Whistleblower

by Tess Gerritsen

  “I’m crazy about older men.”

  The scowl melted away, slowly reformed into a dubious smile. “How much older are we talking about?”

  She kissed him again, this time full on the lips. “Much older.”

  “Hm. Maybe these whiskers aren’t so bad, after all.” He took her face in his hands. This time he was the one kissing her, long and deeply, with no thought of where they were or where they were going. Cathy felt herself sliding back against the seat, into a space that was inescapable and infinitely safe.

  Someone behind them hooted: “Way to go, Gramps!”

  Reluctantly, they pulled apart. Through the flickering shadows of the bus, Cathy could see the twinkle in Victor’s eyes, the gleam of a wry smile.

  She smiled back and whispered, “Way to go, Gramps.”

  THE POSTERS with Victor Holland’s face were plastered all over the bus station.

  Polowski couldn’t help a snort of irritation as he gazed at that unflattering visage of what he knew in his gut was an innocent man. A damn witchhunt, that’s what this’d turned into. If Holland wasn’t already scared enough, this public stalking would surely send him diving for cover, beyond the reach of those who could help him. Polowski only hoped it’d also be beyond the reach of those with less benign intentions.

  With all these posters staring him in the face, Holland would’ve been a fool to stroll through this bus depot. Still, Polowski had an instinct about these things, a sense of how people behaved when they were desperate. If he were in Holland’s shoes, a killer on his trail and a woman companion to worry about, he knew what he’d do—get the hell out of San Francisco. A plane was unlikely. According to Jack Zuckerman, Holland was operating on a thin wallet. A credit card would’ve been out of the question. That also knocked out a rental car. What was left? It was either hitchhike or take the bus.

  Polowski was betting on the bus.

  His last piece of info supported that hunch. The tap on Zuckerman’s phone had picked up a call from Cathy Weaver. She’d arranged some sort of drop-off at a site Polowski couldn’t identify at first. He’d spent a frustrating hour asking around the office, trying to locate someone who’d not only seen Zuckerman’s forgettable film, Cretinoid, but could also pinpoint where the last scene was filmed. The Mission District, some movie nut file clerk had finally told him. Yeah, she was sure of it. The monster came up through the manhole cover right at the corner of Fifth and Mission and slurped down a derelict or two just before the hero smashed him with a crated piano. Polowski hadn’t stayed to hear the rest; he’d made a run for his car.

  By that time, it was too late. Holland and the woman were gone, and Zuckerman had vanished. Polowski found himself cruising down Mission, his doors locked, his windows rolled up, wondering when the local police were going to clean up the damn streets.

  That’s when he remembered the bus depot was only a few blocks away.

  Now, standing among the tired and slack-jawed travelers at the bus station, he was beginning to think he’d wasted his time. All those wanted posters staring him in the face. And there was a cop standing over by the coffee machine, taking furtive sips from a foam cup.

  Polowski strolled over to the cop. “FBI,” he said, flashing his badge.

  The cop—he was scarcely more than a boy—instantly straightened. “Patrolman O’Hanley, sir.”

  “Seeing much action?”

  “Uh—you mean today?”

  “Yeah. Here.”

  “No, sir.” O’Hanley sighed. “Pretty much a bust. I mean, I could be out on patrol. Instead they got me hanging around here eyeballing faces.”

  “Surveillance?”

  “Yes, sir.” He nodded at the poster of Holland. “That guy. Everyone’s hot to find him. They say he’s a spy.”

  “Do they, now?” Polowski took a lazy glance around the room. “Seen anyone around here who looks like him?”

  “Not a one. I been watching every minute.”

  Polowski didn’t doubt it. O’Hanley was the kind of kid who, if you asked him to, would scrub the Captain’s boots with a toothbrush. He’d do a good job of it, too.

  Obviously Holland hadn’t come through here. Polowski turned to leave. Then another thought came to mind, and he turned back to O’Hanley. “The suspect may be traveling with a woman,” he said. He pulled out a photo of Cathy Weaver, one Jack Zuckerman had been persuaded to donate to the FBI. “Have you seen her come through here?”

  O’Hanley frowned. “Gee. She sure does look like… Naw. That can’t be her.”

