The Storm Murders

by John Farrow

  “It’s okay, Émile. I’m willing.”

  “You don’t have to be.”

  “What?”

  “Willing.”

  “What? I’m not following y’all.”

  Cinq-Mars let him mull it through silently.

  “Oh.” Dupree said. “Okay.”

  “I don’t want Flores to know what we know just yet but that doesn’t mean you have to agree with me.”

  “In other words—”

  “I think you got it.”

  “I’ll talk to him before Sivak does.”

  “I can’t stop you from doing what I don’t want you to do.”

  “No, y’all can’t do that. Especially if ya’ll really want me to do it.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Neither did I. So, Émile, playing favorites? Or just both ends against the middle?”

  “I’m on everybody’s side here.”

  The other man laughed.

  “No, I am. But if you talk to Flores, you’ll talk to Flores. I know what that’s about. You’ll get back to me on what he says, it’ll be on the side. No documentation, no rap sheet, no lawyer involvement. But if the FBI talks to Flores, they’ll take him in, maybe arrest him, he’ll lawyer up, we’ll never get our own chance to have a direct word and we’ll never hear back on what Flores says even if by some miracle he does talk. Not verbatim anyway. Only a filtered version and only if we’re lucky.”

  “That’s nothing but true,” Dupree concurred.

  “Listen,” Cinq-Mars told him, “I’ve got the FBI in the other room.”

  “Not Sivak!” He sounded shocked.

  “No, not Sivak. She’s off to Alabama, I hear. I got Randolph Dreher. Know him?”

  “To know him is not to like him so much.”

  “I hear the feeling’s more or less mutual.”

  “No surprises there.”

  “I’ll let you go, Dupree. Thanks for this report.”

  “Back at you, Émile. Talk soon.”

  Realizing that their guest was left temporarily abandoned, Sandra had joined Agent Dreher in the living room in Émile’s absence. Their chitchat never passed beyond life on the farm, the dog, and of course the weather. She was pleased that her husband, upon his return, seemed unperturbed that she was engaging the agent in small-talk, but then he shocked her. “Rand, my good man!” he exclaimed. “My God, where’re my manners? Please, say that you’ll stay for dinner. I insist!”

  Sandra might have fallen off her ottoman if she wasn’t suddenly paralyzed in place.

  “Émile,” Dreher responded, a polite falseness inherent to his protest. “I can’t possibly impose.” He looked to Sandra, for he required her endorsement of the suggestion before acceptance.

  “Please,” Sandra stammered. “I also insist. You must stay.”

  “Rand, stay. I’ll pour my best Scotch.”

  And so, it was agreed.

  Sandra shot her husband a look as he seated himself and put his feet up on the ottoman she now abandoned. Whatever that phone call did to him, he had oscillated through a radical change of mood. He learned a few things that day, confirming that both the Lumens and the Lanos families were farmers who didn’t farm. Finally, a connection. What it could mean, he did not know, but for the first time in this whole sordid business a line was drawn, two dots were successfully connected, and after repeated failures and much floundering in the dark he inhaled the intoxicating whiff of progress. Indeed, the victims—the Lumens in Quebec and the Lanos couple in New Orleans—adopted secret identities concocted by the FBI. No matter how anybody swung this cat—multiple ways existed to skin a feline—the FBI knew stuff. No way was he going to allow an agent to just walk out of his house without first delving into the depths of the man’s being.

  So let the games begin.

  TWENTY TWO

  Special Agent Vira Sivak believed herself wired to fail. Born that way. Part of her genetic code. Despite this, through oversight or some cosmic flub, she still managed to spend a significant portion of her life contradicting that innate impression. Never did success run in her family, nor was she gung-ho on dreaming, which in America was relentlessly touted as the principle ingredient toward achievement. This was the land where anyone and everyone was free to not only follow their dreams, but to rampage after them in manic pursuit, but where oh where did the person go who didn’t dream so much? Wither the dreamless light sleeper devoid of ambition? What on the green earth became of an individual who only fantasized in miniature? Her countrymen gave much tenor to the notion of the Great American Dream, and perhaps she was merely envious when she chose to decipher the rhetoric as meaning to get rich on the backs of others. She thought of it as the Great American Crapshoot, and not being a gambler, Vira was not particularly interested in that roll of the dice.

