Perfect Killer

by Lewis Perdue

  "Meaning?"

  "Meaning, the word is Vanessa Thompson was not killed by anybody in the community. And there are people around there asking questions about you."

  The skein of dread in my gut yanked another knot tighter. I told him about my conversation with Vince Sloane.

  "That's bad my friend, but it gets worse."

  "Hard to imagine."

  "Yeah, but get this: from what I can gather, the people asking the questions are military types."

  I thought back to the helicopter and the military inflatables.

  "This really makes no sense, no sense at all."

  "Like your last three days make sense?"

  I let that sink in as the road sign for Egypt plantation came up.

  "So what do we do?" I asked.

  "What do you mean 'we,' kemo sabe?" Rex laughed, then said, "Keep your head down; keep asking questions. I'll finish up this drywall job here in Eastover by tomorrow, and I'll put all my time into helping you,"

  I thanked him, said I needed a good wingman more than ever, then said good-bye.

  I checked my various voice-mail boxes and found multiple, increasingly hostile message from the LAPD, and a raft of messages from Sonia, increasingly frightened and indignant. I thought of nothing reasonable to say to either of them and decided to think first instead.

  CHAPTER 35

  Greenwood loomed quickly ahead, and according to the map I had printed off the Internet, Jasmine's office was on Main Street, straight ahead at the looming cloverleaf. But Rex's warning about the dangerous neighborhood made me worry about parking there because stealing my laptop—which had my life on it—would be child's play.

  So I took the ramp for west 82 instead and followed it over the steep viaduct spanning the mainline railroad tracks. I dialed Jasmine's cell phone as I came down to a red light where the highway made its way through a congested strip area lined with motels, fast-food restaurants, muffler shops, and other outskirts establishments.

  Again she didn't answer, so I left another voice mail. The light turned green and I pressed on. The local newspaper, the Greenwood Commonwealth, passed by on the left and, next to it, the EZ-Sleep Suites.

  I turned toward the EZ-Sleep and drove past a small brick building whose sign identified it as a cancer treatment outpatient clinic. The building was surrounded by people scattered in ones and twos smoking cigarettes.

  The motel lobby was alive with the faint spicy fragrances of ginger, turmeric, cumin, and lime, which made my mouth water and reminded me it was after noon and I had eaten nothing in the past eighteen hours of travel other than Lilliputian bags of peanuts and pretzels. A middle-aged Indian man checked me in and directed me around the corner to my room.

  As I parked near the stairs and got out, I noted a line of white panel vans with ladders on the roof and signs on the side marking them with the name of a large national contractor that laid and installed fiber-optic cables. Down at the far end of the building, people in orange shirts gathered in conversation, obviously the contractor's people here on extended assignment.

  I lugged my laptop bag and duffel up to my room on the second floor and dumped them on the nearest bed, cleared off a table for my computer, connected it to the phone's data port, and turned it on. I entered the BIOS-level password, then plugged in a USB flash drive that governed the automatic encryption and decryption of everything on the hard drive. Without the flash drive plugged in, the hard drive was impenetrable to anyone save those with access to a supercomputer and advanced code-breaking software.

  With this done, I connected to the internet and began downloading all my spam and e-mail. Next, I knelt beneath the desk, unscrewed the plastic faceplate from the electrical outlet, and replaced it with an invention of my own: a sturdy metal faceplate with an attachment point for a hefty security cable, which I secured to my laptop and set the combination. To steal my laptop, a thief would have to rip the entire electrical outlet junction box from the wall. Then I plugged in the laptop's AC power supply.

  E-mail was still downloading by the time I finished settling in, so I stood in the door of my room for a moment looking out at the field behind the hotel. The heat of the day blushed my cheeks like staring into an open oven. Over to my left, next to the stairs, big red wasps with plump bellies filled with sting and pain hovered near a cranny under the eaves. Experience told me if I risked a closer look, I'd find a big paper nest filled with fat white larvae waiting to be more red wasps. I remembered long ago as a child using the garden hose nozzle at full blast to knock the nests off from under the eaves of our house and running like hell after about a dozen blasts until the nest finally fell and I could toss some gasoline on it to finish the job.

