The Orchid Hunter

by Sandra K. Moore

  I still had the key to his lab, the key von Brutten had given me when all this got started. Maybe it’d be worth another look tonight after I saw Scooter. I figured the feds would have found something if there was anything to be found, but there was the slimmest chance they’d missed something. Something a keen graduate student who knew Harrison’s habits inside and out might happen across.

  “Now that I’ve given you all this information…” Marcus said casually.

  Uh-oh. “What do you want from me?”

  “You know what I want.”

  “I told you the orchids were stolen from me. If you want them, go find Special Agent Shoemaker and get the ones he took from Lawrence Daley.”

  Marcus smiled. “I’m due to meet with Shoemaker—” he checked his watch “—in an hour.”

  “Then I should let you get to it.” I turned to the stack of papers.

  “No, Jessie. I saw the wheels turning in your little head. You know a few things we should know.”

  Yeah. My employer might be a bioterrorist, but I’m not sure. He told me he’d use the Death Orchid to save my great-uncle, but I don’t know if that’s really why he wants it. And if he is a bioterrorist and senses the FBI, CIA and Homeland Security are on to him, he’ll disappear forever.

  I looked Marcus in the eye. “I don’t know anything for sure. That’s the truth.”

  “If you have the orchid, you need to hand it over. Give it to me or to Shoemaker. You let it go to anybody else, and it’ll end up doing some really bad things.”

  “Yeah, Shoe’s already told me that.”

  Marcus’s fine, black brows drew into a frown. “Whatever’s going on, we can help.”

  “There’s nothing going on,” I lied.

  “Don’t bullshit me, Jessie,” Marcus snapped. “I’ve given you a helluva lot more here than I should have because of our history. Now it’s your turn.”

  I heard Rick’s voice. It’s all or nothing for you. I gritted my teeth. I gave my all once and it’d gotten me nowhere.

  “I need some time to think, okay? The orchids are safe. Just give me a day or two.”

  His blue eyes met mine. I could see him measuring, deciding. The civilized version of the Evil Eye, I realized. Putting the fear into me to make me behave.

  “Just a day or two,” I repeated.

  He sighed and nodded, willing to take nothing for now.

  I looked at the papers in front of me. “I need some time to read through this stuff,” I said. “Can you turn up the heat a little?”

  Marcus abruptly laughed, his rich baritone echoing around the lab. “You’ve spent too much time down south. It’s a balmy sixty-eight degrees in here.” He grinned as I pulled my sweater around me, then leaned close, laying his broad, caressing hand on my arm. “I can heat things up if you like. Just to take the edge off.”

  “We tried that once before.”

  “I’m not prejudiced against second chances.”

  His expensive cologne wafted over me. I glanced up at him, warm and sexy. He’d always been a nice guy, a total hunk, confident and cocksure of himself, but gentle. We’d been pretty good together that night, even if I had run away the next day.

  But now, with him offering something like comfort, I realized that wasn’t what I needed. Not from him. He just wouldn’t feel right. Too big, I thought, studying his bare, muscular arms. Not lean enough.

  Not Rick.

  “I gotta get this stuff read,” I said as my throat closed up. I pulled the papers toward me and stared at the words until he left.

  Chapter 16

  “How are you feeling?” I asked Scooter later that evening.

  He sat propped up in his motel bed, a tray over his lap. Marian’s fried chicken, mashed potatoes and butter-drenched asparagus sat, nearly untouched, on a plate. His skin had gone even grayer than the last time I’d seen him, the wrinkles more pronounced. The bed, with its crisp sheets and full comforter, swallowed him whole.

  But what told me how bad he really was were his eyes. No fight. He lay there, a tired old man, picking at his food.

  Scooter pushed the plate away and heaved a sigh. “I don’t feel too good. I just don’t feel too good at all.”

  “Seein’ the doctor’s what done it,” Hank said from the chair across the bed. “We shoulda put that off till tomorrow.”

  Scooter’s brow took on his characteristic granite furrow. That was the Scooter I knew.

