She looks out the window. “That your limo?”
“It is.”
“Nice.”
I waited until she turned her attention back to me. Then said, “How’d you learn about Dee’s passing?”
“Oh. Well, when he didn’t show up, I called his cell phone and got no answer. So I called his girlfriend, Lilly. She went over there, found him dead.”
“Over where, his home?”
“Yes. On Mulber Road.”
“And this was on?”
She takes a long sip before answering, “Tuesday.”
Her mouth is now rimmed in red lipstick and white foam.
“So he passed on Monday night?” I say.
“According to his kids, early Tuesday morning. Between midnight and six, they think.”
I nod solemnly, but inside I’m jumping for joy because these events add up to more than coincidence. Nadine took Rachel to see Dr. Dee for a blood test. Eight days later he and Nadine suffered heart attacks on the same morning that Rachel was kidnapped by a professional extraction team. Why does this make me so happy? It means Rachel wasn’t kidnapped because of me, and I can rule out revenge as a motive for her abduction.
Which means wherever Rachel is, she’s almost certainly alive.
Though the death and kidnapping are obviously connected, I have no idea why. According to Nadine, Dr. Dee gave Rachel a cursory exam, flirted with her a bit, and ordered some blood work. A few days later, he’s dead and she’s gone.
But why?
The only conclusion I can make at this point is Dr. Dee couldn’t have kidnapped Rachel. Not that he was a suspect in the first place. Jesus, listen to me: a suspect. What am I, a cop?
Ruth and I chat for another fifteen minutes, during which time I buy her two more mocha lattes. She orders the smallest size each time in order to get her card punched more often, which gets her a free latte for every six she drinks. By my count she’s on track to get a free one in thirty minutes.
I finally ask, “Did you happen to meet Nadine Crouch?”
“Crouch?”
“Older lady, friend of my mom’s. Before Nadine moved to Louisville, I told her to look up Dee and see if he was taking new patients.”
She scrunches her face to force the memory, which causes the growth on her forehead to shift its position. From this angle I can see several delicate hairs sprouting from it. She catches me staring.
“You like my beauty mark?” she says.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” I say, honestly.
She smiles. “When I was younger, I wanted to have it removed.”
“No!”
“I did. I used to hate it.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Well, you know how it is. Kids can be cruel. When you’re young…” Her words trail off while she thinks about being young.
“Now, of course, I wouldn’t trade it for the world,” she says.
“Of course not!”
She winks. “You wouldn’t believe how much dick I get because of this!”
I nearly bolt my sandwich from earlier in the day. “Well, I’m not surprised,” I say, winging it as I go. “If I’m not mistaken, my buddy Dee was quite fond of you.”
She smiles, punches my arm. “That Dee,” she says. Then laughs heartily.
“What?”
“He used to call it my third nipple!”
I share her laugh until she says, “Wanna touch it?”
What I want to do is cut that abomination off her head and feed it to whoever kidnapped Rachel. But God help me, I do touch it, and she giggles.
“How long are you planning to stay in town, Joe?” she says, calling me by the name I gave her on the phone.
I force a smile. “Well, I was planning to leave after the funeral.” I wait till she looks up at me, then I wink. “But now I’m not so sure.”
She smiles and twists her hair. Then takes a pen from her purse and carefully writes her phone number on the back of a blank appointment card.
“Call me if you decide to stay. We can go somewhere and hoist a glass to Dee’s memory.”
“You think Dee would mind?”
“Who gives a shit?” she says, and punches me in the arm again.
We laugh about that, and when the laughter dies down she excuses herself and heads to the bathroom. When she comes out I notice she is still bowling shoe ugly, but her panty hose is missing.
Her first words are, “I do remember Ms. Crouch.”
“You do?”
“I just called Ricki at the office to check on it.”
“And?”
“She brought us Rachel Case. Patient Number 18660.”
10.
Ruth has never ridden in a limousine, and hopes I’ll let her get in and circle the block just once. I oblige her. As we complete the turn, my driver, Pete, pulls up beside the coffee shop.
Ruth leans into me and whispers, “Will you hold the door for me when I get out?
“Be glad to,” I said.
She whispered, “Good. I don’t want Pete to see my panties.”
