Fatal Bond

by Diane Capri

  “Unfortunately not.” He lifted his shackled hands and ran one unsteady palm over his face. The first indication of a crack in his calm that she’d seen. “My stomach bug went downhill for a couple of hours. Got sick again. By the time I was feeling better, the whole thing at Kelso already happened.”

  Jess frowned as she watched Cole through the glass. Their conversation was being monitored and recorded. Remington was probably watching and listening remotely. She wanted to find an angle Remington hadn’t already explored. But she was six days behind him, and he was too good at his job.

  But she was good at hers, too. There was more to this situation than she’d learned so far. A lot more.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Talking about my cell phone, maybe you’re right, though. Maybe someone did steal it.” Cole sat back in his chair, his head cocked as if something new had occurred to him.

  Jess widened her eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “The last maybe eight months or so at the plant has been, I don’t know, maybe weird is the best way to put it.”

  “Weird in what way?”

  “Nothing as major as this bomb. But there’s been some petty theft. A couple of laptop computers. One time my log book disappeared right off my desk. No one admitted borrowing it, and I don’t know why they would want to.” He shrugged. “Everything in my notebook was already recorded in our databases, and the whole team had access to those. But stuff like that soured the atmosphere among our team. As I said, it was weird. Like sabotage or something, but not that serious. Just little things, annoying but no more than that.”

  Jess nodded. “Six months ago, the local newspaper reported Kelso’s network server room was ransacked, but nothing was stolen.”

  “That was a big thing,” Cole nodded. “Wanton destruction. Our security staff never caught the vandals.”

  “Who do you think did that?”

  “The official word we got was kids.” He shrugged. “Thing is, kids wouldn’t have had physical access. People who live here joke that Kelso Products is more secure than the Pentagon.”

  “Kelso makes insecticides, right? Why would they be so paranoid about security?”

  “Like any plant, I guess. Doesn’t want the liability.” He shook his head. “People can get hurt around the machinery and equipment. It’s not safe unless you’re wearing proper equipment and you know where you’re going.”

  Jess leaned forward. “Industrial espionage seems more likely, then? Was it an insider, looking to make a few bucks selling Kelso’s trade secrets?”

  He shrugged, and his face scrunched into a mask of perplexed confusion. “Doesn’t matter who it was. But once he gained physical access, it would have been a lot easier to hack into our networks and find whatever he was looking for. Much easier than hacking remotely, for sure.”

  Jess arched her eyebrows. “Really? I thought just about anything could be hacked from halfway around the world these days.”

  “Television. It’ll be the death of us all.” He grinned and shook his head. “Maybe that’s true for some systems. But I worked in IT at Kelso both before and during college. Believe me, at Kelso, physical access is everything.”

  Jess chewed her lower lip on the other side for a while as she considered what she knew, and what she needed to know. She was running long on her interview time. She figured Remington would let her keep going as long as she seemed to be making progress.

  “How did you feel when your log book was taken?”

  “How did I feel?” His expression suggested the concept was entirely foreign to him. Which it probably was. He didn’t seem like a man in touch with his feelings much. “How would you feel? My notebook wasn’t important in the big scheme of things. I didn’t even remember it until now. I guess losing it was just annoying, you know? I had to start a new one.”

  “Were you angry?”

  “Yes, I was ticked off at the time. For like a day. As I said, it was annoying.” He leaned forward and spoke earnestly. “But not angry enough to blow the place up months later. That’s irrational. Makes no sense at all, does it?”

  “Your notebook never turned up?”

  He shook his head.

  “Any idea who took it?”

  He shuffled in his seat and appeared to give the question serious thought. “At the time, I thought it was Marco Benito. Italian guy. Older than me. Acted all cool and everything. Worked at the company for about three months. Did nothing but cause trouble. I was pretty sure he took it just to, you know, get under my skin.”

  “You didn’t get along with this guy?”

  “He was an idiot. A real jerk.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He went back to Italy I think. I don’t know. I was just glad he left.” He shook his head. “Like I said. The notebook wasn’t important. It doesn’t matter if he took it, now that he’s gone.”

  Jess could feel Remington getting antsy somewhere. He’d kick her out soon. She searched for another topic. “Marcia tells me you have a girlfriend.”

  Cole frowned. “A while ago. We were just friends.”

  “Were?”

  He shrugged. “Well, we’re still friends.”

  “You got along well together?”

  “She’s smart. We had a lot in common. We’re both biochem Ph.D.s and worked on mosquito control methods. She’d call in the middle of the night to talk about the statistical correlation of our lab results. Odd stuff to most people, but…” His voice trailed off, which seemed like a metaphor for what happened with the relationship.

  “It’s good when you have things in common with other people, isn’t it?” Jess paused. “The work sounds interesting. Was it?”

  “Yeah. I mean, people say that killing mosquitoes is a public service in itself. But control mosquitoes and you begin to control malaria, West Nile, encephalitis, Ebola, and a whole host of other things. It was work we were doing at Kelso a while back.” He stared at Jess, and his lifeless dark eyes sparkled for the first time. “Do you know a million people die from mosquito-borne diseases every year? We were doing good work. Worthy work. The sort of stuff that could change millions of lives for the better.”

