by Nancy Smith
“It’s still too early to harass and harangue them,” she said. “There’s a guest room.” She pointed inside. “Down the hall, second door on the left. Why don’t you get a few hours of sleep and we’ll attack these people at the crack of dawn?”
“I might just take you up on that.” He walked in the front door. “I love what you’ve done with the place,” he called back.
In a few minutes, Isa went back into the house. She opened the hidden closet, locked herself in Dad’s office and pulled out the computer hidden in her go-bag. She did Internet searches on the names on her list, printing items of interest as she went. Soon, she had reduced the list to five suspicious persons.
The smell of coffee lured Rory into the kitchen around seven o’clock in the morning. Isa was making scrambled eggs and tortillas. She seemed to be making the tortillas from scratch, not just pulling them from a bag and heating them up, as he would have done. There was also hot sauce in a mason jar with a handwritten label. Avocado, tomato and cheese sat ready to go on the counter.
“Wow,” he said bleary-eyed. Rory suddenly remembered that he had eaten nuts and chips for dinner the night before. It had been almost twenty-four hours since he’d had any kind of real meal.
Isa poured a cup of coffee for him.
“I don’t have any milk,” she said.
“Black is fine.”
They assembled their breakfast tacos and sat down to eat.
“Hmm,” Rory mumbled around his food. “Really good.”
They ate in silence for a couple of minutes, not sure what to say to each other.
“So who’s on your list? Who makes you the most suspicious?” Rory asked.
“I went through my father’s papers and calendar and compiled a list of anyone not dead that he had contact with in the last few months. Last night I did Internet searches to see what I could find out. Overwhelmingly, one entry in Dad’s calendar stood out as the most suspicious. It was just initials when all the other entries were names and often addresses if it was someone he didn’t know well.”
“Great work. That should be a real time-saver.”
“I don’t have Dad’s phone so I couldn’t cross-check the initials with his contacts, but I did find a notebook with the same initials and a number written in it. Let’s try it, shall we?”
Isa hit send before Rory could say anything. Rory’s phone began to ring, so he answered it.
“RB speaking. Number one suspect.”
Isa spoke into the phone. “Dad was naturally suspicious and he would never, ever talk to an insipid on-air personality.” She hung up the phone. “So, if you wish to continue this little tagalong, you better tell me something that makes sense—something that would make my father trust you.”
Rory blinked a few times. He wasn’t a morning person. He hadn’t had a shower. He couldn’t figure out how to think through all the possibilities this early. Finally he decided that if he wanted her to trust him, than he would have to trust her. He took a sip of his coffee and organized his thoughts.
“Your father didn’t contact insipid, on-air personality me.” He pulled Isa’s computer to him, clicked a bit, “He trusted this guy.” Rory turned the computer around. A website was up called Newsman. “It’s hard to get a complete and accurate story on air in this age of headline news, so I quit fighting the real news outlets and set up this web page. I can dig as deep as I wish and publish the truth as I see it—unfiltered, unedited.” A large media company had bought up his local television channel. They pushed their conservative agenda and controlled the stories that made it on air. The new owner was attempting to erase the news.
“You’re a conspiracy theorist?”
“I have 2.1 million readers worldwide,” Rory said proudly.
“Congratulations,” Isa replied.
“I seek the truth.” Rory opened his laptop. “Here’s what I wrote last night. Of course, I won’t put anything out until I have the whole story.”
“Of course.”
Rory watched her as she read the piece and thought about that ‘insipid’ comment. It rankled.
Isa knew of the Newsman site. She had seen her parents reading it. She sensed that they approved, although she had been so wrapped up in her studies that she had never taken a look. She’d had enough to read for school. She read through the article he had drafted—once quickly and then again more slowly.
“You went to the lab?”
“Yes. Before I came here.”
“And there was nothing?”
“Less than nothing.”
He showed her a dark, grainy photo. He blew it up in size too much for it to be clear. It showed a dark circle in a lighter space.
“And you think this is a bullet hole?”
“I do. It was pretty evident when I was looking at it in person.”
“Why would there be shooting?”
“I don’t know. I have a few trusted contacts. I was going to go to the morgue today. See what I can find out.”
“The morgue. Would you ask the coroner to double-check the body count?”
Rory gave her a quizzical look.
“It’s my parents. I have to be sure.”
Rory nodded.
After Rory left the house, Blanche Naylor, one of the neighbors stopped by. She brought a vegan casserole, because that’s what she was, and a few blooms from her magnolia tree in a decorative dish. The flowers made the whole room smell sweet. Blanche hugged Isa and offered condolences and then thought she was done, but Isa invited her into the kitchen. Blanche wasn’t prepared for that.
“Would you like some coffee or tea?” Isa asked.
Blanche looked a bit uncomfortable, but agreed to a caffeine-free tea with some honey.
Isa looked at a package of cookies and thought about sugar and preservatives and she couldn’t make herself tear the cellophane wrapper. Instead she just sat at the kitchen table and Blanche, who had been watching her progress in silence as Isa made tea, joined her.
