“You know this guy?” asked the gray gentleman. He knew of Guillaume and she could tell he disapproved of him.
“Oh, Guillaume and I go way back. We were in graduate school together. Just because we took separate paths afterward doesn't mean we aren't friends. We've reached a truce. He says he could never prostitute himself for corporate America the way I do but, when cornered, he admits that I do it with integrity. I think his antics are pointless and counterproductive, but at least he's sincere.”
“I remember him now,” the telephone guy broke in. “He founded one of those radical environmental groups. GAIA's the name of it, right? And isn't he the one who highjacked the oil company's supply boat?”
“Yeah,” Larabeth said. “It wasn't much of a highjacking, but he got some national exposure. He kept a crew of offshore workers stranded on a drilling rig waiting for that supply boat to bring them home. I was right in the middle of the hubbub—the boat he highjacked belonged to one of my best clients.”
“Did he serve jail time for that?” The serious young woman had spoken. Larabeth's audience was warming up.
“Nope. My client was desperate to get those workers off that rig. Not because they were in danger. It was just that one of them was his daughter, who had a highly paid summer job working for Daddy. Unfortunately, she was being married within the week and, if Guillaume didn't return the crew boat, Daddy would have to charter a very large, very expensive boat to retrieve her and her co-workers. Maybe even a helicopter.”
Even the gray gentleman was beginning to smile. She seized the moment. “Guillaume made him squirm just long enough. He espoused his radical opinions—specifically, that my client was an air-polluting, water-befouling demon—on the evening news. Then he struck a deal. He would return the boat if my client dropped the charges. I'm sure Guillaume knew about the wedding and planned accordingly. My friend is a clever man.”
“Was your friend right?” The serious young woman had leaned forward, resting her arms on the table. “Was your client an air-polluting, water-befouling demon?”
“Not in the grand scheme of things, no. He'd be happy to pollute and befoul if he could, but he stays within the law because he has to. Even Guillaume admits that my client's not so bad as corporate tycoons go, but he was an easy target and Guillaume had a message to get before the American people. Nobody gets in Guillaume's way when he has a message.”
“I like his style,” said the guy with the telephone.
Larabeth half-expected the young man to dart out the door to join Guillaume's group of flamboyant malcontents, but the phone rang before he completely lost control.
“Three more victims. Three more dead animals. That makes forty-eight this morning,” the young man said as he hung up. He marked their locations on a wall map and the group settled in again to the task of looking for common threads that might help them pinpoint a culprit.
* * *
Randall Yancey surveyed the memorandum with a level of enthusiasm unbecoming in an FBI agent. This was his most exciting assignment yet. Okay, so it was only his third assignment, but it was exciting. He had never been to New Orleans.
He had a couple of questions, though. The task force assigned to these animal slashings seemed small. Anybody who could organize the slaughter and delivery of fifty endangered animals to victims scattered across the country—even in Alaska and Hawaii—was a threat to national security.
He considered the level of coordination required to pull it off so perfectly. Nobody, not one animal killer, not one messenger, had even been arrested. This organization could just as easily take out fifty people. It could happen tomorrow, fifty people dead on the doorsteps of America. He picked up his phone and buzzed Lefkoff. “What gives with this animal massacre thing? I'm supposed to interview and keep tabs on every victim and every lead in Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. You've got Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama. I can't cover an area that size and neither can you. What am I missing here?”
Lefkoff gave a knowing grunt. He'd been with the FBI for nine years. Yancey had no idea what Lefkoff had done to get busted back to his level, but the man knew the Bureau inside and out.
“You left politics out of the equation. Hogood, at EPA, is a pompous ass and the chief would chew the heads off nails before he'd help him out. Hogood announced at his press conference that the investigatory arm of the EPA was eminently qualified to pursue this case, with or without the support of the FBI. The chief is hanging Hogood with his own rope.”