  The vivid, painful memories of being stung replayed themselves now with an amazingly clear image of how a sting grew into perfectly round red welt with a little hole surrounded by white skin at the very center. With this memory vivid in mind, I closed the door and stood there uncertainly. I wanted something to eat, I wanted to talk to Jasmine. I didn't want to look at my e-mail, but I did, all 307 new messages.

  My head spun bright and dizzy with travel fatigue and sleep deprivation. I didn't want to deal with the spam, so I went into the cramped little bathroom, stripped, and took a shower instead. Afterward, I put on the least-wrinkled blue, oxford-cloth, button-down shirt, tucked it into a clean pair of khakis, and sat down to deal with the e-mail vomit fouling my in-box.

  Not needing to add a full cup size to my breasts and being comfortable with the size of my penis, I deleted large stretches of spam, including those from Tiffany, Brianna, and others who promised me a good time and had attached explicit photos. I quickly winnowed things dawn to about a dozen that really mattered, then focused on two from Jeff Flowers.

  Flowers's first e-mail told me Camilla had not changed significantly. He had enclosed the links and account access information for me to access EEG scans on one of Pacific Hills' Web servers. In the second e-mail, sent about four hours later, he said her EEGs had taken a turn toward the bizarre, which had prompted them to conduct a PET scan. He enclosed another set of links for those files.

  I leaned back in the chair and let out my breath in a loud, heavy rush. Again guilt wrestled with feelings of relief. I did not want to look at the EEGs and scans. I really wanted to let Camilla's condition take its course without any further intervention. But my heart told me that if she simply slipped away without me doing all I could, I'd never get rid of the guilt. Regrets were always for the living.

  So I launched Firefox, double-clicked on the links Flowers had sent, and logged in to the server using the user name and password he had sent. The EEG scans would download okay on this connection in half an hour or so, but the PET scan files were huge, multigigabyte monsters. I realized I needed to make contact with someone at the Greenwood Hospital who would allow me to use their connection.

  I stood up, looked at my watch, and found the time creeping up on 1:00 P.M. Jasmine's failure to return my calls nagged at me, but I decided I had left enough voice mails. I pulled out the small notebook I always carried with me and scribbled in it the necessary information from Flowers's e-mails and shut down my laptop.

  Next, I pulled two small Targus motion detectors from my laptop bag and locked one to the laptop and the other to the security cable where it attached to the wall. Then I pulled out a laminated Day-Glo orange placard in English and Spanish warning people not to touch or the alarms would go off. I armed the laptop's motion alarms, made sure their blinking red LEDs were immediately visible to anyone who might enter, and left a light on so the warning note was clearly visible.

  CHAPTER 36

  In the far corner of the EZ-Sleep Suites' parking lot, hidden among the cable vans, Jael St. Clair sat behind the wheel of her white rented SUV, took a deep hit off a fresh cigarette, and watched the door to Brad Stone's room open. He walked out, emptyhanded, closed the door, then headed toward the stairs.

  St. Clair smiled as Stone turned back
to check the door, then got into his truck and drove away.

  "Surprise, asshole," she said quietly, thinking about how nice it would be to watch the reception she had arranged for him and his black beauty. But there was work to be done. St. Clair opened her door, stood up, and took another drag on the cigarette. Then she ground it out on the pavement with her shoe and made her way to Stone's room, pulling on a pair of latex gloves as she walked. At his door, she wiggled a plastic shim in the lock; the door opened in the blink of an eye. Jael closed the door behind her and turned on the lights. The multiple flashing lights on Stone's laptop drew her attention.

  Her anger rose as she examined the cables and alarms. She'd need cutters and a way to muffle the alarms. The heavy, braided steel cable meant a bolt cutter wouldn't work. She'd need a Dremel with an abrasive cutoff disk.

