“I’m quite certain I saw those pictures I took in La Libertad just a day or two ago, Anne,” he said with pedantic fussiness. “Let me see now. You were there to photograph El Diego at his house in Trujillo, correct?”
“Who’s El Diego?” Jeremy asked, grateful for a change of subject.
“The greatest living Peruvian poet at the time,” Anne said. She leaned forward to talk across Martin while he scrolled through one page of thumbnail vulture pictures after another so rapidly that they almost blurred. “Word was out that he was finally going to be given the Nobel Prize in Literature because his main opponent on the Nobel Committee had suddenly dropped dead. He was quite old and he had twisted his ankle while my editor was arranging the interview. Charlie—my editor—was sure that he was going to break out in waves of senility before I got there. It was a good interview, though. The man was brilliant, and he had such an expressive face that the pictures almost took themselves. A month later, the magazine ran them both as a three-page obituary.”
“Huh?”
She shrugged and used her fingers to comb back the short salt-and-pepper curls that fell over her forehead. “The twisted ankle turned out to be a broken hip as well. By the time they realized and put him in the hospital…” She shrugged. “He got pneumonia and slipped into a coma. I was the last one to interview him.”
“Wow!” said the teenager.
“Wow, indeed, young Jeremy,” Martin Crawford said ponderously. “One never knows when history is going to be made. That’s why you must stay alert, keep your cameras ready, and act as if this is the last bird you’ll ever photograph before it goes extinct. The same with your disabled veterans. Any one of them could pop off without a moment’s notice, is that not right, Anne?”
She murmured agreement, but before she could expand on her answer, Crawford said, “Now these eight pictures of a fledgling Vultur gryphus were taken just as it stepped up to the edge of the cliff to try its wings for the first time. Had I not been watching carefully, I would have assumed it was waiting to see a parent return with food.”
Jeremy sighed and dutifully turned his eyes back to the screen. His eye was caught by one of the thumbnails at the top of the screen. Each tiny picture represented a separate file and this one looked like a Gulfstream jet.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the file.
“Which?” Martin moved his cursor to the top. A click of the mouse and the whole line of thumbnails was replaced by another line. He clicked a few more times, but that picture never reappeared. “Oh, dear. I’m always losing my place.”
“It was a small jet,” Jeremy said.
“Jet? Oh. Probably one of those puddle jumpers that one must use to get off the beaten paths. Now here’s an interesting group of—”
“Could I talk to you a minute, Martin?” Anne said, interrupting him. “Outside?”
“Certainly.” He pushed back his chair and handed the mouse to Jeremy. “Just keep left-clicking,” he said. “I’m not sure, but this may be the file where I came across some nubile young women bathing in a river. Very naughty of me to take their pictures before they realized a man was within miles, but you may be amused.”
He stood and followed Anne, who had already grabbed up her coat and opened the door, letting in a welcome wave of fresh air.
Once they were out on the porch, she turned to him and said, “What the hell’s going on?”
“Going on? You asked me to speak to the lad about my work.”
“You’re supposed to be filling him with enthusiasm for a rewarding craft. The adventure of travel. The dollars and cents of selling an article. Instead, you’re narrating a very bad travelogue and putting us both to sleep.”
Her cousin looked offended and stepped onto the ground so that he could sit on the edge of the porch. The pasture that spread out and away before them was a palette of subtle browns and burnt sienna. Tufts of pale yellow broomstraw and patches of dried weeds with dead flower heads waved in the light breeze that blew up from the creek. Dark green pines swayed majestically in the distance and the pasture itself was dotted with tiny green seedlings. In another few years, those pine seedlings would reclaim this pasture if no one mowed it or built houses out here.
At the bottom of the slope, two large vultures were perched on the ruined masonry wall that stuck up from one side of that concrete slab. Two more circled overhead.
“You’re acting like a caricature of a pompous British colonial,” Anne told him. “I almost expect you to say, ‘Pip, pip, old chap,’ or ‘Cheerio!’ Naughty of you? Oh, please. If you didn’t want to talk to him, why didn’t you just say so?”
“I could hardly say no when I’m using your mother’s hospitality to gather material for my article, now could I?”
“No is all you’ve been saying since we got here, beginning with that disgusting odor you’re wearing,” said Anne, who had carefully positioned herself upwind from him.
“Eau de vulture vomit?” He chuckled. “They do insist on regurgitating on me if I’m not careful when I handle them.”
“You handle them?”
He realized instantly that he had slipped and smoothly recovered. “I’ve banded a couple, yes. I thought I’d leave the information with the local wildlife service in case they wish to follow up on my observations. But you’re right and I apologize for my behavior. I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. My editor’s getting impatient, so I’m hoping to wrap this part up by the weekend and get back to England to finish writing the article and edit my photographs.”
Anne had dealt with enough cranky editors over the years to sympathize.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll let you off the hook for Jeremy, but you have to come to dinner again before you leave. Mother has a few small family things she wants you to have.”
“Done,” he said.
