by Archer Mayor
“Her condition’s unchanged,” Sue said shortly.
Rachel shook her head sympathetically. “That’s too bad. I guess you’re close. That is wild, though, isn’t it? That all this bad stuff is happening to Beaupré, and now his old girlfriend is horribly sick. I wonder if it’s connected?”
Willy’s voice was disarmingly dismissive—despite his thoughts paralleling hers. “Oh, hell. Coincidences do happen. Pretty big jump to go from arson and sabotage to Ebola, don’t you think?”
Rachel seemed to consider that for a moment before agreeing, “I guess. It is a reach when you say it out loud.”
“It would also be a risk if you tried reporting it,” Sam said supportively. “Assuming Katz would even let you. We’ll check it out. If we get a notion that fact is stranger than fiction, we’ll let you know—just like we smuggled you into the warehouse after the fire.”
That was frankly manipulative, and a little mean, reminding Rachel of the debt she owed them. Whatever its influence, however, the moment was interrupted by Rachel now being the one distracted by a phone text. She read its contents quickly, pocketed the device, and collected her things before heading for the door, saying distractedly, “Okay, I gotta go. Thanks, everybody.”
It suited Sam and Willy to have her gone, of course, but it prompted Sam to ask, “That was fast. Wonder what fired her up?”
“Don’t care,” Willy replied bluntly, back on keel and looking at Sue. “I wanna know more about Victoria.”
“Not much more to tell,” she responded.
But Willy turned scornful. “Not about their coochie-coo. I’m talking about if there’s any linkage between Beaupré’s problems and her getting sick.”
“You think somebody gave her Ebola?” Sam asked.
He stared at them both. “What do I know? Sue, you were the one who said she couldn’t’ve caught it from the pilot. So how else did it happen, when nobody else got tagged? I mean,” he added, pointing to the room’s far corner, “that’s why the heiress to my worldly possessions is snoring in this nest of microbes, isn’t it? ’Cause none of us was ever at risk.”
Sammie sighed as Sue reassured him, nevertheless comforted to see the old Willy back. “Yes, yes. But I still don’t know of any contact between Bob Beaupré and Victoria since way back when. She hasn’t even mentioned him in years.”
“It could be like you told Rachel just now,” Sam suggested to him. “You said it, if only to throw her off track: Real coincidences do happen. All the time.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Willy grumbled, utterly unswayed. “But then let’s treat it like we do a real case—get out and collect the evidence.”
“Of what?” Sam asked.
“What’s the first golden rule?” Willy asked her. “Anytime we’re called out? It’s a homicide till proved otherwise.”
“You think somebody infected Victoria on purpose?” Sue asked him, the horror clear on her face.
“I’m saying we should rule it out,” Willy stated.
In the following silence, Sam said in a low voice, “He’s right.”
“How?” Sue wondered.
Before he could answer her, Sam’s iPhone went off.
“Your hubby, Sue,” she reported, reading the text. “He’s asking me for backup at the warehouse.”
She glanced instinctively at the crib, but it was Willy who quieted her concern.
“I got it, babe. Leave her with me. God knows I’m not goin’ anywhere, and if I get in a jam, I’ll call Louise.”
“I’m standing right here,” Sue reminded them. “Mother of two? Hello?”
“Okay, okay,” Sam conceded, giving Sue a hug and Willy a kiss. She crouched by the crib and touched her daughter’s head. “Night, night, sweetie pie.”
She threw them a wave at the door, and was gone.
Willy resumed, undeterred. “What were Victoria’s primary bases of operation around here?” he asked Sue.
She blinked a moment before answering, bringing herself back on topic. “Really only her office. Otherwise, she moved throughout the building.”
“Making the office the best place to set a trap,” Willy proposed.
“You make it sound like a trip wire,” Sue said.
“Exactly,” he replied, and wincingly began shifting his legs to dangle over the side of his bed.
“What’re you doing?” she demanded.
“Give it a rest,” he told her. “You’re off duty.”
“And you’re still recovering.”
He gave her an exasperated glare. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. ‘Time for your walk,’ ‘Time to get some exercise,’ ‘Don’t give PT a hard time.’ That’s all I hear around here. Well, I’m ready to exercise. Where’s her office?”
He rose carefully, trying to hide his discomfort, and allowed Sue to adjust his sling. He gestured to her to precede him out the door. She glanced at Emma’s sleeping form as they did so, to which he only said, “A bomb wouldn’t wake her up, and I’ll tell the nurses.”
Garlanda’s office was one flight up, large, light, pleasantly decorated, and as neat as when Willy had first met her there with Sam.
He approved, although—typical of the man—his own demonstrations of similar neatness were restricted to his home and car. In a classic display of misdirection, he pointedly kept his office desk a mess, so that most people would think him a slob.
Victoria had no such need to disguise a monumentally complicated psychology. She was simply tidy.
“I don’t know what you’re going to find,” Sue said, hitting the lights to enhance what was coming through the glass partition overlooking the central hallway.
Willy didn’t answer, touring the room like an art patron at an opening, albeit dressed in a gown with its back flapping open. He eventually took Victoria’s seat behind the desk.