Yancey dropped the memorandum and let it float to his desk. “You mean I got this assignment because—”
“You got this assignment because you are devoid of experience. I got this assignment because I am a disgrace to every red-blooded Fed carrying a badge. The chief is giving this thing the smallest, least-qualified task force that he can assemble. Have fun in New Orleans. And, son, stay off Bourbon Street. Those people won't just eat you for lunch. They'll use you for hors d'ouerves.”
* * *
Larabeth strapped herself into the rental car. She missed her Mustangs. Either one of them would look positively feral next to this nondescript Euro-Japanese blob of steel.
Larabeth had always driven a Mustang. Her father bought her first Mustang when she earned her driver's license, shortly after Cynthia was born. It had been an extravagant gift for a fifteen-year-old—a powder-pink convertible with all the options—but this fifteen-year-old had been to hell and back. Her father had wanted Larabeth to feel normal again, just like the other high school girls, so he bought her the foolish car every high school girl dreamed of owning.
Her father's plan failed. Larabeth never ever felt like one of the normal girls again. She felt like an old woman with an old woman's problems who still had to get up every morning and pretend to be just a teenager with a cool car. She concentrated on her studies, graduated a year early, and sold the car to someone who was going to be around to use it. Before the ink was dry on her diploma, she was in Vietnam, as far away from her troubles as a girl could get.
She came home from Vietnam, wounded in body and mind, and found that the year had been even harder on her father. His heart had given him one more summer. After she buried him, she'd bought herself another Mustang to drive back and forth to college. She had lost her mother, her childhood, her baby, and her father. She could, by God, have the car.
Larabeth gripped the wheel and forced herself to think only of the task at hand. Even the anonymous vehicle she was driving couldn't stifle her self-satisfaction. Her briefcase held photocopies of the N-Deck files on the herbicide incident, and the fifty people who were singled out by the criminal the press had already begun calling the Bambi Slasher.
Better yet, in her briefcase was the address of a secured web page being compiled on the fifty victims by the EPA. It held names, addresses, employment histories, hobbies—anything that the agency considered useful.
Not a solitary soul took her Babykiller theory seriously. The EPA and the FBI had their own prime suspect. They were leaning toward the leader of one of the property-rights groups fighting the Endangered Species Act in Congress.
If she'd been an average Jane nobody'd ever heard of, they would have ignored her completely, but she had persisted until they added military service history to the database. She knew Babykiller had served in Vietnam (she knew precious little else about him) and she wanted access to military data on all the victims and suspects.
All in all, not a bad morning's work. She wished J.D. had fared as well in his interview with the “Happy Farmer.” He'd sounded discouraged when she called him, as promised, just before noon, so she'd suggested a change in plan. She would pick him up at the Happy Farmer and let him drop her back at N-Deck and keep the car. That way, he'd have the mobility to work anywhere a lead took him.
It was a good plan, but it left no time for lunch. Larabeth berated herself for not renting a second car, but she had fortunately remembered the old saying, “A good consult
ant always eats a big breakfast.” Because one never knew when one might have time to eat again.
Merging the car with some difficulty into rush hour traffic, Larabeth was startled when her purse beeped politely. Since the modern world had forced her to get a cell phone, she'd been accessible to anyone who wanted a piece of her time. It was no small wonder that her cell phone number was a more closely held secret than her bra size.
Larabeth told herself she would ignore the call even as she fumbled with the catch on her purse. She was lying to herself and she knew it. It could be an important client with a lucrative contract in hand. Or it could be Babykiller, calling to mess with her mind. She answered the phone and it gave a contented beep.
“Hi, Doc. I'll wager you're not surprised to hear from me today.”
Larabeth's hand trembled on the steering wheel, an undesirable condition given that she was traveling above the speed limit in the center lane of an unfamiliar highway. She couldn't remember how to activate the speaker function, so she tried to free her right hand to drive by tucking the phone between her shoulder and chin. No dice. Its sleek, expensive design guaranteed an immediate slide down her chest. She had to either control the car with her left hand or hang up on Babykiller. She gritted her teeth and got the car under control.
