Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 11 - Flashback

by Flashback(Lit)

  Clean, fed and in uniform, she felt shaky but ready to face the day. Her first task was to sort out which bits of the past seventy-two hours were real and which were drug-induced. When she left her quarters, she locked her door behind her.

  The first order of business was getting the engine's serial number tracked down. To that end she called the Key West Police Department and the coast guard. But for a short time on Isle Royale in Lake Superior, Anna had little experience dealing with boats. That, and being denied easy communication with the rest of the world, decided her to leave the police work to the police. Lieutenant George Henriquez, her contact on Key West, a man who might have been squat, balding and pockmarked but who was blessed with the telephone voice of an Adonis, told her they'd had no luck as yet identifying the John Doe Ranger Shaw had towed to East Key. They had, however, identified the tattoo on his leg with the help of a local DEA agent who worked, if not closely then amicably, with the local police force. He had seen it before on the leg of a Cuban, an illegal alien arrested for smuggling drugs from Central America across the Gulf of Florida.

  "More than that we don't know," Henriquez said. "Could be some kind of gang ID. A lot of these guys-the low rungs on the totem pole-have that adolescent mentality. The higher-ups, the brains, know better than to intentionally brand themselves as criminals."

  Anna asked him if he would find out the whereabouts of Theresa Alvarez for her. He grumbled at having his already considerable workload increased but promised to try. Enduring another two minutes of conversation aborted then accelerated, then made simultaneous by the phone delay, Anna gave him what she had gathered about Lanny Wilcox's erstwhile inamorata.

  She did not tell the lieutenant of being drugged, nor would she tell anyone, not for a while. The only way to be absolutely assured of keeping a secret was to tell no one. No suspicion attached itself to the Key West police-because of the repeated and hands-on nature of the poisoning it had to be someone at the fort or one of the boating regulars who'd learned enough of the ranger's living situation to take advantage of it. Anna leaned strongly toward the idea that it was an NPS employee. Who else could move unseen and unremarked upon in a society as closed as that at Fort Jefferson? She just didn't want a chance remark or careful question to reveal to someone that she was onto the drugging. As long as whoever was behind it believed her to be partaking of the contaminated waters, it was less likely a new approach would be devised.

  These thoughts trickling through her mind, she knew she would have to let Lanny Wilcox suffer the fears of the newly demented a while longer. Should she tell him he had purposely been made delusional, odds were good he'd begin asking questions, upsetting her precarious applecart.

  And he might be returned to duty and she sent home. Much as she wanted to go, she had no intention of leaving till she found out who was messing with her mind.

  That done, she settled in to find out who had chosen to drive the Dry Tortugas' Supervisory Rangers mad, and why.

  The computer had the most reliable link to the real world, and Anna logged on.

  For starters, she ran everyone working on Garden and Loggerhead Keys for wants and warrants. Mack, the man who'd said he'd earned his stripes in prison, came up clean, not even an outstanding parking ticket.

  Daniel had been arrested twice, once for assault and once for drunk and disorderly. He'd served three months in the Dade County Jail and been given two years' probation. Both arrests and convictions were seventeen years old; a misspent youth. Since then, nothing.

  Bob, as Anna expected, was clean. Should she take it into her head to do an illegal search of his quarters as she had done of Lanny's-though she did have probable cause unless the will-o'-the-wisp lights and nocturnal moat creature were drug-born and not of this world-she had little doubt she would find under a bed or high on a closet shelf a box of merit badges. Probably covering his years from cub to eagle.

  By regulation National Park Service law-enforcement officers were given background checks. The execution of this had been haphazard at best until it was revealed in a series of short-lived but unpleasant public-relations nightmares that there were quite a few gun-toting felons stalking the woods in flat-brimmed Stetsons and gold buffalo badges. Since then, the various offices of personnel management in the parks had been more thorough. Most felons in the green and gray would be those hired way back, probably genuinely gone straight or getting too old to bother with violent crime. If by some fluke Anna had uncovered a felony in Bob Shaw's past, unless it had a direct bearing on why she and Lanny were drugged, what the go-fast boat was up to when it blew up, or why Theresa Alvarez took a powder, she might not have said a word.

  She'd spent much of her adult life catching criminals. Not once had she been accused of being too soft on them. But, unlike some others in the field of law, she never quite lost her need for fairness. When a debt to society was paid, all rights and privileges should be restored: the right to vote, carry arms, protect and serve.

  The surprise was Bob's wife, Teddy Shaw or, as her rap sheet would have it, Theodora Placer alias Teddy Andrews, Teddy Lee and Lily Lee. Wanting the woman's history, Anna had run her under her maiden name as it appeared on her VIP application papers: Theodora Lily Placer. Teddy was thirty-two years old, her last arrest had been when she was twenty-seven, only months before she became Teddy Shaw and left her past on the mainland. Or moved her business to the Keys.

  Anna printed out what there was and leaned back, deck shoes on Teddy's desk, to read it. The sudden tilt of the chair startled her. Whatever ball bearing in her head served to reorient the brain had not fully recovered from the hallucinogen. Either that or her body cried out for sleep.