“This the way she usually kept it?” he asked.
“Yup. Nothing’s been changed. People may have come in for a file or something. That’s possible. But she’s only been out a few days.”
“Good,” he said, surveying the scene as its rightful occupant would have every workday.
He sat forward and rested his good arm on the edge of the desk, studying the retro leather desk pad; the twin silver pen holder; the elegant, feminine antique clock; the red stapler and tape dispenser. He reached out and handled one of the sharpened pencils above the pad, pretending to take a note. Fulfilling the gesture, he then pulled a Post-it notepad toward him, although he wrote nothing.
He touched the box of tissues with a fingertip, the small replica of an ancient Greek recumbent figurine—reworked as the handle of a letter opener—and a porcelain dish of paper clips.
Finally, he pointed to a small bottle parked beside the multibutton phone. “That her eyedropper? I saw her use something like it when Sam and I were here.”
Sue made to reach for it.
“Don’t touch it,” Willy requested quietly. “Just tell me about it. Why’s it not labeled?”
“She thought buying it was wasteful, when it’s just saline and we have bags of the stuff in the dispensary. They charge a bundle for it at the drugstore. So she got hold of a generic bottle and just refilled it as needed.”
“Huh,” he said. “How does she transfer it to the bottle? What’s the process?”
“Pretty straightforward, for a nurse. You spike the bag, like you would for a patient, but instead of starting an IV, you put the drip straight into the bottle—run it wide open till it’s full.”
“And the bag?”
“If it’s still got fluid left, you shut off the drip. If not, you just throw it out. Like I said, they’re really common around here. Almost every drip set we rig begins with a bag of saline.”
Willy was silent, lost in thought. His next question, however, caught her by surprise. “Didn’t they decontaminate this office after she was diagnosed? I woulda thought they’d strip it clean.”
Not knowing where this was going, she explained, “They did swabs
and ultraviolet. It’s not my area, but the experts went all through here, including this office, and gave us a clean bill. They sure convinced me they knew what they were doing. Maybe it was just those suits they wear.”
“Swell,” Willy said, virtually to himself. “You have any gloves on you?”
She didn’t, but opened a nearby drawer and extended a box to him without comment.
He extracted one, slipped it on his good hand, and picked up the bottle, shaking it slightly.
“About half full,” he said before dropping it inside a second glove, which he handed to Sue. “You have a twisty or a rubber band to close that off?”
She circled the desk to stand beside him and opened the drawer at his waist to locate a rubber band, asking, “Where’re you going with this?”
“Literally? To the lab. Figuratively? I’m playing twenty questions in my head about everything I’ve learned while I’ve been staying here, trying to come up with who tried to knock off your pal.”
Sue pointed at the bagged eyedropper with her chin. “With that?”
“If I’m right, yeah. Everybody’s been saying how ya gotta have fluid contact with Ebola to catch it.” He held up his prize. “Well, how ’bout self-administered spiked saline, right into her own eyeballs?”
* * *
Sam found Lester holed up in his new permanent residence, the GreenField conference room he shared with Pat Smith. Pat wasn’t there when Sam arrived, however, since by now, it really was getting late—which made her all the more curious about his request for assistance.
“Guess who I found?” he asked her as she entered, his enthusiasm at odds with his haggard expression.
“Who?” Like everyone before her, she crossed to the interior picture window and looked out into the dark, and now empty, interior space beyond.
“The ever-elusive Philip Beaupré,” he replied. “For days, I made it crystal clear we wanted to interview him, especially after Joe missed seeing either him or his father on his trip to Colchester headquarters. A couple of times, I was even told that he’d come and gone right here without my being told. But this time”—he raised an index triumphantly—“I was not only given the heads-up he was coming, but—one minute before I texted you—confirmation that he’d arrived. He’s supposedly in the executive offices on the top floor right now.”
At that, without Sam saying a word, Lester’s face fell slightly, revealing how tired he was.
“I’m really sorry,” he said. “I should’ve asked, what with Willy sick and Emma needing a babysitter. Shit. Not thinking straight. I just didn’t want to question him on my own, not after all this anticipation. I’m getting a little punchy.”
Sam left the window and patted his shoulder, struck by not just his show of consideration, but also how it reflected their squad’s instinctive interdependence and support. “Let it go, for crying out loud. Emma’s fast asleep on the floor of her father’s hospital room—with your wife, no less. What can go wrong?”
His split second of confusion made her laugh. “Come on,” she told him. “Don’t answer that and lead the way.”
As she followed him toward the aforementioned executive offices, located in the penthouse suite, Sam found herself bemused by her colleague’s excitement. She, too, was interested in speaking with Philip, he being the one family member they had yet to meet. But she’d also had the advantage of watching the variable components of this convoluted case behave like bumper cars at a country fair. Lester almost hadn’t been out of this building since he’d been assigned to it, buried among its files and flowcharts, rumors and facts, legends and lore. The huge, all-encompassing edifice had become a world unto itself. She half wondered whether, in that light, the place hadn’t become an empire where its missing prince—the wandering Philip—had taken on mythic proportions.
