The Blood Betrayal

by Don Donaldson

  “How familiar were you with its contents?”

  “I had full access to everything on it, and there was nothing there that would cause him to be a threat to anyone, except maybe someone else working on artificial blood.”

  Beth shook her head. “From what we heard about Hollenbeck’s research, it seemed to deal only with reproductive issues.”

  “Then I have no idea what they had in common.” He paused, then said, “That piece of paper with Hollenbeck’s name on it in my father’s book . . . It also contained Meggs’s name and the phrase tree fountain.”

  “Meggs . . . tree fountain . . . It’s Meggs and Hanson. That’s who’s behind all this.”

  “With help. I think the man who killed my father was named Jan Echols.”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “Right now, it’s just a name to me, too. But I’m trying to get a lead on him.”

  Beth looked back at the burned cabin. “If Meggs and Hanson were behind both deaths, maybe they’re also responsible for this.”

  “That’s what I was thinking myself a minute ago.”

  “But why do that? If Hollenbeck had a computer here, why not just steal it or erase the incriminating information?”

  “I suppose there’s a chance this wasn’t intentional. Let’s take a look around.”

  They got out and walked over to the burned building, which on closer inspection had small weeds peeking through the crumbling remains. Between the new growth, ash pummeled by many rains covered the cabin footprint in a dark crust.

  Beth picked up a piece of charred rafter with the stubs of a half-dozen roof boards still attached and threw it aside, revealing a set of denuded bedsprings and a blackened TV set. “Could a hard drive survive this kind of destruction?” she asked, wrinkling her nose and trying to brush the charcoal and dirt from her fingers with her other hand.

  “I have no idea,” Carl replied, flipping over a piece of warped tin that once seemed to be a vintage sign for Clabber Girl baking powder. Under the tin was a stuffed large-mouth bass, carbonized on its mounting plaque.

  They picked their way through the rubble, moving aside anything large enough to conceal a computer. Near the fireplace and its chimney, which stood as a lone sentinel over the destruction, Carl found an almost pristine rod and reel, showing that at least some things survived the fire.

  Spotting another rafter and roof board section a few feet away, Carl headed in that direction. Two steps later, as his left foot hit the floor, the fire-damaged planking gave way and he sank to mid-calf so he was left standing like a big game hunter posing for a picture.

  Hearing the noise, Beth looked at him. “You okay?”

  “More surprised than anything,” he replied, withdrawing his foot.

  In addition to now possessing a set of rattled dentition, Carl was curious, for he’d felt his shoe crunch into something at the bottom of the hole. He knelt and reached down to see what it was.

  Metal . . . a box.

  He got his hand around it and brought it out.

  Beth began picking her way through the rubble to join him. “What have you found?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  The box was locked but of flimsy construction. Carl’s foot had crushed the lid in the middle and popped up each end. He grabbed one of the lifted ends and wrenched it hard, increasing the size of the opening so he could get at the contents.

  The first item he could reach was a thick set of letter-sized sheets of paper stapled together and folded lengthwise. He put the box on the ground, then unfolded the documents and examined the front page, which was stained and blurred from water that had apparently made its way into the box after the cabin roof was gone.

  Despite the damage on the sheet, Carl could see it was a list.

  His eyes stopped at William Corbin . . . Beth’s husband. And the number H75. That was the same number they’d seen opposite his name on the computer in Meggs’s office.

  Carl turned to the second sheet, scanned it, and then moved on to the third, where he found the listing for Beth Roark, Beth’s maiden name. Opposite her name was the designation H232, again, the same number as on the hospital computer.

  He turned back to the first page and handed the document to Beth, who was waiting impatiently to see what he’d found.

  She studied the material briefly, flipping through the pages as he had, then looked up, her eyes clouded with confusion. “This is a list of the people who live in Artisan. At least a lot of them are. Some names I don’t recognize . . . like Mary Asher.”

  “You’re listed on there by your maiden name. Could she be an Artisan resident whose maiden name you don’t know?”

  “I suppose. If she was married when she moved to Artisan and her parents didn’t live there, it wouldn’t be something I’d necessarily be aware of. Did you notice that my number and William’s are the same as those on Meggs’s list in the hospital?”

  “I saw that,”

  “Do all these sheets contain the same thing?”

  “I’m not sure. I wanted you to see the list, so I gave it to you before going all the way through it.”

  While Beth examined the other pages, Carl picked up the metal box, turned it on end, and shook it. Inside was a stack of envelopes bound with a rubber band. The collection was so thick he had trouble getting it through the lid opening.

  As he struggled with the envelopes, Beth said, “Here’s something else.”

  Carl tucked the box under his arm so he could take the pages Beth handed back to him. She had found another list with different headings than the first.

  There were five pages like that with the number of entries totaling three hundred and five. The destination column was always one of three names, except in one case, H276; the destination was Little Rock, Arkansas.

  “I have no idea what this means,” Beth said, “but I think one of those four places under destination . . . Loiza, is a town in Puerto Rico.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’m not sure. But look at the entry for 232.”