“Larabeth, dear, are you all right? You're usually so chatty,” cooed the voice in her ear.
“Get to the point, Babykiller. You didn't call me to ask about my health. You called to gloat over the deaths of fifty innocent creatures who never did anything to you.”
“Oh, but if their suffering had meaning, if their rotting carcasses sent a valuable message, wouldn't you think they died for a purpose?”
“What a pretty speech,” she said. “Why didn't you leave a note with all those murdered animals? As it is, the whole country knows that somebody's upset, but they don't know who and they don't know why.” She looked desperately for a chance to get off the freeway and devote her full attention to this conversation. Predictably, she approached a construction zone and traffic slowed to a crawl.
“Now come, Larabeth, how can you accuse me of a crime that took place simultaneously in five time zones? I am not, after all, Santa Claus.” His laugh was humorless. “I've had my eye on CNN this morning. I must say that the culprits have a sense of humor. The eagle's nest on your friend Langlois' front stoop—why, the only thing more perfect would have been a spotted owl carcass at the Audubon Society's Oregon headquarters.”
“Say what you like. I think you're behind this. If I'm right, you have a fairly large organization. What is it, Babykiller? The Mafia? Some kind of drug cartel?” She spotted an opening in the right lane and steered into it. “I've never heard of organizations like those doing this kind of grandstanding. They usually concentrate on making money. So maybe you have your own organization.”
“You're a logical woman, too logical to jump to such unsupported conclusions.”
“Humor me. So, if I assume that you're part of a nationwide organization, maybe bigger, and it's not the Mafia and it's not one of the better-known drug cartels, I also have to assume that you hold a pretty influential position. Maybe the top one. Otherwise, you wouldn't have been able to put your twisted ideals into action this morning. I can follow that line of reasoning.”
“I'm glad you can follow it, Doc, because you've lost me completely.”
Larabeth at last reached an exit. Praying that it wouldn't dump her into a boarded-up, grafittied, high-crime area, she guided the car down the exit ramp. She pulled into the first parking lot.
“I've got some ideas about you, Babykiller, and about your motives. I'm beginning to understand how you pulled off the animal-slashings this morning.”
Larabeth paused, suddenly tired. She leaned her head on the steering wheel and continued. “I don't understand one thing, though. Why are you calling me? You gave forty-nine other people an unpleasant surprise this morning. Do they get to have these cozy chats with you like I do?”
“Of course not, Doc. I told you last week that you were special. I'm surprised you forgot, but you've been under a lot of stress. I picked you because I admire you. I've got big plans, plans that will dwarf this little animal-slashing stunt—whoever is behind it. If you review our conversations—mentally, because I'm sure you're too honorable to record them—you will note that I haven't admitted responsibility for anything illegal. Yet. Nevertheless, you're smart enough to appreciate the planning that goes into these things and you're perceptive enough to understand my motives. You're almost smart enough to catch me.”
“Thanks a bunch,” she mumbled.
“No problem,” he said. ”With that bit of self-revelation, Doc, I really must go. You're a charming woman. That's another reason I like to talk to you. And if I let you, I'm afraid you'd charm me into saying too much. Stay close to the phone, dear.”
Larabeth distractedly clicked her phone off, after a futile glance to confirm that Babykiller's phone number was blocked from her phone's Caller ID function. She looked at the tiny microphone attached by suction cup to the mouthpiece. A fine cord snaked from the microphone to the recorder in her purse. She didn't have to listen to the tape to know that she had nothing—no unequivocal confession, no clue to Babykiller's identity, no information on his whereabouts.
