“What about the guy who had the heart attack in the forest?” Lewis asked. “Larry—”
“Henderson,” Kyle finished for him. Even Lewis wasn’t his normally sharp self this morning.
“Yeah, Henderson,” Lewis said. “Have they checked to see if he might have been affected by anything?”
“They’re working on it. There wasn’t anything that came up in his original autopsy,” Geddes replied. “They ran a toxicology, but it came up negative for any of the usual drugs. The lab’s going to run more tests on his samples to see if they find anything that fits with this new information. Anything new on your end?”
“Not yet,” Lewis said.
“All right, keep me posted.”
“Will do.”
CHAPTER 58
Denver
Charlie’s stomach growled. He hadn’t eaten since … he couldn’t remember when exactly, sometime late last night when he had gone to the all-night burger joint a few blocks away. He looked at the clock in the corner of the screen and was glad to see it was after 11:15, which meant he could order take-out.
He pulled open a drawer to his right and shuffled through the collection of colored menus until he decided he was in the mood for Chinese. He had yet to have Chinese during the marathon, and it was less likely to make him sleepy than pizza was. He called in his order for Kung-Pao chicken with fried rice and then offered the driver an extra five-dollar tip on top if he would stop at the 7-Eleven a few blocks away and pick up a couple of Red Bulls on the way.
He was still sitting in front of the computer, copying the data to the second flash drive when the doorbell rang. He jumped up and hurried to the door, anxiously grabbing the sack with the cardboard cartons of food and the Red Bulls from the startled Middle Eastern deliveryman. The Red Bulls were even cold. Awesome! He hated it when they brought the warm ones. Red Bull over ice just wasn’t right.
After paying, he slammed the door and checked on the computer. The hard drive’s led was still blinking as the data was transferred. Time for a bathroom break, he thought. Leaving his lunch on the table, he had just starting down the hall when the doorbell rang again.
Must have forgotten the fortune cookies or something, he thought as he went back to the door. But when he opened the door, it wasn’t the deliveryman. Instead, a large, hulking man with short-cropped, reddish blonde hair was standing there. He held a small silver aerosol can in front of his face. Charlie had just enough time to notice that it looked like a can of mace or pepper spray before the mist hit him in the face. Only it didn’t burn his eyes or nose at all. It just made everything go instantly black.
*
The darkness faded slowly, gradually shifting to a blurry gray before coalescing into the speckled white of the ceiling. He had the bed-spins, as if he had been up all night drinking, but he didn’t remember any of it. Charlie’s head lolled to the right. He looked for the clock beside the bed, but it wasn’t there. Instead, he saw a long, low brown table with his gaming magazines and a couple of oddly shaped white things with neon green in the middle of them. They looked scary but strangely familiar. Then it came to him—Xbox controllers. That’s what they were. On the coffee table, but why is the coffee table in the bedroom? Then he noticed the entertainment center beyond and realized he wasn’t in his bedroom. He was on the couch. He must have stayed up too long and crashed on the couch.
He tried to sit up to shake the cobwebs from his head, but his body didn’t respond. It was as if all his limbs had turned to jelly. A warm, floating feeling suffused his body, radiating from the inside out, but something wasn’t right. Nothing moved.
The only true discomfort came from his right arm. He looked down, struggling to focus through the kaleidoscopic haze until the three arms slowly merged into one. There was an ugly red spot and small trail of dried blood in the crook of his arm.
There was a noise behind him. He tried to turn his head enough to see into the dining area, and in the process, he wound up falling off the couch. He landed with a thud, but he didn’t feel a thing. Except floaty. And warm. He felt warm and floaty.
As he lay with his face against the carpet, he giggled as he realized that this was what the world looked like from a roach’s point of view. He could see just enough to notice a man sitting at the computer. His computer. And he was doing something to it. Charlie stopped giggling.
The man ejected a CD from the drive. He must have been loading something onto his computer. Something about it seemed wrong, but his thoughts were all muzzy, as if his head were full of warm molasses, and he couldn’t seem to remember why.
The man picked up the flash drives from the table, dropped them into his pocket, and then walked over to Charlie. Squatting down in front of him, he held up the CD. Incredibly bright, silver-white light reflected into Charlie’s eyes. He squeezed them shut, but the light kept bouncing around inside his head like a disco ball in a spotlight.
A steady tapping on his forehead caused him to open his eyes. Had he passed out? The man rapped the disk against his head a few more times. “Who are you working for?”
Working for? Couldn’t the idiot see he wasn’t working? He was lying on the floor. He giggled at his cleverness and then realized he was drooling onto the carpet. Oh, well, he’d just make a little lake for the roaches. He giggled some more.
“Who are you working for?” the man asked again.
His tongue was thick, and the words came out slurred like after he went to the dentist. “Ithss for Caireee.”
“Who else knows about this?”
“No uhn, jus Caireee.”
The guy held up a slip of pink paper. “Is this where she’s staying?”
