Under the Beetle's Cellar

by Mary Willis Walker

  Sandy Hendrick leapt to her feet, her slender body vibrating. “This is ridiculous!” Her voice shook with rage. “I don’t have to stay here! I’m leaving.”

  “There’s a grandchild,” Molly continued. “A boy. His mother was murdered today. His father will not come out of this alive. That baby will be an orphan. You wouldn’t have to get involved, but you could if you—”

  “No! I never had a baby until my Sarah was born in 1967, and I’d been married for two years. I was a virgin when I got married! I never—”

  Bryan Holihan spoke up. “We could do this privately, Mrs. Hendrick. No one would have to know.”

  “Listen!” she cried out. “I’m not the woman you think I am.”

  Molly studied the taut, high-strung body, the tense, self-preoccupied, ravaged, humorless face. The woman was about to break. Sandy Hendrick was right—she was not the woman Molly thought she was. She was certainly Samuel Mordecai’s biological mother and a DNA test would prove it, but she was not the right woman. It would do no good to continue tormenting her, or to try to coerce her to speak to her son. And, anyway, it didn’t matter. She had come to the end of the strand. She had found what mattered.

  Molly stood. “Sorry we bothered you, Mrs. Hendrick. You’re right. This is a misunderstanding and I apologize.”

  Bryan Holihan reached up and grabbed her arm. “But—”

  “Agent Holihan, it’s clear Mrs. Hendrick is not the woman we thought she was. We need to let her get on with her evening.”

  He struggled to his feet.

  Sandy Hendrick looked incredulous, as if she’d received a last-second reprieve from certain disaster.

  Molly handed her a card, her usual practice. “If you want to talk to me, later on,” she said, “give me a call. Thanks for your time. We’d appreciate your not talking about this matter to anyone.” No danger of that, Molly thought.

  They returned to the car in silence. As they pulled out of the lot, Holihan demanded, “Have you lost your mind? That’s her. Even I could see the resemblance to Mordecai. And she was just starting to break down. All the signs were there. You had her where you wanted her. In two more minutes she would have admitted it.”

  “Probably,” Molly said. Copper was leaning into the front seat resting his head on Molly’s shoulder and she was scratching behind his good ear.

  “Then why—”

  “Because I saw that it doesn’t matter.”

  “Doesn’t matter! Then why have we wasted all this time?”

  “Nothing is ever wasted, Bryan. Haven’t you learned that? How old are you?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  “Well, see, you’re too young.” Molly leaned back and closed her eyes. “I need five minutes of silence to think some things through before we call in. Okay?”

  The dark landscape whizzed by. One good thing about Bryan Holihan was that he drove like a bat out of hell. Another was that he didn’t feel he had to make conversation. That made for perfect thinking conditions. Molly sat cross-legged in the passenger seat and contemplated deceit and homicide. Or, more accurately, she decided, ingenuity and assassination.

  The dog slept on the back seat, occasionally making little whines and twitches in his sleep. Molly glanced back at him and wondered if police dogs had worse dreams than other dogs. According to Grady, this one had had his fair share of nightmare experiences during his career. But this morning, when he’d gone after the attackers in the garage, he had seemed joyful in his ferocity, totally alive, an animal doing what he was born to do. Bred and trained for such action, he would kill easily and without remorse if the occasion required it.

  Just like most people.

  Molly had never had the slightest problem understanding why people killed one another. There were times in her life when she had been angry enough or scared enough to commit murder; if the conditions had been right, she probably would have. On the Patriot police beat, she had seen the results of countless murders—murders for money, revenge, love, drugs, and in one memorable case, murder for bottle caps. Her reaction had never been surprise or outrage, but a grim acknowledgment that it happens because that is the kind of animal we are.

  Now she was going to do something she’d never done before: try to persuade others to commit a homicide. “Bryan, I’m ready. Let’s call the command post. I need to talk to Lattimore and Stein.”

  He glanced over at her and grunted an assent. When he got Andrew Stein on the radio, he handed the mike to Molly. She asked, “Who else is present, Mr. Stein?”