  Jess nodded. It was one of those statistics that was just too large to forget, or to fully absorb.

  “Debbie was really passionate about saving lives. Like every day we didn’t get closer to controlling mosquitoes really bothered her.”

  “Debbie?”

  He blinked as if he’d forgotten Jess was sitting there. “Yeah. Debbie.”

  “Debbie…?”

  He shifted in his seat. “Elden.”

  “You spent a lot of time together?”

  “We did.” He laughed. “She was the one who challenged me to make the rail gun. Brought a vase as my first target.”

  “Did it break?”

  His eyes glowed with enthusiasm. “Shattered to smithereens.”

  “Really?”

  His demeanor changed. “She wasn’t that impressed, though. She’d seen better rail guns on the internet, she said.”

  “Did she ever build anything in your lab?”

  He shook his head. “She tried to make some of the Kelso mosquito control products using common stuff. She had this idea that third world countries could make their own and do it cheaper.” He leaned forward and winked. “Don’t tell that to anyone at Kelso.”

  “None of her efforts panned out, I take it?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  Jess nodded. “Where does Debbie live?”

  He shrugged. “She’s not around anymore.”

  Jess widened her eyes. “Did she leave her job at Kelso Products?”

  “She was pretty mad when we lost our funding back in the spring.” He nodded as if Elden’s decision to quit her job made perfect sense. “Went to work somewhere else. Foreign conglomerate, I guess.”

  “Do you know where she’s working now?”

  “Not in Chatham.” He shook his head.

  “You don’t keep
in touch?”

  He shrugged.

  She softened her voice. “You miss her, don’t you?”

  “I’d do anything for her. Anything within reason.” He rolled his eyes. “But I didn’t blow up Kelso. That would be stupid. And it wouldn’t bring her back, would it?”

  Jess heard the doorknob twist the lock open behind her. “Well, thanks for speaking to me, Alex.”

  “You’re lucky.” He looked at her and grinned. “I didn’t have anything else on my calendar for today.”

  She smiled. Not many men accused of multiple murder and terrorism kept a sense of humor. Whether that made him innocent, guilty, or plainly crazy, she wasn’t sure.

  “Just one last thing. You said, ‘It was what we were doing here a while ago.’ Kelso isn’t working on mosquito control anymore?”

  “Yes and no.” He shrugged. “We were looking at biological control methods back then. Poisons, you know? But that’s expensive and difficult, so when we ran into money problems, the work got shelved. We went back to plain old chemical methods. I’d like to start up the bio work again, though. I really think we were close to a breakthrough. Before this bombing thing happened, I thought we might start the research up again.” He shook his head, sadly. “Now, I don’t know.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Tuesday, August 16

  2:00 p.m. CDT

  Chatham, Iowa

  Jess left the Chatham Police Department building with her phone in her hand. When she reached the rental, she started the engine and spent a few minutes online.

  She surfed the Kelso Products website. The organizational chart wasn’t as extensive as she’d expected. There were the usual collection of titles and portraits arranged in a pyramid to demonstrate the hierarchy.

  Curiously, the head of security’s position was occupied by nothing but an empty blue box. No picture and no text. Had he been fired because of the bombing? She shook her head. Getting rid of the guy was not the way to deflect criticism of Kelso’s security team.

  The VP of Security position was one of several that reported directly to the woman at the top of the pecking order, CEO Claire Winter.

  Jess had seen Winter on screen in news video over the past few days. She looked good enough in person, but her official portrait was stunning.

  Winter was fifty-one, according to the biographic snippet, but she looked younger. Dark blonde hair was combed straight back and fell to her shoulders, artfully streaked with platinum to camouflage the gray and accentuate vibrant blue eyes. Despite deeply tanned skin and perfectly arched eyebrows, her forehead was as smooth as any twenty-year-old’s. Bright white teeth sparkled against impossibly full lips.

  Jess wondered how many stylists had to prepare her before the elite photographer used his skill behind the camera, finishing the portrait with his airbrush. Together, they’d created Winter’s perfect style. Which was equal parts devil-may-care wealth, formal boardroom boss, and arm candy for men twenty years older than her.

  Winter’s jaw jutted forward a fraction. She was in control, no question about it. She used the restrained smile to disarm, and it worked, most likely.

  Minuscule text under Winter’s picture directed inquiries to Kelso’s press office. Jess automatically dialed four of the digits before she disconnected. The call would be a waste of time.

  Scheduling an interview with Claire Winter was notoriously difficult, even under normal circumstances. Like many skillful CEOs, Winter avoided the press except when she found extensive coverage useful to further her own agenda.

  A cold call from a magazine, even a national glossy with a sterling reputation like Taboo, wouldn’t get past the answering service.

  If there was one person she could trust to do the impossible, it was her assistant Mandy Donovan. She pressed the speed dial and listened for the call to connect.

  “Hey, Jess,” Mandy’s can-do attitude was another plus. “What’s up?”

  Jess smiled. Right to the point. She liked that about Mandy, too. “I need to talk to Claire Winter, CEO of Kelso Products.”