  “At least you’re done and can go home tomorrow,” I said in the best approximation of ‘soothing’ I can do. “Nice spread,” I said, looking around the large blue bedroom and hoping to change the subject. “How many bedrooms total?”

  “Two, with a full kitchen,” Marian said as she breezed in with a half-filled water glass, full of young energy and efficiency.

  Two? I guessed Hank’s pot had found Marian’s lid, as Scooter would have said. Hank sat like a rock on the other side of Scooter’s bed: stable, still strong and good-looking. Good for Marian, I thought, getting the man she wanted.

  “I wouldn’t let my favorite man out of my sight,” Marian said with a wink at Scooter, “so we got us a suite. And he sure didn’t need to be eatin’ no restaurant food.”

  Right. Heavily breaded and pan-fried chicken ranked right up there with raw fruit on the healthy-eating scale.

  Hank took Scooter’s plate from the bed tray. “And he can’t remember which pills to take when.”

  Scooter humphed weakly. A bouquet of pills, all sizes, shapes and colors, sprouted next to his napkin. “If I wrote it down, I’d keep up with it.”

  “If you could remember where you put the paper,” Marian teased. She dropped a kiss on his silvered hair, which he accepted with grudging grace. “Now take them pills.” She set the glass on his tray.

  Scooter put the first one in his mouth, then picked up the glass with both hands. Water sloshed with his shaking and a thin line of liquid ran down the outside, over his fingers.

  “That’s good,” Hank said encouragingly as he walked to the bedroom door. “Only seven more to go.”

  “Here you go, let me help.” Marian took the glass from Scooter, her tanned skin startlingly young next to his wrinkled, mottled hand.

  “I’ll do that while you wash up,” I said suddenly. I was scared to death—nursing is not my bag—but it seemed like something I ought to do.

  Marian handed over the glass. “Give me a holler if you need anything,” she said on her way out, Hank right behind her.

  Scooter fished the second pill, a blue one this time, off the tray. He juggled it into his palm, then raised his palm to his mouth. I held the glass to his lips, my hands trembling almost as much as his. He needed me to hold his glass right now and it was almost beyond me. The image of the dying colonel, naked and weak and alone, nearly overcame me. I clamped down on my tears and shame.

  All the weeks and months Scooter had been fading from the stout, healthy, robust man I’d grown up with, I’d been running around in some jungle somewhere, not giving him a second thought. I guess I figured he’d always be around for me to visit. That every time I came back, he’d be exactly like he was when I left on my little adventures.

  But here he was, having to rest between pills, and I had no idea how to take care of him, scared of doing something as simple as helping him take his medication. The grand gesture I could do: risk life and limb, talk big, strut around. But hold a glass steady?

  Why hadn’t I left well enough alone and let him keep going to Old Lady Fenster? The worst she’d have done was give him a pouch of herbs to stick under his pillow at night. Hell, doing nothing would have been better than this.

  And now I carried in my luggage either the cure for all ills or the next terrorist’s weapon of choice. I didn’t know which angel—life or death, saving or avenging—von Brutten was. I wanted von Brutten to have told me the truth about saving Scooter. I wanted him not to be funding a bioterrorism lab, even though I knew in my heart of hearts he was capable of it. I wante
d him to save Scooter because he said he would.

  But there was more to it. There was what Rick had asked me back in Brazil. About whether or not I’d given Scooter a choice. Had I made that choice for him, when all along he might have just wanted me to be around for his last days?

  “Scooter,” I said softly.

  He blinked his watery eyes and looked at me. “What’s on yer mind, Ladybug?”

  “If somebody came up with some medicine that could fix your heart tomorrow, would you take it?”

  His teeth gleamed as he grinned. “You think seventy-four ain’t old enough? ’Cause it feels plenty old to me.”

  “That’s just because you don’t feel well.”

  “I don’t know ’bout that.” His gnarled fingers played with the blanket’s edge. “They’s times I figger I’ve lived long enough.”

  “But you could have more time,” I insisted. “Don’t you want that?”

  His brow furrowed as he thought. “It’s been a good run, and I done ever’thing I wanted.” He smiled feebly. “I reckon I ain’t so special I deserve to see more than what my Creator intended I should see.”