  Carl turned to the fourth page of this new list and saw that the destination for 232, Beth’s H number, was Loiza. “Did your parents ever visit Loiza before they moved to Artisan?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Did you go there on some kind of school trip or with friends of the family?”

  “I don’t remember doing any of that.”

  “You must have read about the town somewhere.”

  “I guess. But what is all this? History . . . 6 x 23 and 4 x 25 . . . That mean anything to you?”

  Carl exhaled in frustration and shook his head. “It looks like a size, but there are no units with it.”

  “What would a size have to do with history?”

  “Beats me all to hell.” He plucked the metal box from under his arm. “I saw some other stuff in here a minute ago. Let’s see what that’s all about.”

  With some effort he extracted the envelopes and read the address on the top one aloud. “Arnold Hollenbeck, Department of Reproductive Medicine, U. of Arkansas Medical School, Little Rock, Arkansas.” He shifted his eyes to the return address.

  “It’s from someone named Rosa Swarez.” Looking at Beth, he asked, “And guess where she lives?”

  “Puerto Rico?”

  “You’re taking all the fun out of this,” Carl said, surprised and disappointed that he didn’t get to dispense this interesting bit of information.

  Beth shrugged. “Seemed obvious from the way you were acting. Are all those from her?”

  Carl put the metal box at his feet. He pulled off the rubber band from around the envelopes and shuffled through the pile. “Every one of them.” He went back to the top envelope and checked the postmark. “This one was sent a m
onth before he died.” He removed the letter from inside, unfolded it, and began reading aloud.

  “Dear Arnold. It was wonderful to see you again after so long. I can’t believe it has been over thirty years since we met. We were so young then. And now I feel so old, which I guess I am. For many of those early years, I admit I was angry at you for not being willing to leave your wife, and at one point even thought of telling her about us. But I’m glad now I didn’t. It took me a long time to accept that we would never be together. When I did, I was finally able to see that there were good men here in Canovanas. And with Juan, I found one of the best.

  “I’m sorry about the way little Juan acted toward you when you were here. After you left, I discovered that he’d overheard my two sisters talking about you, and he learned about us. He was just taking up for his father. I’m sure his behavior in part came from him still having trouble dealing with his father’s death. For that part, so am I.

  “I do believe he has that computer thing you lost . . . what was it called . . . your PDA? I’ll try very hard to get it from him, but he has been so difficult since Juan’s passing I can’t promise anything, Sincerely, Rosa.”

  “So Hollenbeck was a philanderer like his daughter said,” Beth commented.

  “Looks that way. I’d love to have that PDA she mentioned in here.”

  “Anything else in the box?”

  Carl picked it up and angled the opening in the lid toward the sun. “Yes there is.” He slipped his fingers inside and fished out the remaining piece of paper. When he had it unfolded he saw at the top, a handwritten heading: Loiza Facility, 1430 Portobella Road.

  While Carl studied the document, Beth came around to where she could see it, too.

  “Loiza Facility,” she said. “I wonder what that means.”

  “Sure can’t tell from this.”

  They were looking at a hand-drawn map showing the facility and its parking lot adjacent to Portobella Road. But the interesting part was the path running from the facility through an undeveloped field to an enclosure containing an old shed and a well. A second path ran from the left side of the enclosure into more wilderness. Along that second path, at three different locations, arrows pointed into the adjacent vegetation. Each of the arrows was accompanied by a distance measurement from the path to an x at the end of the arrow. Several large trees were included for orientation.

  “Looks like something’s buried at each of those Xs,” Carl said, pointing to them.

  “And I bet if we knew what, we’d be a lot closer to understanding what’s going on in Artisan,” Beth replied.

  They stared at the map for another few seconds without speaking. Then Carl looked at Beth and said, “You’re not one of those people who hates flying are you?”

  “Not if the plane is going to Puerto Rico.”

  Chapter 33

  BETH HAD NEVER dreamed when she left Artisan that she’d find her way to a place as far away from the Arkansas mountains as Puerto Rico, yet here she was in the Louis Munoz airport in San Juan, where she found the crush of humanity both fascinating and intimidating. Across the concourse, a little kiosk that appeared to be a photography vending machine added to the feeling of chaos by loudly playing a little song accompanied by a bank of neon lights that flashed and rippled to the beat.

  “So many people . . .” she said, surveying the milling throng.

  “It’s certainly busier than the airport in Little Rock,” Carl said. “Let’s find the car rentals.”

  As they moved forward, they became part of a giant game of airport pinball in which people and their baggage careened off them without apology.

  Yesterday, they’d gone from Hollenbeck’s cabin, back to a FedEx Office, where on a rented computer, Carl had put together a schedule that took them from Little Rock to Dallas on Southwest Airlines early the next morning, and then on to San Juan via a connection with American.

  The fact Beth didn’t have a driver’s license and wouldn’t be able to prove her identity to the airlines when it was time to board was a somewhat more challenging problem. Carl solved it by taking her to Green Light Studio, a shady business that had been in Little Rock so long Carl had first heard about it when he was in high school. Arriving there, he and Beth had purchased their specialty: a fake driver’s license labeled on the back as a “facsimile document for entertainment purposes only.” Convinced Carl and Beth weren’t cops, the proprietor then told them how to remove the disclaimer on the rear with rubbing alcohol.

