“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m as sure as I can be, in the dark. I have a flashlight in my pocket, but I don’t want to turn it on.”
“Keep moving. Don’t stop on top of it.”
“Right.”
“How do you know?” he whispered hungrily.
Now that I had found the spot, I felt like I was standing on a hot griddle. I forced my body to continue the sensuous show of a woman caught in the nectar of the moment. As we shambled along, painfully doing our burlesque of courting tourists, I contemplated his question. How did I know? Call it a matter of geologist’s intuition, something in the gut, a flash of recognition. It was a compass of the mind, a little needle that knew how to find true north.
But there was another part to this reckoning process, a part that came before the needle swung, a feeling that was a compass of another sort, and that feeling was anxiety, plain and simple. It is the curse of the intuitive mind to grapple with ambiguity: incomplete data, crudely sketched maps, hunches, a sense of pattern that wants just a few more variations before the theme is clear. To embrace the rigors of ambiguity, one must be willing to suffer the anxiety such dissonance and fragmentation spawns. When I was first beginning as a geologist, I had misunderstood that feeling. I had thought it meant I was on the wrong trail. But as the sequence of anxiety and recognition came again and again, experience increasing with layer upon layer of observation, I had come to recognize that the intensity of the anxiety increased until the exact, exquisite moment when knowing came, and vanished into the ecstasy of the aha!
But how did I know this time? I thought of Scott Thomas, and his subtle reading of the landscape. “I know because Jack took the trouble to mark a significant feature of the beach geometry, and relative to that geometry, these proportions are right. The upper swash. This is where the storm waves reach. See? And there are your ‘streets’: one, two, three, four, five. They fit perfectly, and make the scale correct. Jack did a damned good job. So this,” I kicked the sand where the line of wrack and shells were totally absent, “is a break in the pattern. And the slope of the beach changes ever so slightly. There’s a slight hump, as if the sand was replaced over an additional volume. It’s not much, but just enough that I can see it even in this little light. In that way,” I said, now realizing why I knew what I knew, “he felt the map to be complete. He marked the Holiday Inn, its wooden walkway, the upper swash line, and these five boardwalks coming out of the palm trees; nothing else was necessary. The scale is much tighter, see? In fact, the lines marking the Atlantic and the Banana River, even the shuttle at the Cape were gratuitous, and not to scale.”
“Good eye, Em.” For the first time that day, Tom sounded truly happy. He gave me a hug borne of delight.
“And it makes sense,” I said, still whispering. “It’s above the saturated part of the beach, so what’s buried here is less likely to corrode. And if you think about it, Jack would look at a beach this way.”
“Why?”
“Because he grew up here. He likes sports. He’s really good at them. He would have been a surfer. And here there is surf.” I pointed out to sea. The breakers were coming in like white panthers, the cresting foam glowing in the light from the moon, which had for the moment broken free of the clouds.
“That’s some big surf,” Tom said. “I’d hate to see what it takes to come all the way up the beach.”
“The storm surge from the hurricane?” I conjectured. “That’s why the damned wrack is here. I’ll bet with all these motels there’s so much foot traffic here that if we’d waited a few more days, we’d have seen nothing. But screw it. How are we going to get the damned thing out?”
“For that,” Tom said, “we are in fact going to need some help. We’ll need shovels, muscle, and some cover, in case we’re being watched.”
“Where are we going to find that at this hour?”
“That’s the question I was just asking myself.” As we had begun to discuss the logistics of the extraction, we had unconsciously gravitated apart, and now Tom put an arm around me and reeled me in close, again playing the lover. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
He led me back down the beach. My back crawled with the sensation that someone was watching us. I wanted to get away. I wanted to run back home to the Rockies where I could get my bearings, where I knew my way around, and where there were mountains and valleys I could hide in. After what seemed ages, we finally reached the car and got in. Settling in the leather seat, I said, “So what are we going to do?”
“We have time, but not much. The launch has been rescheduled.”
“It takes a while to roll it back out. Then they have to refuel it. And the wind is still blowing.”
“It’s been tailing off all day. I think the winds are passing.”
“You could try one more time to reach Jack. Maybe he has the guy under surveillance.”
At the mention of Jack’s name, Tom lapsed into another of his long silences. Then he said, “Em, how well do you really know Jack?”
Something in the tone of Tom’s voice put me on red alert. And it made all the other little doubts that had been piling up in my mind about Jack—about his sudden disappearance, and a hundred little dots of peculiarity that had been trying to connect themselves to that one point—began to tumble down on me, and I felt the need to defend myself. I wanted to say, “How dare you! I’ve slept with him! I’ve made love with him! I do not do that casually!” but instead, I said, rather stiffly, “Why do you ask?”
Tom stared out through the windshield for a while, as if the conversation he had started had wandered from his mind. I had time to wonder if I had imagined it. Then he spoke again, his voice like lead. “I mean how much do you really know about Jack?”
“What does it matter? We’ve been through—”
Tom cut across my words. “Yes, Jack knows how to be there for you. I got it. But what do you know about Jack?”
“I …”
“How old is Jack?”
