided grin, along with a conspiratorial wink. “So it’s like that, is it,” he said. “Ya, sure. I yust wanted to tell you that there’s a Friends of Bill W. meeting getting together in the library in another half hour or so. Beverly’s on her way to high tea with the Wakefield girls, which means I’m free to go to my meeting. I was wondering if you’d like to come along, but I can see that’s a bad idea. I’ll yust go on about my business.”
Right, I thought. And go straight back to Beverly and tell her that her grandson couldn
’t come to the AA meeting because he was entertaining a woman in his cabin.
Lars started down the hall.
“Where did you say the meeting was again?” I called after him.
“In the library. Four o’clock.”
I closed the door and turned back to Rachel Dulles. “What exactly is it that you want me to do?”
“Keep an eye on Marc Alley.”
“Like I kept an eye on Sue Danielson, you mean? I didn’t do her much good, did I? What makes you think I’d have any better results looking after Marc?”
Rachel Dulles let that one pass. “Why was he waiting for you at the bottom of the gangplank earlier today?”
“To tell us—Naomi Pepper and me—about what had happened to Margaret Featherman, that she had disappeared.”
“And why do you suppose he told you?”
“I give up.”
“Because he trusts you, Beau. And so do I.”
She glanced at her watch and stood up. “I have a meeting, too,” she said. “So I’d best be going. Here’s my cabin number,” she said, pressing a card into my hand. “And remember, as far as the ship is concerned, I’m Phyllis Nix. Call me right away if Marc mentions anything unusual or disturbing.”
“What about telling him what’s up?” I asked.
Agent Dulles shrugged. “I may be under orders not to warn the patients,” she replied, “but that doesn’t mean you are.”
I opened the door for her. Once she was out in the corridor, Agent Dulles turned and offered her hand. “Thanks for the help, Beau. And by the way,” she added, “most of my friends call me Rachey.”
I watched her go until she turned into the elevator lobby, then I closed the door and shook my head. I might not have taken the attorney general up on her offer to go to work for the Special Homicide Investigation Team, but one way or another, it looked as though J. P. Beaumont was back in the game.
8
THERE ARE ALMOST as many reasons for going to AA meetings as there are meetings themselves. That day I went because I wanted to prove to Lars Jenssen that there was no hanky-panky going on between me and the attractive young woman he had spied sitting in my stateroom. I arrived at the Starfire Breeze’s book-lined library only a few minutes after he did. With Lars there’s no such thing as presumption of innocence, but even he had to admit that I couldn’t possibly be that smooth or fast an operator.
“Another woman from your table, I suppose?” Lars asked when I sat down beside him.
“No,” I said with no further elucidation.
Lars sighed. “If I’da only known this was what cruises were like, I would have taken them years ago when I was a lot younger.”
“What does Beverly have to say about your wanting to play the field?” I asked.
“Who’s playing?” Lars asked. “Since when does it hurt to look?”
Because we were still in port, the library was officially closed. Glass doors had been pulled shut and fastened over the shelves, locking the books inside. Upholstered chairs and love seats had been moved into a loose semblance of a circle which was gradually filling with people. When the library doors were finally pulled shut several minutes later, there must have been twenty-five or thirty people gathered in the room, about the same number of attendees that show up for most AA meetings on land.
Lars had called this a Friends of Bill W. meeting. In AA circles that means it’s an open meeting where anyone involved in a twelve-step program is welcome to attend. Sobriety is a catch-all term that can apply to any number of issues. Looking at the attendees gathered in that room, I noticed that a few of the older guys sported bulbous, thickly veined noses that spoke of years of hard drinking and hard living both. During introductions, a couple of the younger people mentioned that they were involved in Narcotics Anonymous. Several others came from the Al-Anon side of the spectrum.
Al-Anon is a separate organization with its own twelve-step program designed for people involved with drinkers and druggies. It helps members gain tools to maintain enough serenity that they don’t resort to killing or leaving their loved ones or end up falling into the same trap of drinking and drugging themselves. One woman, a grandmotherly type in her sixties, announced that she belonged to Overeaters Anonymous. OA must have worked for her because she looked great, although it occurred to me that dealing with a food addiction on board a cruise ship had to be a very real kind of hell.
On dry land, AA, NA, OA, and Al-Anon sort themselves into separate meetings. On the Starfire Breeze we were all part of one group. We had finished introductions and someone was reading from the Big Book when a latecomer burst into the room and dived into the first available chair. Her tardy arrival created a small stir. I judged her to be a woman in her seventies—sturdy but a little stooped at the shoulder. Once seated, she seemed to have a difficult time sitting still. Her hands fluttered nervously in her lap. She shifted back and forth in her seat and checked her watch time and again. Of all the people in the room, she was the one who seemed most in need of a meeting.