  Tears slipped down my cheeks. “Your Creator didn’t intend you to get hold of bad drugs.”

  Scooter gripped my fingers. His skin was hot, a little feverish. “Maybe, maybe not. But there ain’t a whole lot I kin do ’bout that, is there?” He sighed and added, “You done growed up. I reckon my real work is done.”

  And there was nothing I could say to that. I laid my head on his thin chest and breathed in his vaguely mothball and spearmint scent. “I love you, Scooter.”

  “I love you too, Ladybug.”

  After a little while, his chest rose and fell evenly. I raised my head. Everything about him had gone colorless, as if he were about to disappear into the air itself.

  I had the cure in my possession and wanted to use it, to keep Scooter around for a little while longer. He might be at peace with his coming death, but I wasn’t, and wasn’t sure I ever would be.

  I juggled a metal clipboard and stack of papers at the locked side door of Harrison’s office building. The lab coat Marcus had borrowed for me to wear didn’t quite reach the short gray skirt I’d bought. Absurd as it seemed, the high heels felt like they’d added about two inches to my thighs. Behind me, the parking garage sported my rented Lexus and a single Toyota that had just pulled in. The Toyota’s occupant, a harried-looking lab tech, got out carrying a fast-food bag. His footsteps slowed when I dropped the clipboard and bent over straight-legged to pick it up.

  “Let me get the door for you,” the scrawny tech said.

  “Thanks!” I stood straight and heaved a sigh that shoved more cleavage from the push-up bra into the opening of my pink silk blouse. “I hate these late evenings, don’t you?”

  “Not tonight.”

  He swiped a keycard through the card reader and held the door for me, blocking half the entrance. Lecherous rat, I thought as I smiled and brushed against him, full frontal. His smile stretched. That was probably as close as he’d been to a woman since birth. I felt his attention lingering on my legs until he peeled off down a side hallway leading toward the back of the building.

  In the soaring foyer, the Spurs game echoed from a clock radio. My heels clicked on the polished brick floor as I walked past the spilling fountain and ficus trees toward the stairs. A guard’s desk sat at the stair’s base. The beefy guard grinned and turned down the game as I approached.

  “Got to sign in? I just left!” I protested, shuffling the messy papers in my arms from one side to the other, pulling the blouse open a little wider.

  “Aw, you know the rules,” the guard said. “Especially after all that ruckus with the police.”

  I took a deep breath, bent low and scribbled an indecipherable name on his check-in list. It’d be a freakin’ miracle if I didn’t fall out of this blouse. “What’s the time?” I asked idly.

  “Nine-oh-five.”

  Of course it was. I’d watched this guard’s predecessor leave at eight-thirty and waited for a late-working lab tech to return with dinner. Lucky for me, both the tech and the guard had been male. No woman would have let me just walk in and go upstairs.

  “See you later,” the guard said as I straightened.

  I smiled sweetly and started up the stairs. The heels made me walk slow and put a lot of hip action into climbing the steps. After I walked around the landing corner, out of the guard’s sight, the game started blaring again.

  A couple of minutes later I found Harrison’s fourth-floor lab. As far as I could tell, there were no surveillance cameras. Had Harrison rented a high-tech science lab in a down-market building? Anybody working in the pharma industry ought to have a protected environment. Maybe I’d drop old Shoemaker a note about the state of security in this place.

  As a high-dollar contractor with an academia attitude, Harrison didn’t use Cradion’s facilities but preferred to keep his own. If he was working for both Cradion and von Brutten’s Lexicran, I realized as I unlocked the office door with the key von Brutten had thoughtfully provided, the preference went beyond just his being a cranky highbrow. He needed his privacy for all his little extracurricular activities. My first browse through had yielded nothing because I was looking for a run-of-the-mill map to the orchid. But now I wanted the Death Orchid formula and I’d have to be more thorough.