Charlie tried to focus. His eyes burned from the sweat seeping into them. With great effort, he managed to make the swirling colors slow enough to make out the FedEx receipt from when he shipped Carrie’s laptop. “Caireee,” he mumbled pleasantly. She was going to be so happy when he told her what he had found. He should call her. But he felt so sloshy, like he was getting seasick. Maybe the man with the silver disc would help him.
But the man didn’t seem interested in helping him at all. He just pulled out his cell phone and began punching in a long string of numbers. Maybe he was calling 911.
“I’m done here,” he said. “Yes, sir, I’m on my way there next.”
The man flipped his phone shut. Without another look in Charlie’s direction, he walked out the front door and closed it behind him. It was then that the sickening realization of what had happened finally dawned on Charlie.
He puked as a massive black wave came crashing over him, washing away the light.
CHAPTER 59
Montana
Carrie had just turned off Highway 2 onto the road leading to Hungry Horse Dam when her cell phone rang. As she dug it out of her purse on the passenger seat, she was careful not to drive off the road into the deepening valley on her right.
It was Agent Andrews. Carrie felt an unexpected thrill of excitement. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“I just wanted to call you to let you know we’re following up on the lead you gave us,” he said.
“Have you found anything?”
“Not yet,” he said. “But there’s something else I need to ask you.”
“What?” she asked, excited by the prospect.
“This isn’t something you’re working on for a news story is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s concern from within the bureau that you’re working on this for your paper. I told them you weren’t, but I have to be sure.”
“No,” she said. “You know why I am doing this.” She was disappointed and a little hurt that he had even asked.
“Good,” he said. “That’s what I told them. If anything comes of this, I promise you’ve got first rights to the story, but I have to ask that you not print anything in the paper about any of this until then.”
“Fine.” She knew he was just doing his job, but that
didn’t mean she had to like it.
“Also, I have to ask that you stop investigating on your own. Now that the bureau is looking into this, they want to make certain that no one does anything to tip anyone off.”
Carrie was silent for a moment. She didn’t like where this was going. She began to get an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of her stomach. If she had uncovered something that the government was trying to cover up, it would make sense that the FBI would know about it. She thought she could trust Kyle, but she wasn’t sure about the people he worked for.
“Okay, fine,” she said, even though she had no intention of doing it.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll be sure to keep you informed of our progress.”
She hung up and flung the phone onto the passenger seat.
A few miles ahead, she pulled off the road onto the narrow asphalt lot alongside the visitor center overlooking Hungry Horse Dam. The lot was vacant except for a couple of cars, so she pulled in sideways, afraid the rear end of the Hummer would stick out into the road if she didn’t. She sat in the truck for a moment, gathering herself, but she couldn’t shake the growing sense of dread she felt after Kyle’s phone call. Was the FBI really investigating it, or were they just putting her off while they worked to help cover it up?
The only way she could be certain of the truth was if she found it out for herself.
She flipped down the mirror on the back of the visor and ran her fingers through her hair as she checked her makeup. She hadn’t worn any in so long that it was jarring to her at first, but she had to admit that she did look better with it on.
The main visitor center overlooking the dam, which had been recently renovated, did not open to the public until May. Carrie continued past it to the smaller building housing the dam’s operational offices. Inside the front office, she was greeted by a middle-aged secretary with mousy, gray-brown hair.
“Hi there, how can I help you?” she asked.
Carrie looked for a nameplate on the desk, but there wasn’t one. “Hi,” she said with a pleasant smile. “Is the facility manager in?”
“Yeah,” the secretary replied with a suspicious tone. “Can I ask what this is about?”
Thanks to Charlie, Carrie had picked up her laptop from the motel office yesterday. Last night, she had used it to search for more stories involving Hungry Horse Reservoir and had come across an interesting one that had prompted her trip here today. According to the article, early last year, the US Department of Energy had begun a program designed to conserve the genetic purity of the Westslope cutthroat trout in Hungry Horse Reservoir and upstream of it in the south fork of the Flathead River. What Carrie had found curious about the story was that part of the program included the introduction of fish toxins, piscicides, into the reservoir and streams in order to kill off hybridized species of fish that had been introduced into the area and threatened the native cutthroat population. The piscicides, it said, had been applied through the use of aircraft, boats, and in some cases, packhorses had been used to reach some of the more remote streams and lakes.
The story had grabbed Carrie’s attention for several reasons, the first being that it could have been used as a way of explaining a sudden appearance of large numbers of dead fish in the lake, and secondly, it gave a reason why aircraft might have been seen flying over the lake and up the valley, dumping large clouds of chemicals.
Carrie saw it as a convenient method of covering up the fact that the government had been trying to mitigate the damage caused by whatever had been on the GenTech plane.
“I’m Wanda Hipple with the Kalispell Mountain Herald,” she lied, hoping the name might at least sound familiar enough to work. “I’m working on a story about the cutthroat trout conservation program currently underway, and I was wondering if I might have a few minutes of his time.”
“Do you have an appointment?” the secretary asked, her eyes narrowing.
