What I was in the mood for, though, was ending this insanity once and for all—figuring out what the hell was going on, who was after me, and what they were really up to.
So I told Bill I was taking the rest of the day off out of post-traumatic stress. Then I walked over to Café Whatever and ordered myself a double espresso. I sat down at a back table, called a certain Benson law professor, and asked him how a person could find out who was in charge of a New York State corporation. Two minutes later, he’d offered to track down Mohawk Associates for me himself.
I drank my espresso and ordered another, the usually attractive contents of the dessert case making my stomach turn. Within fifteen minutes my phone rang.
“I called in a favor at the secretary of state’s office,” Joe Kingman said, “and what I’ve got for you is a list of names and addresses of the officers of Mohawk Associates, Inc.”
“I’m all ears.”
“But there’s something fishy.”
“There is?”
“For you, I thought I’d go the extra mile and do a LexisNexis on these people, but…Well, it seems that all the names and addresses are fake. I Googled them and looked through the crisscross directory, but none of the addresses match up. And the names… they’re all supergeneric—Mary Brown, Jeff Smith, that sort of thing. So I’m afraid I flunked.”
“No—you didn’t,” I said. “Thanks a lot for trying.”
“Anytime. I mean it. Like my wife and I told you, anything, anytime. You saved our daughter’s life. We owe you the whole damn world.”
“Thanks, I…Wait—let me ask you something else. How hard would it be to fake this kind of thing—to basically make up an untraceable dummy corporation?”
“I hate to say it, but… not too hard. When you file your articles of incorporation, you have to list who your officers are, but it’s not like anybody checks your ID or anything.”
“What about opening a bank account, like so you could write checks?”
“You’d have to apply for an employer ID number, but again it’s not like you have to prove your identity at any point in the process.”
“Is it just me, or is that a little crazy?”
“You know how I feel about big business,” he said. “Thieving bastards love it like this.”
“Like what?”
“Ain’t nobody guarding the henhouse,” he said, “excepting the fox.”
BY THE END OF MY SECOND DOUBLE ESPRESSO, I was pretty much bouncing off the walls. All hepped up on caffeine and guilt, I sat there in the back of the café feeling desperate for something to do but having no real clue what. Not knowing a whole lot about corporate law, it hadn’t occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to figure out who was really behind Mohawk Associates. But now I needed a Plan B, and fast.
I pulled out my reporter’s notebook and spent some quality time bouncing the end of my pen against the paper, whack-whack-whack. When I finally wrote something down, it all came out in a rush:
Mohawk Assoc. Sources
R. Hamill—doubtful
Trike Ford—scary?
Jo Mingle—also doubtful
Glenn Shardik
R. Sturdivant—where is he?
Lauren—via Tom, etc.?
Alan Bauer—still blowing me off?
Gordon—?
I’d barely written down the last name when I crossed it off; appealing to Gordon’s sense of humanity seemed like the dictionary definition of pointless. I scanned the rest of the list, finally settling on the one name that didn’t have a question mark or “doubtful” attached to it—Glenn Shardik. Shardik was also the only one who wasn’t involved with Melting Rock; his connection to Mohawk Associates came through Deep Lake Cooling.
And speaking of Deep Lake… That was where Axel—whose initials (I was pretty sure) were on the list in the Melting Rock office—had gotten himself killed.
So why had Deep Lake paid Mohawk Associates fifty thousand dollars? And how had Gordon gotten onto the story in the first place?
Those two questions prompted me to do two things: (1) call and leave a message for Glenn Shardik that I wanted to set up an interview with him and (2) go back to the library.
This time, though, I didn’t head for the Deep Lake file; I went over to the stack of recent copies of the New York Times and waded through the entire past month in search of Gordon’s byline. There were nearly a dozen of them, of which several had datelines within Walden County. Since I couldn’t rip out the clips, I jotted down the headlines in my notebook, in order of publication date:
THREE TEENS DIE IN APPARENT OD AT MUSICAL FESTIVAL
IN GABRIEL, PROTEST CULTURE IS ALIVE AND WELL
BENSON UNVEILS “ENGINEERING MARVEL” OF DEEP LAKE COOLING
SUSPECT IN MELTING ROCK DRUG MURDERS JUMPS BAIL
AT UNION HOLIDAY PICNIC, AN UNWELCOME GUEST
I read through each of the stories twice, but my bright idea was starting to look like a dud. I’d thought that maybe if I saw what Gordon had been covering recently, I might be able to figure out who or what had sicced him on his big scoop, whatever it was. Unfortunately, the five stories looked pretty innocuous. The first was a combination of spot news and the feature he’d been working on when I ran into him at Melting Rock; the second an enterprise thing about Gabriel’s surfeit of civil disobedience; the third a straightforward feature on Deep Lake; the fourth a news story on Sturdivant vanishing; the fifth a short piece (with, if you ask me, a rather snarky headline) on Axel’s appearance at the park. Any of them could have led Gordon to the Mohawk Associates thing one way or another, but I was damned if I could figure out how.