  “Who?”

  “Well, there was this woman in here ‘bout an hour ago. Kind of a down and outer. Some little brat ran smack into her. I sort’ve brushed her off and sent her on her way. She looked a lot like this gal, only in a lot worse shape.”

  “Was she traveling alone?”

  “She had an old guy with her. Her pop, I think.”

  Suddenly Polowski was all ears. That instinct again—it was telling him something. “What did this old man look like?”

  “Real old. Maybe seventy. Had this bushy beard, lot of white hair.”

  “How tall?”

  “Pretty tall. Over six feet…” O’Hanley’s voice trailed off as his gaze focused on the wanted poster. Victor Holland was six foot three. O’Hanley’s face went white. “Oh, God…”

  “Was it him?”

  “I—I can’t be sure—”

  “Come on, come on!”

  “I just don’t know… Wait. The woman, she dropped a makeup case! I turned it in at that window there—”

  It took only a flash of an FBI badge for the clerk in Lost and Found to hand over the case. The instant Polowski opened the thing, he knew he’d hit pay dirt. It was filled with theatrical makeup supplies. Stenciled inside the lid was: Property of Jack Zuckerman Productions.

  He slammed the lid shut. “Where did they go?” he snapped at O’Hanley.

  “They—uh, they boarded a bus right over there. That gate. Around seven o’clock.”

  Polowski glanced up at the departure schedule. At seven o’clock, the number fourteen had departed for Palo Alto.

  It took him ten minutes to get hold of the Palo Alto depot manager, another five minutes to convince the man this wasn’t just another Prince-Albert-in-the-can phone call.

  “The number fourteen from San Francisco?” came the answer. “Arrived twenty minutes ago.”

  “What about the passengers?” pressed Polowski. “You see any of ’em still around?”

  The manager only laughed. “Hey, man. If you had a choice, would you hang around a stinking bus station?”

  Muttering an oath, Polowski hung up.

  “Sir?” It was O’Hanley. He looked sick. “I messed up, didn’t I? I let him walk right past me. I can’t believe—”

  “Forget it.”

  “But—”

  Polowski headed for the exit. “You’re just a rookie,” he called over his shoulder. “Chalk it up to experience.”

  “Should I call this in?”

  “I’ll take care of it. I’m headed there, anyway.”

  “Where?”

  Polowski shoved open the station door. “Palo Alto.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE FRONT DOOR was answered by an elderly oriental woman whose command of English was limited.

  “Mrs. Lum? Remember me? Victor Holland. I used to know your son.”

  “Yes, yes!”

  “Is he here?”

  “Yes.” Her gaze shifted to Cathy now, as though the woman didn’t want her second visitor to feel left out of the conversation.

  “I need to see him,” said Victor. “Is Milo here?”

  “Milo?” At last here was a word she seemed to know. She turned and called out loudly in Chinese.

  Somewhere a door squealed open and footsteps stamped up the stairs. A fortyish oriental man in blue jeans and chambray shirt came to the front door. He was a dumpling of a fellow, and he brought with him the vague odor of chemicals, something
sharp and acidic. He was wiping his hands on a rag.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  Victor grinned. “Milo Lum! Are you still skulking around in your mother’s basement?”

  “Excuse me?” Milo inquired politely. “Am I supposed to know you, sir?”

  “Don’t recognize an old horn player from the Out of Tuners?”

  Milo stared in disbelief. “Gershwin? That can’t be you?”

  “Yeah, I know,” Victor said with a laugh. “The years haven’t been kind.”

  “I didn’t want to say anything, but…”

  “I won’t take it personally. Since—” Victor peeled off his false beard “—the face isn’t all mine.”

  Milo gazed down at the lump of fake whispers, hanging like a dead animal in Victor’s grasp. Then he stared up at Victor’s jaw, still blotchy with spirit gum. “This is some kind of joke on old Milo, right?” He stuck his head out the door, glancing past Victor at the sidewalk. “And the other guys are hiding out there somewhere, waiting to yell surprise! Aren’t they? Some big practical joke.”

  “I wish it were a joke,” said Victor.