When it was time for sharing, some people spoke, some didn’t. When the group leader nodded at the woman, she launched into her story.
“My name’s Lucy,” she said. “Me an’ Mike have been married for almost fifty-five years. Twenty-five of those we was both drunk. We sobered up on our twenty-fifth anniversary, and we’ve both been straight ever since. But now . . .” She faltered and shook her head. It took several seconds for her to gather herself again.
“Now things is different,” she said. “It’s not like Mike has fallen off the wagon or nothin’. It’s worse.”
In AA nothing is supposed to be worse than falling off the wagon, but from the grim set of Lucy’s mouth, I knew what was coming would be bad news.
“It started with him just forgetting little stuff. At first we both sort of laughed about it together and more or less ignored it. But it’s a lot worse than that now, and I’ve been hidin’ it—keepin’ things to myself because I didn’t want to worry the kids none. There’s nothin’ nobody can do about it anyways. Nothin’ that’ll make it better.”
By then everybody in the room knew what Lucy and Mike were up against. If developing Alzheimer’s isn’t everybody’s worst nightmare, then it’s got to be right up there, close to the top. I glanced at Lars. Unsmiling, he nodded. He probably knew more than anyone in the room about what Lucy and Mike were dealing with. Alzheimer’s disease was what had killed his first wife, Aggie, eight years earlier.
“The kids pooled their money to send us on this trip,” Lucy continued. “I didn’t have the heart to try talkin’ ’em out of it. I thought I could handle things same as I do at home, but all of a sudden it’s taken another turn for the worse. Mike won’t so much as come out of our room or even get dressed. He just sits there in his underwear or not all day long watchin’ that damned TV set, excuse my French. And he’s not watchin’ on one of the channels where there might be a program worth watchin’. Oh, no, it’s the same stupid channel, hour after hour, the one that shows what’s happening off the back of the boat. That’s all he watches.
“Mike says he’s scared. He’s afraid if he leaves the room they’ll probably throw him overboard, too. I keep tellin’ him they won’t—that nobody’s throwin’ nobody off the back of the boat, but that don’t make no difference. He won’t listen. I feel like I’m in a jail cell instead of on some hoity-toity cruise. This afternoon, I wanted a drink so bad I could taste it. After thirty years, that’s what I wanted to do today—go out and get fallin’-down drunk. That’s why I’m here. I gave the room attendant fifty bucks and asked him to watch Mike for me till I got back. I knew if I didn’t come to a meeting today, I was gonna lose it.”
Lucy’s words had tumbled out so fast that when she finally stopped speaking, she was almost breathless. She sank back into her chair. Spent with effort, her fluttering hands lay still for the first time.
“We’re glad you’re here,” the self-appointed leader said after a moment’s pause. �
�And if you want to hang around for a little while afterwards, maybe some of us can give you a hand with Mike, help take a little of the pressure off.”
There were nods of assent and murmurs of agreement and encouragement all around the room. Before I came into AA I thought it was going to be a bunch of deadbeat, down-at-the-heels drunks sitting around a room complaining about not being able to drink anymore. What I didn’t realize at first is that AA is a fellowship. People who go there end up caring for one another. Strangers don’t stay strangers for long.
“Thanks,” Lucy mumbled. “I’d really appreciate it.”
The meeting went on for several more minutes, but I had fallen off the track, stopped cold by the implications of what Lucy had said—that her husband was afraid someone else would be thrown off the ship. Did that mean that he had already seen someone go overboard? Was that real, or was it simply a figment of his unraveling imagination?
When had it happened? I wondered with that old familiar catch in my gut that always used to tell me when separate pieces of a case were starting to fall into place. About the same time Margaret Featherman disappeared? Did that mean that Mike possibly had witnessed what had happened to her?
The bad part of all this was that I had learned about this potential witness in the course of an AA meeting. That second A stands for anonymous. What’s said during meetings is strictly confidential. Without Lucy’s full agreement in the matter, there was no way anyone in the room could reveal a word of what she had said there—me included.
Once the meeting finally broke up, Lars Jenssen was the first to approach Lucy with his offer of help. Several others did the same, saying they’d be glad to come sit with Mike from time to time during the cruise in order to give Lucy a break so she could go to the dining room for dinner or have some fun on one of the shore excursions. I hung back because I wanted to talk to Lucy alone. That was easy to do since I knew Lars would pick up all pertinent information, including the location of her room as well as her last name.
Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101) Page 9
