Was that a Honda? Christ, why does every car look alike? Deciding it was a Honda, he ran the plates, but it didn’t come back belonging to Sharon McKinney, one of the two he was looking for.
LEE-ANN REMAINED in the doorway until the cop who’d given her a ticket got on his motorcycle and drove off. Then she bolted for her car, grabbed the ticket, and slid behind the wheel. In seconds she was in pursuit of the cop.
Eddie Rogers saw Lee-Ann pull away from the curb so fast she drifted over the center line. He considered giving chase, but decided he’d rather look for the redhead.
Keeping two or three cars between them, Lee-Ann followed the motorcycle cop for a quarter of a mile, until he stopped to write another ticket. Unable to stop in the middle of the street without drawing attention to herself, she went past him and turned right at the corner. Pacing herself so he’d have time to finish the ticket, she went around the block, reappearing on Magazine just as he climbed back on his cycle and resumed cruising.
Even in her desperation, she knew she couldn’t just run him down. But what could she do? She uttered a little prayer promising God if he’d just get her out of this, she’d never kill again. The plea was barely past her lips when the cop went into the parking lot of a McDonalds, got off his cycle, and put something in the saddlebag before going inside.
Lee-Ann parked beside the cycle and got out of her car. Crouching so she couldn’t be seen from inside, she made her way to the motorcycle saddlebag and opened it. Reaching inside, she grabbed two ticket books and duckwalked back to her car.
From the McDonalds, she drove to a Rite Aid drugstore, pulled into the lot, and looked at what she’d taken. One ticket book was unused. The other contained the carbons of a dozen tickets. Number eleven was hers.
Up to that moment, she’d had her doubts about the existence of God, but now, seeing how he’d assisted her tonight, she decided she might have to give the matter a little more thought.
EDDIE ROGERS HAD checked Magazine Street for three blocks on either side of Tropical Joe without spotting either of the women he was looking for, or the redhead’s car. Going around again, he turned right onto the side street where Sharon had followed Lee-Ann. At the alley he stopped and raked the shadows with his spotlight. Just before the beam would have picked up Sharon’s body, he got a call young cops yearn for and veterans dread. “Shots fired. Officer needs assistance.” He waited for the address, then flicked on his lights and siren and sped off.
IT WASN’T ENOUGH that a patrol car was on its way to Tropical Joe. Sarchi needed to do something herself. Worried that a call to Sharon’s cell phone might give Sharon away to the person she was following, Sarchi was afraid to make that call. Instead, she called Sharon’s pager, which was almost certainly set on vibrate.
To keep her mind occupied while waiting to hear something, Sarchi turned to her computer and played a dozen games of video solitaire, missing some obvious moves in every game. When it was long past the time Sharon usually responded to a page, Sarchi made the cell phone call to Sharon that earlier had seemed so inadvisable.
No answer.
The cops in New Orleans should know something by now. She hadn’t written the number down earlier, so she had to use information again.
The woman who answered didn’t know anything about her previous call. “Isn’t there someone you can ask?” Sarchi said. “I talked to a man before.”
Getting nowhere, she hung up. John—maybe he could help.
She called him in McKenzie, and this time he answered.
“Sarchi . . . I was just about to call you.”
Relieved to hear his voice, she poured out her story to him.
“Let me make some inquiries,” he said. “I’ll get back to you in a few minutes.”
Seven minutes later he did. “The uniform they sent over there didn’t find anything.”
“Not even her car?”
“That’s what they said.”
“Then where is she?”
“How long has it been since she left the coffee shop?”
“About an hour.”
“That’s not much time. I’m not saying you’re wrong to be concerned, but it’s too soon to conclude she’s in trouble.”
“She’s not answering her cell phone or her pager.”
“Let’s just have good thoughts about this.”
Sarchi wished she was in New Orleans so she could look for Sharon herself. New Orleans . . . West Bank Medical Center, one o’clock. “John, I have to go to New Orleans. Will you come with me?”
“To look for your friend?”
“And for something else.” She told him about the bald man with the insulated container.
“How were you planning on getting there?”
“By plane, if there’s a flight tonight. Car if I have to.”
“Certainly I’ll go with you, but it’s going to take me two hours to get back to Memphis. Even if we could get a commercial flight tonight, which isn’t likely, the earliest we could get there would be around two a.m. That’s six hours. If we drive, including my trip back to Memphis, it’ll be ten hours. Those aren’t time frames in which you could do much for Sharon if she is in trouble. Assuming she needs help, it’d be better to alert someone there who cares for her, like a boyfriend.”
Of course, why hadn’t that occurred to her, Sarchi thought. “Steve Oakley—they’ve been going together off and on for two years.”
“Do you have his number?”
“I can probably get it. What about the guy we’re supposed to follow tomorrow? To get there in time, we need to make some travel plans fast.”
“I’ve got an idea about that. You call Oakley, and I’ll see what I can arrange.”
A few minutes later, Sarchi eagerly waited for the only Stephen Oakley in the New Orleans listings to pick up. Please be him and please be home.