“Thank you for being so thoughtful,” Isa began. “I’ve been trying to make sense of a situation that makes no sense to me—that absolutely defies sense. May I ask you a couple of questions?”
Blanche took Isa’s hand as she nodded her consent. “I don’t know how I can help, but you’re welcome to ask.”
“When was the last time you saw my parents?”
Blanche considered her answer.
“I guess it’s been almost a week since I saw your father. I noticed your mother bringing in groceries Monday evening. With them both working so hard, it must have made long days for them.”
“And yet they were always there for me,” Isa said. A tear clouded her eye.
She guessed that Blanche had not seen her father return. She didn’t know if he was hurt. She hadn’t shared any words with him or even seen what direction he took off.
“Did my parents ever say anything to you about projects they were working on?”
“No. They were pretty secretive about their work.”
Isa’s head bobbed up and down. She knew that.
“Have you seen any strangers around the house?”
“Cars with men. I think they’re cops.”
“You noticed that too,” Isa said. “Anyone before—,” she paused, but couldn’t think of what to call the murder of her mother, “it happened?”
“No. Nothing unusual. No strangers, repair vans.”
Blanche was getting into the cloak-and-dagger of Isa’s investigation. She smiled just a little, like it was a joke, and then tried to hide it with her hand.
Isa returned the smile to show Blanche that her smile was forgiven, and then asked with the most sarcastic tone she could muster, “Black SUVs?”
Blanche lost her smile. She had seen a black SUV.
“Will you give me a call if you see them again?” Isa asked.
After Blanche left, Isa sat for a while, willing herself to think more clearly, to focus. Isa had one task, one goal—to find her father.
>
Isa’s mind wondered to Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone, a fictional private investigator. She couldn’t find any index cards in her father’s big desk on which to record her thoughts as Kinsey would have done, but she located one of her parents’ blank notebooks and began to scribble. She sat at her father’s desk and recorded her memories and thoughts of her conversation with Blanche.
Isa turned on the computer and called up the file that had the list of names she had gathered. There were the five culled from the herd at the top of the list, but all the names were still in the file. She printed the list.
Blanche Naylor’s name was at the bottom on page two. Isa pulled a pen from the center desk drawer and crossed off Blanche’s name.
She saw Rory’s name at the top of the list, considered crossing it off for a minute, but didn’t. While she was doing that, she heard the clank of the metal mailbox outside the front door. It was too early for the mailman. She went to look.
Inside the mailbox was a sympathy card. She studied the name and then looked up the phone number and called. She spoke into her cellphone.
“Hello. This is Isa Vedkka. It was so nice of you to bring by that card. It meant a lot to me. May I ask you a couple of questions?”
The medical examiners office was located on prime downtown property about halfway between the largest emergency hospital in Austin and the main police station, yet most people couldn’t have told you were it was. A plain, square, brown brick building they must have worked to make unobtrusive.
Rory walked down the alley and slipped into the building at the main loading bay. Nine medical examiners took shifts that divided up the twenty-four hours in the day. Rory only knew one of them— Harrietta McAfee. Harry took an incredible amount of grief in her job. She was female. She was small. She had this bouncy Shirley Temple hair. She was smarter than most. She was also waiting for him at the entry.
“Harry.”
“Rory.”
“How’s the family?”
“Fine. Etta, she’s fifteen, so she’s a handful.”
Harry had had a baby at seventeen and still managed to outshine her competitors in medical school and residency. The other medical examiners, her coworkers resented her. She outshone them too.
Rory had expected to see a clamor of activity at the morgue—maybe all nine medical examiners rushing about—but it was still, quiet.
“I can’t tell you anything about this one,” Harry said.
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Bodies didn’t come here.”
“Where did they go?”
Harry shrugged her petit shoulders and her curls jumped up and down in response. “Couldn’t say.”
“Does that make any sense to you?”
“Not one bit.”
Rory walked the seven blocks down to the police station. He sat on a low brick wall across the street from the parking lot waiting to see if someone who might talk to him would enter or exit the building. In time, his patience was rewarded.
“Good morning, detective,” Rory said.
A few days ago, Detective Aleah Escobedo was Detective Victor Jimenez’s partner. Now she was alone and looked angry.
“I looked for you with your partner on the scene of one of the biggest crimes this city has seen.”
“You know something I don’t know,” she said.
“I don’t know anything,” Rory said. “I was hoping you might help me out. What’s all this about terrorism?”
“Seems that’s the go-to for the press. Our story is that they died of a flu virus that was handled improperly. They worked in that basement. Conditions were not ideal for handling diseases.”
“So what? Those people that cut you out of the investigation are from the CDC, or maybe WHO?”
Detective Escobedo was getting ticked off which is exactly what Rory wanted. “What about the bullet holes?” he asked.
“Bullet holes?”
“Saw them myself.” Or at least he saw one.
“Try this on for size,” Detective Escobedo said. “The chief announced yesterday that we were going to get a whole new building, new equipment, all of it.”
“Where did the money for that come from?” They had been trying to get a building project funded for a decade.