  Throwing caution to the winds, she put down the printouts and made a pot of coffee. Surely the water supply for the entire fort hadn't been contaminated. As the coffee began to percolate, it occurred to her how easy it would be to do just that, drop acid, ketamine, PCP, Ecstacy, rat poison, kerosene or a dead cat into the cistern. Easy as pie. Access wasn't difficult; trapdoors big enough to climb through were set in the cistern's top. The traps weren't hidden and they weren't locked.

  Anna clicked the coffee machine off before the pot was half full. She sat back down at Teddy's desk and rested her forehead on the pages. For poisoning her, she wanted to catch the jerk. For denying her morning coffee, she wanted to kill him.

  Or her. Reminded of Teddy Shaw's checkered past, she sat up and once again began to read. Teddy had been a busy woman. She'd not given up a job as head nurse in the ER; she'd been fired for stealing prescription painkillers. The judge had sentenced her to rehab and five years' probation. The second arrest had been for forging doctors' signatures on hospital prescription pads, stolen from the clinic at the rehab center. For that she'd served three months. Two and a half years later she'd broken probation again. This time she was arrested in Philadelphia for trying to buy Percodan from an undercover narcotics officer. She'd been sent back into the state jails to serve out the remaining six months of the original nine-month sentence. Shortly after being released she'd again broken parole by leaving Pennsylvania for parts unknown. There was a warrant out for her arrest.

  After her release she must have left Pennsylvania for Florida, where she met and married Robert Shaw and fled as far in the U.S. of A. as she could without having to tread water. It was a good bet Bob didn't know. The man was such a boy scout he would have wanted to make things right with the law before he endangered his career by becoming an accomplice. Then again they seemed very much in love. Love was a great leveler. Maybe it had enticed Bob to look the other way. Just this once.

  Anna set the papers down and stared longingly at the coffeepot. Not the entire water supply. Not yet. Why bother when the perpetrator knew Anna was swilling down doctored fizzy water?

  She walked over and punched the "on" button again. Some things were worth the risk. Watching the coffee drip into the pot, comforted by the gurgles and clicks of the machine, Anna thought about Teddy. From her long
association with the medical profession by way of her psychiatrist sister, Molly, Anna knew the terrible flaws in the myth of its superiority. Drug addiction was one of them. Rehab centers were one of the best places to have a heart attack. A large percentage of the clients were doctors and nurses. Psychologists were next, then the usual scattering of strippers, rock musicians and regular citizens.

  Medical professionals often worked under great pressure. They were called upon to go without sleep or to remain alert more hours than the body or psyche could realistically maintain without help. They had access to drugs, both to buy and to steal. A good many of them also had the arrogance to believe they could handle it, would never become dependent.

  The coffee was done. Anna mixed in a chunk of Cremora to take the edge off and carried the mug back to the desk. Her first sip brought that tight sensation to the back of her neck, fear that she was condemning herself to another few hours where pigs could fly and beggars ride. Putting the creeps firmly out of mind, she took another sip to commit herself and returned to her cogitations. If she were doomed to be a drug-crazed lunatic, at least she would be a wide-awake drug-crazed lunatic.

  Teddy had the knowledge to drug somebody. Chances were good she still had contacts or a prescription pad she'd squirreled away against future emergencies before she'd been packed off to jail. If the doctor they worked with on the mainland hadn't bothered to check too carefully, he wouldn't know her nursing license was revoked-if it was. There was a possibility the various institutions hadn't communicated with one another and Teddy could still practice legally.

  Why would Teddy want to poison her? Make her believe she was going nuts? Teddy had saved her life when she'd been knocked unconscious by the second explosion.

  Not poison just me, Anna reminded herself. There was Lanny Wilcox. Was it that simple? Did Teddy think once Lanny was deemed incompetent, her very own hero, Bob Shaw, would be elevated to the position of Supervisory Ranger? When Anna came on scene instead had Teddy seen her as merely another obstacle to be removed from her husband's career path?

  Though simple and-given the negligible hike in money and power such a promotion would bring with it-to Anna's mind potty, as a motive it was not bad. Women ambitious for the man they loved had done worse for less.

  The phone rang. Nearly upsetting her coffee, Anna squawked and flapped in the tradition of Chicken Little. By the second ring she'd recovered.

  "Dry Tortugas National Park."

  "Anna?"

  The sound of her name spoken with the honeyed warmth of a Mississippi drawl brought tears to her eyes.

  "Paul," she said, not because she was unsure who the caller was but for the sheer pleasure of feeling his name on her tongue. A thousand years had passed since she'd thought of him. Mountains had crumbled to dust, seas dried up, civilizations fallen to ruin, and yet just to hear his voice and say his name took her back to the good safe times on his living room couch before a fire. Life ceased to be made of ghosts, iron and salt and became once again a thing of flesh and blood.

  "I've been worried about you, Anna. It's been-"

  "Listen to me, Paul. Oh. What? Days since-"

  "You haven't answered the phone, no-"

  "No-Listen-"

  "What?"

  "Wait." Anna stopped talking, letting the line clear of the overlaid clogging of words, delays and spaces. During the break she soothed herself by saying goddammotherfuckingphone three times.