  His lab had been cleaned up, as Marcus had told me, but just barely. Residual light from the building’s floods next door illuminated the office well enough to let me get a good look without turning on a light. The broken specimen glass that had graveled the floor during my first visit was gone and traces of powder still lingered here and there from the fingerprint dusting. Long, bare worktables loomed. The oak specimen cabinets sat empty along the walls.

  The odor of alcohol, formaldehyde and propylene glycol took me straight back to long afternoons in school, when heatless New England sunlight shone through the tall windows onto a table covered with hundreds of incredibly boring North American specimens. I’d spent the better part of a semester cataloging the damned things for Harrison’s herbarium. By the time he and I quit squabbling over the uselessness of the task—who needed yet another sunflower preserved for all posterity?—Dr. Harrison had finally decided I was better utilized in the field. I felt a stab of regret. I’d never see him again. Never work with him again. Never read his papers again.

  “Okay, Doc,” I said aloud. “There’s no reason to hide anything like you did the medicine bowl. This time I want to know about von Brutten. What exactly were you doing for him? Did you hide the formula here? Throw me a bone, old man.”

  Two hours later, I leaned against one of the stainless-steel worktables and pondered. Nothing up his sleeve, nothing in the lab. But the Brain and the Whiner had clearly known where to look when they searched his home office. Hell, they’d destroyed a desk to dig up his map.

  But the desk here hadn’t been dismantled. Had the Brain come here first? And who was that guy? My bet was he was the medical science part of the team on the Death Orchid project, working for Cradion. Maybe this Reginald Thompson.

  That idea made a lot of sense. Even if the Cradion directors were clean, it was possible Thompson was the bad seed, the bioterrorist connection. So when Harrison got scared and went to the FBI, Thompson was left without any orchids and without the man who was capable of finding more. Hence his hiring of Rick.

  This theory still made Cradion responsible for the poison—and the drug trials. I made a mental note to ask Hank to remind me who the Cradion rep was attending Scooter’s trials. Dime to a dollar it was Thompson.

  Maybe all that theorizing was me grasping at straws to absolve von Brutten of any wrongdoing, but it was all the hope I had. My realism kicked in hard and heavy. I couldn’t just make up an idea and hope it was right. I had to know.

  I had to know whether my boss was out to save my great-uncle or out to poison the world.

  First things first. The desk, a
metal utility affair, had nothing to hide. I inspected each cabinet in turn, checking for hidden compartments, loose drawers, buttons, knobs, anything to press. Nada.

  Then I looked at the untouched specimen cabinets. The Brain had torn the home office wooden desk apart, so could it be that one of these cabinets might need the same treatment?

  I dragged one of them screeching out from the wall. The glass doors had already been smashed, leaving just the empty frames and a few dangerous teeth of glass. I reached inside and whacked the middle shelf from beneath with the heel of my hand. It gave slightly. Good old Harrison, using only real wood furniture. Another couple of whacks and the wood tore from the securing nails. I examined the shelf closely for seams, lettering, carvings—anything that might constitute a clue. Nothing.

  Then I got the trusty minicrowbar from my oversize purse and methodically dismembered the cabinet. Still nothing.

  This went on until I pulled out the last cabinet. I opened the useless doors and when I reached in to whack the shelf, I realized something was different. My stinging hand fell to my side as I looked. The shelves in this cabinet were a good inch narrower than the others. But the cabinet itself was the same size as its siblings.

  I angled the cabinet around to look at its back. The wood was just as solid there as anywhere. Around front, I tugged on the middle shelf. It was loose. When I lifted its front edge, it pivoted up, attached to the solid back by a hidden hinge.

  At the point where the shelf met the back wall was one of those four-digit combination locks where each number had its own dial setting, like on luggage locks. I looked closer at the back wall. A fine seam ran horizontally where the shelf had rested, then when the seam reached the cabinet’s sides, it turned to run down nearly to the bottom shelf. Big enough to house documents if nothing else.

  The lock was set to 2317.

  Great. Like I’d be able to figure out which four numbers Harrison might have picked to protect his little treasure trove. I’d be here all damned night trying out numbers I could remember from his life—birthday, phone numbers, office number at the university, and so forth.