by Greg Iles
“He didn’t have to pass a test?”
“He’s not actually practicing here. He owns and operates a dog-breeding facility in south Jackson. He sells dogs to medical schools for animal research.”
Alex tugged at an errant strand of hair beside her chin. “This is strange, John. Especially if he’s not Noel Traver at all, but Eldon Tarver.”
“Hang on a sec.” She heard voices but could not make out words. “Alex, I need to call you back.”
She hung up and went back to her computer. It struck her then that she had not tried the simplest method of finding out whether Noel Traver was an alias or not. She typed the name into Google, then searched IMAGES. The computer hummed and clicked, and then a row of thumbnails began to load.
The first picture that popped up showed an African-American man wearing an army uniform, Captain Noel D. Traver. The second showed a high school kid with pimples. The third image showed a square-headed man with a gray beard and a full head of hair. The picture had been shot by a photographer for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. The caption read BREEDER TREATS RESEARCH PUPS LIKE PETS. The picture was grainy, but Alex had no doubt: Noel D. Traver was not Eldon Tarver.
“What the hell?” she whispered.
Her cell phone rang again. She answered without looking at the screen. “John?”
“No, it’s Will.”
“Do you have something?”
“Maybe. Dr. Eldon Tarver owns a pathology lab here in Jackson.”
“What?”
“Jackson Pathology Associates. They do the lab testing for a lot of local doctors. They’re pretty successful, apparently. They do DNA analysis on-site.”
“This guy is something.”
“You want me to ride out there and check it out?”
“Yes. Poke around and see if anything seems out of whack.”
Will chuckled. “I know the routine.”
Alex’s phone beeped, indicating an incoming call. Kaiser’s cell. “Call me later, Will. Gotta go.” She clicked over to Kaiser’s phone. “Hello?”
“I’m sorry, Alex. I’m over at the Jackson field office, and things are kind of messy right now. The SAC found out about my little off duty surveillance club, and—”
“John, listen to me. I did an image search on Noel D. Traver, and I found a picture of him.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s not him. I mean, it’s not Eldon Tarver.”
“Really?”
“I don’t get it. Two names that are perfect anagrams couldn’t be coincidence—not if one name is found on the desk of the owner of the other.”
“I agree. We’re into something weird here. Changing subject, the SAC says that even if you’re right, this is a homicide case and not under our jurisdiction.”
“Webb Tyler sucks.”
Kaiser laughed quietly. “Webb says I should turn over any evidence I have to the Jackson police department and go back to New Orleans. And you should find a new line of work.”
“Screw him. I say we check out Noel Traver’s dog-breeding facility.”
“Tyler won’t go for that. I already asked for a search warrant. No dice.”
“Jesus, what’s his problem?” snapped Alex.
“Mark Dodson is his problem. Tyler knows Dodson hates your guts, and he thinks Dodson is the new director’s fair-haired boy. He also thinks Jack Moran is on his way out—early retirement. So, Tyler’s not about to help me, since I’m a disciple of the wrong acolyte.”
“I’m starting to think I’m well out of the Bureau.”
“You know better than that. We’ll get the warrant. We just have to keep piling up evidence.”
“How, without any support? I don’t guess Tyler will try for autopsies on the past victims, huh?”
Kaiser laughed out loud.
“Do you have any idea where Eldon Tarver is at this moment?”
“No. He lives alone, and he’s not at home. He’s not at the university or at his clinic, either. I’ll let you know when we locate him.”
Alex grunted in dissatisfaction. “So, exactly where is this dog-breeding facility?”
“Don’t even think about it. Not without a warrant.”
“I can find it on my own, you know.”
“You’re making it hard enough on me already. I’ve got to go. Call me if there’s something I need to know.”
Alex hung up and dialed Will Kilmer.
“Speak,” Will said.
“Noel D. Traver owns a dog-breeding facility in south Jackson. I need you to find out where.”
“I already know.”