  Now, slightly less than twenty-four hours after finding the Loiza Facility map in the metal box, they were only an hour or so away from learning what was buried there.

  Behind them, barely fifteen feet away, Ernst Mahler was confident that before the day was out, both Carl Martin and Beth Corbin would be dead. And neither would be capable of visiting him in his dreams.

  With the vast business and police connections The Brotherhood maintained, it was a relatively simple matter for them to set up an alert so they would be informed anytime a target used a credit card. After Mahler had missed Carl at the crime lab, Meggs pushed that button. It was a desperate strategy that, late in the day, sent Mahler speeding toward a Target store in central Little Rock, where he missed Carl and Beth by six minutes.

  Though that attempt had failed, the alert soon justified the effort put into it. Thus, they knew within minutes after Carl paid Southwest and American with his Visa card. It likewise hadn’t been difficult to learn the destination and itinerary for each of the flights he’d purchased.

  Had Mahler flown to Dallas on the flight the targets had taken they might have noticed him when he also boarded the same plane for San Juan. To avoid that, he left Little Rock for Dallas the night before. When he got on the American flight with them the next morning, he was just another face in the crowd.

  There was no way he could carry his gun on board either of the planes. He might have put it in a piece of checked luggage but didn’t want to declare to anyone that he was bringing a weapon into the country. Nor could he afford to have his movements hindered at the San Juan baggage claim. So he’d made other arrangements. Still, as he maintained his distance from Carl and Beth while they all moved through the terminal, he felt like one of those crabs that are vulnerable to being eaten as they scuttle from one abandoned snail shell to the next.

  With his eyes on the two targets, Mahler almost didn’t see the small woman cut in front of him. Sensing her flash by, he looked down and came to an abrupt stop just before colliding with the rear wheels of her bag. Behind him, a kid who was being dragged along by his mother crashed into Mahler’s legs. The big German had only been in the country a few minutes and already he hated it.

  BETH HAD RIDDEN an escalator for the first time in her life at the Little Rock airport. But she was still fascinated by them, so she was very much enjoying the ride on the one now taking her and Carl down to the next level. She particularly liked the way you could watch everyone on the floor below and not have to worry about what your feet were doing.

  Suddenly, her pleasure was interrupted by the odd feeling someone was watching her. She turned and looked behind her, past a fat old guy eating a PayDay candy bar, beyond a tanned young woman in a pink tube top, around a middle-aged guy in a business suit, to a tall man with brown hair who was at the top of the escalator.

  MAHLER WAS TAKEN by surprise when the female target suddenly turned and looked right at him. But he didn’t panic. Even if the two were aware they were being pursued, there was no way they could know he was the one. So he didn’t react, but merely stared past her with a vacant expression.

  “WATCH YOURSELF,” Carl warned. “We’re nearing the bottom.”

  Still feeling vaguely unsettled, Beth turned and negotiated the transition from the escalator to the ground floor without catching her shoe in the escalator’s disappearing treads. Ignoring the small olive-
skinned man in an Armani crème-colored suit who was waiting at the foot of the escalator with a briefcase, she accompanied Carl past the security checkpoints on the opposite side of the corridor and followed him to the baggage area. There, they would claim the small piece of luggage he’d checked to get the Mauser into San Juan.

  THOUGH MAHLER saw the man with the briefcase well before reaching the ground floor, he gave no indication of it. But as the big German stepped from the escalator a few seconds later, he glanced briefly at the man and held out his hand.

  “How was your trip?” Rosario Guardiola asked in Spanish-accented English as he passed Mahler the briefcase.

  Though he was now no longer vulnerable, Mahler did not relax. Appearing to look well to the right of the two targets, but actually keeping his attention on them, he said, “It got me here. What else matters?”

  “The car is right outside,” Guardiola said. “We can head over to the rental lot now and beat them there.”

  “Not until I see them leave on the shuttle.”

  Guardiola followed Mahler over to a pillar, where Mahler took up a position that made it appear he was waiting for someone else to join them from the upper level. But he was actually watching the two targets now standing with a crowd at the baggage conveyer.

  Using the kind of insight that had kept Mahler at the top of his profession, he’d anticipated that Martin would bring a gun on the trip. Mahler looked at Guardiola. “The bag they’re waiting for—”

  “Sanitized,” Guardiola said with a ferrety grin.

  CARL SPOTTED his bag as it emerged from the hanging rubber strips separating the claims section of the conveyer from the loading area. The appearance of the luggage from their flight was like corn on the ground at a chicken farm, and their fellow passengers flocked to it. Wedging himself into the fray sideways, Carl managed to pluck his small bag from the belt the first time it passed and then escape with nothing more serious than an elbow in the chest.

  Just to be sure everything was okay, he keyed the small brass lock on his bag, unzipped the main compartment, and put his hand inside, where he felt around for the lock box the airlines required for the Mauser. His expression said it all, but he spoke the words anyway. “The gun . . . it’s gone.”