“Interesting timing, don’t you think?”
He certainly did.
“Who are these security guys in the olive drab?” Rory asked.
“You’re gonna have to do a deep dive. Might need a submarine. I got no clue.”
Rory sat on the low wall and thought about all the detective had said as he watched her walk off. That uniform did nothing for her shape.
5
Jesus Martinez met his contact at eight o’clock in the morning in the back parking lot of a Tex-Mex restaurant called La Munchie. The restaurant’s historical location was nestled into an older neighborhood. The parking lot was lined with red-tip photinia, a tall, thick hedge shrub that displayed red tips on older green leaves. The back parking lot was empty and would remain so until the lunch crew came on at 11:00 a.m. This meet-up was all very cloak and dagger.
A light silver Jeep Wrangler pulled into the parking lot. A beefy man who looked like he should be on the World Wrestling Tour stepped out beside Jesus’ gunmetal gray Infinity. With arms the size of telephone poles, the man removed an ice chest from the trunk and handed it over to Jesus. The ice chest looked dainty in his huge hands.
Jesus looked up at the man’s face. He had an excellent view of the man’s firm chin. “Are you the assistant?” he asked.
The man shook his head. He handed over one airline ticket packet.
“I was promised an assistant,” Jesus said.
“She’ll met you when you get there.”
“What’s her name?” He was disappointed. It would have been nice to have this mountain of a man on his mission.
“Amanda Sanger.”
The man returned to his car and drove out of the lot.
Jesus stood there on his own. He opened the ticket envelope and felt worse. Three stops during his flight into Chihuahua: Houston, Los Angeles, and Baja. Hours of travel. Three checkpoints. Loads of potential trouble.
Ah, beautiful Amanda Sanger. She was curvy with perfectly straight teeth and blonde hair. How could he have ever wanted that muscle man to accompany him?
They met in Chihuahua for the two hundred plus mile drive to Creel, which was on the edge of the Tutuaca Natural Protected Area. Creel, a remote tourist mountain town, had about five thousand residents in the off-season. It was the end of August. Tourists were going home.
He and Amanda secured a rental car and drove it through high, scruffy mountains. The view wasn’t that impressive.
Amanda smiled using all her teeth. “I’ve never been to Mexico before,” she said.
“I haven’t either,” replied Jesus.
“With a name like Martinez...”
“I’m an American. Born and raised in Austin. My grandfather on my father’s side was from Mexico.” He pointed to his eyes. “I would have thought that the hazel eyes would have given me away.” He fluttered his lashes at her. “They’re my mother’s.”
Jesus was a short, middle-aged doctor with a paunchy belly. There was little to recommend him to a woman as young and pretty as Amanda Sanger—except his mother’s eyes. Women seemed to like his hazel eyes, but Amanda seemed discomforted and she changed the subject.
“I’ve heard the news reports. Some kind of flu breaking out in this area.”
“Well,” he said as he patted the ice chest. “We’re here to help.”
Jesus was a healer, a compassionate man who helped people. She might appreciate that.
Jesus’ ice chest carried a weak virus vaccine that he intended to deliver by use of sugar cubes, as they were cheaper than injections and more likely to be taken in rural areas. Weak virus meant that the virus he carried was live, but should be weak enough for the body to fight it off—if it was prepared properly. He remem
bered reading about how a batch of the Jonas Salk weak virus for polio was incorrectly prepared and gave its vaccine recipients polio. He could live without a repeat of anything like that.
Jesus had been given blood samples from recipients who had been inoculated with a working flu vaccine. He was asked to replicate it. It seemed to be a very effective vaccine. Jesus thought the vaccine was from one of his competitors in the race to create a universal vaccine.
He’d conducted testing in the lab and on mice, but had not been involved in the “First in Human” tests; the tests were the first tests conducted on people. Usually, First in Human trials were done on desperate and wildly scared patients, but as these tests were for a vaccine, they had had to be conducted on healthy people. The testers would do a double-blind study with one group receiving the vaccine and another group receiving a placebo. Often these trials took years, but the First in Human trials must have gone well. They received approval for a field test in just six months. He was impressed.
“So, how did you get roped into this?” Jesus asked Amanda in order to start some small talk.
“Doctors Without Borders,” she said. “I like to help out.”
“You’re a doctor.”
“Almost. Resident at MD Anderson in Houston.”
“I guess that’s how you heard the reports. I thought that they were trying to keep this outbreak hush-hush, except in the affected area.”
Amanda pointed to the ice chest.
“Is that the vaccine?”
He nodded.
“And you developed it?”
“I had lots of help,” he said humbly and not quite truthfully.
The end of the drive had grown steadily more scenic. Jesus and Amanda took a deep breath as they exited the car in Creel.
“Wow,” Amanda said and he nodded.
They checked into a Best Western in Creel that advertised that it was just twenty miles to Copper Canyon. Creel was known for a scenic overlook over three rivers and steep and rocky canyons tinted the color of copper. Creel usually attracted the outdoor types like hikers and campers, but highwayman and kidnappers had dangerously slowed the tourist trade.