Pete puts the car in park.
“Pete?” I call out.
“Yes sir?”
“Stay put. I’ve got this.”
He nods. I climb out and circle the car and open Ruth’s door with a flourish. As she exits the limo, I realize the only way Pete could’ve seen her panties is if he’d opened her purse. In the space of three seconds I manage to see more of Ruth Henry’s anatomy than Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears have revealed, combined.
“You like that, don’t you?” she says.
“Very much so,” I lie, thinking my driver Pete to be a lucky man.
After agreeing to meet at the funeral tomorrow, Ruth and I say our goodbyes.
On the way back to Rachel’s apartment I call Lou Kelly, my facilitator, and tell him everything I’ve learned since getting Nadine’s phone call seven hours ago. He listens carefully, asking no questions. When I’m done, I ask him what he thinks.
“We don’t have enough information yet,” Lou says. “But I agree we should check the blood test. I can get the results and have them interpreted if you want.”
“Get at least one set of eyes on them before sending them to me. Then I’ll have someone at the hospital review them.”
“What hospital?”
“There’s a hospital below Rachel’s apartment, remember? Someone there can help me.”
Lou pauses a moment, and I say, “How long will it take?”
“Give me thirty minutes.”
“That sounds too quick.”
“Well, you’ve given me the name of the doctor, the date, and Rachel’s patient number. That ought to be enough for our guys.”
I described Lou Kelly as a facilitator, but he’s worlds beyond that. He’s also a computer wizard who employs a group of geeks who can access anything in the world that can be accessed. He’d been my right-hand man for years, both at the CIA and afterward, at Sensory Resources, where we teamed up to kill suspected terrorists. Lou found them, I killed them. Now we’re semi-retired, but we still do some work together.
I paid Lou an enormous sum of money recently, for helping me steal billions of dollars from the world’s most dangerous criminals. To this day he’s the one asset I can’t afford to lose. We had a temporary falling out once, when he tried to murder me, but we’ve moved past that. Our relationship is symbiotic. He continues to make things happen for me, and I continue not to kill him for his disloyalty.
11.
It takes Lou more than an hour to call me back. When he does, the news is bad.
“There’s no record of Rachel Case’s blood work.”
“Could they have lost it?”
“Doesn’t matter. There’d still be a record of submission in one of the data bases.”
“Maybe Dr. Dee used an out of town lab.”
“That’s what took so long. I checked them all.”
“The whole country?”
“The whole world.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Do I sound like I’m kidding?” he says.
“You’re taking this personally.”
“I don’t like it when things go missing. This isn’t some routine kidnapping. This is a government thing.”
“Well, we assumed that already. They used a professional extraction team.”
“Right. But there are lots of government operatives who could’ve pulled that off. What I’m saying, this goes all the way up.”
“And you’re basing that on a missing blood test?”
“You keep forgetting I still work for Sensory Resources.”
He’s right, I do keep forgetting. “So?”
“So when this sort of thing goes down, I’m the guy who makes the records disappear.”
“What are you saying—that whoever’s responsible knows Rachel and I have a personal relationship? And you and I have a business one?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
We’re silent awhile. Eventually I say, “Let’s approach it from the other end. Let’s say something turned up in Rachel’s blood test that was so terrible, so dangerous, they wanted to abduct her and study it.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“But let’s say it’s not. What could possibly come out of her blood test that would cause this type of reaction? I mean, they killed her doctor, for God’s sake.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Sure we do.”
“No,” Lou says, “we don’t. Not for certain. If we assume the doctor died of natural causes, and that someone wanted Rachel enough to kidnap her and kill Nadine, the blood test becomes irrelevant.”
“Except that the blood test suddenly never existed. And the doctor died from a heart attack within the same time frame Nadine suffered one. And we know hers was induced. Thank God she keeps an emergency beeper at her bedside for Rachel. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have made it.”
Lou pauses. “If you’re clinging to the blood test, I have no answer for you. If Rachel had any type of blood disease, the lab would’ve contacted the doctor, and he would’ve gotten her to a hospital.”
“What if she’s a carrier for something the military could use for chemical warfare?”
