Critical Judgment (1996)

by Michael Palmer

  "Dotty, did Gus have any headaches?"

  "Oh, yes, they were very bad. One day while he was working in the garden, he actually had to lie down right back there on--"

  It had been the right idea, just the wrong performer. Abby could feel any hope of presenting Black with this tape slipping away. Once again she flicked off the recorder. A frontal assault was going to be the only way.

  "Dotty, I don't have a lot of time, so I'm going to try to keep the questions and answers short."

  "Would you like some more Strudel? I use that low-cholesterol, low-salt butter."

  "It's wonderful, but no, thank you." She clicked on the tape once again. "Dotty, did anything unusual happen along with Gus's headaches?"

  The woman stopped wrapping Strudel for Abby to take home, actually stopped talking, and thought in silence for a surprisingly long time.

  "By 'unusual,' " she said at last, "do you mean like the flashing lights he complained of before the headaches actually started?"

  Shielded by the table, Abby clenched her fist and pumped it excitedly. Nice going, Kelly, she was thinking.

  "Yes, Dotty," she said. "That's exactly what I mean. Tell me about the flashing lights...."

  As Lew had predicted, Abby made the spectacular drive down to Feather Falls in just over two hours. She had wanted to take him along for company, moral support, and to present a unified front to Ezra Black, but he was on duty in the ER. He would be working an extended shift--from eight A.M. until almost midnight--because Jill Anderson and her husband had a wedding to attend.

  Abby cruised down the neatly kept main street and was out of town in just a few blocks. The narrow road curved upward through rolling range, high above Lake Oroville. Then, past a small painted sign that said simply Feather Ridge, it entered a rich, perfectly planted orchard--oranges, pecans, avocados, and even several cork trees. About two hundred feet farther was the guardhouse, and beside it, an ornately wrought ten- or twelve-foot-high gate that spanned the roadway. The letters "EB" were scrolled on both sides in bronze. Extending out from either side of the gate as far as Abby could see was a seven-foot-high iron-rail fence topped with several tightly strung strands of thin wire that she guessed were electrified. And beyond the gate, beyond the orchard, there was only grassland and a gently rising tree-lined road.

  So this is where the other zero point zero, zero, zero, one percent lives, she thought. Not bad. Not bad.

  "Dr. Dolan, we've been expecting you," the gateman said. "Would you mind opening your trunk and stepping out of your car?"

  Maybe not so great after all, she decided as the gateman and another identically uniformed guard checked her with a metal detector and carefully searched the Mazda inside and out, including beneath the hood. To amass wealth of this magnitude, there must be countless casualties--and enemies. One of the guards examined the tape recorder and passed it over to her.

  "Would you play this for me, please?"

  Abby did as she was asked. The guard apologized to her for the inconvenience, made a call from a cellular phone, and opened the gate electronically.

  "You'll be met at the house, Doctor. Have a good day."

  Abby drove slowly through the gate and up the road, feeling slightly like Dorothy approaching Emerald City. The road continued upward for almost half a mile, then crested above a broad, verdant valley. On the far side of the valley, sprawling across the side of a small mountain, was a magnificent rustic estate--rough-hewn logs, massive windows, decks and balconies, and seven chimneys. Abby paused for a time to take in the entire panorama. The view to the north encompassed the lake. To the south was the heavily forested area she assumed was the game preserve, and behind her was a vista that might have extended to Japan. It was daunting to think of the movers, shakers, and world leaders who had driven in over this road or flown in by chopper.

  Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

  Abby rolled down into the valley past a dozen grazing horses, and up to the house on Feather Ridge. A security man opened the door for her and asked her to leave the key. Apparently, Ezra Black disliked automobiles cluttering his front drive. She mounted the broad stairs to the veranda, thinking about the modest home of Gus and Dotty Schumacher. How strange that suddenly their lives and Ezra Black's were so intimately entwined. But she knew, even without the full story on Ethan Black, that they were. The problem was going to be convincing Ezra Black.