She had no guarantee that a car wouldn't pull up beside her, in the next second, and put a bullet in her brain. She had no protection from a man who could have her dead body delivered tomorrow to the doorstep of anyone in America. Her only connection with the lunatic slowly seizing control of her life was the phone clenched in her trembling hands, but every atom of her knew that there was not a chance that she would let him steal her power.
She hurled the defenseless phone to the floorboard of the passenger side, risking the destruction of J.D.’s fancy recording device. She would have stomped on it in frustration, but that would have required climbing over the console into the other bucket seat, no small task in a compact car while wearing a skirt.
Instead, she cranked the car. J.D. was waiting for her.
* * *
Babykiller regarded the phone in his hand. It was a cheap, clunky model and he would be glad to be rid of it. He needed to finish his preflight routine, and he needed a nap before tonight's flight. Cancer did have a tendency to slow one down, but before he allowed himself the luxury of sleep, he had some business to wrap up. He owed Gerald a bonus for orchestrating the events ofthe morning. And he wanted to remind Gerald of the importance of rewarding good work.
CNN had reported that some of the slaughtered creatures had been traced to Sea World. What a stroke of brilliance—they might as well have kidnapped Mickey Mouse from the Magic Kingdom and crucified him. Gerald owed a hefty bonus to the person who orchestrated the Sea World heist.
“If you don't acknowledge genius, it will turn on you,” Babykiller muttered to himself.
Gerald was a capable kid. Babykiller dialed an access code and deposited a tidy sum in his account, enough to fund a couple of bonuses for Gerald's best people and one for himself. After that, he would give Gerald a personal call to offer congratulations and advice.
As he dialed, he wondered whether Gerald had followed the first advice he'd given him: Make sure your workers never learn your name and never see your face. Unless you're prepared to kill them.
He kept the conversation short and to the point, then resumed his pre-flight prep. Careful precautions were critical when you were flying Babykiller's way: alone, at night, and without filing a flight plan.
* * *
J.D. exited the freeway while Larabeth downed a greasy burger. She checked her watch.
“Across town and back in just over an hour. I'd say we made good time, considering I had to stop and chat with a raving maniac,” Larabeth said, trying to joke away her lingering jitters.
“Maybe we'll get some leads this afternoon that will help us track that maniac down,” J.D. said, as he turned the rental car into the N-Deck parking lot.
>
“He could be anywhere in the world. Do we really have a chance at finding him?”
“I've got some ideas. When we get back to New Orleans, I'm going to pay a visit to The Spy Place.”
“The what place?”
“The Spy Stop. They sell, you know, James Bond stuff—the latest call tracing and wiretapping products. We can hire their resident expert to come out and sniff your house and office for bugs. If anybody can find this Babykiller guy, Kydd can." He stopped the car in front of a squat, square, 1970s-era office building.
“The Spy Stop. You're kidding.”
“No, I'm not. Check the Yellow Pages. They have franchises in all the major cities. Ex-CIA agents have to make a living, too. Hackers and techno-dweebs have to support their habits. Don't worry about a thing. If it can be tapped, traced, or tweaked, the ladies and gentlemen at The Spy Stop can do it for us.” She was still gaping at him.
“I'll pick you up here at five,” he said.
Larabeth opened the passenger door and swung one long leg out, still gathering her things. She leaned forward to retrieve her purse and her hair blocked her peripheral vision, or she would have seen the woman coming.
As it was, J.D. saw her first. He was surprised to see her and particularly surprised by the BioHeal nametag she was wearing. He didn't gather his wits in time to speak, so Larabeth's first inkling of the situation came when an unfamiliar voice said, “Dr. McLeod, I was so honored to receive this assignment to work with you.”
Or perhaps the voice wasn't wholly unfamiliar. Later, Larabeth fancied that she had recognized the woman's voice in the way you recognize a recording of your own voice. The sound is strange, but it isn't. In the moment it took for Larabeth to look up, she knew.
Larabeth McLeod raised her head and, for the first time, looked her daughter full in the face.
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