  And fast-setting acoustic foam for the alarms. What a mess.

  "You pig-fucking shit-bird."

  She walked to the bathroom, where her frown softened as her eyes fell on the short, graying-brown hairs gathered at the drain. St. Clair gathered the strands and put them in one of the Ziploc snack bags she had brought just for this. Running her hand across the cigarette-scarred fake-marble counter, she found another half dozen hairs.

  Then she left.

  CHAPTER 37

  About a mile northwest of my hotel, Highway 82 crossed a wide stretch of railroad tracks. Moments later, I turned right on Strong Avenue and caught sight of the hospital in which I had been born. According to Mama, lightning from a passing thunderstorm had hit the building pretty near to the time I had been born.

  The hospital was a pale yellow brick affair towering over the street and the green, green levee that ran behind it along the Yazoo River. Suddenly, I looked through a sevenyear-old's eyes at my grandmother, Mamie, the Judge's wife, lying in one of the hospital's darkened rooms under a plastic oxygen tent that looked pieced together from dry-cleaner suit bags. A cerebral hemorrhage had nailed her like a stroke of lightning and sent her there to drift out of our lives for a terminal day or so. Mamie slept so peacefully to my young eyes.

  This vision washed over me like muddy floodwaters from a breached levee. Something like this happened every time I visited Mississippi, home no matter how long I lived elsewhere. I shook my head and tried to focus on my mission. I decided to start with the emergency room, which always had sharp people able to deal with the unexpected— such as some California doctor coming and asking to use their computer system. I put the truck in gear and pulled into sparse eastbound traffic.

  As I neared the emergency room entrance, I spotted a prominent sign at the road's edge for Giles Claiborne, M.D., and the past lurched in front of me again. Claiborne had to be as old as the hills because he had been my family physician in Itta Bena not long after Uncle Doc had died. Uncle Doc was the husband of Mamie's sister and took care of everyone regardless of color or their ability to pay. I remembered shots, stitches, and the back entrance that led to a separate waiting room for Negroes Only. I do remember getting entirely unsatisfactory answers about this from Al Thompson and Mama.

  As I parked next to Claiborne's office, my cell phone rang.

  "Where you at, boy?" I recognized Rex's voice.

  "Greenwood. Camilla's in a really bad way. I'm at the hospital seeing if there's a

  way to have them pull up her scans"

  "Y'mama said a prayer for her every damned day. I'da said some myself, but God'n

  me, we don't get along."

  I wanted to laugh, but Camilla's shadow chilled my heart.

  "Okay, look. I've been doing some checking," Rex said. "Nothing for sure. I just

  wanted to say you better watch your back. I—"

  My phone beeped a "no service" tone. I tried to call Rex back, but got nothing. "Nuts." I got out and made my way into the clinic. A young woman with intensely

  dark skin in a white uniform sat behind the receptionist's desk and gave me a smile filled

  with brilliant, even teeth set in gums the color of blueberries. I introduced myself and

  asked for Dr. Claiborne.

  "Across the street in the little broom closet he calls an office," she said. "I'll call

  him"

  As soon as she finished punching in the numbers, she looked up at me. "You one

  of his old patients?"

  "I think maybe his father's." I smiled. "A long time ago!"

  She gave me a warm laugh and shook her head. "Dr. Claiborne has three

  daughters, no sons."

  The surprise played across my face.

  "He retired once, back when my mother worked for him. It didn't take so—" She

  stopped to leave a voice mail to tell Dr. Claiborne about me, then she drew me a map to

  his office.

  I thanked her took the map, and hurried across the street, where a uniformed

  security officer directed me straight on back. I passed through a set of double doors

  guarded by another security officer and followed the hand-drawn map's zigzag along the

  fluorescent-lighted, tiled corridor to the first landmark, a lighted sign for radiology. Across

  the hall sat an unmarked wooden door with louvered vents in the lower panel. I stopped by

  the door and raised my hand to knock when it opened, leaving me to stare straight into the

  timeworn face of Dr. Giles Claiborne.