  “Curtis, and Borthwick.”

  “Would you get Lattimore in and Traynor, too, and ask Borthwick to wait outside? I want to tell you what happened, and I have an idea I’d like to talk about.”

  “Traynor’s still at the Grimes scene and Lattimore’s on his way to the airport in Austin.”

  “He’s not leaving?”

  “No. Just picking someone up. Jules, could you wait outside. Go ahead, Miss Cates, it’s Curtis and me.”

  “Is this frequency secure?”

  “It’s supposed to be. Go ahead. Have you found Mom?”

  “Oh, yes. Sandy Hendrick is the mother all right. She didn’t admit that she was, but she looks so much like him you could pick her out from a hundred other women. Also she was so stressed by our questions, she was ready to explode. She’s really tried to repress the event. If we’d stuck with it, we could have broken her down, but I could see that it doesn’t matter.”

  “Doesn’t matter?” Stein sounded impatient.

  “I needed to complete the line of inquiry to see what the point really was. This is probably immoral and unethical, but I’ve got to tell you what I’m thinking now, while we still have time.”

  “We’re all cynical adults here,” Stein said.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking. Mr. Stein, I’ve heard the FBI has agents who are trained as assassins.”

  “Miss Cates, I—”

  “No. Don’t respond to that. I know that you do, but you probably call it by some other term, like rearrangement specialists or mortality adjusters. Here’s my real question: Have you got any middle-aged women, around fifty, who have that kind of experience? Who can go into dangerous situations and take someone out? That’s the way you say it, isn’t it? Take them out?”

  There was silence at the other end.

  “Do we all agree that launching an assault on the Jezreelites without taking Samuel Mordecai out is likely to give us dead hostages?”

  “Miss Cates, where are you going with this?”

  “First answer me. Do we agree?”

  “We could get dead hostages even if we did figure out how to take him out,” Stein said evenly.

  “I know, but we would have a better chance with him out.”

  “We’re all nodding,” Stein said curtly.

  “Okay. You said Mordecai always watches the Channel 33 news at six, right? And you’ve used that to feed him information.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Suppose they carried a news item tomorrow that Samuel Mordecai’s birth mother had been located and that she wanted to talk to him before the end.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And suppose he bit on it and contacted you and said he wanted to talk to her, too. And suppose she said it had to be face to face and private, and she wasn’t afraid to come in where he was. And suppose she went in there, into the compound.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And suppose she gets him alone, away from where the kids are, sort of diverts him. And suppose she kills him. And right then you start the maneuver, take the barn, and swoop down to protect the agent.”

  “That’s a lot of supposing.”

  “I know.”

  “We’re a civilian agency, Miss Cates. We don’t kill people.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Maybe you watch too many movies.”

  “Maybe I do.”

  “Where are you now?” Stein asked.

  “San Marcos just zoomed by. With Bry
an driving, we’re forty minutes from you.”

  “Come back right now. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Bryan, do not stop at McDonald’s. We’re all dining here.”

  “But what do you think?” Molly persisted.

  “I think you need to come here. Grady will be back shortly and Lattimore should be back in an hour or so. We’ll talk about it then.”

  ——

  Grady Traynor, Andrew Stein, and a slender bald man Molly hadn’t met were standing around the computer monitor eating fried chicken and watching George Curtis type words onto the screen. The bald man wore jeans and orange suspenders with palm trees on them over a lavender T-shirt.

  Bryan Holihan immediately went to the bucket on top of the fax machine and took out a piece of chicken.

  Grady kissed Molly on the cheek. Then he embraced her, holding on longer than usual. She looked up at him. His face seemed grayer than it had a few hours ago and the circles under his eyes looked engraved into the skin. “Bad scene?” she asked.

  “One of the worst.”

  Andrew Stein said, “Miss Cates, this is Jules Borthwick, just flew in from New York. Molly Cates.”

  Molly shook hands with the bald man. His hand was fine-boned and soft. She’d never seen anyone who looked less like an FBI agent. “Are you an agent?” she asked.

