by Dudley Lynch
Mayes pressed his steepled fingers against his chin. Stared at me as if he was still deciding if I could be trusted with what he was about to say.
I passed the test, whatever it was. Because he started describing what Huntgardner had said the sheet was like. He told me nothing I hadn’t already heard from others. Except for one thing — he said it was the writing on one side of the sheet that had intrigued the professor most.
“Strange markings, like hieroglyphics, scientific notation, that kind of thing. Somehow, he had the notion that these characters held one of the great secrets of the universe. And that it was all going to be revealed to us Earthlings when intelligences superior to ours returned to explain what the characters meant. And it was going to happen in Flagler.”
“Doctor, you’re no dummy. You believed all this?”
He leaned forward slightly, seeming more determined than ever to be understood. “Well, for years and years, my wife and I viewed Thaddeus and his schemes as a kind of experiment in human nature.”
I’d taken my notebook and ballpoint from my shirt pocket earlier, but I realized I wasn’t ready to include this kind of information in my report, so I put them back. “That explains why you got so drawn into all this.”
“Some of it. All of us, including the professor, were astounded that the rumors about the fragment spread in certain circles so quickly and were greeted with such hostility. And that so many of the people disturbed by it seemed to be playing for keeps. If we were going to survive, we realized, that was the way we needed to play.”
He said his snoops — the actual word he used — ferreted out information that Huntgardner’s claims were the reason Dr. Rawls had mobilized his Ezekiel’s Wheel secret society. Other forces he’d never understood put Flagler in their crosshairs too. Townspeople were being hurt, threatened, burglarized, burned out. On at least one occasion, one of them disappeared.
“So that’s why you formed the Unus Mundus Masters?”
“In part, it was. But the closer we got to the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Roswell event, the more my wife and I sensed that we might be caught up in something authentic and historic. That Flagler might be about to become the stage for something enormously important. And that somebody was increasingly unhappy about it. Maybe a bunch of somebodies.”
I wasn’t bothering to hide my skepticism. But Mayes wasn’t noticing. He was still caught up in his story. “I guess I didn’t totally get aboard until Thaddeus’s friends started contacting my wife.”
“What was that about?”
“They wanted her help therapeutically with their dreams.”
“Dreams?”
“Yes.”
“Dreams about what?”
“About flashing blue lights. About being abducted by aliens. Being transported up into UFOs and told to get ready. About Flagler becoming the site of a kind of a . . . Second Coming.”
Should I tell him about the flashing blue light that had been left in my house by an intruder? I thought about it, then decided it would disrupt the flow of our conversation. Instead, I decided to get to the point. “So was that why so many physicists were at Huntgardner’s house the other Friday?”
He kept his head still, but his answer equivocated. “Yes and no. It explains why they were all in Flagler that weekend. My wife felt they’d benefit from hearing one another share their experiences with the dreams. But I don’t know whose idea it was to go to the old Huntgardner house.”
“Do you know what they were doing?”
This time, he dipped his head, paused, then answered. “I do know that. They thought Thaddeus might have hidden the fragment somewhere on the property.”
At that moment, my eye fell on a painting someone had hung on the chapel wall. It showed the baby Jesus in his manger. The observation sent my thoughts scrambling. Here we were once again, dealing with something that could lead to a deadly conclusion. Again, the cause was something alien, or so religious people had argued for eons. Only, this time, it wasn’t a baby. It was a piece of space junk. I could feel my forehead wanting to switch to its “oh, really” face, but I repressed it. “Do you think that was why they were killed — because they found it?”
“I wish to God I knew.”
I still wasn’t clear about the remodeled building. “Tell me if I’ve got this right. That elaborate warehouse and all the electronics and the steel bars on the doors and the armored bus — you created that to keep alien visitors in?”
He shook his head with enough vigor to make his large earlobes flap. “My heavens, no! The bars aren’t there to keep the aliens in. They’re there to keep people who would harm our visitors out. We don’t want what happened in Roswell repeating itself. Not in Flagler.”
That was when my “Thaddeus awakening” began. The light exploded on the horizon. I had the beginnings of an epiphany. And the immediate craving for context.
“So, the conflict, the chaos, the mayhem, the endless lawlessness of the past seventy years in Flagler has been a jurisdictional conflict.”
Mayes bobbed his head five times, moving his chin farther along an imaginary line each time. I knew what he was doing. He was advancing through my word “jurisdictional” syllable by syllable. Five syllables, five head bobs. By the time he got to the final one, he’d decided. “Jurisdictional? Yes, that’s one way to put it.”
I felt the need to explain. “I mean, the brouhaha has mostly been over who’s going to take charge of our so-called alien visitors if and when they show up. Right?”
The doctor was still. When he spoke, his rhythm was slow, his tones resigned, almost mournful. “No, not that. It’s been a bit more diabolical. It’s been over whether our alien visitors will be protected or whether they’ll be destroyed.”
