by Edward Lee
“Of course it is, it has to be.” But now Rick seemed reluctant to continue voicing whatever was on his mind. He walked a few more yards away from the building.
“Where are you going?” Joyce demanded.
“I’m looking for clues,” he snapped back. “That’s what we’re supposed to be doing, isn’t it? And what is it we’re trying to find? Tiretracks? Footprints?”
“Yeah, shovel-head. And what were you about to say?”
“Forget it. You’d just give me a ton of shit for saying it.”
She trotted after him, into the outskirts of the woods now. “What!”
“Hey, look at this, Joyce…”
“Don’t change the subject. I hate it when you do that!”
Rick had turned around, was holding up a 5-gallon plastic bucket. “Another one of these. It was right over here behind this log, and it’s full of that granular stuff.”
She didn’t know what he was talking about. She looked in the bucket and saw the material, ran a finger through it. “It feels like some kind of detergent or cleaning material.”
“Yeah, but what’s it doing here? It’s exactly like that bucket we found the other night.”
“When?” Joyce asked.
“You know, the other night. When we were making love.”
“Rick, that’s every night of the week,” she reminded him. “You think you could be a little more specific?”
“The night when we were in the truck, out on the old logging road. The night the cockroach crawled into your boot.”
An instant expression of disgust flashed with the recollection. “Oh, that’s right. You did mention something about a bucket, when you were looking for my boot.”
“Right, and you told me to forget about it. But now I’m kind of curious. Come on,” and he began to stalk off. “That road is only a couple of hundred yards away if we cut through here.”
“But I don’t want to go back there!” she exclaimed. “There might be more cockroaches!”
“It’s broad daylight,” he scoffed over his shoulder. “Cockroaches are nocturnal—and I want to see if that bucket is still there. You can stay here if you want, I’ll only be a few minutes.”
“Shit!” she muttered, then trotted after him. “Why don’t we just take the bucket you just found and turn it in to Dellin?”
“No,” Rick said, much more adamantly. “I’m not really thinking too highly of Dellin right now.”
Joyce had to keep trotting to keep up. “And what does that mean?”
“I’m not gonna even go there, ’cos you’ll get all pissed off like you always do.”
“I’m already pissed off! So start talking…and stop walking so fast!”
“Ah, here’s the logging road. Watch out for sinkholes.”
He stepped over some brambles, then helped her over. The ground was very wet—poor drainage. They could still see the vaguest tiretracks from where they’d parked here a few nights ago.
Rick’s boots clicked through the muddy ground when he loped across the road. “I knew it. That first bucket was right over here—and now it’s gone.”
But Joyce stood still, fuming. “Rick, stop jerking me around. What were you going to say?”
“Honey, look. The bucket’s not here any—”
”I don’t care about the goddamn bucket! What were you going to say?”
Now he stooped over, examining the ground. “You won’t like it, same reason Clare wouldn’t—’cos you’re both girls.”
“You should’ve noticed by now that I’m not a girl. I’m a woman. So what kind of sexist-moron crap are you about to lay on me?”
“I guess Clare knows what she’s doing as the security chief, but she’s just not seeing every angle,” he began, still stooped over looking at something. “She’s got the hots for Dellin so bad it’s clouding her professional judgment. And you think he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread too.”
Her irritation was flirting with anger now. “Brainchild, I don’t have the hots for Dellin. If I did I wouldn’t be in bed with your dumbass every night, would I?”
“I don’t mean that you have the hots for him, but it’s this thing with you chicks. Dellin’s the handsome egghead. Every time the guy walks into the room, you and Clare both act like it’s fuckin’ Mickey Rourke who just walked in. Neither of you are seeing past your noses because this chick thing you’ve got going on.”
“If you say chick thing one more time, I’ll twist your nuts off.”
“Get serious, Joyce. You and Clare both think Dellin’s oh-so-cool that he couldn’t possibly have anything to do with this. Am I right?”
“I think you’ve got your head up your ass but that’s beside the point. And do I think that Dellin staged a break-in to his own clinic? No. That’s ludicrous.”
Rick shrugged. “See? You just proved my point. Personally I’ve got nothing against Dellin, and until today I thought he was a perfectly cool guy. But after all the shit that’s gone down? He stinks worse than Harry and Adam combined.”
She opened her mouth to complain further, then just said, “It’s too hot and muggy to even bother listening to an explanation.”
“Think what you want,” he said, still stooped over. “All I know is this: some inside jobs, the guy who calls the cops first is usually the guy behind it. If I was going to rip Interthiolate out of the clinic—as an employee of the clinic—I’d report it to security as fast as I could. Because the gesture makes me look more innocent than anyone else. And who called security on this?”
“Dellin. But we don’t even know that any Interthiolate was stolen. There’s no evidence that anything was stolen.”
“Um-hmm, and we won’t know until we get into B-Wing. And who won’t let us into B-Wing? Dellin. Don’t tell me you believed that jive about it being too hot. Jesus Christ, I did boot camp in Nellis, Nevada—in August. They were PT-ing our asses four hours a day in 120 degrees. We didn’t fuckin’ die. Nobody dies from heat stroke in ten minutes—except ninety-year-old geezers. I could’ve crawled over to B-Wing under the floor in a couple minutes, and Dellin knew that. That’s why he wouldn’t let me go.”