  “Don’t you just love those dark suits?” he warbled in a falsetto. He lowered his voice to a normal pitch. “I’m a consultant—makeup and special effects.”

  “Mr. Borthwick is a celebrity,” Andrew Stein said. “He created the Elephant Man on Broadway, the Mantis Pieta, lots of movie and rock video monsters. He’s said to be a genius.”

  Molly studied Borthwick with interest. “Is this true or are they playing with me?”

  “Oh, it’s true, especially the genius part. I got an Obie for Methuselah the Dread.”

  “What are you doing in Jezreel?”

  Andrew Stein said, “It will all come clear. Wait until Lattimore gets back.”

  She looked around. “He’s not back yet?”

  “Plane was delayed,” Stein said curtly. “Just twenty minutes.”

  “Who’s coming in?” Molly asked.

  “The woman you were talking about—the fifty-year-old agent—Loraine Conroy.” Stein checked his watch. “They should be back here by eleven.”

  Molly was breathless with surprise. “You had already—”

  “Great minds,” Stein said. “But your idea of breaking it on the TV news is excellent, original with you. We were planning to call Mordecai with it direct, but this is much better because he’ll see it and call us. That way, it feels like his idea. Go ahead and print that out, Curtis, so she can read it.”

  Curtis hit a key; the light on the printer began to blink.

  Molly tried to keep her voice even. “When did you decide to do this?”

  “Early this morning, right after Lieutenant Traynor told us Samuel Mordecai was adopted and how far you’d gotten in searching for the mother. We’ve been sitting around here for days trying to figure out how to get someone inside there to take Mordecai out, and then you came into our lives and gave us the answer. Hallelujah. Lattimore called Quantico right then to ask if Rain could fly down. We had to get a green light on Mordecai, but the real problem is that we have a policy against risking agents’ lives to get hostages out.” Seeing her expression, he explained bluntly, “Hostages are considered to have one leg in the grave already and you don’t risk a fully alive person for them. But when children are involved, everyone goes all mushy.”

  The printer spit out a single sheet.

  “So,” Molly said, feeling hot anger building up, “you knew all along it didn’t matter whether we found the mother or not, but you let us make the trip to San Antonio.”

  “Oh, no. We hoped you’d come back with a bona fide mom. It would be nice to have her in our pocket, just in case. But you know as well as we do this negotiation’s at a dead end. Mordecai’s just been leading us on, buying time. Any bargaining chip is worthless. He never intended to let any of the kids go.”

  Molly looked at Andrew Stein’s plump face in wonder. She’d been considering herself ruthless. But these guys were way beyond her.

  Stein picked the paper up from the printer and handed it to her. “Read it out loud.”

  Molly read: “MOLLY CATES: I was working on a story about Samuel Mordecai for my magazine when I learned he had been adopted as an infant. I went back and researched it. It was difficult, but I finally located his birth mother yesterday. She lives in Houston now and had no idea that Mordecai was her son until I talked to her yesterday.

  “NEWSPERSON: How can you be sure that the woman you found really is his mother?

  “CATES: Because I was careful not to give her any of the details I knew about where the infant had been found and when and what was found with him. She was able to tell me all that, every detail. There’s no question—this woman is Samuel Mordecai’s real mother. She wants more than anything in the world to speak with him, explain things to him.

  “NEWSPERSON: What are the circumstances of his birth? You said he was found?

  “CATES: At this point in time I’m not at liberty to talk about that.” She stopped reading and said, “I’d never say ‘at this point in time.’ I’d—”

  “Just read it,” Grady said.

  Molly shrugged and continued: “NEWSPERSON: Have you passed all this on to the FBI negotiators?

  “CATES: Yes, I have. I gave them copies of my notes and tapes.

  “NEWSPERSON: What do they intend to do about it?

  “CATES: I don’t know.”

  Molly finished reading and looked up. “Why me?”

  Grady said, “Have some chicken. We’ve got plenty.”

  She shook her head. “Why me?”