“Oh … I always figured a couple, three … maybe four years older than I am. That would make him forty.”
Tom’s face was hard as rock. “When’s his birthday?”
“His … birthday?”
“He was born, wasn’t he? Then he has a birthday.”
“I … I don’t know. I haven’t known him a full year. That means it’s sometime in the next few months.”
“It was last week.”
“What?” I pulled away from him.
“The day you first loved each other. It was his birthday present to himself.”
I balled my fists up against my eyes. “How dare you! How dare you know that and not me!”
Tom caught me by the shoulders again, but now he spoke with a voice full of tenderness. “I know it because I had his personnel file. I’m just trying to illustrate a point. There’s just a whole lot you don’t know about Jack Sampler.”
I began to shake. A little whimpering voice came out of my throat. “Are you going to tell me?”
“No,” he whispered. “There are things that none of us know, things even Jack doesn’t know about himself.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s time you met his mother. If anyone can explain Jack, it’s her.” He brushed my cheek with the back on one hand, then started the car.
– 20 –
His heart pounded with fear and anticipation as he watched the specialist stand up from his desk, stretch, and wander off to find dinner. Here it was, his chance to get onto the computer and find out when the shuttle launch had been rescheduled. The days of outwaiting the high winds and waves had ended, and his plan could once more go forward. Time to make the bitch Lucy pay him back for everything she had done to him. All the nights of lost sleep. The insult of spurning him burned in his gut like a hot iron.
He looked both ways. No one coming, no one to see what he was doing. What fools they were that they thought he did not know about their setup. They thought
him stupid; well, that was handy to let them think so, and he did nothing to change their impression of him. They came and went from the airstrip with the shadow of night, just as he came and went on the boat that they had so foolishly given him to use. He was the pale face they kept around to run errands to the mainland, while the big black Bahamians handled the unwitting slobs from Middle America whose lolling visits made the operation seem legitimate.
He swept down on the machine, hacked into the system, got his information. Lucy would launch at dawn in three days. Three days. Three days! Perhaps it was time to take the boat now, before his swarthy employers had any chance to block his transit. He would have to lay low, wait near the motel, but he had waited before … .
He moved quickly, backing away from the machine, out of the room, out of the building so cleverly decorated to look like a quaint Bahamian beach shack. Little did the pigs from Ohio know what was kept in here, or in any of the others along this row. He hurried away through the trees, and was almost to the dock when he heard his name called. Mispronounced, as usual.
“Yeah?” he answered, sliding seamlessly into his stupid dolt act.
“You are needed at the command center. Move!”
His stomach tightened. “Yes, well, I was about to run some errands across at the mainland. Will I be going soon?” he said, hoping he had shown the correct mixture of initiative and obsequiousness.
“No. This boat is needed. You will stay on this island until it returns.”
“How long will that be?” he inquired anxiously.
“At least until day after tomorrow,” the man said. “And then you must hurry, we will have many errands for you then.”
Don’t worry, he thought. I will fly like the devil himself. For I have an errand of my own.
– 21 –
It was past eleven when we reached Orlando, later still when we pulled into the driveway in front of a modest bungalow-style house that was nestled among graceful shade trees and curving lines of flowers that danced pale and fragrant in the cooling, humid air and the light of the street lamps. The moon was lost behind the clouds and the brighter lights of the city sprawl.
Tom had used his cell phone to call ahead, so a welcoming light was on at the end of the house closest to the carport. A tall, gray-haired woman answered to our knock. “Tom!” she said, her face lighting with a smile. “It’s so lovely to see you!”
“I wish it were under better circumstances, Leah.”
She tipped her head to one side, eyes alert. “What’s happened?” Her voice was soft, but the question carried a note of command. She was Tom’s senior by ten or fifteen years and, while her demeanor was gentle and open, it was clear that she was accustomed to being heard and obeyed.
Tom said, “Let’s go inside. Please.”
“Yes, come ahead. I want you in and the mosquitoes out. But first, who’s your friend?”
Tom turned toward me, and a shadow of sadness swept across his eyes. “This is Em Hansen, a colleague.”
So I am not being introduced as Jack’s girlfriend. I smiled and offered Leah a hand to be shaken. I found hers dry and cool, the bones narrow and surprisingly delicate for such a tall woman. Falling back on my prep school manners, I said, “I’m so pleased to meet you.”
“Welcome, Em. Please, both of you come in.”
Inside the house, I found what appeared to be the peaceful sanctuary of a calm woman. The furniture and deécor were dated but comfortable and well kept, and the effect was one of spaciousness and organization. The dining table, side tables, and coffee table all held neat piles of letters and papers, some bundled with rubber bands or paper clips. There were note pads and pencils close at hand at each location, suggesting that Leah was a woman accustomed to making notes, or that perhaps she was old enough that her memory was no longer entirely sharp. My eyes wandered to the walls, which were decorated with framed lithographs of birds by various artists, and, over the mantle, framed photographs of Jack.
Jack as a boy, smiling in a baseball cap and uniform.
Jack as a teenager, smiling from under a mortarboard.