  "I'll marry you," she said when silence was established. "The sooner the better. Meet me at the airport with a priest."

  Another silence, this one organically grown, filled the line after she'd spoken her piece. Two seconds, three. Maybe this, too, was a hallucination. The phone hadn't rung at all. Lost in the wherever of the mind, she'd dreamed the noise, grabbed at the phone, pressed it to her ear.

  "Oh, Jesus," she whispered and threw the coffee into the wastebasket, splashing her leg and the first two desk drawers. Carefully, she moved the handset away from her ear.

  "Anna?" A tiny voice pushed through the terrible darkness of a thousand miles of telephone wire and abyss of the microwave. Her hand stopped. She did not hang up. Neither did she put the phone back to her ear. Time and reality had been suspended and she was afraid to move, to believe.

  "Anna, are you there?"

  The voice sounded so lost and alone. Even if Paul had become one more symptom of impending disaster, she could not leave him unanswered. "I'm here," she whispered, realized the receiver was still halfway to the phone, brought it back to her ear and said again, "I'm here."

  "I hate this phone. Did you say you'd marry me?"

  "I did."

  "You sound funny."

  "I am funny."

  "Anna, this phone makes me crazy. I'm going to be quiet now and listen. You tell me what's going on, okay?"

  "Does the offer still stand?" Anna asked.

  "What offer?"

  "You asked me to marry you."

  "It still stands. It will stand forever. Maybe lean a little after eight hundred years like the tower of Pisa, but it will still be standing."

  "I want to do it. I want to marry you. Right away. As soon as I get back."

  Another silence threatened Anna, but this one was blessedly shortlived.

  "I would like that," Paul said carefully. "Right now I need to hear what is happening to you."

  Anna told him everything. Words poured out haphazardly, the plots of her various tales interweaving, pronouns dropped, sentences with subjects and no predicates. Chronological order was abused and misused and her emotions colored fact and fiction alike. She was not a law-enforcement officer making a report, she was a tired, shaken woman talking to her lover.

  The drugs with which she'd been washing down her peanut butter sandwiches had eaten away a wall she'd not known was still standing. Though only vaguely, she was aware that she had never talked this way to anyone-or not for so many years she'd lost count. Not even to her sister.

  Retaining control, a degree of professionalism, appearing to be always master of herself, if not the situation, had been so much a part of her she'd not been aware of it till it was gone. Never-at least not since the death of her husband Zach and possibly not before-had she allowed herself to be so vulnerable.

  This scrap of knowledge flittered through her mind as she babbled. She tucked it away for further investigation. Ecstacy, a designer drug that had hit the world running in the eighties, was said to have an opening effect on the heart and mind. Ecstacy had come long after Anna's days of seeking recreation and/or enlightenment with various toxic substances. She had no personal experience to draw upon.

  At length she had, in her uncalculated and fragmented way, told Paul Davidson of the adventures both physical and metaphysical which had befallen her. He left a moment's silence and she resisted the temptation to blurt: "Are you still there?" while the last of her words surmounted whatever delaying obstacle lay between Fort Jefferson and the rest of the world.

  "Have you told me everything?" Paul's voice returned after the expected seconds had ticked away.

  From anyone else-anyone besides her sister, Molly-Anna would have fielded that question with care; responding to the accusation often cloaked in the words, the suggestion she was hiding something.

  In Paul's kind tones, coming from a mind she was learning was subtly complex but never devious, she believed the question was only what it seemed. "Everything I can think of," she told him.

  "Do you want me to come out there?"

  Did she ever. She'd not thought of it, but when he asked, she knew how desperately she had been needing exactly that. Someone she could trust. Warm arms to hold her at night. A fine mind with which to share her great-great-aunt Raffia's letters. A hard-nosed southern sheriff to keep her from harm. A wise and loving priest to whom she could confess her sins. The thought of Paul Davidson stepping onto the dock in front of Fort Jefferson engendered a sensation behind her rib cage that lent credence to the bard's allusion to hearts ta
king wing.

  "No. No thanks," she said. Supervisory Rangers did not call in their boyfriends to help out when things got sticky. There would be no faster way to feed her career to the sharks and her credibility to the endless gossip mill run by the boys.

  "You're sure?"

  Anna didn't trust herself to answer. As she'd hoped, he took her silence for an affirmative. "If you change your mind-"

  "I won't." A lie. She'd already done so fifty times in the brief pause between the asking and the answering.

  The call went on as calls between sweethearts do, with professions of love and mutual "I miss you's," but Anna kept it short lest she weaken and take the White Knight option. Being a damsel in distress had a dark fascination for her; the idea of being without responsibility, merely enduring and hoping and-if the scenario happened to be in a fairy tale-ultimately rescued not only from the situation but from the specter of loneliness. In real life she'd never had the guts to try it. Even had she found the courage to wait, to have faith, she knew she would never have the patience. When things went wrong she couldn't rest till she'd righted them, or tried to. And, too, self-respecting damsels were not allowed to kick, spit, shout or swear at their respective dragons. "Got any guesses as to who might be doctoring my water?" she asked to get the conversation back on safer ground.