The keyboard of Martin Crawford’s laptop might have been in Arabic, but arrows are international symbols, and as soon as Crawford and Anne Harald went outside, Jeremy Harper slid the cursor to that top row of thumbnails and clicked the left arrow until he came to the file with an airplane, then clicked to open it. The screen filled with more tiny pictures and it took him a moment to realize what he was looking at.
With one eye on the computer and the other on the window that let him see the two adults, he pulled a jump drive out of his pocket and inserted it in the computer’s USB port. A few more clicks and that file was copied and the jump drive back in his pocket.
When Anne Harald returned with her smelly dull cousin, he made himself look like the clueless nerdy kid they seemed to think he was, ogling the pictures of naked young women splashing in a jungle pool.
As soon as his cousin and her do-good project left, Martin Crawford stripped off and put those befouled trousers out on the porch. With a little luck he would never have to wear them again. He filled a basin with warm water from the kettle and scrubbed himself until all the stench was gone. Dressed again in clean clothes from the skin out, he opened both the front and back doors to let cold fresh air blow through the whole house.
All credit to Anne and the boy, he thought, still surprised that they hadn’t left the instant they got a whiff of him.
But he was getting careless. Not merely that slip of the tongue with Anne, but leaving his computer alone with that boy. Happily, the screen appeared to be as he’d left it, and his mail program was password-protected had Jeremy tried to open it. Nevertheless, it had been a stupid mistake.
Especially now, when everything was coming to a head.
CHAPTER
17
Turkey vultures are masters of soaring flight—which is by far the most energetically efficient form of travel. In fact, flying turkey vultures use only slightly more energy than they do when standing on the ground doing nothing.
—The Turkey Vulture Society
Thursday afternoon
Both of Jeremy Harper’s grandparents and his mother worked, so the modest three-bedroom house on the edge o
f Dobbs was empty when he parked out front that afternoon and went straight to his bedroom.
As he waited for his PC to wake up, he shucked off his jacket, turned his cap backwards so that it would keep the frizzy silver curls out of his eyes, and unwrapped the striped scarf from his long thin neck, fuming with impatience.
It sucked that his computer was so slow. He knew he was supposed to be grateful that his mother had scored this one when her company updated all their hardware, but jeez! Snails ran faster than this antique hunk of junk he was stuck with. He thought longingly of the Mac Pro that a friend had gotten for Christmas. All Sam did with that state-of-the-art laptop was play games and cruise the net for porn sites that hadn’t been locked out by his parents. If he had that machine and a decent photo editing program—!
Fat chance of that happening anytime soon, he thought gloomily. His Burger King job barely paid for gas and car insurance. No way was he ever going to save $3,500 for a Mac and the expensive software program that would let him work magic with the pictures he took.
At last the screen stopped blinking and he clicked on the photo app. Another wait for it to load, then he slipped his jump drive into the USB port and opened the file he’d copied from Martin Crawford’s computer. As he scrolled through the pictures, his curiosity deepened.
Not buzzards and definitely not Peru.
Each picture was time-stamped, beginning with Wednesday morning a week ago and ending with Monday; and most were aerial views of the Colleton County countryside. Not just anywhere in the country either, but out at the county airport. There was that little block building that acted as office and terminal and there were the hangars. And damn! Look at the clear shot of that little Gulfstream!
Each scene seemed to have been shot in bursts of three. He adjusted the focus until he could read the fuselage numbers. He jotted them down and switched over to his search engine. As part of his Patriots Against Torture activism, he kept the FAA bookmarked, and soon he was searching their database for the owner of this plane. When the name popped up and he Googled it, he was disappointed to realize it belonged to a local insurance agency and not to some shell company that might be fronting for the CIA.
The wings of a Learjet could be seen off to the side, but even at extreme magnification, he could not make out any details.
As one three-picture set after another of the airstrip and the surrounding area scrolled past, he puzzled over how Martin Crawford had taken them. Had he rented a plane and flown back and forth over the strip at a low altitude? A hot air balloon?
He flicked back to the beginning and saw three aerial views of the shack where the ornithologist was staying. The details were amazing. There was Possum Creek and Grayson Village and there was Crawford’s truck parked next to something square down near the creek. Another click or two and he was looking down on a flying buzzard, the back of its ugly red head and ruff of feathers clearly visible, and there on the ground so directly beneath that only the face of the foreshortened figure was clear—Crawford himself. He seemed to be holding up some sort of small device that was pointed straight toward the camera. Cell phone?
“Holy shit!” the boy whispered to himself as the problem of viewpoint crystallized into certainty. “He’s put a miniature camera on one of those damn birds!”
Why?
Jeremy leaned back in his chair to consider the implications. Clearly the device Crawford held was a remote that could trigger the shutter of the camera.
And all those pictures of the airstrip. Was the man a spy? If so, who for? What was an Englishman who used an Arabic keyboard doing here in Colleton County? Was he planning to rescue someone from one of those rendition flights or to blow up the place or what?
As one wild scenario after another filled the boy’s head, one thing was becoming clearer. Here was a story a hell of a lot more interesting and potentially more profitable than interviewing wounded veterans. Only how to go about it without letting Anne Harald or Martin Crawford realize what he was up to?