“No, I—” Carrie stopped as a dumpy man with a big potbelly walked into the room. He was wearing gray polyester pants and a short-sleeved dress shirt with a burgundy tie that barely reached more than halfway down his belly.
“Can I help you?” he asked as he hitched up his pants. He had thinning hair combed over the top of his head and beady little eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses.
“I hope so,” Carrie said, trying to sound demure as she walked over, holding out her hand as she introduced herself again. Apparently, she pulled it off, for the man smiled and shook her hand.
“Bob Kellogg,” he said, his eyes drifting down to her chest. “Why don’t you come on back to my office?” She wasn’t disgusted by him half as much as she was with herself for what she was doing.
Like the secretary’s up front, Bob’s office was also furnished with an old metal desk along with a row of metal filing cabinets against one wall. The wall behind him was covered with large, complex-looking mechanical diagrams that Carrie assumed were representations of the plant’s systems. The computer monitor behind him was covered with a number of readouts in varying colors. Carrie surreptitiously glanced at the display, but she was unable to make out anything useful.
Bob motioned to an old chair with a brown vinyl seat in front of his desk. Carrie took a seat and began to pull her notebook from her satchel. Instead of returning to his chair, Bob remained on the side of the desk with Carrie, casually sitting on the front edge with one foot still on the floor, giving him an even better vantage point from which to look down her sweater.
Carrie could feel her face beginning to flush. It was going about as well as she could have hoped, but now she found herself having second thoughts. She didn’t see any family photographs on his desk, which made her feel a little better, until she noticed the gold wedding band on his pudgy finger.
“Now what can I do for you?” Bob asked cheerfully.
“Well,” Carrie said. “I’m working on a follow-up story about the cutthroat trout mitigation program that was begun last year, and I was wondering if you could give me an update on the status of the program.”
Carrie feigned interest, dutifully taking notes while Bob towed the company line, raving about the success of the program. She even asked a couple of follow-up questions before she got to the real reason she had come. “And what about the water quality after the application of the piscicides?” she asked.
“Well, of course, there was a temporary situation after the application,” Bob said. “But the water was detoxified through the use of potassium permanganate.”
“So you’re saying the water is safe for human consumption?” she asked.
“Oh, certainly,” Bob said. “No concerns whatsoever.”
“I assume the toxicity levels were carefully monitored throughout the process?”
“Of course, constantly,” Bob said. “Your readers can rest assured that there are no reasons to be concerned about the water quality downstream of the dam,” he said with a placating smile.
“That’s good to know,” Carrie said, forcing a smile in return. “I don’t suppose you would happen to have copies of those toxicology reports for say … the last two years or so, would you? It would really alleviate their concerns if we could tell them that we were given copies of those reports to verify the accuracy of the DOE’s claims.” She placed her hand on his knee as if emphasizing the point.
“Well, of course, we do,” he said, glancing down at his knee and then over at the filing cabinets. “But—”
“I would really appreciate it,” Carrie purred as she leaned forward.
Bob leaned forward as well, his eyes inexorably drifting to her chest. He was so close Carrie could smell his sour breath as he spoke. “I don’t see why that would be a problem,” he said. “I just need to make a call first to get approval.” He got up off the desk and began walking back around to his chair. “Funny thing is … the FBI called just this morning asking for the same information and instructing me not to give out any records to the media without going through them first. Still got the nu
mber right here. If you don’t mind waiting, I’ll call ’em right now.”
“I really don’t have time for that,” Carrie said as she stood up. “I’m … up against a deadline.”
“Oh, it won’t take but just a minute,” Bob said, reaching for the phone.
Carrie leaned across the desk and put her hand on top of his, holding the receiver down. “Bob, can’t you just give me the records without calling. I promise I’ll make it worth your while.”
Bob had a confused look on his face as she leaned across his desk. Tiny pinpricks of sweat began to bead on his greasy face. He licked his lips.
“No. I’m afraid I can’t,” he said as he lifted the receiver.
Carrie turned in a huff and quickly stormed from the office before he could make the call.
“If you’ll give me one of your cards, I’ll be happy to bring ’em to you,” Bob called out to her as she left.
Back in the truck, it was all Carrie could do to keep from crying. She took several deep breaths to try to calm down. She felt … dirty … and sick to her stomach. She had made a fool of herself—and all for nothing.
After she mentally berated herself for a few moments longer, she began to slowly regain her composure. As she thought about her setback, she knew what she had to do next.
She started up the truck, threw it in gear, and with a spray of gravel started across the dam toward her grandparents’ cabin and the far end of the reservoir.
CHAPTER 60
Highway 83 heading east through the tiny town of Swan Lake was wet and slushy as the snow of the previous few days slowly melted away. The roads at the southern end of Flathead Valley had gradually worsened as they neared the mountains. Kyle rode along with the sheriff and Lewis as they headed toward the Jewel Basin area in order to follow up on a complaint that had come in overnight. The place belonged to a Mr. John Morris.
Shadow Dragon Page 24