So this was what an epiphany felt like. I didn’t like the feeling. I’d much prefer to be back in a classroom or around a seminar table dealing with history that was already cut and dried. Arguing about insights that had been parceled out to me chapter by neat chapter. Having time in between the arrival of unexpected insights to cogitate and evaluate.
I looked at my watch. Eighteen minutes. That’s how long it had taken to go from Thaddeus Huntgardner’s birth to the death of my naiveté about what solving Flagler’s crimes and mysteries was going to require.
I might have been able to ask more questions if my dispatcher’s voice hadn’t interrupted. He was calling on my walkie-talkie. Wanted me to get to the hospital ASAP.
I told him I was already here.
He said an ambulance was incoming. Helen was riding in it. She’d explain everything.
Chapter 60
Helen wasn’t on a stretcher. She was seated on one of the ambulance’s benches, close to the person being transported. A woman. I recognized her the moment I looked up into the ambulance. It was Cassandrea Caraballo. “Cassie” to her friends. Caraballo was Abbot County’s supervisor of voter registration and elections.
Most mornings, the sassy dark-haired import from Brooklyn breezed into our offices from hers across the hall. She and Helen had a name for themselves. The courthouse beverage sommeliers. She’d announce that it was time for the sommeliers to meet and would ask if the “cawfee” was hot. She called Helen her “fren,” which she was. A good one. And she would sometimes slip back into pure Brooklynese and announce she was going to the “terlet.”
I helped my office manager step down from the ambulance. I didn’t get a good look at Caraballo as she was wheeled passed me on the stretcher. The paramedics were already waiting with her at the nurse’s station when I caught up. They needed to know to which treatment room they were being assigned.
Their patient was unconscious. And a mess despite their efforts to clean up after her. She’d been vomiting. And had the runs. All our noses were indicating that her bowels were dealing with something they couldn’t tolerate. Her face was bathed in perspiration.
The paramedics were calling out her other symptoms as she was surrounded by ED personnel. Some of it I understood. Most of it I didn’t.
“Pulse rate forty-six.” I knew that wasn’t critical. Not by itself. A normal resting heart rate is between sixty and one hundred beats a minute. Most times, forty-six beats a minute would be considered a healthy pulse.
“Blood pressure one eighty over one ten.” That signaled hypertension — high blood pressure. Very high blood pressure. I’d discussed the condition enough with my own GP to know a reading that high was not a good sign. Not unless it was a normal reaction to stress or something severe, like a stroke.
Then one of the paramedics rattled off a string of conditions. A few, like excessive tearing and tremors in the extremities and increased salivation, I understood. The others were Greek to me. But having one eye is an amazing goad to your auditory memory. I could often tell you what I’d just heard, whether or not I’d understood it.
Miosis. Bradycardia. Fasciculation. Then came some more plain English. The paramedic said before the patient had become unresponsive, she had been confused and agitated.
But it was what I heard him say next that told me I needed to get in the picture. “We’ve been doing almost constant airway aspiration. It’s like this patient wants to drown herself in her own fluids.”
Yes, that’s one of the reasons why they call it Tres Pasitos — “three little steps.” That’s all the steps the unlucky rat can take before it drowns in its own fluids.
There was no one around the stretcher I knew. No one I could see in the entire emergency department whom I recognized. My top-gun impersonation was going to have to be one of the best of my career.
“Listen, people, I don’t have time to explain why I know this. But I do. You don’t have much time. If you don’t do the right thing, she’s going to die on us.”
The response came from a smooth-cheeked kid in light blue scrubs. He had the stethoscope draped around his neck like a dog collar. Any other time, I’d have admired his spunk.
But this time, he pointed toward the swinging doors I’d barged through only moments before. “You mind stepping outside, mister? We’re pretty busy here.”
His name tag said Dr. Wittig. Young Dr. Wittig was only seconds away from a humbling experience. For the first and perhaps only time in his still budding medical career, he was about to be levitated on the job. I intended to grab the fresh white T-shirt showing from beneath his scrubs right below his chin. Gather it tight in my fist. And jerk him upright until his feet cleared the floor. He wasn’t a sizable person. I’d probably be able to dangle him for a moment in thin air.
But I wanted to try the nonviolent route one more time. Maybe I could impress him with the basic verbal currency of his profession.
Jargon.
“Aldicarb. Do you know what aldicarb is, son?”
His reply encouraged me no end. “It works like an organophosphate.”
I had no idea if that was true or not. But already, he was showing less and less interest in calling security and having me ejected. “It’s a deadly poison. Illegal in the U.S. It will kill a rat before it can take three steps.”
His eyes moved from me to his patient. “She’s taken rat poison?”
“I don’t know that for sure. If she has, I’m almost certain she didn’t know she was doing it. But if we let her die lying here in your ED, you and I are both going to have a lot of explaining to do. Not to mention, one of the greatest regrets of our careers.”
He pointed to a computer and gave the nearest nurse an order. “Look up aldicarb. I haven’t heard the word since my toxicology training.” His next comment seemed to be an aside. “We don’t get a lot of that in medical school, you know.” Then he looked back at me. “Tox training — we don’t get a lot of it.” His eyes fell to the badge penned to my shirt. “You’re not a medical person, are you?”