“I love you, old man. Give me the address.”
Will read it out. “You planning on a visit?”
“I may ride by. I’m not going in. Kaiser would have my ass. I want you to do the same at the path lab, though.”
“On my way. You stay in touch.”
“I will.”
Alex went to Chris’s bed and knelt beside him. He was still shivering, but his eyes were closed now, and he was breathing regularly. She went back to the desk, packed her computer into its case, and left as quietly as she could.
CHAPTER 46
Will Kilmer touched Alex’s knee and said, “That building was a bakery when I was a boy. Hell, I think it was still one till about 1985.”
Alex nodded and kept trying to get her computer to stay connected to the Internet. For some reason, the surveillance spot they had chosen was a cellular dead zone, as far as data was concerned. Will had parked his Explorer in the bay of a defunct auto repair shop, because it commanded a good view of the dog-breeding facility owned by “Noel D. Traver.” Traver’s building was an aged redbrick rectangle about the size of a Coca-Cola bottling plant, with an even bigger parking lot surrounding it. Glittering razor wire spiraled along the top of the fence. The only vehicle in the lot was a panel truck parked ass-end toward the wall of the building, which put its license plate out of sight. The building itself looked deserted. No one had been in or out since they’d arrived two hours ago, nor had any sound come from the building. The distance was close to a hundred yards, but still. Alex figured they would have heard barking or something.
“Yours again,” said Will, in response to the chirping from the seat beside her.
“Kaiser,” said Alex. “He keeps calling.”
“Just answer it.”
“If he knew I was here, he’d flip out.”
Will sighed like man fed up with bullshit. He had already checked out Dr. Tarver’s pathology lab, and on cursory inspection it had seemed legitimate. Now he was wasting the rest of his day here, probably for nothing.
The SIM card in Alex’s notebook computer made a momentary connection to the Internet, then dropped it. She slammed her hand against the door in frustration. It was that or toss her computer out the window. She’d been trying to get online to do research, but now it was late enough for Jamie to be out of school, and he might be logged on to MSN.
“I’m worried about Jamie,” she said. “I haven’t talked to him for almost forty-eight hours.”
“He’s all right,” Will said. “He’s ten years old, and he has to go wherever his old man takes him.”
“I’m worried about Chris, too.” She felt terrible guilt at leaving him alone in the hotel room.
“How many times have you tried him?” Will didn’t know, because he’d gotten out of the Explorer several times to take a leak or smoke a cigarette.
“Five or six. He hasn’t answered in the past hour.”
“Probably sleeping, huh?”
“I hope so.”
“Almost all the victims have taken over a year to die,” Will reminded her.
“Not Grace.”
The old detective closed his eyes and shook his head.
“I think I should go back and take him to the emergency room,” Alex said. “Will you help me get him down to the car?”
“Sure. You point. I’ll march him.”
Alex tilted her head and pointed at the tal
l Cyclone fence around the old bakery. “What do you think the razor wire’s for? It sure isn’t to keep dogs inside. The fence alone would do that.”
Will shrugged. “Crime’s pretty bad out this way.”
Alex’s cell was ringing. Kaiser again. She expelled a lungful of air in frustration, then pressed SEND. “Hello, John.”
“Christ, Alex, I’ve been trying to get you for hours. Where are you?”
She grimaced, then recited her lie. “I’m at the hotel taking care of Chris. He’s in bad shape. Have you found something?”
“Yes and no. Tyler has really dug in his heels. I think he’s basically Mark Dodson’s puppet right now. I’m calling in all the favors I can to run deep checks on Shane Lansing, Eldon Tarver, and our mysterious nonveterinarian. I’m also pushing hard for a search warrant on Tarver’s residence.”
“Thanks,” Alex said, gratified to have someone pushing in the same direction at last. “Anything new on the background checks?”