  Andrew Stein said, “First of all, it has the advantage of being as close to the truth as we can stay. This version is true up until the last step. Makes for less lying, more chance of it being believable, less chance of getting caught. But the main reason you’re the one to do it is that he’s talked about you in our conversations.”

  “He has?” She looked at Grady; he hadn’t told her this.

  Grady shrugged.

  “He trusts you,” Stein said.

  “Trusts me! Oh, no. You’ve got your wires crossed.” She walked to the fireplace and studied the selection of photographs they had managed to find of the estimated hundred and fifty Hearth Jezreelites believed to be inside the compound. At the top was Samuel Mordecai standing with Annette Grimes outside the compound. He was smiling, golden-haired and radiant, a sun god on top of the world. Next to him, Annette looked tiny, pretty and shy.

  “No,” Stein said. “He sees you as ungodly, unfeminine, wrong-headed, and doomed. But he also sees you as ruthlessly honest and struggling to tell the truth as you see it. More honest than the people who call themselves Christians and do nothing about it. He thinks your interest in exploring faith is more religious than most people’s watered-down or fake belief.”

  “He said that?”

  “Yup. Curtis, find her the transcripts of the relevant phone tapes, please. Mordecai says you didn’t try to misrepresent yourself and you quoted him accurately. He says you tried to get at the truth, but it was impossible because your magazine, your audience, and the world you live in are hopelessly materialistic and corrupted. So you had no chance.”

  “Well, that may be true,” Molly said. “There are days I think that myself. But how did my name even come up?”

  “At one point we approached him about outside, neutral people to serve as possible go-betweens. Mordecai insisted you are the only one he’d trust. But like everything else we’ve tried with him, that collapsed.”

  Molly was flabbergasted. She’d assumed Samuel Mordecai had hated her as much as she hated him. It was pathetic. If he had no one he trusted more than her, then he was truly alone and besieged in this world. “Well, he couldn’t be more wrong, could h
e? I’m clearly an inveterate liar and now I’m collaborating on fraud and murder.”

  Andrew Stein said, “The problem here, Molly—may I? I’m tired of saying Miss Cates.”

  “I wish you would.”

  “The problem, Molly, is what we in the business call divergent worldviews. Mordecai sees what he’s doing as leading the world to its glorious, millennial rendezvous with God, and you see what he’s doing as butchering innocent children. In divergences this extreme, normal morality doesn’t apply.” He looked at Grady. “Lieutenant, Mr. Borthwick and I have some work to do. We need Bryan, too. Could you take Molly through the script idea?”

  “Sure,” Grady said. “Can we use the computer in here?”

  “Yes. And it would be nice to have a draft before they get back from the airport. Curtis, you man the phones, please. Come on, Jules.” The three men left. Curtis slipped a pair of earphones on and sat at the hostage phone control panel.

  Grady pulled out the chair in front of the computer. “Sit down, Molly. We need to get some notes and tapes put together. We want evidence that will convince Samuel Mordecai that you did in fact track down his mother.”

  Molly looked at her watch. “This sounds too much like a term paper, and it’s ten-thirty, Grady. I was planning on taking my dog home to bed.”

  He patted the chair. “Sit down here and rest your weary self. Your shoulders look all tense. Let me work on them.”

  Molly sat. Grady stood behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders. Slowly he began to knead the tight muscles at the base of her neck. She closed her eyes and relaxed into his familiar hands. “Good thing the dog’s outside,” she murmured.

  “Yeah, it would be nice if Curtis were, too.”

  “Mmmmm,” she said, letting her head fall forward, “that’s good, right behind the bones there. Ooo. Perfect.”

  “This job is right up your alley,” he said into her ear. “A bit of writing and a bit of acting.” His thumbs were working their way down her spine. “We want you to write a script, Molly. An interview between you and Samuel Mordecai’s mother. You come in and tell her what’s led you to her and then she tells you—eventually—the details of his birth and abandonment and you get convinced she is the mother. She ends up saying she’s regretted leaving him every day of her life and wants to tell him about it and why she did what she did. Make it convincing and make the mother contrite and loving.” He used the heels of his hands to press into her lower back.