  Nonetheless, contradicting her own expectations, she excelled.

  Emerging from university, the brainy young woman was courted by IBM, Microsoft, and a pair of Fortune 500 companies she’d never previously heard mentioned which nonetheless held impressive balance sheets. The latter struck her, perhaps unfairly, as being remnants of an old world economy, to whom she conveyed her disinterest. She really wanted to be at Apple—in her shoes, who didn’t?—but Steve Jobs never called, not even after she submitted her résumé twice, something she did not need to do once for any other company. Her sense of failure properly restored, she chose to shuffle off to IBM, preferring the opportunity in product development they dangled over a generic pitch from Microsoft. Before signing—she liked the idea of keeping IBM on the hook if only to verify that their interest was genuine—Vira filtered through a few additional opportunities that were slowly drifting in. Cisco got her attention. Google, not so much. As she confided to a friend, her shilly-shally was not to determine if she could do better elsewhere, but to see if she could not find a way to screw the whole thing up.

  By the whole thing, she meant her future. She meant life.

  FedEx delivered an inquiry from the FBI. Would she be interested?

  A laughable notion, really.

  Imagine, packing a weapon. Shooting people! Me!

  Hilarious. Downright ludicrous when you thought about it, and she thought about it, had a few drinks with pals and made jokes. And yet, upon quieter reflection, Vira grew curious, enough to at least check out what they had to say. A few days after an interview with the Bureau, FedEx rang her buzzer with another message in an envelope: the job at IBM had evaporated. Had she delayed too long? At least they were demonstrating that their level of interest was never all that strong and were courteous in saying so. Saddened, Vira did not dwell on her misfortune. She deserved it for procrastinating, and, as she perpetually anticipated and perhaps encouraged failure, this was a perfect example of how things were meant to be. So it begins, the downhill slide. What a shambles. She joined the FBI as if to put an exclamation mark on this blight she was obliged to call a career, which, given her sense of doom, she would also frame as being her pathetic life.

  Only after she was hunkered down as an agent for eight months did the thought finally dawn on her that she’d been snookered. A colleague whispered the suggestion over lunch—IBM stepped aside from competing for her services only because they were asked to do so. By this time she was losing the shine off her innocence. She gleaned that the Bureau did not always play fair. Indeed, the Bureau played fair only when that strategy favored a positive outcome. Otherwise, the FBI did exactly what was necessary to achieve an objective.

  She was an objective. They wanted her.

  She got that now.

  Something to do with her outside-the-box, peculiar, yet spectacularly analytical and computer-savant mind intrigued them. As she advised a colleague at the time, “Either that or my retarded social skills, one of the two.”

  Nonplussed. Her failure, as inevitable as she always supposed, someday would morph into dust around the heels of those who recruited her. Given that the FBI resorted to dirty tricks in acquir
ing her services, she took pleasure in knowing that her eventual comeuppance—their oversight, their error, her shortcomings and eventual failure—served them right.

  Vira evaluated her professional life as she drove solo through the state of Alabama in a rented SUV. She had no need for a vehicle this large or anywhere near this luxurious, but landing at Birmingham International in a downpour she opted for an upgrade in case the roads were flooded. She wanted to ride above the slosh and an all-wheel drive might prove to be the ticket. More than a size upgrade, the Acura was the only such vehicle available and, what the hell, later she could explain to Agent Dreher that it was the last black car on the lot. He wouldn’t know if that was true. Neither did she. She presumed it was a lie. But Dreher suffered from a foible: he preferred his agents to drive black cars.