Joyce was about to fire off another lambasting…until she began to consider his words.
Maybe he’s right.
“What are you looking at?” she asked, her annoyance dispersing.
He glanced over. “You said we’re supposed to search the site for footprints. Well, here’s a whole line of fresh ones. And it looks like they lead right to the lake.”
When she edged over, she saw that he was right, and suddenly her firecracker personality lost all of its kick.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re the security guards here, let’s do our job.”
“Why don’t we just report it to Clare—”
Now he was having some fun. “Oh, big tough Joycie scared of the woods? Hmm?” Then he made chicken sounds.
She couldn’t help but smile. “There could be poachers or something, more than a match for big tough Wicky-Poo.”
Rick tapped his gunbelt with snide confidence. “Hey, be a man large or small in size, Colonel Colt will equalize.”
“Poachers have guns too, shovel-head.”
Rick shrugged. “Then we’ll run away. Come on!”
She followed him, however reluctantly. Then he put his arm around her, for further assurance. I guess I really am a chicken, she admitted.
“Nothing’s gonna happen,” he told her. “It’s broad daylight.”
The line of footprints they followed were poorly formed; there was too much water on the ground for them to keep their outlines in any detail. At several points, when the ground got drier, the prints almost disappeared entirely, but Rick managed to keep the trail pieced together. In another twenty minutes, they’d arrived at the placid edge of Lake Stephanie.
“Can you believe it?” Rick said. “The footprints go right up to the lake, stop, and then branch off.”
Joyce squinted down. “And there’s
more of that stuff…”
Some of the strange soapy granules hadn’t washed away.
“So it’s true,” Rick said. “Somebody dumped that stuff right in to the lake.”
“Somebody from the clinic.”
“Yeah.”
“So, what? We don’t tell Dellin we found the bucket and the tracks?”
“No friggin’ way we tell Dellin.” Now Rick was scanning the rest of the shoreline. “We tell Clare. Why don’t you go do that right now? I want to see where the rest of those footprints lead.”
Joyce’s lower lip quivered. She grabbed his arm. “I’m too scared to walk around in the woods by myself.”
“These footprints branch off along the marsh. Marshes often have snakes. Snakes don’t bother me, but—”
“I don’t want to get anywhere near snakes!” she almost shrieked.
Rick gave her a hug. “I know. So that’s why you should go back to the clinic and tell Clare about the buckets. I’ll follow these tracks along the marsh. I’ll meet you back at the clinic in an hour.”
“Okay,” she peeped. “You’re my big brave stud, aren’t you?”
“That’s a fact.”
She kissed him and let him go off. Maybe I really do love that lame-brain, she realized. Then she turned around, heading back to the clinic.
Crunching through the brambles, she had to keep reminding herself, though. Nothing’s going to happen, Rick had assured her just a short while ago. It’s broad daylight…
“Yeah,” she murmured to herself. “Just—please! No snakes. And no giant cockroaches.”
Broad daylight or not, however, Joyce didn’t get very far. She didn’t even have time to scream before the clammy, two-fingered hand grabbed her by the throat from behind.
And dragged her down.
— | — | —
Chapter Fourteen
(I)
“I’m sorry, miss, but he hasn’t been in today,” a cheerful older woman told Clare at the front desk of the Fort Alachua Park Information Center. But the woman paused, glanced at her watch. “And that’s actually…kind of strange, because we’ll be closing in an hour.”
“What you mean is that Adam Corey usually comes in on Sundays?” Clare asked.
“Oh, yes. Even if it’s only to check his messages, he’ll stop in at least once.”
Great. “Is it possible that he came in sometime today, checked his messages, and then left without you seeing him?”
“I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t think so.”
It was five p.m. now. Thus far, the clinic director had never come on or called back, and now it looked like the same thing was happening with Adam. Back at the clinic she’d left messages at his work phone, his cell-phone’s answering service, and his home number. It had been Dellin who suggested she come out here to the info center. But so far—
Wild goose chase.
“It just so happens that I left a message with Adam, on his office answering machine,” Clare went on with the woman at the desk. “I really need to know if he got that message, and it’s rather urgent.”
The woman gave Clare an appraising look. “Well, I can tell you’re official,” she said, noting Clare’s uniform, gunbelt, and badge. “Go right on in and check his machine yourself. His office is just down the hall.”
“Thanks.”
Clare hurried down the cool corridor, passing admin offices and portraits of famous Floridian historical figures. It was just some instinctive inkling that rose up in her sometimes, a professional hunch, and Clare couldn’t shake it. She hoped that she wasn’t being prejudice, and that she was effectively keeping her personal dislike for Adam out of her total assessment of the situation. All she knew was this: something’s really screwed up at the clinic and I know damn well he’s involved somehow. Maybe he’s not completely behind it, but he’s in on it some way.
Of this, she felt certain.
