The mode control button was switched to talk; the line was still open.
“Hello,” Garth said evenly into the mouthpiece. “Who’s this? Anybody there?”
Even from where I was standing, I could hear the dial tone suddenly come on. Garth cursed with disgust, then hurriedly punched the REDIAL button. I moved closer, listened as the handset whirred and clicked, automatically redialing the last number that had been called. The noises stopped, and a phone at the other end of the line began to ring. A woman answered on the third ring.
“Nuvironment. Good afternoon. How may I help you?”
Garth glanced at me, raised his eyebrows slightly. My heart was pounding even more rapidly, and I imagined that if I’d tried to speak my words would have caught in my throat. But not Garth.
“This is Dr. Craig Valley,” my brother said evenly. “I called a few minutes ago, and my party and I were cut off. Please reconnect me.”
There was a pause, which to me seemed ominous. When the woman spoke again, suspicion was clearly evident in her voice. “Dr. Valley? Craig? You sound very different.”
“I have a sore throat.”
“I see,” the woman replied coldly, and from the tone of her voice I was afraid that she did. “Whom would you like to speak to, sir?”
“Just reconnect me to whoever I was speaking to before.”
“You have to give me a name.”
“Let me talk to Mr. Blaisdel.”
“This isn’t Dr. Valley,” the woman said tersely. “Who is this? I demand to know who this is.”
So much for cute private detective tricks. Garth pressed the HOOK button, got another dial tone, and called the police.
While we waited for the police to arrive, we took turns availing ourselves of Valley’s kitchen sink to wash the blood off our hands and faces as best we could, drying ourselves with a roll of paper towels we found in a cabinet. I was still trembling, but Garth seemed more outraged than shaken. We didn’t talk much, probably because there didn’t seem much to say; there was no question in our minds that Craig Valley had opted to kill himself rather than risk supplying us with information under the duress Garth had guaranteed he would supply. As obviously mad as Valley had been, suicide still seemed a rather dire means of trying to keep one’s mouth shut. It had to make us both wonder just how much else was involved besides the sexual abuse of a child.
Craig Valley hadn’t punched holes in his throat because he’d been worried about a load of dirt, or because we’d labeled one of his religious idols a child molester; he had to have been afraid of us finding out something else—a secret he had given his life to protect. All we’d wanted to know was the dump site of a load of Amazon rain forest soil, and Valley’s decidedly bizarre response to our inquiries made me strongly suspect that when we did get to the site we were going to find a lot more than just a big pile of bug-infested dirt.
It certainly appeared that something big and complicated was afoot, as it were, and that didn’t bode well for our relatively small and simple quest.
“Shit,” Garth said dispassionately as he tossed a wad of paper towels into the garbage can beneath the sink, then glanced at his watch.
“Yeah, shit,” I said in agreement. More than twenty minutes had passed since Garth had called the police to report Valley’s suicide, and there was still no sign of officialdom. We had other things to do, to say the least. With a little luck, and a lot of pressure, if need be, applied in the right places, there still seemed a chance that we could find Vicky Brown before nightfall; it wasn’t as though we didn’t know where to go next. “You can never find a cop when you need one.”
“We’ve got better things to do than wait around here,” Garth said, looking down at his blood-stained shirt, tie, and jacket. “I’ve got a good mind to split.”
“We’ve got better things to do, but I think we’d best stay put if we don’t want to get grounded even longer; the police will get cranky if we’re not here when they do show up. What do you suppose Valley meant by that business with the ‘second beast’? Just more loony talk?”
It was not surprising that Garth, always the better of the Frederickson brothers in biblical studies taught at our mother’s knee, would know the answer; considering some of the things we’d been through over the past decade, I should have known, but it was Garth who came up with the words.
“It’s Revelations, Mongo,” he said in a weary voice as he sighed and rested a hand on my shoulder. “Chapter six, verses three and four. ‘And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see.’
“‘And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.’”
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