by Andy Straka
“We’ll just step outside for a minute,” I said.
“Dad and I brought you something we thought you might like,” Nicole said.
She stood and she and I stepped out into the hall. Along the wall we’d propped a large flat parcel covered in brown wrapping paper.
“You know, Dad,” Nicole said. “Wendy told me once that she believes people with severe disabilities who are forced to spend a lot of time in one place develop a kind of sixth sense for people and for things going on in the world around them.”
Wendy was the creator of the object beneath the paper, a stunning watercolor painting of a pastoral countryside framed by the Blue Ridge with quarter horses grazing in the foreground. Wendy was also a quadriplegic, a luminous former student of Marcia D’Angelo’s, injured when her boyfriend’s motorcycle, on the back of which she was riding at the time, skidded beneath a passing eighteen-wheeler. The now ex-boyfriend had walked away without a scratch and had gone on to other more important things in his life a few months later, but rather than turn to bitterness, Wendy had turned to her faith—Marcia and Nicole sat with her at church every Sunday—and her painting. She held the brush with a special rig between her teeth.
“Could be,” I said.
We took the package back into the bedroom. The nurse now had Camille sitting upright in bed and taking a bite of oatmeal. The nurse had to help her eat and wipe her mouth.
“Thas a whole lot better Miss Rhodes. You should be takin’ company more often. Maybe then we could get you to eatin’ halfway decent.”
Camille waved a feeble hand across the sheets at her as if to swat the entire notion away. Her countenance brightened a little, however, at the sight of the package.
The nurse took Camille’s bowl away momentarily and gathered up the tray that had been in front of her patient and set it on the dresser. “You see if you can keep that down, Miss Rhodes. I’ll just be down in the kitchen doin’ up the dishes if you need anything else.” She shuffled quickly from the room.
Nicole lifted the parcel onto the bed. “This is something very special, Mom, from a friend of mine. She’s bedridden, like you, except she’s lost the use of all of her limbs.”
Camille scratched at her board again.
PARLYZD
“Yes. Her name’s Wendy and she’s a quadriplegic. Would you like some help opening this?”
Slow nod.
Nicole and I helped Camille tear away at the paper, beginning carefully at the corner. The watercolor was mounted in a frame of light wood that offset the artist’s use of color. The changing textures and brushstrokes would have been striking and unusually appealing, even if you hadn’t known how painstakingly the painting had been crafted.
Once it was completely revealed, Camille seemed to look in the direction of the picture for a long time. Was she thinking of the magnificent view down her own driveway, of the wide-open fields, the riding she used to do? Her eyes filled with tears. Nicole moved in to put her arms around her mother.
She scratched out THNK U SO MCH IS BUTIFUL on her board.
“You’ll always be my mom,” Nicole told her.
“You got that right, kiddo,” I said. I was proud of her, proud of the young woman she’d become, about to graduate from the university, a whiz when it came to finance and computers, even if the part-time job she currently held, working for me, wouldn’t have been my first choice of things for her to do. But the truth was I was getting used to her prowess around the office and beginning to wonder what I’d ever done without her.
I checked my watch. “Ladies, I hate to have to break up the party, but we’ve got to get going.”
Camille slowly took up her white board and scratched out another message.
WHRE
Nicole looked at me. “Jake’s in trouble,” she said. “Dad and I need to go help him.”
A gust of cold wind shook the windows outside the bedroom.
“Got to be turning up the heat,” the nurse, who’d suddenly reappeared in the doorway, said. “S’posed to be getting colder tonight.”
Camille had one more message for us.
B CRFL
Then her face became virtually expressionless again. I wondered where her mind must be turning. I wonder now if she’d somehow seen the cemetery on the hill, birds in flight, the last dangerous change in illumination night would bring, how much the future held or didn’t.
30
No one answered the phone at Damon Farraday’s place. I still didn’t have enough evidence to go to Grooms or the police. Hopefully, the ATF had gone through the cave by now, and if the amount of spilled ANFO I suspected was present there turned out to be substantial, somebody’s eyebrows should be raised. The Stonewall Rangers’ plans Toronto had told me about included nothing to do with a big bomb. Such a device, assuming it had been put together there, could now be headed, or have already been placed, virtually anywhere within a radius of a few hundred miles or more.
My cell phone went off just as I crossed the Kanawha River on I-77 headed back into Charleston. No number was displayed on the caller ID. Thinking it might be Nicole, I punched the answer button and said hello.
“Pavlicek? Where in the hell are you?”
“Agent Grooms. Well, I’m, ah, a bit busy at the moment,” I said.
“Busy. You’re in a car, right? It sounds like it.”
“I have been moving around a little today.”
“I want to know where Toronto is.”
“Jake?” A stab of fear shot through me. “Aren’t you in a better position to be able to know that than I?”
“Don’t get cute with me, Pavlicek. Is he there with you right now? I want to talk to him.”
“With me? What are you talking about?”
“You mean you want me to believe you haven’t seen him?”