For her, Philip Beaupré was no more than just another player, with no more or less involvement in this mayhem than anybody else—including the one guy—now dead—whom they’d arrested for a murder it didn’t look like he’d committed, and whose demise, according to Joe, seemed to have generated a quarter-million-dollar payoff.
She only hoped that leaving her daughter yet again—not to mention a healing Willy, whose testimony of love had left her stunned, happy, and understandably nervous—would be worth the guilt and disappointment accompanying this outing. Could Philip even remotely live up to Lester’s expectations?
Personally, she doubted it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Rachel sensed she’d been given the runaround. The person who’d texted her in Willy’s hospital room, “I got what your after,” had been coy from the start, not to mention grammatically challenged, and was now clearly missing in action.
As she’d explained to Joe earlier, journalists of her generation were as tied to their smartphones as their predecessors had been to police scanners. But the difference exceeded technology. The scope of her sources had become virtually endless, since texting, tweeting, emails, and Facebook knew no boundaries. Everybody with a device and the urge to broadcast was a potential source of information. And people’s near compulsion to publish every thought and observation, in all circumstances, greatly favored news reporters.
The problems, however, went from the obvious to the more nuanced. This information overload meant that Rachel’s phone never stopped receiving, needed constant housekeeping, and ran the risk of becoming addictive. Along those lines, it also meant that, if she wasn’t careful, she could become like a puppy chasing treats—too distracted separating worthy morsels from trash to ever lift her head and develop a story based on a more thoughtful, measured, and penetrating approach. Investigative journalism—still rightly or not the crown jewel of the profession—had once been a painstaking business, often conducted through the meticulous, lengthy nurturing of reliable informants. This hadn’t necessarily changed, but too many reporters were opting for the less taxing option of sorting through easily acquired online garbage in search of a rare nugget of gold.
All of this was alive in Rachel’s mind because she’d proceeded straight from the hospital to GreenField’s White River warehouse in the hopes of locating just such a nugget. That’s what she’d been hoping her source meant by “what your after.” Unfortunately, that little bird was known to her only as SuperStacker, which “handle” implied that he or she worked inside the plant, but withheld the logical next step, like a phone number or a real name. This was a definite disappointment, now that Rachel found herself empty-handed. She had circulated her interest in talking with anyone about why and from whom GreenField had come under such fire, and SuperStacker had been the only one to volunteer something beyond an uninformed opinion.
But no one had shown up where SuperStacker said they should meet, leaving Rachel with few options beyond texting, “Where are you?” to no effect. She was tired, unwashed, with her stomach complaining about her steady fare of fast food, making the ease and regularity of simply snapping pictures of Rotary meetings look increasingly attractive.
And there was an additional concern, arising in the wake of her adrenaline collapse. Stan Katz had warned her at her job interview about the number of dead ends that lay ahead of her. He had not detailed the pitfalls of traveling late at night to meet with mysterious sources promising much-desired intelligence. Perhaps he’d assumed she’d have common sense enough to figure that one out for herself.
In any case, as she looked around the gloomy edges of the remote, poorly lit, gigantic recycling area she’d been directed to, it occurred to her to move to a more populated part of the property, rather than wait any longer.
That didn’t mean she was giving up. Her mother’s everyday dogged determination hadn’t been lost on her over the years. If SuperStacker had veered off, it didn’t mean that his information hadn’t had merit. And even though Rachel was now on the building’s outside, she sensed its security to be in disarray, and was thinking that she could do worse than to hunt for the story on her own. SuperStacker had
implied there was something to be found. Why not try to turn a setback into something more rewarding?
* * *
Lester had been to the executive offices before, and thus better appreciated his and Pat’s Castle aerie as a result. He’d wondered at the time if the intent had been to park the visiting investigators in such hardscrabble environs, hoping they would tire of the lack of the penthouse suite’s soft lighting, wall-to-wall carpeting, and clean and shimmering walls, complete with artwork.
But in fact, the fancier digs struck him as sterile and disengaged, indistinguishable from any offices inside a bank or insurance company. His opinion was that he’d gotten a better feel for the organization from his rough-and-tumble perch and—he could only hope—the vengeful menace in its midst.
Nothing about the area he and Sammie now entered spoke to him that viscerally.
Reinforcing the notion, they were met at the elevator by a woman in high heels, silk blouse, and a business suit—an unusual sight in Vermont to begin with—holding a seemingly prop clipboard and wearing a broad and vacant smile. Connecting her and this setting to the dark and now abandoned black vastness below demanded a serious stretch of the imagination.
“Would you like to follow me?”
Lester’s instinctive response was, Not really, quickly overridden by his desire to both succeed where Joe had not—in having a conversation with Philip—and in doing something slightly outside the paperwork slog he and Pat had been bound to for so long.
“Lead the way,” he therefore said, gesturing politely with one hand.
Their receptionist took them down a long, quiet hallway, no doubt bustling during normal operations, and even now containing the odd figure working before a computer or a copier as they passed.
“Must be hard, working here with everything shut down,” Sammie said conversationally, in fact thinking of how bizarre this woman appeared, dressed to the nines just so she could wander around a largely empty office with no apparent purpose.