  Milo instantly caught the undertone of urgency in Victor’s voice. He looked at Cathy, then back at Victor. Nodding, he stepped aside. “Come in, Gersh. Sounds like I have some catching up to do.”

  Over a late supper of duck noodle soup and jasmine tea, Milo heard the story. He said little; he seemed more intent on slurping down the last of his noodles. Only when the ever-smiling Mrs. Lum had bowed good-night and creaked off to bed did Milo offer his comment.

  “When you get in trouble, man, you sure as hell do it right.”

  “Astute as always, Milo,” sighed Victor.

  “Too bad we can’t say the same for the cops,” Milo snorted. “If they’d just bothered to ask around, they would’ve learned you’re harmless. Far as I know, you’re guilty of only one serious crime.”

  Cathy looked up, startled. “What crime?”

  “Assaulting the ears of victims unlucky enough to hear his saxophone.”

  “This from a piccolo player who practises with earplugs,” observed Victor.

  “That’s to drown out extraneous noise.”

  “Yeah. Mainly your own.”

  Cathy grinned. “I’m beginning to understand why you called yourselves the Out of Tuners.”

  “Just some healthy self-deprecating humor,” said Milo. “Something we needed after we failed to make the Stanford band.” Milo rose, shoving away from the kitchen table. “Well, come on. Let’s see what’s on that mysterious roll of film.”

  He led them along the hall and down a rickety set of steps to the basement. The chemical tang of the air, the row of trays lined up on a stainless-steel countertop and the slow drip, drip of water from the faucet told Cathy she was standing in an enormous darkroom. Tacked on the walls was a jumble of photos. Faces, mostly, apparently snapped around the world. Here and there she spotted a newsworthy shot:

  soldiers storming an airport, protestors unfurling a banner.

  “Is this your job, Milo?” she asked.

  “I wish,” said Milo, agitating the developing canister. “No, I just work in the ol’ family business.”

  “Which is?”

  “Shoes. Italian, Brazilian, leather, alligator, you name it, we import it.” He cocked his head at the photos. “That’s how I get my exotic faces. Shoe-buying trips. I’m an expert on the female arch.”

  “For that,” said Victor, “he spent four years at Stanford.”

  “Why not? Good a place as any to study the fine feet of the fair sex.” A timer rang. Milo poured out the developer, removed the roll of film, and hung it up to dry. “Actually,” he said, squinting at the negatives, “it was my dad’s dying request. He wanted a son with a Stanford degree. I wanted four years of nonstop partying. We both got our wishes.” He paused and gazed off wistfully at his photos. “Too bad I can’t say the same of the years since then.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Cathy.

  “I mean the partying’s long since over. Gotta earn those profits, keep up those sales. Never thought life’d come down to the bottom line. Whatever happened to all that rabble-rousing potential, hey, Gersh? We sort of lost it along the way. All of us, Bach and Ollie and Roger. The Out of Tuners finally stepped into line. Now we’re all marching to the beat of the same boring drummer.” He sighed and glanced at Victor. “You make out anything on those negatives?”

  Victor shook his head. “We need prints.”

  Milo flipped off the lights, leaving only the red glow of the darkroom lamp. “Coming up.”

  As Milo laid out the photographic paper, Victor asked, “What happened to the other guys? They still around?”

  Milo flipped the exposure switch. “Roger’s VP at some multinational bank in Tokyo. Into silk suits and ties, the whole nine yards. Bach’s got an electronics firm in San José.”

  “And Ollie?”

  “What can I say about Ollie?” Milo slipped the first print into the bath. “He’s still lurking around in that lab over at Stanford Med. I doubt he ever sees the light of day. I figure he’s got some secret chamber in the basement where he keeps his assistant Igor chained to the wall.”

  “This guy I have to meet,” said Cathy.

  “Oh, he’d love you.” Victor laughed and gave her arm a squeeze. “Seeing as he’s probably forgotten what the female of the species looks like.”

  Milo slid the print into the next tray. “Yeah, Ollie’s the one who never changed. Still the night owl. Still plays a mean clarinet.” He glanced at Victor. “How’s the sax, Gersh? You keeping it up?”

  “Haven’t played in months.”