  That was not his only peccadillo, although in all honesty she did not find the list of his peculiarities long. What intrigued her about him the most was that he reached out across a great breadth of humanity to bring her aboard his team. She was obliged to do a few years in the field before being eligible to move up through the ranks in D.C., at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, and he wanted her for that time. The Bureau wanted her at headquarters and, on the day her superiors found out that the CIA had their bloodhounds out and were taking an interest, rapid promotions were promised. Yet time in the field remained an obligation to fulfill, then up the ladder addressing national security and international crime issues through the use of technologies that in all likelihood had not been invented yet, possibly because she hadn’t imagined them yet. She was destined to foster a slew of high-tech developments, and in due course to administer their use. Still, a few years in the field came first, in part for the experience, in large measure to meet the requirements of a massive bureaucracy.

  Dreher delved into the bounty of that bureaucracy to snag her. “Out of thin air.” She voiced that thought in that way to him. Secretly, a question.

  He explained, “I take on the difficult tasks, Agent Sivak, the cases few can figure out. I’m not that bright myself so I put brilliant people to work and succeed that way.” Of course, he arranged things so that she had no choice. Being assigned to him over the chagrin and vocal objections of others, even from those who outranked him, demonstrated to Vira Sivak that he was neither “not that bright,” as he was fond of claiming, nor someone who failed to succeed on his own merit.

  Despite the phony modesty, Dreher made no false assertion. He worked the difficult cases and very bright people stood dutifully in tow. She was happy to serve her apprenticeship under him and with his team. If the day came that she outranked him, which was everyone’s expectation, she might bring him onto her own team, who knew?

  Driving, the young agent revelled in the Acura at speed out in the rain, appreciating the road clearance, the smooth acceleration, and having the whole of her ruffled life ahead of her. She laughed once to herself, thinking of how Dreher would fume on the day the invoice arrived. She was meant to be in Alabama semi-incognito—unknown to outsiders, scarcely known even to the FBI. Renting an Acura was not going to help that aspect once her expenses landed on a desk at HQ.

  Poor Rand. She could hear him blustering already.

  That was another of his peccadilloes: his adoration of budgetary restraint.

  Torrential as the plane landed, the downpour persisted but was diminishing. Rain fell steadily and Vira enjoyed the rhythmic swish under her tires. Small town lights periodically reflected off the shimmering black asphalt, then all was dark again for long stretches. Vehicular traffic on the highway was not heavy, but constant, with an annoying number of tractor trailers. She was on her way to Marshall County, to the town of Albertville where she’d booked a room, then on to Geraldine in the morning. Marshall was one county over from DeKalb, which had its heart ripped out by a tornado two years earlier, but in Geraldine a couple had been murdered in the storm’s aftermath in similar fashion to the man and woman slaughtered in New Orleans. She had issues with her boss, but he consistently delivered on this one account—he drew down the complex assignments. Indeed, her boss reached across and steered the tough ones into his orbit as effectively as he selected her. Strange, that ability, yet Vira reveled in the challenges it provided.

  The storm murders were especially perplexing.

  She chose accommodation in Albertville for her own specific reasons. She preferred not to sleep and wake up in the same neighborhood where she was conducting an investigation. She preferred to keep her quiet time to herself across a physical boundary where people were unlikely to identify her as a special agent. Albertville was also significantly larger than Geraldine, which might permit her to go out at night and still stand a half decent chance of meeting people, men in particular, with whom she might converse and share a drink. Perhaps a liaison. She was not the first lady to whom men gravitated when she sat alone in a bar, so her odds improved when the bars were both plentiful and pleasantly populated. In a city as large as Albertville, should she find herself in company that pleased her, she might then venture an invitation back to her room without churning a small town’s rumor mill. Long before she arrived she was feeling that that’s how she wanted the evening to go, and Vira was pleased to be greeted by an abundance of twinkling lights along the strip where her motel was located.

  Good. Promising.

  First, a shower, a change of clothes, makeup that was apparent, yet subtle—she could manage that contradiction—then dinner.

  Over honey-mustard chicken and roast potatoes, Émile Cinq-Mars and Agent Rand Dreher were discussing slime, and the biological stew in the earliest days of the fledging planet. Sandra objected to the subject matter. “Gentlemen, please! We’re eating!” Into their drinks—white wine, the Scotch put away—they cheerfully carried on.

