Sleeping With the Crawfish

by D. J. Donaldson

  Noell flipped some pages and stopped to read. When she finished, she handed the article to Broussard.

  “As I said, even if I did have one, unless it was recently wild-caught, it’d be harmless.”

  Broussard looked at the picture on the page Carr had first found for Noell. It showed that two of the frogs were from Central America and three were from South America. Beside the picture of Phyllobates terribilis, Carr had added a note indicating it was the most toxic of the five. Finding that note of more than passing interest, Broussard turned to the passage about batrachotoxin’s limited amphibian distribution, verifying what Carr had said.

  “If what you say is true, you wouldn’t mind if we inventory your frogs,” Noell said.

  “Actually, I would. To do a careful job, you’d have to dismantle the terraria they’re in, so unless you get a search warrant, I’m going to be a bastard and refuse to cooperate.”

  Noell studied him for a few seconds, her jaw set. Finally, she said, “Where could someone buy a wild-caught frog like those in the article?”

  “I have no idea. It may not be legal in their countries of origin to export them.”

  “Still, I’m sure it happens.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “What about batrachotoxin—where could someone buy that?”

  “Now you’ve really exceeded my knowledge. If you like, I’ll give you the Internet address of the poison-frog home page. Maybe some link on it will help you.”

  “There’s a home page for poison frogs?”

  Carr shrugged. “If the Joe Nobody family in Kokomo can have one, why not poison frogs?”

  “If you’ve got the address handy, I’ll take it.”

  Carr thumbed through his Rolodex, stopped, and recited a string of letters and symbols that Noell jotted in her notebook.

  “Now, if that’s all you wanted, there’s a shipment from the St. Louis Zoo waiting for my attention.”

  Noell flipped her notebook shut. “Yeah, that’s all. Thanks for the information.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell me not to leave town?”

  “Don’t leave town.”

  As Noell reached for the doorknob, Carr said, “Detective . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “When you see Sergeant Cagney and Sergeant Lacey at your next gender neutral meeting, tell them I love their work.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  When Noell and Broussard were outside the building, Broussard said, “Why’d you tell him not to leave town? You really think he’s a suspect?”

  “No. I was considering shooting him, but there’d be all that paperwork. . . . Better I just curtail his travel.”

  “I admire your restraint.”

  “I might have stayed awhile and traded insults, but I was anxious to leave.”

  “Why?”

  “I was late because there’s been a break in the case.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “The state police in the next county have tracked two guys who burgled a jewelry store to a cabin in the woods, where they found Anthony Hunter’s notebooks and a bunch of computer storage disks that are probably his, too.”

  “How’d they connect all that to the Hunter murder?”

  “The notebooks had UT Memphis and Hunter’s name on each one. They were so obviously stolen, one of the cops called UT and learned Hunter was dead. Then they called us.”

  “Sharp police work.”

  “We’re not the hicks some people think we are.”

  “You don’t mean me?”

  “No. You still want to see those notebooks?”

  “Absolutely. Where are they?”

  “At the cabin. Most of the take from the jewelry store is still missing, so everybody’s there looking for it. If we want those notebooks anytime soon, we’ll have to go get them.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  19

  While Broussard and Noell fought the flow of late-afternoon traffic out of Memphis on their way to the cabin in Fayette County, Kit sat at an EdgeGARD tissue culture hood in Thibodaux changing the growth medium on Mudi’s cell cultures. It had been hours since she’d invaded Woodley’s lab, but her nerves were still sizzling, so the pipette she was using to dispense medium danced over the culture dish. When no one was looking, she’d resorted to holding the pipette control in both hands, similar to the way she’d been trained to steady a pistol. It was, therefore, with great relief that she finished the last dish and carried the stack of ten she’d been working on back to the incubator.

  She carefully distributed the dishes around the lower shelf in the incubator, then returned to the hood to wipe the stainless-steel work surface with alcohol prior to shutting off the lights and the blower that kept bacteria in the room from entering the work area.

  Five o’clock . . . quitting time . . . glorious words. She reached for the hood’s power switches.

  “Leave it on.”

  Turning, she saw Rose Lewis, who was carrying a cardboard box.

  “I need this calf serum aliquoted into fifteen-milliliter tubes,” she said, putting the box on the nearby benchtop.

  Kit walked over and looked in the box, where she saw twenty-five small bottles of frozen serum. “Can’t this wait until morning? It’ll take twenty minutes to thaw them and another half hour or more to aliquot.”

  “If it could wait, I wouldn’t have brought ’em in here,” Lewis said. “So, do you follow orders or do you hit the road for good?”

  “I’ll give you a hand,” Jenny said from the doorway to the next room.

  “Did I ask you to help her?” Lewis said sharply.

  “I just thought—”

  “It’s time you went home,” Lewis said.

  Confused, Jenny remained in the doorway. “I was only—”

  Lewis pointed a finger at Jenny. “One more word and you’re fired.”

  “Jenny, it’s all right,” Kit said. “I can do it.”

  Lewis turned on Kit, her face contorted with rage. “You’re not in charge here. I am. She’ll be leaving because I say so, not because you allow it.”

  In her vehemence, Lewis sprayed Kit’s lab coat with spittle.