  She was shown to his study by a cadaverous servant wearing a white dress shirt and black vest, but no coat. He was the first man she had met on the property who she decided was not wearing a gun.

  "Welcome to Feather Ridge," he said. "Mr. Black will be down presently."

  He offered her a drink, and she opted for a Diet Pepsi--something to hang on to. The room was about as she would have expected--huge rough-hewn beams, animal heads on the walls, plush oriental carpets on the floors, perfectly worn leather furniture. Black's desk--mahogany, Abby guessed--could have been marked off in yards. Unimaginable wealth. Yet none of it had been enough to keep Ethan from diving out a twenty-third-story window.

  There were several framed pictures on the desk. Not feeling comfortable walking around to view them, she turned the nearest frame around and then picked it up. It was an eight-by-ten black-and-white of Ezra Black arm in arm with Senator Mark Corman. Several seconds passed before Abby recognized the backdrop, purposely blurred to get sharp detail of the two subjects. They were standing in front of the main entrance to Colstar.

  She replaced the photo and picked up another. This one, in color, was of Black and a man who she felt certain was Ethan. He was a bit taller and huskier than his father, but there was no missing the likeness. They were wearing waist-high waders and standing knee-deep in a mountain stream, each proudly displaying a large trout. Ethan looked about eighteen. Suddenly Ezra Black's loss was real to her--more than just a link in a chain of events.

  "Sorry to keep you waiting, Dr. Dolan."

  Abby whirled, immediately self-conscious that she was still holding the photo. Ezra Black stepped forward and extended his hand. Abby shook it, then somewhat sheepishly set the frame back where she had found it.

  "Thank you for seeing me," she managed.

  Black motioned her to one of a pair of hand-tooled beige leather couches and settled himself on the other. He was bigger than life in print and on television, but in person he was rather ordinary in stature. In fact, he was actually slight, without an ounce of excess fat. His pale-blue shirt perfectly matched his piercing eyes. She could almost see the energy crackling off him.

  Abby had long ago learned the distasteful feeling of having a man undress her with his eyes. Ezra Black's steady gaze was something else entirely. She was not being disrobed, she was being scanned. X-ray vision to her soul. The sensation was not disturbing, not even intimidating. It was, in fact, impressive. She bet herself that he was seldom very far off the mark in his assessment of people.

  "I assume you deduced that photograph is of my son and me," he said.

  "I felt very sad seeing the two of you together and obviously enjoying one another so much. You have my sympathy for what happened."

  His expression, the slight raise of an eyebrow, suggested that he was surprised by her empathy.

  "Ethan and I had our differences," he said. "What father and son don't? He was never ambitious enough for me; I suppose I was never understanding enough for him. But on the whole, we were reasonably close. Do you know much about him or about the way he died?"

  "No, sir. Only what I read in the papers."

  Abby was careful not to bend the truth in any way. She was struck by the fact that Black had asked her nothing about herself, her background, or how she came to be practicing at Patience Regional Hospital. Then it occurred to her that within minutes of hanging up after their phone conversation last night, he probably knew a great deal. Unfortunately, that would mean he had probably gotten the Joe Henderson or Lyle Quinn version.

  "If all you know is what you
've read in the papers, why would you conclude my son was toxic from cadmium?"

  No wasted time. No small talk. Ezra Black's way was strictly put up or shut up. She opened her briefcase and passed over what documents she had accumulated as she discussed each one.

  "This is a list of over one hundred fifty cases treated at Patience Regional Hospital over the last two years, none of which has had a positive test leading to a specific diagnosis. All of their symptoms are consistent with the many faces of cadmium toxicity."

  Black glanced at the list for no more than a few seconds and set it aside.

  "It says that a number of these people have had negative tests for cadmium. Have any of them had a positive blood test?"

  "No, sir, but--"

  "What else do you have?"

  Abby felt the already chilly atmosphere grow colder.