  “Here’s the thing, this is the thing,” Dreher was saying, in pursuit of a notion that kept slipping off his tongue. He couldn’t seem to get his head around his own thesis. “It’s been proven, I mean not proven, per se, but there’s been experiments—experiments! yes—to show that slime—pure simple slime, single cell slime, brainless heartless revolting slime—slippery gooey pungent—”

  “Okay, thanks, I think we got it,” Sandra intoned.

  “Slime thinks for itself. No, no,” Dreher protested to objections he only imagined as none were spoken in this room, and, indeed, Cinq-Mars knew of the experiments he referenced, “it’s true. I swear on my mother’s grave. Slime thinks.”

  Sandra did not know what he was talking about and expressed curiosity and perhaps disbelief with a simple expression.

  Cinq-Mars explained. “Slime, living slime, can follow a path to food. To sugar, let’s say. In an experiment, scientists blocked the path of slime, made it difficult, then let the slime try again. Even if its old trail was masked to a certain extent, slime figured out the route to food more quickly the second time than the first. Similar experiments have indicated—well, it depends on one’s analysis I’m sure—that slime thinks. I like the idea, although perhaps for different reasons than Rand here.”

  “Slime thinks!” Rand postulated with inebriated enthusiasm. “That’s such a sublime thought! I’m in awe of that thought. Single-cell slime thinks! No wonder that the detritus of the earth, the bottom feeders, the night crawlers, and the slimiest of human specimens also think, enough to make things difficult for those of us charging with cleaning up their god-awful messes.”

  Seconds were dished out. The chicken had been consumed, but Vira had plenty of roast spuds, caramelized onions, and Brussels sprouts drizzled with a secret sweet sauce, popular dishes all. Perhaps the presentation instigated Dreher to discuss life in a primordial slough. He attached himself to the subject with relish.

  “This is the thing!” he sang out. “Organisms way back then in that fetid slush interchanged their cells and their DNA willy-nilly.”

  “Meaning what?” Sandra asked, scooping.

  “Meaning exactly that!” he enthused. “I’m talking about micr
oorganisms, you understand, but if Polly wanted Molly’s mouth or Ralph thought that he might strike a more impressive figure in a bathing suit if only he had Harold’s pectorals, they’d just switch off. Just like that. None of this reproductive morass we’re subjected to.”

  “Microorganisms have pecs? Cool.” They laughed, and drank, and dug in again. Sandra was alert to the possibilities. “Just think, Émile, you could’ve have had a new nose, on a daily basis if you wanted.”

  “I’d probably wander the swamp looking for the culprit who made off with my perfectly good one.”

  “Surely it wouldn’t be that hard to find,” she put in, which scored a second chuckle from Dreher.

  “But seriously, this is the thing. The thing!”

  Apparently tipsy as well, Émile enjoyed a laugh at his guest’s expense. Sometimes, as he already cautioned himself, folks who normally embraced decorum, yet who easily succumbed to the influence of the grape, needed to be watched. And encouraged. “What, dear Rand, is the thing now? Pray tell.”

  Cinq-Mars couldn’t be certain if the drink or the subject matter was the cause, but the fellow was having trouble lining up his words. “What life used to do on this planet was comparable to one massive, messy, all consuming, wet, slurping, unrepentant orgy. A ram’s horns on a monkey’s arse, that was the way of our fledgling planet. Difficult to sit, I agree, ha ha. But it was a free-for-all in those days! Cells and DNA were traded like penny stocks. You don’t like your skin? Try scales. Don’t like your monkey face? Become a goat. Metamorphically speaking, of course.”

  “Of course. But metaphorically.”

  “Of course. Metamor. No. Metaphor. Phic.” He gently burped and excused himself. “But this is where it gets interesting.”

  “It’s all fascinating, Rand.”

  “This is the moment, Émile,” Dreher insisted.

  “The moment and the thing,” Émile emphasized, yet nothing in his tone indicated that he was having one over on him.