It was on the third pass that I finally noticed something. It was the lead of his Deep Lake story—not particularly noteworthy in and of itself, but odd coming on the heels of the previous piece.
To the sounds of a student chorus singing songs about cool, Benson University today turned on its Deep Lake Cooling system, $150 million and three years in the making. The flipping of the ceremonial “on” switch was greeted with surprisingly little opposition in this upstate college town, home to innumerable action groups and protest movements over the past several decades.
He was right; practically from the beginning, the Deep Lake protests hadn’t amounted to much. And to be honest, I hadn’t really thought about it beyond a vague sense of relief at not having to cover more chanting sign-carriers than I already did. And if I had considered it, I probably would’ve chalked it up to the university’s concerted efforts to prove the cooling project was kosher.
But coming as Gordon’s Deep Lake story did—directly after the one about the Gabriel protest scene—the contrast was pretty damn striking. I mean, even if Deep Lake was the most environmentally sound project in the history of the planet, the local reactionaries would probably have agitated against it anyway. And as it was, the Benson name alone was enough to make people oppose the plan. But every time the protesters had raised an objection, the university had won them over to its side in record time.
The whole process, in other words, had been conducted in a perfectly sane and reasonable manner.
In Gabriel, though, that was the weirdest thing of all.
CHAPTER26
An hour later, not having sussed out some clever way to penetrate the Deep Lake weirdness, I headed back to Jaspersburg. But just inside the Gabriel city limits, I pulled a spontaneous right turn and wound up exactly where I’d been that morning: the hospital parking lot. I made a pit stop at the gift shop and, in flagrant violation of doctor’s orders, headed upstairs.
I’m not sure what I expected, but it definitely wasn’t what I found—which was Melissa propped up on pillows, eating a blueberry yogurt, watching a rerun of Ally McBeal.
“Hey,” I said from the doorway. “How ya doin’?”
She gave me a weak smile, licked the back of her spoon, and said, “Pretty okay.”
“I’m glad.”
“Whatcha got there?”
I eyed my g
ift shop swag. “Er …I think they call it ‘overcompensation.’ ”
Her smile got a little stronger. “Then bring it over here.”
Shutting the door to avoid trolling nurses, I dropped the booty on the tray table: stack of magazines, bouquet of carnations, giant stuffed cat, balloon proclaiming GET WELL SOON.
“Jeepers,” she said, pulling the gray kitty onto her chest and kissing it on the nose. “When you overcompensate, you don’t mess around, do you?”
I sat down on the edge of the bed. “You look really good,” I said. “I mean, I expected you to be—”
“All messed up?”
“Um…yeah.”
“Well, I sure look like hell, and I hurt all over. But I guess I’m… I’m just kind of in a good mood or something.”
“What? Why?”
“ ’Cause last night I really thought I was a goner,” she said. “And, holy shit—here I am, still breathing.” She waved the plastic Dannon cup. “I’ll tell you, goddamn yogurt never tasted so good. Is that weird or what?”
“Melissa, I’m…I’m really glad you’re okay.”
“You didn’t have to bring me all this stuff, you know.”
“Are you out of your mind? You got the shit beaten out of you because somebody thought you were me.”
“Yeah, but that’s not your fault.”
“It goddamn well is,” I said, and told her about the break-in at Groovy Guitar.
“So that’s what those assholes were after,” she said. “I just…They kept hitting and hitting me, saying, ‘Where is it? Where is it?’ And now that I think about it, they might even have said, ‘Where’s the file?’ But I just had no idea what they wanted.”
“Listen, I don’t want to upset you or anything, but I just need to ask. Are you sure you weren’t, um… sexually assaulted?”
“No. I mean, yes, I’m sure. It was close, but no.”
“Jesus, Melissa, what the hell happened? No, wait. You don’t have to—”
“One of them wanted to. The other one didn’t. End of story.”
“Oh.”
“They sort of started to argue about it, and they got spooked—I think it was some headlights from across the street. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that’s when they bolted.”
“Melissa, I’m just so …I’m really sorry this happened. I swear, I wish …I wish I’d been there. I wish it’d happened to me instead of you.”
“No offense,” she said, “but that makes two of us.”
• • •
JASPERSBURG HIGH ISN’T MUCH to look at. It’s one of those bland, no-nonsense academic buildings that went up in the late sixties, replacing something made of brick or stone that had less space but a hell of a lot more character. It’s located on the main Gabriel-Jaspersburg road, next door to the equally ugly junior high. Out front is a rusting metal sculpture of the school mascot made from scrap in the vocational machine shop.
I drove past a hand-lettered sign that said GO JAGUARS! and pulled into the last space in the student parking lot. My timing turned out to be pretty good. The final bell rang as I was getting out of my car, and within seconds a tide of adolescence came streaming out of the institutional glass doors.
The buses were already lined up, and some kids got right on. Others wandered toward the queue of idling cars, each with a parental type behind the wheel. But the older ones, the juniors and seniors with driver’s licenses and parking privileges, headed in my direction.
I’d come in search of dual prey: I’d take either Alan Bauer or Dorrie Benson, whichever wandered into my clutches first.