“No, I’m just a country sheriff. But at the moment, I probably know as much about dealing with aldicarb as anybody between Fort Worth and Phoenix.”
“Then you know what we normally do first for cholinergic toxins.”
“All I know, Doctor, is how different it would have been if you had been available to pump nine of our Abbot County citizens full of something called pralidoxime the other day. You could have prevented the largest aldicarb murder in American history.”
“The physicists’ deaths?”
“Yes, the physicists.”
His attention shifted away from me, and I was thrilled to see it go. I’d done what I wanted to do. Reengaged the doctor in him.
He might have directed one further comment in my direction, though probably not. More likely, it was directed to the small army of trauma center staffers who had gathered to attend to Cassandrea Caraballo. “We may not need pralidoxime. Let’s try atropine first. That’ll help the secretion problem — help dry her out. Her muscles are getting weaker and weaker.”
I was already moving toward Helen who had been observing the tense encounter between the ED doctor and me like a bewildered parent. Neither of us needed to encourage the other to find a place where we could speak in private. It wasn’t going to happen in the emergency department. I pointed to the ambulance loading area outside the automatic double doors. Told her to wait there. I’d pick her up in just a minute.
I needed to know in minute detail what had happened to Abbot County’s supervisor of voter registration and elections. From all appearances, this morning’s regular meeting of the courthouse beverage sommeliers had almost killed her.
Chapter 61
Out in the ambulance bay, Helen didn’t wait for me to come to a full stop. She chased after my cruiser. Reached for the passenger side door. Jerked it open. Leaned down into my still-moving car. And began to talk. Or tried to. She was short of breath.
I eased to a full stop. Put my vehicle in park. Waited until she was seated. Then encouraged her to take a moment and collect herself.
She was verging on tears. I didn’t mind that. But it would delay my learning something that might well keep someone else in my courthouse or elsewhere in my county from going through what Cassandrea Caraballo was going through.
I reached over and squeezed her shoulder. “You did well. Looks like Cassie’s going to be okay.”
She shuddered as she exhaled. “I thought she was going to die.”
“Tell me what happened.”
She didn’t do that. Not right away. Instead, she raised both her arms and began to tap the crown of her head with all four fingers on both hands. Not hard taps. But solid enough that I could hear them land.
I knew about tapping because I’d seen her doing it while seated at her desk the previous day. I asked what she was doing, and she told me about this relaxation method she’d read about in one of her health magazines.
She said the user starts at the top of the head and tap-tap-taps their way down the body’s energy meridians. Said the Chinese had been doing it for 5,000 years.
I wasn’t going to wait for her to proceed through the whole routine, but she knew that. Several taps to her head and several along the inner edges of her eyebrows, and she was done. “She drank a glass of the tea I made for you.”
I’d had time stand still before. Once. While I was gazing into the Grand Canyon. It was the awe of it all.
I wasn’t awe-stricken this time. Now, the clock stopped because I realized it was going to be impossible to do all the things that needed to be done.
I reached for the handset on my car radio. Depressed the talk button. And stopped without saying anything. I realized I needed more information from Helen. “Did Cassie drink the tea I left sitting in my office? Or did you fix her a glass for herself?”
She didn’t answer at first with audible words. But it was easy enough to read her lips. “Oh, bloody hell.” I’d not witnessed a stronger curse from my office manager in sixtee
n years. “She fixed her own glass. From the same pitcher.”
“Is the glass you fixed for me still sitting on my credenza?”
This was where Helen’s head began a reinforced kind of bobbing after each of my questions. It was more a scooping motion than a head bob. Chin-down, then chin right back up. The meaning was clear each time. “Oh, hell, yes.”
“Is the tea still in the pitcher?”
Scoop bob.
“Is the ball infuser still in the pitcher?”
Scoop bob.
“Is the canister you keep the tea leaves in sitting in its usual place?”
Scoop bob.
“Did you take the tea leaves from that canister when you made my tea this morning?”
Scoop bob.
“Did you leave the kitchen unlocked?”
Scoop bob.
“So anybody who wants to can still drop in and help themselves to a glass of tea?”
Scoop bob.
This time, I held the switch open and gave precise instructions to Jeff Brailsford, my daytime dispatcher.
Get someone to put my office suite on lockdown, starting with the door opening from the hallway. No admittance to anyone for any reason until I got there. Crime scene tape up across the kitchen entrance and my personal office. CSI unit standing by for my arrival in the first-floor hallway. And no one should drink any tea. No explanations to anyone about what was going on. I’d be there shortly, code 1.
* * *
As I walked toward the courthouse, I couldn’t help but be aware of the pandemonium that my instructions to Jeff had triggered. In my rush to ensure that no one else got near the kitchen, I’d set off a near-panic in the courthouse. It wasn’t only the kitchen that had been put off-limits. Two deputies were stringing crime scene tape at the foot of the courthouse stairs. Already, a small crowd had gathered, blocked from entering the building.