Someone answered. “Steve, this is Sarchi Seminoux, Sharon’s friend in Memphis. Is she there with you?”
“No. I took her to a place called Tropical Joe tonight. Far as I know, she’s still there.”
She told him what had happened.
“Dammit,” he said. “I shouldn’t have left her.”
Feeling that the fault was hers if anything had happened, Sarchi said, “Sharon has a strong will. If she told you to leave, she wouldn’t have let you stay.”
“I’m going over there and see what I can find out.”
“You’ll call me and let me know?”
“Absolutely.”
Shortly after she’d talked to Oakley, John called back. “I’ve arranged for a friend to fly us to New Orleans tomorrow morning on his private plane. I’ll pick you up at seven thirty.”
32
“DID YOU SLEEP at all last night?” Linda asked, putting her coffee down. “I heard you rattling around at midnight and again at two a.m.”
“I’m worried about a friend,” Sarchi said.
“So am I. Everybody at the hospital misses you.”
“That’s nice.”
“Kid, I’d love to chat, but I have to leave. I’ve got the admitting rotation, so I won’t be home tonight. Maybe we could have dinner tomorrow night.”
“You’ll be too tired.”
“I’m not suggesting we stay up all night, but if you don’t want to . . .”
“We’ll see.”
A few minutes after Linda left for the hospital, John arrived.
“Heard anything about your friend?” he asked as she got in the truck.
“She’s simply disappeared.”
“Did you get in touch with her boyfriend?”
“He couldn’t find her. I called her again this morning and still couldn’t reach her.”
“That’s not good.”
“He tried to get th
e cops to help, but they won’t even list her as missing until tonight.”
“When we get there, maybe I can convince them to bend the rules a little.”
“I never should have involved her in this.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over it. You took precautions. Things just went wrong.”
As he backed the truck out of the drive and headed for the airport, his words brought Sarchi no comfort.
“When I got home this morning I had a message from my PI friend in Brooklyn,” John said. “He found something interesting about the kids on that list we sent him. Even the ones who didn’t live in New York were born there. And in every case, the parents let the New York Cord Blood Repository have their umbilical cords.”
“I know about that place,” Sarchi said. “Umbilical cords contain stem cells, the mother cells that form all the different cells in blood. If a kid gets leukemia and needs to have his bone marrow replaced, they can give him back his own stem cells to repopulate the marrow. Or sometimes if there’s a tissue match, they can give a different kid those stem cells. This is important.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know yet, but I have the feeling that when I figure it out, it’s all over for Latham.”
It soon became apparent that they were not headed for Memphis International.
“Where are we going?”
“Olive Branch, Mississippi. My friend keeps his plane at the small airport there.”
At eight ten they pulled into a parking place adjacent to the Olive Branch airport, a minimal operation consisting of a few metal buildings and a smattering of small planes tied to the pavement. When they got out of the truck, the only sounds were from the distant hiss of an air-operated tool and a flock of chattering birds picking at half a doughnut. They were met at the front door of the nearest building by their pilot, Danny LaPlante, a guy with a ruddy face and teeth that looked like the rubble in a jackhammered sidewalk. When John had said private plane, Sarchi had not imagined he was talking about a craft as flimsy looking as the purple and white Cessna that LaPlante led them to. Seeing the look of apprehension on her face, LaPlante said, “First time in a single engine plane?”
She nodded.
“Don’t worry. You were at greater risk of bein’ hurt in the truck comin’ over than you will be on this flight.”
“But one engine . . . There’s no safety margin.”
“If anything is gonna happen to the engine, which it ain’t, it’d be in the ignition system, and we have two of ’em. Every cylinder has two spark plugs, and we need only one. But say we lose power, like in some weird world I don’t live in. For every mile of altitude we’re flyin’ we can cover twelve miles of ground lookin’ for a place to land. And we don’t need much. Any farmer’s field, or maybe a mall parkin’ lot. Last year at the Oshkosh air show I saw this guy cut his engine, do a loop, an eight point roll, a hundred and eighty degree turn, land, and roll up to his parkin’ place, all with no power.” He hooked his thumbs in his belt and adopted an exaggerated sneer. In a Mexican accent he said, “So we don’t need no stinkin’ engine.”
“No parachutes then?” Sarchi said.
“I wouldn’t even know how to put one on.”
Though the weather had been on a binge of benevolence and there were only a few scattered herringbone clouds in the sky, she had to ask, “Are you instrument rated?”
LaPlante looked at John. “Why’s she so worried? You tell her about the time we took out a barn and a silo in a fog?”
Then he looked back at Sarchi. “Just kiddin’. Yeah, I’m rated. It’s too inconvenient not to be. For the first five years, when I wasn’t, I can’t tell you how many times I flew somewhere and had to leave the plane there for a few days until the weather cleared so I could fly it back. For those five years, my wife thought private aviation meant flyin’ somewhere and takin’ a bus home. We ready to go?”
“Guess I’m satisfied.”
Sarchi climbed into the backseat of the Cessna, leaving the copilot’s seat for John. LaPlante got in and put on a set of headphones. He fiddled with the controls for a few minutes, then yelled “clear” out the open window even though no one was around. The engine coughed once and came to life. Heartened by its prompt response, Sarchi felt better about the whole trip.