Jack as a young man, smiling with his arm around a petite and beautiful young woman with dark hair and high cheekbones.
I had to stop myself from going directly to them to study the face of my beloved in the many stages of his growth. And who was the young woman? The picture had to be at least fifteen years old, perhaps twenty. I pulled my eyes away from that photograph, checked the next. Jack in uniform. It was white. Did that mean Navy?
“That’s my son, Jack,” Leah said, her voice rich with pride. “Or perhaps you know him, if you work with Tom.”
I was trying to figure out how to answer that oblique question when Tom spoke for me. “I’m not with the Bureau anymore, Leah. I’m in private consulting. Security. Em is an independent, too. She’s a geologist with a knack for forensic work.”
Leah studied me. “A geologist. Good for you, dear. But, Tom, you’re no longer with the Bureau? Why?”
I in turn answered for him. “He’s going to be a father. He married my friend Faye, and it won’t be long. Tom, does this mean you’ve been keeping this happy detail to yourself?”
Tom stiffened at my chiding, and I immediately felt like a rat. I should have let him tell her what he wanted when he wanted to tell it. But why hadn’t Jack told his mother the news? After all, he’d been at the wedding. And why hadn’t he told her about me? I added this to my growing list of increasingly worrisome questions about Jack.
Leah said, “Oh, how lovely! Tell me about Faye, Tom.”
Tom said, “Leah, I’m sorry. I’d tell you all about her, but I’m afraid this is not a social visit. As I mentioned on the phone we’re on a job. And we’re here because we need your help.”
“Of course, Tom. Anything you need.” Leah was an interesting study. Her light delivery of words suggested that she was your ordinary suburban housewife who was being politely congenial, but she watched Tom intently, and now held her head with the alert stiffness of one who has spent years making eye contact with snakes.
“Thanks. We need to borrow some equipment, and … we need to locate a friend of Jack’s named Brad. Jack told me once that he lives nearby. He was in the Navy, and—”
“He lives right next door.” She gestured to the house just beyond the carport. “He and Jack have been friends since boyhood. Brad grew up there, and bought the house from his parents when they moved into a retirement home.”
“Great. Can I use your phone to call him, please?”
“Why, Tom, it’s late. Brad has several small children. I’m sure—” She stopped in midsentence, staring at Tom. “What is going on?” she demanded sharply, all surface layers of polite conviviality stripped away.
Tom said, “I need to talk to him now, Leah.”
In his usual fashion, Tom was trying to leave Leah out of the loop. But Leah was not a lady who was easily left in the dark. So why come to her at all? Why not just find Brad in the phone book, or knock on doors until he found him?
Leah picked up the phone, dialed it, and handed it to Tom, a fierce look of disapproval fixed tightly on her face. The phone was cordless, so Tom carried it into the kitchen and pulled the door shut. That left me alone with Jack’s mother, two women staring at each other with plenty to say but no way to get started. Or, at least, I didn’t have a clue. Leah again surprised me. She said, “Tell me how well you know Jack.”
I blushed.
She slowly nodded, an abstracted smile floating on her lips. “That’s nice, dear.”
The blush deepened.
Out of precise politeness, she shifted her gaze to her fingers and started to pick at her cuticles. “Jack is a boy who keeps his secrets,” she said. “But you are the type of young woman he would be very proud to know, and I hope that he would eventually bring you home to meet his dear mama.”
I closed my eyes. Swallowed. Her words had been stated with calm formality, but in fact they were astonishingly int
imate. In this brief, unguarded instant of knowing her, I saw that she was the kind of mother I had longed to have, but could not have imagined: candid, kind, affirming, in charge of her intelligence. A wave of feeling swept over me, as intense in its own way as my hunger for Jack, and I was afraid that if I did not run away quickly, I would drown in it.
Easily reading my emotions, she said, “Jack would not love a woman who was incapable of caring deeply. But please tell me why you are here. Something must be very wrong.”
I nodded, eyes still closed.
Tom reentered the room, interrupting our conversation. “He’s coming,” was all he said.
“Where is Jack?” Leah asked.
“I don’t know.”
“How long has he been gone?” she pressed, not even trying to cover the urgency of her words.
Carefully keeping his voice clear of emotion, he said, “I was hoping you might know. Has he contacted you in the past forty-eight hours?”
“I haven’t seen him since Easter. He called a week or more ago to say hello. Why, is he here in Florida?”
“I think so. He was two days ago.”
Leah fixed a hard stare on Tom and sharpened her tone. “What in hell’s name is going on, Tom? Come on, none of your dissembling. This is Leah you’re talking to!”
Tom held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, if you must know, Jack came down here to find someone who was threatening to take a potshot at the space shuttle. And—and you know what that can mean. Jack told me to tell you code red if it got out of control.”
Code red? My eyes shot to Leah. Her gaze flew quickly to one of the pictures on the mantel, just a quick glance, but I couldn’t tell which one had drawn her attention. I wanted to snatch at her, get the information from her. Which one held significance? Was it the picture of her son with his arm around the lovely young woman? The one who gazed into the camera like she knew something the photographer didn’t … .
Killer Dust Page 18