Once again he went slowly through the pictures, bringing each up to its maximum magnification so that he could see every detail. And that’s when he spotted them—three pictures that would surely be worth $3,500.
Thirty-five hundred? Hell, make it 5,000, he thought as he printed out the pictures.
The only real question was whether to make the call today or wait till morning. He ejected the jump drive, hid it where he was sure no one would ever find it, then went looking for the Colleton County phone book.
Taking a handful of the cheap throwaway cell phones from the satchel in his bedroom, Martin Crawford checked that all were still completely switched off before he put them in his jacket pocket. He had paid cash for the phones at different electronics chain stores in Raleigh, and his name was not connected with any of them. Nor had they been turned on since he drove out of Raleigh.
Before leaving the shack, he made sure that his own personal mobile was switched on and under the pillow on his bed. Modern technology was a wonderful thing, but it could also trip you up if you weren’t extra careful. Cell towers could and would track a phone that was switched on even if not in use.
It wasn’t much of an alibi, but better than nothing if he needed to claim that he had never left the place that evening. Not that he expected it to come to that.
Twenty minutes later, as the sun slid toward the horizon, he was seated in his nondescript black truck at a strip mall on the eastern edge of Cotton Grove, where he called a local motel that he could see from where he sat. As with so many motels around the South, this one was owned by a low-level consortium of Pakistanis.
When a clerk answered, he adopted an Egyptian accent and asked if an Alex Franklin had checked in yet.
“I’m sorry, sir. We do not have reservations for Mr. Franklin.”
Crawford thanked her, broke the connection, and checked his mental list of passport aliases the man commonly used. This time he pinched his nose and used a high-pitched French accent. “Do you have a Frank Alexander staying there?”
“Yes, sir. Will I connect you?”
“No, I’ll just come over when I get in. What room is he staying in?”
“So sorry, sir. I cannot be telling you that.”
“Never mind. I’ll call back once I fly in tonight. We’re giving him a surprise party. Do you know if any of our other friends have arrived yet?”
From the clerk’s voice, Crawford gathered that she was young and not too long in this country. “I am not knowing, sir. No one is saying this to me. Will you be needing a room, too, sir?”
“No, I usually stay with friends.”
He ended the connection, pocketed the SIM cards from both phones, wiped his fingerprints, then crushed the two phones he had used under his foot and deposited them in trash barrels at opposite ends of the small town.
He waited a full 35 minutes before calling the motel again, and this time he used his stepmother’s accent. Within minutes both were speaking Punjabi. He lent a sympathetic ear when the girl admitted that she was more homesick than she had expected to be, and a mild joke made her giggle. Two minutes later, he had extracted the room number and assured her that yes, there was indeed a surprise party of old friends in the works. She promised not to tip Mr. Alexander off.
Again he crushed the phone and tossed it in the weeds, then drove to another quiet spot where he used a wire cutter to reduce all of the three SIM cards to shreds of plastic and copper before strewing them along his route.
And then he waited.
CHAPTER
18
Many vulture species around the world live closely associated with human societies.
—The Turkey Vulture Society
Maidie Holt, Daddy’s longtime housekeeper, had asked me to pick up a couple of bags of stone-ground yellow grits from the only store in Dobbs that carries that brand. The local grist mill has been in operation since the 1830s, and no commercial grits taste as flavorful. As long as I was getting them for her, I bought
a bag for myself. There was a package of shrimp in the freezer that we had brought home from Harkers Island in the fall. They needed to be eaten before they got freezer burn, and shrimp and grits is an easy dish that doesn’t take too much preparation. I knew I had onions, a green pepper, and half-and-half on hand, so I wouldn’t have to stop at a grocery store.
The version I make calls for some sort of fancy Italian ham, but my brother Robert cures out a mean country ham with a smoky, salty flavor that can’t be matched by anything from Italy and he always gives us five or six pounds of it for Christmas every year, each slice individually wrapped for the freezer.
According to him and Daddy, our winters used to be cold enough to let the legs and shoulders hang in the smokehouse all winter without spoiling. No more.
A quarter cup of Robert’s ham diced and sautéed would easily substitute for pancetta, but no other brand of grits could substitute for the bags on the car seat beside me.
As I drove west out of Dobbs, it seemed to me that the days were getting noticeably longer. Time was passing much too quickly, though. Turn around twice and it would soon be summer—sandals, cotton slacks, and sleeveless dresses. What with the growth spurt Cal had taken this winter, I doubted if there was much he could still wear from last summer. Unfortunately, he likes to shop for clothes just about as much as Dwight does, but maybe I could issue a bench warrant for the two of them and haul them both out to one of the Raleigh malls this spring.
They say time is relative, and to prove it, Einstein supposedly compared a minute of sitting on a red-hot stove to a minute of kissing your lover. Driving into the sunset past pine thickets and dormant fields, I wondered how Sigrid, Anne, and Mrs. Lattimore were experiencing time these days. Was it zipping past or dragging?
The Buzzard Table Page 13