  "I have five other people who are not on that printout," she said, passing over a chart she had made. "As you can see, all of them worked at one time or another for Colstar. One of them is your son. Two of the five have died violently. One of the others, Angela, is a self-mutilator. Josh Wyler is off on some crazy mission of vengeance right now. Willie Cardoza is the one who ran down Peggy Wheaton." Abby sensed she was speaking too rapidly, but she feared that if she slowed down, Black would cut her off for good. "As you can see, four of the five, not counting Ethan, whom I don't know about, had severe, distinctive headaches. This cassette is of an interview I did this morning with Dotty Schumacher, the widow of the third person on the list. I thought maybe something she said would resonate with what you know of your son's case."

  Black popped the cassette into the player and listened stonily for ten minutes. It was impossible to read what he was thinking. He clicked off the machine and gestured to the chart once again.

  "If I understand this correctly, the one positive-cadmium blood test you have here was on the man who murdered Gary's wife?"

  "Yes. The test was run by a toxicologist at my old hospital in San Francisco. We have blood going out on Angela Cristoforo now."

  "What about all these negative tests?"

  Black was like a guided missile. Abby knew this was not the time to accuse his company of purposely switching samples or falsifying data. But since that probably was, in fact, the truth, there was no decent alternative explanation. She hoped her response didn't sound as feeble to him as it did to her.

  "The cases on that printout, with a few exceptions, did not have symptoms as severe as the five people on that chart. They might have tested negative because their exposure to the metal wasn't that great."

  "And this box, Eye Findings, that you've checked positive on Cardoza and Cristoforo?"

  "A yellow glow around the iris of their eyes when looked at with an ultraviolet light."

  "And you think this ... this glow is from cadmium?"

  "I do."

  "You have scientific proof of that?"

  Abby hesitated just a second, then shook her head.

  "No. No, I don't."

  She could sense that she had still not piqued his interest, and now she had played every card in her hand. There was half a minute of silence while the billionaire processed what she had presented. His face was still an undecipherable mask.

  "Do you belong to the Alliance?" he asked suddenly.

  Abby felt her hopes sink. Ezra Black had read the evidence, but he remained unconvinced. Now she was going to have to defend her motives in bringing it to him.

  "I've been to one meeting. I confess that I felt sympathetic toward their issues. But I haven't considered myself a member, and I had no intention of actively supporting their cause until certain people started trying to frighten me into leaving Patience."

  "Frighten you?"

  "Someone tried to run me off the road while I was taking Willie Cardoza's blood to St. John's in San Francisco. Then, yesterday, that same someone, I suspect, shot at me in front of my house. The police think they were trying to miss. I'm not so sure."

  "So instead of frightening you into leaving town, they've driven you to stay and fight."

  "I think people are in great danger from this chemical. At first I didn't feel it was my fight. Now I do."

  For the first time since meeting Ezra Black, Abby had no trouble reading his expression--utter disdain.

  "Dr. Dolan," he said, "as far as I can see, you couldn't be further off base. Those misguided zealots in the Alliance have taken advantage of you. They've been tilting at the Colstar windmill for almost three years, and they have nothing to show for it. They knew you were looking for some explanation for your boyfriend's insane behavior and some way to justify your decision to treat that animal, Cardoza. So they fed you just enough lies to help you put two and two together and come up with five!"

  "That's not so."

  "Trust me, Doctor. It is. There is no cadmium exposure. Never was, and from my plant, never will be. My son Ethan was always weak. From the time he was a child he had a great deal of difficulty in developing self-esteem. The two years he spent at Colstar were the longest time he had ever held a job. But, in general, he was managing fairly well. Then one night he skidded off the road going home from work in a storm. He was driving a stupid little sports car with no protection. That was his problem--that and the damn high-society psychiatrist I was foolish enough to trust. Ethan sustained head injuries, including a laceration and a severe concussion. He couldn't even remember the accident. That's when his personality began to change and he began to go downhill. Ethan's problems dated from that accident. Not from any goddamn cadmium exposure."

  "But--"

  "My son was a numbers cruncher, for crying out loud! An accountant. How in the hell would he have gotten poisoned from an industrial exposure? Well? Answer me. How could he?"

  "I don't know."