They taxied down a paved strip parallel to the runway. Where the taxiway connected with the runway they turned and paused while LaPlante gunned the engine. Abruptly, he cut the throttle back and shook his head.
“What’s wrong?” John shouted over the sound of the engine.
“Don’t like the way the instruments are operatin’. We might have a vacuum pump problem.”
He got the plane in motion again, turned it around, and taxied back to the maintenance hangar, where he shut off the engine and looked at Sarchi. “This is going to take at least an hour. You two might as well wait in the office.” He gestured toward one of the buildings. “They got snacks in there and coffee. I’ll come and get you when we’re airworthy.”
On the way to the office, John said, “Sorry about this.”
“Once we get in the air, how long will the trip take?”
“About three hours. How far is the hospital from the airport?”
“I’ve driven it in forty minutes.”
“If Danny is right about the repair taking an hour, we’re going to be cutting it close.”
Sarchi spent the next sixty minutes nursing a Coke and trying to find something to take her mind off Sharon and the possibility that they weren’t going to reach Westbank Medical in time. Unable to find even the sports section of a newspaper or any portion of a magazine, she passed some of the time in front of a big bulletin board looking at sixty Polaroid photos of people who’d ceremoniously had the tail of their shirt cut off after completing their first solo flight.
Finally, LaPlante came for them. “We’re fixed.”
Hoping they weren’t going to find out in the air that he was wrong about that, Sarchi walked quickly with the others back to the plane.
When they were all seated, John said to LaPlante, “Our one o’clock appointment is at a hospital forty minutes by car from the airport.”
LaPlante looked at his watch. “It’s gonna be tight. When we get close, we’ll call ahead and have somebody standin’ by to take you over to the car rental.”
This time there were no problems, and they were soon heading down the runway at full throttle, the engine sounding strong and reliable. Then they were off the ground.
For the next minute, it felt as though they were suspended in air, the engine and gravity at an impasse, the plane neither progressing nor falling. Sarchi was worried that if the engine failed now, there’d be no time for LaPlante to make any kind of corrective maneuver. They’d just plummet to the ground. But the engine kept stroking, and slowly it carried them upward.
Although they were still so low that Sarchi could see the tails flicking on a herd of cows, LaPlante leveled the plane. For the next few minutes it was like riding in an elevator simulator as the Cessna was buffeted by air currents. But then LaPlante put it into another climb, eventually reaching an altitude where Sarchi no longer felt as though she might throw up.
FIVE-YEAR-OLD Karen Owens was wheeled back into operating room three at Westbank Medical Center, where the anesthesiologist quickly reconnected her to his equipment. The reassuring repetitive beep of the pulse oximeter registered every beat of the child’s heart, and its pitch indicated that she was well oxygenated. Preparations for invasion of her brain were moving into the final stages. Behind the anesthesiologist, George Latham fed the RAS coordinates he’d obtained from the MRI scan they’d just done into the OR’s briefcase computer.
In two minutes he had the data he needed. He hung the printed calculations on the wall next to the X-ray viewer and went to the patient�
��s head, which was surrounded by the stereotaxic frame, a titanium ring screwed to her skull in four places. Attached to the ring so it enclosed the child’s head was the titanium cage they’d used to obtain the RAS coordinates.
“Okay Lee-Ann, let’s move her up so we can get her position fixed.”
They moved the patient so her head lay at the table’s edge. While Latham held the cage steady, Lee-Ann crawled under the table and secured the ring to it. With Lee-Ann’s help, he removed the orientation cage and replaced it with the arc, the attachment that would guide the biopsy probe. Latham then shaved the child’s head in two places, each the size of a silver dollar.
Lee-Ann donned a fresh pair of sterile gloves and spent the next five minutes scrubbing the two areas of scalp with Betadine soap, working it into a lather. Looking at the rusty froth she’d created, her mind went back to the redhead she’d killed the previous night. If only she’d been able to think of another answer. But things had moved so fast. It wasn’t as if she’d had time to consider all the possibilities.
What exactly the redhead was doing at Tropical Joe and how she’d spotted Lee-Ann weren’t clear. In any event, time should be running out for the old whoremonger Doctor Latham, unless Seminoux doesn’t get here in time. She should have given the woman more warning. She glanced at Latham being helped into his surgical gown by the scrub tech. He really was such a bastard.
Finished with the soap, Lee-Ann wiped the two areas with a sterile towel and painted them with Betadine prep.
“Ready for me?” Latham said from behind her.
Lee-Ann moved aside, and Latham replaced her. In less than two minutes, he had sterile blue toweling sewn to the child’s scalp all around the perimeter of the shaved areas. He next applied Ioban film to each site, sticking it firmly to the exposed scalp.
The field was then isolated with sterile blue drapes until the only portions of the patient visible were the two naked circles in her hair. Latham lined up the probe in the right circle using the coordinates he’d obtained from the computer. He then moved the probe to the side and held out his hand.
The Killing Harvest Page 26