  “Lucky neighbors.”

  “How did you ever get that name?” asked Cathy. “Gersh?”

  “Because,” said Milo, wielding tongs as he transferred another batch of prints between trays, “he’s a firm believer in the power of George Gershwin to win a lady’s heart. ‘Someone to Watch Over Me,’ wasn’t that the tune that made Lily say…” Milo’s voice suddenly faded. He looked at his friend with regret.

  “You’re right,” said Victor quietly. “That was the tune. And Lily said yes.”

  Milo shook his head. “Sorry. Guess I still have a hard time remembering she’s gone.”

  “Well, she is,” said Victor, his voice matter-of-fact. Cathy knew there was pain buried in the undertones. But he hid it well. “And right now,” Victor said, “we’ve got other things to think about.”

  “Yeah.” Milo, chastened, turned his attention back to the prints he’d just developed. He fished them out and clipped the first few sheets on the line to dry. “Okay, Gersh. Tell us what’s on this roll that’s worth killing for.”

  Milo switched on the lights.

  Victor stood in silence for a moment, frowning at the first five dripping prints. To Cathy, the data was meaningless, only a set of numbers and codes, recorded in an almost illegible hand.

  “Well,” grunted Milo. “That sure tells me a lot.”

  Victor’s gaze shifted quickly from one page to the next. He paused at the fifth photo, where a column ran down the length of the page. It contained a series of twenty-seven entries, each one a date followed by the same three letters: EXP.

  “Victor?” asked Cathy. “What does it mean?”

  He turned to them. It was the look in his eyes that worried her. The stillness. Quietly he said, “We need to call Ollie.”

  “You mean tonight?” asked Milo. “Why?”

  “This isn’t just some experiment in test tubes and petri dishes. They’ve gone beyond that, to clinical trials.” Victor pointed to the last page. “These are monkeys. Each one was infected with a new virus. A manmade virus. And in every case the results were the same.”

  “You mean this?” Milo pointed to the last column. “EXP?”

  “It stands for expired,” said Victor. “They all died.” SAM POLOWSKI sat on a bench in the Palo Alto bus terminal and wondered: If I wanted t
o disappear, where would I go next? He watched a dozen or so passengers straggle off to board the 210 from San José, noting they were by and large the Birkenstock and backpack set. Probably Stanford students heading off for Christmas break. He wondered why it was that students who could afford such a pricey university couldn’t seem to scrape up enough to buy a decent pair of jeans. Or even a decent haircut, for that matter.

  At last Polowski rose and automatically dusted off his coat, a habit he’d picked up from his early years of hanging around the seamier side of town. Even if the grime wasn’t actually visible, he’d always felt it was there, coating any surface he happened to brush against, ready to cling to him like wet paint.

  He made one phone call—to Dafoe’s answering machine, to tell him Victor Holland had moved on to Palo Alto. It was, after all, his responsibility to keep his supervisor informed. He was glad he only had to talk to a recording and not to the man himself.

  He left the bus station and strolled down the street, heading Lord knew where, in search of a spark, a hunch. It was a nice-enough neighborhood, a nice-enough town. Palo Alto had its old professors’ houses, its bookshops and coffee houses where university types, the ones with the beards and wire-rim glasses, liked to sit and argue the meaning of Proust and Brecht and Goethe. Polowski remembered his own university days, when, after being subjected to an hour of such crap from the students at the next table, he had finally stormed over to them and yelled, “Maybe Brecht meant it that way, maybe not. But can you guys answer this? What the hell difference does it make?”

  This did not, needless to say, enhance his reputation as a serious scholar.

  Now, as he paced along the street, no doubt in the footsteps of more serious philosophers, Polowski turned over in his head the question of Victor Holland. More specifically the question of where such a man, in his desperation, would hide. He stalked past the lit windows, the glow of TVs, the cars spilling from garages. Where in this warren of suburbia was the man hiding?

  Holland was a scientist, a musician, a man of few but lasting friendships. He had a Ph.D. from MIT, a B.S. from Stanford. The university was right up the road. The man must know his way around here. Maybe he still had friends in the neighborhood, people who’d take him in, keep his secrets.