  "That's because he never did. You put words in this Schumacher woman's mouth, and you know it. She hears you, and suddenly she's thinking about how much she can extort from Colstar." He stood and handed the tape recorder back to her. "Dr. Dolan, my company is in a very delicate position right now in a number of areas. I warn you not to cause any more trouble for us. My man will show you out."

  He turned and started out of the room.

  "Mr. Black, you're wrong," she said firmly. "And I think you know it. There was a sustained cadmium exposure--a big one, I'd guess from Cardoza's blood levels. And somehow the people on those lists were hit, including your son. Go speak to Mrs. Schumacher yourself if you think you're such a good judge of who's misguided and who's not."

  "Good day, Doctor," Black said without looking at her.

  "Okay, have it your way. One more question, then I'm gone. Did Ethan have an MRI?"

  Black turned around and eyed her evenly--another penetrating scan.

  "That test was done the night of his injury," he said finally. "It showed nothing, just like all the other tests. Do you have some reason for asking me that question?"

  Abby stared down at the floor, then back up at the man.

  "When I do, sir," she said, "you'll be the first to know."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Although Abby had been in the Feather Ridge mansion for less than an hour, by the time she left, the bright, crisp day had turned overcast and humid. She was somewhere between the house and the main gate when the first of a series of squalls hit. The drive back from Feather Ridge, hampered by the wind-driven rain and impassable truck traffic, took a seemingly endless three hours. When hunger got the better of her, she stopped at a roadside diner for an omelette and home fries.

  The visit with Ezra Black had hardly gone as Abby had anticipated. But why? Black had been interested enough in what she had to say to invite her out to his home. Yet he refused even to admit to the possibility that Colstar was responsible for a cadmium leak. She had actually planned to suggest exhuming Ethan's body as confirmation of her theories. Fat chance. If digging up the man's son was somewhere between third base and home, she was still in the dugout waiting her turn at ba
t.

  She pulled out of the diner lot just as a huge semi roared past ahead of her. The narrow highway looked as if it was going to be solid yellow line for miles, so she slowed down until she was out of exhaust range and cruised. For a time she lost herself in Nanci Griffith's latest album. But there was just too much going on in her head to stay distracted for too long. Time was running out for Josh and anyone else who had been exposed. And with that folder sitting inside Joe Henderson's desk, time was running out for her, too.

  The only explanation that kept making sense for Black's rude behavior was that he knew something about what had happened at Colstar. He knew there had been a cadmium spill of some sort. Perhaps he was aware of, or even responsible for, the subsequent cover-up. But until her call he had no idea his accountant son had been a victim. Even now he wasn't sure. So he had invited Abby to Feather Ridge to size her up as opposition, and to hear what she had to say.

  It had been ridiculously naive of her to believe that he would simply embrace all her facts and theories on the spot. The man had not become a billionaire by taking anyone's word on blind faith. He had listened to her, and now he was checking out her story.

  "What did you expect him to do?" she asked out loud.

  But even if Black had no idea that Ethan's death was connected to his employment at Colstar, something she had said over the phone had registered. For the final thirty miles of the drive back to Patience, she played that telephone conversation over and over in her head. She hadn't said much, really--only that a large number of still-undiagnosed cases had passed through the Patience Regional Hospital ER with symptoms consistent with cadmium toxicity, and a group of at least five Colstar employees had exhibited bizarre, often violent, behavior that she believed was caused by massive exposure to the metal.

  Violent behavior. Was that it? Was that the hook that had gotten Ezra Black's attention? As she rolled down the final hillside into Patience, Abby mulled over the possibility. Although Ethan's suicide was tragic, it was explainable by his depression. According to Ezra, the depression was believed to be a product of his son's head injury and profound, preexisting low self-esteem. But supposing there had been more going on. Supposing Ethan had behaved with the same illogical, unbridled violence as Josh, Willie, and Gus Schumacher. There would be no reason for Ezra to share that information with her--especially if he had gone out of his way to cover it up. But if he knew that Ethan's violent behavior was no longer a secret, there was at least a chance he would allow his company to accept responsibility for what it had done ... or was still doing.