  “You’re covering the explosion at the Kelso plant in Chatham, Iowa, right?” Mandy paused. “And you’re willing to be, shall we say, not negative about the company?”

  “Yeah, sure. Why not?” Jess ran her fingers through her blonde curls. She could lead with some fluff if that’s what it took to get the interview.

  “You might try to be a bit more enthusiastic about it.” Mandy’s trilling laugh could be heard through the connection as clearly as if she was walking alongside Jess. “You’re willing to take any day and time I can get?”

  “Sooner is better.”

  “Understood. Anything else?”

  “That’s all for now.”

  “Call you back soon.” Mandy hung up.

  While Jess waited for Mandy’s return call, her thoughts circled back to Alex Cole. Could Marcia McAllister be wrong about him?

  He was a loner. He had the ability to create a bomb. And he might have felt snubbed by the potential girlfriend. But did he perpetrate this extreme violence?

  And what about Elden? He seemed sorry that his relationship, whatever it was, with Elden had ended. But had they really lost touch? The internet made such a thing almost impossible these days for young techy types like Cole and Elden.

  Jess used her phone to search the internet for Debora Elden. Several social media accounts popped up after a fraction of a second. A slew of Eldens with various permutations of Debora’s first name.

  She filtered through Debs, Debbies, and Deborah’s seeking references to Iowa, Chatham, and Kelso Products.

  Fairly quickly, she’d culled a list of five possibles.

  Three hadn’t been used for several years.

  The last two fell quiet a few months ago.

  The pictures showed a cute-as-anything fresh-faced girl about Alex Cole’s age, maybe a bit younger, with brown hair tinged an unnatural shade of red. Wide smile, perfect teeth, and dimples in her cheeks that conveyed an impish good humor. Her body suggested a woman much more athletically inclined than Alex Cole’s introverted existence.

  Elden had opened her social media accounts while she attended The University of Illinois. Like many young people do, she’d posted way too many status updates, substituting social media for daily human contact, perhaps.

  Jess flipped through candid photos of various athletic pursuits from hiking to kayaking. Easy to see why Alex Cole found her attractive. She seemed happy and full of life.

  Jess thumbed through another eight pages of search results before she found a link connected to “Debs” that looked like it might be Elden.

  A picture of a university building was front and center.

  When she zoomed in, she could read a sign above the door that identified it as dedicated to “Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics.”

  Jess clicked on the photo.

  A website for something called “Local World Action” opened.

  Images of activist groups blocking wild game hunting, protest marches with placards, and a convoy of trucks distributing food and medicine in an unidentified war-torn country cycled through.

  A whaling ship appeared. Underneath were the words good riddance. Jess’s skin tingled. The ship had been in the news a few years earlier. It was rammed by a dinghy packed with explosives.

  Jess searched the page for a way to look deeper into the website but didn’t find one.

  Ready to give up and call Mandy back, a moment of indecision allowed her finger to hover over the phone’s off button. The website’s background picture changed to a protest march.

  She enlarged the photo. A few hundred people walked along the National Mall in DC. The Washington monument stood tall and proud in the distance as the march headed toward the Capitol building.

  Marchers held hand-lettered signs protesting cuts in government funding for a clean water program in Africa. It wasn’t the signs that caught her attention.

  She enlarged the right-hand edge of the pi
cture.

  A fresh young face atop an athletically toned body.

  A woman holding a Local World Action placard high overhead with both hands.

  Unmistakably, Debora Elden.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Tuesday, August 16

  10:00 p.m. Central Africa Time Zone (CAT)

  Zambia, Africa

  The Zambian dry forest stretched for miles in all directions. Its tall tree canopy and low levels of undergrowth allowed good visibility in the moonlight.

  A mixed blessing, Tebogo knew. The environment was “see and be seen.” He preferred clandestine conditions, like the dead of cloudy nights, when night-vision gear separated the professionals from the amateurs.

  Tebogo was a mercenary. When money called, he answered. The boss was someone called Lopez. A name so common it had to be fake, but in this business, who cared? Money was the only thing Tebogo wanted from this Lopez and all the others like him.

  The Europeans paid better than the Russians, worse than the Americans. This particular European was a regular source of income. Tebogo liked that. His life was measured one contract at a time.

  The operation was stupid, though. For two days, he and his brother in arms, Kago, had done nothing but zigzag their way across a hundred-mile square of western Zambia in an old yellow pickup truck. Toyota HiLux. Tebogo drove while Kago navigated a long list of GPS coordinates. At each stop, they installed a small mosquito monitoring station.

  They had both been thoroughly briefed on the procedure. Find the precise GPS location. Set the timers. Take photographs. And most important, no one must know. Absolutely no one.

  The monitoring stations had two parts.

  The first was a trap to collect mosquitoes. Two simple chambers. Tebogo set the timers to trigger two days apart. In a week, they would return for the traps.

  The second instrument was a curious cylinder, maybe nine-by-thirteen-by-three. About the size to hold a gallon of gas. With a series of probes on the top.

  The probes looked as though they might sample the air, but Tebogo wasn’t sure. He’d been told to set the timer to activate midway between the two mosquito collections.