Obviously, Bauer was my first choice. I’d been trying to talk to him for over a week, ever since Mad and I had debated the actual target of the fourth acid tab. But the messages I’d left on his family’s answering machine had been predictably ignored, as had the e-mails I’d sent him after having sweet-talked his address out of Lauren Potter.
Unfortunately, my lying in wait for him outside Jaspersburg High did no good, either. Although Bauer was one of the first to emerge from the building, he was accompanied by his entire soccer team—which promptly boarded a bus for an away game.
But I did manage to waylay Dorrie for a conversation that would culminate in her smacking me in the kisser.
I’d noticed her in front of the school even before she’d broken out of the pack; her shorn head and multiple piercings set her apart from the JHS mainstream, which was actually pretty conservative. She was clad in a baggy pair of army-surplus pants and a brown work shirt, and since she didn’t have much of a figure from a distance, you could’ve easily taken her for a guy.
She walked out of the school by herself, a black backpack slung over one shoulder, and kept her head down as she made straight for her car, which turned out to be a red Beetle identical to mine. And I thought I was spoiled.
“Hey, Dorrie,” I said as she opened the door, “can I talk to you for a second?”
She squinted at me, her expression saying I was about as welcome as the SATs. “What for?”
“A couple of things, actually.”
She tossed her backpack on the passenger seat. “I don’t have time.”
“It’ll only take a second.”
“I have homework.”
“Look, Dorrie, I just—”
“Sorry.” She climbed in and tried to shut the door; I say “tried” because I stood by the car and blocked her way.
“Hey, what the—”
“Did you get a copy of the key to the Deep Lake building for Axel Robinette?”
Her mouth fell open, revealing the silver tongue stud. Within a couple of seconds, she recovered and tried very hard to glare at me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Give me a break, Dorrie. I saw you at Melting Rock. You were following him around like a goddamn puppy dog. I bet you would’ve done anything to get him to like you.”
Her gray eyes instantly filled up with tears. I felt like a heel, which at the moment I was. “I… How would I even get…”
“Come on, you’ve been hanging around that campus your whole life. I’m sure you could figure it out.”
Her eyes overflowed in a veritable gush. “Axel’s dead.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“No you’re not.”
She was right, but I decided now wasn’t the time to agree with her. “Honestly, Dorrie, I’m really sorry. I know you liked him a lot.”
She sat there sobbing for a good long while, me standing by the open door like an idiot. Finally, she stopped crying, blew her nose on a pile of Subway napkins, and announced that she needed a smoke. I told her to go ahead, but she informed me that it was against school rules.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s take a walk.”
“Hey, I…I never said I wanted to talk to you.”
“Christ, Dorrie, look at yourself,” I said. “You’ve gotta talk to somebody.”
She didn’t contradict me, and the two of us set out across the empty athletic fields and down a well-trodden path through the woods.
“Where does this thing go?” I asked.
The hint of a smile formed at the corners of her mouth. “Melting Rock.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Path goes from JHS to the fairgrounds.”
“How far is it?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. Half a mile maybe.”
“Oh.” We kept walking. “So listen, Dorrie…have you ever heard of a company called Mohawk Associates?”
“Huh? No.”
“Are you sure none of the guys ever mentioned it? Or maybe Axel?”
“Nah. He didn’t talk about his business with me. He didn’t trust people too much.”
“Okay, but about breaking into Deep Lake—”
“I already told you I don’t know anything about that.”
“I think you do.”
“Well, that’s not really my problem, is i
t? And why do you care so much, anyway?”
“I was there.”
She stopped walking. “Huh?”
“I was at Deep Lake the night Axel died. I was the one who saw his body floating in the pool.”
She stared at me. “What were you doing there?”
“Axel said he’d show me how they pulled that trick with the Jell-O. But when I got to the building, he was already inside, and the gate was—”
“Inside?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“If Axel was really…If he wanted to show you how they did it, why would he go in?”
“What do you mean? Are you saying they did it from the outside?”
“Yeah, I”—she looked down at the dirt path, littered with cigarette butts and the occasional beer can—“…I’m not supposed to tell.”
“Come on. What difference does it make?”
“I promised Axel.”
I tried to think of a way to weasel it out of her, and after a disturbingly short time, a method occurred to me.
“Look, Dorrie,” I said, “I totally respect your loyalty. But Axel isn’t around to get nailed for it anymore. Don’t you think he’d want people to know how clever he was?”
It was a pretty lame attempt, I know. Funny thing is… it worked. “You…you think?”
“Definitely.”
She bit her lip, took a long drag of the cigarette, and shrugged. “It was pretty simple, really.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“They just sort of dumped the stuff.”
“What do you mean, dumped it?”
“He said they got a ton of that Jell-O shit from somebody in a kitchen up at Benson, and somebody else in one of the materials science labs gave them this biodegradable plasticky stuff that dissolves in water after a while. So they did up all these pouches of the powder, and they made some of ’em thicker so they’d take longer to open. At night they rowed out to the buoy that marks where the intake pipe is, and they just tossed ’em down there and like, whoosh, a lot of it got sucked up.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Ecstasy Page 26