“Lansing looks clean to me. Typical surgeon. Son of a lawyer, big ladies’ man. He’s moved around a lot, which is sometimes a flag with doctors, but he’s only thirty-six, so maybe he’s just the restless type. Like Rusk, he’s invested in a lot of different ventures, most medical but some not. The radiology clinic in Meridian is a legitimate concern, and Lansing seems to be a passive partner. I suppose he could get access to radioactive material if he really wanted to, but right now he seems like the least likely killer of the bunch.”
“And the others?”
“You know Rusk. He’s rich, well connected, and on his second wife. Lives like an international playboy when he’s not working. The only grounds for suspicion are those business connections you turned up, but all of those are aboveboard. Not even the IRS has a gripe with Rusk.”
“And Tarver?”
“Tarver’s is a little different. He was born in 1946, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the illegitimate son of an army officer. He was dumped at the Lutheran Children’s Home in Greenwood, Tennessee, from which he was adopted at age seven. The adoptive family was from Sevierville, Tennessee. I worked a serial murder case around there twelve years ago. That’s the Smoky Mountains. It’s commercialized now, but in the 1950s it was rural, with primitive fundamentalist religion. Some of the snake churches were based there.”
“Snake churches?” echoed Alex, and Will cut his eyes at her.
“Congregations that use poisonous snakes in their worship services. Drink strychnine, that kind of crap. I don’t know if Tarver saw any of that, but his foster father was a pig farmer and lay preacher. Eldon went to the University of Tennessee on full academic scholarship. That got him out of Vietnam. While I was running through rice paddies, Tarver was doing high-level graduate research in microbiology at UT. Data’s pretty scarce for that part of his life, but in 1974, he went to work for a major pharmaceutical company. They fired him less than a year later on sexual harassment grounds. It must have been something pretty bad to be fired for that in 1975. He didn’t actually go to medical school until 1976, but he definitely found his calling there. He’s board-certified in multiple specialties, including pathology and hematology. He took the job at UMC in 1985, and he married a biochemistry professor there two years later. She died in 1998, of cervical cancer. You know the rest. He opened a free clinic with the money he inherited from his wife. He’s had the pathology lab for over fifteen years. So far, no information about girlfriends or live-in lovers. The sexual harassment thing gives me a little pause—”
“And the birthmark,” Alex cut in.
“Yeah,” said Kaiser. “It looks pretty severe in photos. I wonder why he hasn’t had a buddy take it off for him.”
“I don’t think he can. He told me it’s some sort of vascular anomaly. It’s dangerous to mess with.”
“I think we’ve got a weird one, all right,” Kaiser said thoughtfully. “My antennae are quivering. We may find some kinky stuff in Tarver’s house, if we ever get inside it. Webb Tyler’s starting to piss me off. He’s a bureaucrat to the marrow of his bones. If he has any bones.”
“He sure doesn’t have a backbone,” Alex grumbled.
Will grabbed her knee and pointed through the windshield. Sixty yards away, a red van was pulling through the gate of the parking lot. The gate must have been unlocked, because the driver simply nosed through it without getting out and drove slowly toward the side of the building.
“Chris needs me,” Alex said, trying to make out the license plate of the van. It was too far away and the angle was bad.
“One more thing,” said Kaiser. “Noel Traver is a real mystery man. On paper, he didn’t even exist prior to ten years ago, as far as I can tell. He’s got a driver’s license but no car, and his residence appears to be the same address as that dog-breeding facility.”
“I really need to run, John. Anything else?”
Kaiser laughed. “Yeah, one thing. I’ve really been calling to make sure you don’t do something stupid, like break into Tarver’s house or that breeding facility.”
Alex laughed, hoping it didn’t ring hollow. “I wish,” she said. “Keep pushing for that search warrant.” She hung up before he could reply.
“Did you hear that?” asked Will. “The driver just honked his horn.”
The red van had pulled up to a large aluminum door set in the side wall of the old bakery. As Alex stared, the door rose until it was high enough for the van to pull inside the building.