No message lights blinked on the answering machine in his office. Which means he already played the message back, she thought. Either he came in here without the lady at the desk seeing him, or he retrieved it by phone.
And that could only mean he was on his way to the clinic.
It was a lot of running around for nothing but at least it would work out in the long run. Unless Adam decided to head for the hills after he got my message, he’s GOT to be going straight to my office. It was one or the other. If he’d left town, then they’d all know he was guilty, and if he hadn’t, she’d get to confront him, and Clare was very interested in how the ranger would answer her questions…
She was back in her Blazer and back on the road immediately. But just as she’d checked herself through the security gate—
beep beep beep
—her pager went off.
This whole day’s becoming one big Chinese fire drill, she thought. She kept driving for the island’s main spur, carefully slipping her pager off her belt as she did so. She thought sure it would be either Dellin—calling to tell her Harry had arrived—Rick or Joyce—to tell her they were done with their search—or Adam returning her call.
It was none of those.
It’s an alarm code!
Clare was mystified. Another feature of the alarm system was the automatic dialer; if an alarm on the grounds was triggered, the mechanism would first call the security office, and if no one picked up, it would dial the on-call officer’s pager and leave a code.
The little LCD strip on the pager read: ALERT! @ PS-13
PS-13, she thought now. That’s one of the punch stations out on the site. She lead-footed the Blazer now. She’d only been on the job a few days—not enough time to commit all the station numbers to memory. One hand fumbled in the glove box as she drove, feeling around for the duty manual. Probably just Joyce or Rick tripped one of the perimeter alarms by accident, she deduced, but when she found the list of station numbers, she saw that number 13 was one of the stations at the lake.
Damn it. I guess I better go out there first, see what’s going on before I go back to the clinic.
Everything darkened when she re-entered the site, branches from myriad palms and pines joining overhead, blocking out most of the sun. When she arrived at the edge of Lake Stephanie, she saw no vehicles and no people.
The punch-stations, she thought.
The punch-stations worked by key—each guard’s master key. When the key was turned clockwise, the time would be logged in the computer, proving that the guard had made his round. But if there was trouble, the key would be turned counter-clockwise, which triggered the system. Nothing here, Clare thought when she drove by the first station post. Who the hell activated the sensor?
She stopped and stared at the second post. Jesus, is that—
When she got out and rushed to the punch-station, someone’s master key and chain was hanging out of the keyway. The key had been turned counter-clockwise.
And there was blood all over it.
Blood dripped off the chain, too, and when Clare looked closer, she noticed something like dragmarks starting at the foot of the post and going all the way back to the lake shore. Almost as if—
Someone crawled to the punch-station…
Her guts seemed to sink when she followed the dragmarks backward. Just at the edge of the shoreline—
The vision made her stomach clench. She knew exactly what she was looking at: a great wash of blood.
Two spent shotgun shells in the dirt answered the rest of her questions. The key in the punch-station has to belong to Joyce or Rick. And all we carry are pistols, not shotguns.
Clare ran back to the Blazer, the rear tires blowing plumes of mud when she floored it and cut a hard turn. Somebody shotgunned Rick or Joyce—a poacher probably. Gotta call the police, gotta get an ambulance out here—
She felt horrified and numb at the same time. Panic would only hinder her. When she called back to the clinic on the walkie-talkie there was no answer. Phone, she thought next. Where’s the nearest phone?
The clinic itself was a mile away, while her own cottage was only half that distance. In no time she was skidding to a halt out front. But when she barged into her cottage and picked up the phone—
“Shit!”
The line was dead.
She was jogging back for the Blazer when she saw Dellin’s Mercedes parked in front of his own cottage. She didn’t ask herself what he might be doing back here; all she thought was Maybe he’s got a cell phone! and was running over.
“Dellin!” she called out and strode right into the cottage. She’d found the door ajar, and wasn’t surprised to discover that his phone was also out of order. “I need your cell phone! I think someone’s been shot at the lake!”
Only silence answered her back.
Where the hell is he?
She quickly searched the entire cottage, but he wasn’t there. She was about to leave—to run over and see if he was at Mrs. Grable’s—but she stopped quite suddenly, noticing something.
The strangest sensation grabbed her gut, and the silence only amplified the unease. Around her, Dellin’s cottage was tidy and well-organized, everything in its place.
Everything except the single videotape sitting atop the television.
When she picked it up, she discovered that it wasn’t actually a tape, it was the tape’s empty box. The box read: MAXELL, GX-SILVER.
Then she looked down at the VCR, saw the tape in the loading slot.
Even before she turned on the TV and pushed the tape in, she knew that the tape was the third one from the three-pack at her own cottage.
More sex stuff, she felt sure, of Grace Fletcher and her kinky security friends. She’d already seen the first two tapes, and the evidence of this third one wasn’t what put the knot in her stomach. It was the question: What the hell is Dellin doing with this tape?
She wondered if there was something special about this third tape, then doubted it when the screen fizzed on. Grace, Donna, and Rob all frolicked nude on the big bed—it was the same old thing. But in a moment Grace sat up on her elbows, wide eyed.