“No. Why?”
“Because if you’re lying. …”
“Did you release him or something?”
“Release him? Hell no. He escaped custody.”
“Escaped federal custody.”
“To add to the growing list of charges against him.”
“But how—?”
“Don’t ask how. If you’re harboring a fugitive, Pavlicek, not only will you never be doing any private investigation work again, you’ll be joining your pal out in Leavenworth for a few years.”
“I haven’t seen him, Grooms. Haven’t seem him or heard from him.”
He was silent for a moment.
“Did you people check out that cave I sent you to?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “Still got a team up there.”
“I was right, wasn’t I? It’s ANFO.”
He said nothing.
“Was someone building a big device?”
“I want you to drive straight to downtown Charleston to the FBI office,” he said. “I want you in here now.”
“But what if someone’s about to set off a bomb?”
“Pavlicek—”
“What if it’s not Toronto and it’s not even the Stonewall Rangers?”
“I don’t care. You want to stop ‘em, you need to get in here. Now. Do you hear?”
“I gotta go, Grooms.”
“Listen! You—”
“I gotta go. I’ll try to find Toronto for you,” I said, and punched the line dead and the power off.
Kara Grayson lived in a third-floor unit of a condo complex near the golf course in South Charleston. Lights glowed from her windows. A couple of stars were beginning to shine overhead. A peaceful setting for a quiet winter Sunday night. I climbed the outside stairs and rang the bell.
A dark spot moved across the peephole before she pulled open the door.
“Frank. Finally come to give me the scoop, huh?” The question was all business but there was a hint of a gleam in her eye.
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
“Well, I, uh, wanted to check and see if you found out anything about that lab company. And
I thought I ought to come by and explain a little more.”
“You mean about why you and your friend were there.”
“Yes. And I wanted to tell you again how sorry I am about what happened to Dr. Winston.”
“No, please … it’s okay.” She rubbed her shoulders against the cold. She was dressed in a heavy sweater under a bathrobe and blue balletlike slippers, neither of which did much to camouflage her trim, athletic figure. Unlike the night before, she wore no makeup. It gave her a clean, more youthful appearance. “Please come in,” she said.
I entered and she shut and locked the door behind me. A fat white tomcat with pearly gray eyes padded across the hallway in front of us.
“Fresco, meet Mr. Pavlicek. … Oh, it’s Frank, isn’t it? Is it okay if I call you Frank?”
“You bet.”
Fresco narrowed his eyes at me for a moment and arched his back.
“Now, don’t you be like that, Fresco. Don’t worry, he always does this to strange men. He’ll get used to you.”
The cat probably still smelled hawk on my jacket or something from the day before. I tried the stare-down technique, but Fresco wasn’t about to be budged. Not yet anyway.
“Would you like something warm to drink? I just put on some hot water for tea.”
“That would be great, thank you,” I said.
She led me into her living room, which had a high ceiling and very tall framed photos of mountains and people skiing. Fresco retreated up a flight of stairs.
“You’re into skiing, I see.”
“Yes. I used to race.”
“Not anymore?”
“No,” she said. “I gave it up.”
I nodded.
“Have a seat on the couch, if you’d like. I’ll be right back with the tea,” she said, and disappeared through an archway and around a corner toward what must’ve been the kitchen.
The living room sofa was one of those huge overstuffed affairs with gargantuan pillows you could sink into. The only other piece of furniture in the room was an oversized furry beanbag that looked like someone had dropped a grizzly bear pelt in the middle of her floor and forgotten to take out some of the bear.
In a few moments she was back carrying a tray with two steaming mugs of hot water.
“I didn’t know what kind you liked or what you wanted in it, so I brought a selection.”
I picked Twinings English Breakfast tea, no sugar, a little milk, and after she’d put it together she sat down on the edge of the couch a few feet away from me.
“That looks sore,” she said.
“Oh, you mean my face.” I’d almost forgotten about it.
“You wanted to know about the lab company.”
“Yes.”
“I talked to Betty Ann—she’s my friend the nurse. Everyone’s in shock, of course, over what happened. But she said the company the clinic uses is Princeton Medical.”
“Okay. Did she give you contact information?”
“Yes. I’ve got it in the other room. Are the tests Dr. Winston ordered on the blood sample from Chester Carew’s bird the reason why you think he was killed?”
“Yes. How well did you know him?”
“Dr. Winston? I knew him from the clinic.”
“He have any other friends or family in the area?”
“Greg’s main friend was his work … that and his sports. He was really into biking. I mean really into it.”
“Mountain biking?”
“Umm-hm.” She swallowed a sip of tea. “Road racing.”
“Sure. He was never married then? No children or anything?”
“No. Me either,” she added quickly.
“Dating?”
“Dr. Winston? Not that I knew of.”
“I meant you.”
“Me?”
I nodded.
“No.” She looked chastened. “I asked you out, didn’t I? How about you?”