“Son of a bitch,” said Will. “I think somebody’s been in there all along.”
“He may be using a remote. Did you get a look at the driver?”
“No, the damn windows are tinted.”
The overhead door stayed up, but the van did not pull inside.
“What should we do?” Alex asked.
Will stuck out his lower lip. “You’re the boss.”
“I want to know who’s in that van.”
Will laughed softly. “I do, too. And we can find out. But it sure won’t be legal.”
“I don’t give a shit.” Alex reached for her door handle.
Will caught hold of her wrist. “Hold on, now. Let’s don’t get you in worse trouble than you’re already in.”
She pulled her arm free. “The bastards have already fired me. What else can they do?”
Will lowered his head and looked at her with seven decades of accumulated wisdom. “Well, honey, there’s fired, and then there’s fired fired. You just got off the phone with a special agent of the FBI. If you were fired fired, he wouldn’t be talking to you at all.”
Alex forced herself to sit back in the Explorer, anger boiling in her gut. Immediately after Grace’s death, she had felt she was at a great disadvantage in her quest, but not powerless. She may have acted irresponsibly, but at least she’d been doing something. Now she was being restrained by the possibility that the agency that should have been investigating all along might finally get off its ass and do something.
She grabbed her computer from the floor and took it out of hibernation yet again. This time her toolbar showed a three-bar data connection. She’d already searched the names Eldon Tarver and Noel D. Traver so many times in the past few hours that her eyes blurred when she looked at the Google search page.
“I’m missing something,” she said.
Will grunted.
She checked MSN Messenger, but Jamie wasn’t logged on.
“What did Kaiser tell you?” Will asked.
“Not much.” She thought back to Kaiser’s brief biography of Eldon Tarver. “He said there was a gap in the years when Tarver was in college or grad school. During Vietnam, I guess. When did the Vietnam War end?”
“They scraped the last chopper off the roof of the embassy in ’75, but for all practical purposes, the big show was over by ’73.”
Vietnam…
“Late Vietnam,” Alex murmured.
“What?”
“Something Dr. Tarver said to me in his office. It was about a research project he worked
on…something about combat veterans and cancer.” She closed her eyes and saw the photograph on Tarver’s office wall again, the black-and-white snapshot of the blonde bookended by Tarver and the military officer. “VCP,” she said, scrunching her eyelids tight. “Those letters were embroidered on Tarver’s lab coat. Also painted on the building behind him.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Will.
“An acronym,” she said, suddenly recalling Tarver’s explanation. “The Veterans’ Cancer Project.”
Alex typed “Veterans’ Cancer Project” into the Google search field. Google returned over 8 million links, but not one in the first fifty referred to a formally named Veterans’ Cancer Project. Most of the links led to sites dealing with various types of cancer in Gulf War or Vietnam veterans. But the Vietnam links dealt almost exclusively with Agent Orange, which Tarver had said his group had not looked into.
“There’s not a Veterans’ Cancer Program,” she said, puzzled. “Or at least it wasn’t a big enough deal for anyone to remember it.”
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. “But Veterans’ Cancer Project isn’t what I saw,” she thought aloud. “I saw VCP.”
She typed “VCP” into the search field and hit ENTER. What appeared was a plethora of results related only by their sharing the same acronym. Next she typed “VCP” plus “cancer.” The first few hits concerned a research project in India. But the fifth started her pulse racing. The first words following the acronym were Special Virus Cancer Program—not Veterans’, as Tarver had claimed—which the link description defined as a scientific program that had begun in 1964, consumed 10 percent of the annual budget of the National Cancer Institute for some years, then was renamed the Virus Cancer Program in 1973. Alex bit her bottom lip, clicked the link, and began to read.
The VCP was a massive research effort involving some of the most distinguished scientists in the United States, all probing the possible viral origins of cancer, particularly leukemia….
“My God,” Alex breathed.
“What is it?” asked Will.
“Wait,” she said, reading as fast as she could.