“Are you listening to yourself?” Lou says. “I mean, I know you’re upset about what’s happened to Rachel and Nadine. But sometimes the simple reason is the way to go.”
“Which is?”
“If you assume the doctor’s death is a coincidence, you’re left with an attempted murder and kidnapping. A single event.”
“To what end?”
“My best guess?”
“Shoot.”
“We stole billions of dollars from war lords and terrorists.”
“So?”
“Maybe they want it back.”
I think about this a minute. Then say, “Well, I’m not going to sit around and wait for a ransom note.”
“What’re you going to do?”
“Call someone who might be able to help me find Rachel.”
“Who’s that?”
“Sam Case.”
Lou laughs out loud, then catches himself. “Sorry, Donovan. Didn’t mean to laugh with Rachel being kidnapped and all. But you’ve got to admit it’s hilarious about you and Sam working together. I mean, she’s still his wife, right?”
“Technically.”
“And legally.”
“There’s that.”
“You see the irony, yes?”
“Should be a simple thing,” I say. “We both love her, want what’s best for her.”
Lou chuckles, softly. “I agree there’s not a finer mind on the planet than Sam Case’s. He’s more logical than a super computer. Spock, from Star Trek, could take lessons.”
“Sam is so methodical and orderly, he makes Spock look like Richard Simmons,” I say.
“You think he’ll help you?” Lou says.
“Not in a million years.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Formulate a plan.”
“How can I help you?”
“You can start by getting me a snake.”
“A snake,” Lou says.
“Yeah. One that bites.”
“A snake that bites,” Lou repeats.
“A snake that will bite a man in the dark.”
“How big?”
“At least three feet.”
“What species?”
“One that can handle being in water.”
“How about a water moccasin?”
“I don’t want to kill Sam, I just want to encourage him.”
“I’m on it. When do you need this three foot, night-biting, water snake?”
“Midnight tonight. At the back entrance to Sawyer Park, on Lakeland.”
“Any magic to that location?”
“It’s a mile from Sam’s house.”
“Burlap bag okay?”
“Yeah, that’ll work. You got someone here locally?”
“I can get someone. But it’s going to cost you.”
“It always does.”
“Anything else you need?”
“You still on premises at Sensory?”
“Of course. And by the way, your office is still vacant. They keep expecting you to come back.”
“Fat chance. Is the medical center still running?”
“As always. Full staff, twenty-four seven.”
“Good. I’m going to need access.”
“I can get your code reinstated.”
I think about it, working my plan in my head. “I’m going to need a vehicle, and some people.”
“This is turning into a major caper,” Lou says.
“You up for it?”
“Lay it on me,” he says.
And I do.
12.
My next call is to Sam Case, Rachel’s husband.
“Case,” he says.
“Hi Sam, it’s me.”
There’s a long pause. “I thought we had a deal.”
“We do, but I’m fuzzy on the details. Maybe we should meet and discuss it.”
“You promised.”
“Sam, have you heard from Rachel lately.”
“You trying to be funny?”
“The reason I ask, she’s been kidnapped.”
I wait for a gasp, or an exclamation of shock or surprise, but he gives up nothing.
“Did you hear me Sam?”
“I think you’re probably trying to set me up somehow. I can come up with a thousand how’s, but not a single why. But I haven’t completed my thoughts on it yet.”
“Save your thoughts. It’s not a set up. I need your help to find Rachel.”
“Uh huh. Why me?”
“You’ve got every reason to be skeptical.”
“Ya think?”
“Yes. I can see why you might not trust me, but—”
“No,” Sam says. “Let’s not rush past those reasons I might not trust you.”
“We’re wasting time,” I say.
“Indulge me this recap.”
I sigh. “Fine.”
Sam says, “You lured me into an affair, kidnapped me, forced me to witness a double homicide, kidnapped me a second time, locked me in a container, and came within an inch of killing me.”
“That’s ancient history. You can’t live your life dwelling on the past.”
“It was barely a year ago, you asshole. Anyway, I’m not finished. You stole my wife, destroyed my business, and ruined my reputation. You subjected me to physical assault and mental torture. You put my life in danger.”
“You already said that.”
“No, I didn’t. You put my life in danger twice. The second time, by double-crossing my clients.”