“I’m divorced. There was a woman I wanted to ask to marry me, but it looks like that’s pretty much over.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I have a twenty-one-year-old daughter from my marriage.”
“Really?”
“She has a boyfriend. Good young guy. Smart. I’m always lecturing her about keeping herself pure for marriage.”
“I see.” She smiled. “You don’t look old enough to have a daughter that age.” She crossed her long legs, and when she did her robe slipped back up well above her knee. She made no attempt to straighten it.
I looked around the room at the comfortable furnishings.
“Rumor has it you and your friend are in a lot of trouble.”
“No comment.”
“Uh-hum.”
“Are we going to do the reporter thing again?” I asked.
“Hey, now, it’s not that bad. A lot of people are excited to talk to someone in the media.”
“Not in my line of work.”
She nodded. “I understand. I sometimes feel the same about my work.”
“Are you good at it?”
“I’m good at a lot of things,” she said matter-of-factly.
“You haven’t asked me anything more about what my friend and I were doing there at the vet’s office last night.”
“I’ve found it’s best to just let people talk about themselves. They usually get around to answering most of my questions.”
“Is that so?”
“Anyway, I thought detectives were supposed to be the ones asking the questions.”
“Normally.”
“Well, here’s a question: why did you really come here tonight?” She reached her hands up and ran her fingers through her long hair.
“I don’t know.”
She smiled again and looked out her tall windows at the gathering darkness. There was a light dusting of snow on the evergreens outside.
“I guess maybe, when people die, and when dangerous things happen, it can either make you want to retreat into yourself or want to reach out to someone,” I said.
“Is that what you’re doing now, Frank? Reaching out to me?”
“Maybe.”
She uncrossed her legs and shifted a little on the edge of the couch. “You know I didn’t really get a chance to thank you for saving me last night. I’ve never been shot at before.”
“Doesn’t happen to me every day either.”
“That’s good.” She laughed a little and slid over next to me. She reached around behind me and with both hands began massaging my neck. “You’re tense as a drum,” she said.
A soft growl came from the stairwell.
“What was that, the cat?” I asked.
“Fresco’s jealous as the day is long.”
“I have to do some things tonight,” I said.
“Oh?”
“I have to help out a friend who’s in trouble … and I have to do some things I’m a little afraid to do.”
“You don’t seem like the kind of a man who scares easily.”
“I’m not.”
“Then just go ahead and do what you have to. Don’t think too much about it. That’s what I always told myself in the gate at the top of the mountain.”
“Top of the mountain, huh?”
Her fingers felt like a warm balm gently moving back and forth across my shoulders. I turned into her body and then her lips were there, moist and inviting as they melted into mine. She smelled of tangerine and lilac.
“You still haven’t asked me what I was doing there last night,” I said.
“Ummm.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a reporter.”
“Maybe I’ll have to coax it out of you,” she said. But she must have felt my arms tense a little as they raised up to hold her back from our next kiss. She pulled away and sat back on the sofa.
We sat together in silence for a moment.
“This can’t happen right now,” she said. “Can it?”
“No,” I said, as gently as I could. “For a lot of reasons.”
/>
She nodded. “I understand.”
“You don’t want the story?”
“Not if you’re not ready to give it to me.”
“Maybe sometime,” I said.
“Maybe sometime.” She rose from the sofa and straightened out her robe. “I’ll go get you that information on the lab.”
31
A half an hour later, I found myself trolling Charleston’s west end looking for the Connors brothers again. Were the two young white supremacists on the run? If Caleb Connors had been sent back up to the site of Chester’s murder by Bo Higgins to try to find anything that might tell them who had done the shooting, it meant that Higgins was concerned someone was complicating their own plans. Could it be the same man who was trying to frame Jake? Damon Farraday? Had Caleb Connors seen something or found something that might close the loop on who the real killer or killers were? And where was Toronto and why hadn’t he tried to contact me?
I caught a small break. The whore’s real name was Beatrice. She was working the bars on Washington Street and said she’d seen Caleb Connors a little earlier in the evening in a different bar down the street and that she’d seen his brother with him too.
“Caleb, he’s the one with the firebird tattoo on his shoulder, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
I put a twenty down on the bar and thanked her.
“Anytime you’re asking, baby. Anytime.”
I drove past the brothers’ house again. Nothing—no car in the driveway and the place was locked up tight. It was growing later and I was running out of bars.
I had just walked out the door of the latest when I spotted the bright orange GTO the neighbor had said the brothers drove. It was rounding the corner onto Washington a couple of blocks down and headed in my direction. As the car approached, even though the windows were slightly fogged, I could make out four people inside. One of the brothers drove while the other sat in back and each had a young woman seated beside him. The rear stereo speakers thumped down the street. A front window on the passenger side cracked open, smoke blew out from the opening, and a set of long slender fingers flicked ash onto the pavement as they passed.
Betty’s Buick sat just a few spaces away. I kept my eye on their taillights as I unlocked the door, climbed in, fired up the engine, and pulled into a slow-moving line of traffic a few cars behind them.