  The wrinkled familiarity of the past froze me for another instant. I figured he must

  be at least eighty-five, but his cool, glacial blue eyes lit up his face and made him appear

  decades younger. Claiborne stood imperially straight and unbent by time and crowned

  with a full shock of white hair.

  He wore a cotton broadcloth shirt with a weave as fine as silk and a three-letter

  script monogram instead of a pocket. A gold collar bar made sure the knot in his silk,

  regimental stripe tie remained perfect. His khakis had knife creases, where mine

  resembled tired aluminum foil someone had tried to press into respectability. His knife

  creases broke perfectly above stylishly comfortable and obviously expensive burnished

  leather loafers.

  My old feelings of social insecurity rebounded with a vengeance. Even though I

  had been wellborn into a family with a distinguished Mississippi heritage, I had come

  along at a time when the family fortunes had slipped away in a latter-day Faulknerian

  crisis that had left too many of my relatives clinging to nothing more substantial than

  ancestral bloodlines. As a result, I had grown up uneasily among the privileged classes

  from the planter culture of the Delta and, later, the moneyed movers of Jackson. I had always felt from those classes but never of them. I tried to belong to those

  classes as a child, but never found a comfort level with their patrician attitudes and their

  casual, nonreflective acceptance of superior entitlement granted by the natural order of

  things. I'm sure that played no small role in my ultimate rebellion and rejection of my

  heritage.

  Despite my professional and financial achievements, I had never completely

  exorcised my desire to be accepted by them. I didn't understand that flaw, but it played a

  major role in my avoidance of my home state and most of those with whom I had grown

  up. Clearly, I had rejected this culture but had not escaped it.

  "Bradford! What an unanticipated pleasure!" Giles Claiborne extended his hand. I

  took his powerful, warm grip. It subtracted yet more years from my perception of him and

  made me feel almost like his child patient again.

  "Dr. Claiborne," I managed as I returned his handshake.

  "Please call me Clay. You're an accomplished physician yourself now; I've run

  across your papers in the literature any number of times now, and I ha
ve to confess, a lot

  of what you have written sails right over the head of this old country doctor." His broad, self-deprecating smile further rattled my emotional equilibrium. "Of course… Clay."

  "Well, then, come on in." He motioned me into a small, windowless room

  overstuffed with an Oriental rug, dark mahogany furnishings, and all the professionally

  decorated accoutrements that went with the look.

  Broom closet indeed. I saw from a quick glance at the walls that he was on the

  hospital board and had been for a several decades.

  "Here." He motioned me in the direction of his desk, to an armchair upholstered in

  burgundy leather and studded with brass. "Have a seat." He closed the door and followed

  me, settling his tall, lanky frame into an identical chair facing me.

  Claiborne gave me an intense silent stare that made me feel like a patient again.

  Then he leaned closer to me, studied my face, then sat back in his own leather-upholstered

  chair.

  "Lordy, Bradford, you do have the Judge's eyes," he said finally "You have that

  look that… demeanor he had which made people do what he told them to, made them

  instantly believe he was right about most anything." He nodded to himself as he continued

  to fix my face with his gaze. "Call it charisma or presence if you like, but it clearly made

  him such a successful lawyer and a political force that lives on today."

  Given the Judge's political leanings and the ways he enforced his power, I did not

  want to say "Thank you," so I nodded and asked, "You really think so?"

  I knew my noncommittal, equivocal response fell right in with how good people

  could stand by and let evil things like segregation happen. I reminded myself, I had not

  come to refight the Civil War, but to find a way to look at my comatose wife's brain scans. "Lordy," Claiborne said again. "Why, I remember the last time I saw you, you

  were about this high." He raised his left hand about three or four feet off the floor. I caught