  Kit was about to make an exaggerated gesture of wiping it off and say something devastatingly appropriate, but the thought that if she got fired there’d be no one to reclaim the tape in Woodley’s office made her say and do nothing.

  Lewis stood in the doorway and watched until Jenny was out of the lab. She then turned to Kit. “I want each individual tube labeled. When you’re finished, put the tubes on Dr. Woodley’s shelf in the walk-in freezer. You know where it is?”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “And between now and tomorrow, I want you to learn to keep that expression off your face.”

  “What expression?”

  “The one that shows how much you despise me. I can’t stop you from thinking it, but I don’t want to see it every time I look at you.”

  Lewis turned and walked away, leaving Kit with the best example yet of the expression they’d been talking about.

  Kit put the bottles of frozen serum in the 37°F water bath that was always kept switched on, then lined up in the hood enough test tube racks to hold the 167 tubes she’d need.

  By the time she’d labeled all the tubes and put them in the racks, the serum had thawed. The anger she felt toward Lewis was not an entirely unproductive emotion, as it washed away the nervous hand tremors she’d been experiencing all afternoon, allowing her to work quickly and smoothly.

  When all the tubes were filled, she put the empty serum bottles in a dish of soapy warm water in the sink and packed the tubes in groups into the compartmentalized box in which the bottles had arrived. She then bedded the hood down for the night. On the way out of the lab with the box of tubes, she shut off the lab lights and locked the door.

  By now, everyone else in the building had gone home, so through the narrow vertical rectangles of glass in the door to each of the other labs, she
saw only darkened rooms. This reminder that she had been singled out to stay late for a task that could just as easily have been done in the morning fanned her resentment of Rose Lewis.

  Her thin lab coat was little protection against the frigid air the two fans at the rear of the walk-in freezer blew against her when she opened the door. Stepping inside, she shut the door gently without engaging the latch.

  Lewis had said to put the serum on Woodley’s shelf, but that one and the shelf below it were full. While she was deciding if it would be worthwhile to rearrange Woodley’s things to make room, the door behind her clicked shut.

  With an icicle through her heart, she rushed the door and rammed the cardboard box in her arms against the metal piston that prevented lock-ins.

  The piston slid into its sleeve, but the door wouldn’t open.

  She chucked the box of serum onto the floor and threw her shoulder against the cold metal door, which moved a fraction of an inch before colliding with something on the outside.

  Amid the crystals of fear spreading through her, she remembered the sound she’d heard while tapping Woodley’s phone. It hadn’t been someone entering, as she’d thought, but someone leaving, someone who’d been in one of the small adjoining rooms she’d neglected to check. Lewis had set her up and she’d fallen for it.

  Stupid . . . stupid . . . stupid . . . She slammed her shoulder into the door twice more, the exertion sucking frigid air into her lungs. No good—this was not helping.

  Fingers already so cold they hurt, she thrust her fists into her chilled pockets. With the fans at the rear blowing numbing air over her, it was like standing on an Arctic tundra. She tried to think, but the clattering fans and the ache that had begun in her ears made it difficult. In such cold, she wouldn’t last thirty minutes.

  Her eyes strayed to the opposite wall, to the sixty-watt bulb covered by heavy glass that at least gave her some light. Crossing the freezer, she reached for the glass with shaking hands, hoping the bulb might provide a little heat. But she could feel nothing.

  More than ever before in her life, she needed clarity of thought, but ice buildup left her mind earthbound.

  As the minutes passed, hopelessness became a thriving malignancy that threatened to drive her screaming to the freezer door, where she would claw at it until her fingernails shattered and her blood turned to icy sludge. She put her hands to her ears, but it was like trying to warm them with blocks of ice. She was shivering madly now, her teeth clacking nearly as loudly as the fans. Her feet were numb and heavy. If she didn’t do something fast, she was going to die. . . . But there was nothing to work with.

  Wait . . . the Ladysmith . . . She was actually reaching for it before she realized it couldn’t help.

  Think . . . think. But all that came was a barren wind.

  Eventually, she opened to the finality of her plight. She slumped against the metal shelving and closed her eyes. If she couldn’t escape physically, could she at least imagine herself free? And this, she found her mind could do.

  She was home, not the dump she now lived in, but the first home she’d ever owned, in bed, wrapped in Teddy’s arms, Lucky waiting patiently on the other side of the bedroom door for them to let him in.

  Lucky . . . Nolen would take him. . . . He’d like living with Mitzi.

  Then, deep in Kit’s mind, icy plates overrode one another, dislodging a small snowdrift that fell into a larger drift. A buzzer . . . There was something about a . . .

  She struggled to think, tried to blot out the narcotizing images carrying her to her grave. If the temperature goes up even a few degrees, a buzzer will sound. That’s what Jenny had said—a buzzer will sound.

  A buzzer will . . .

  There must be a heat-sensing device somewhere inside the freezer.

  Her eyes scanned the metal walls but saw nothing that looked likely. Shivering violently, she turned and saw a copper tube that went into the front wall near the low ceiling. On the end of it, slightly above her head, was a cylinder of the same color.

  Dropping stiffly to one knee, her hands wooden, she pulled a stout cardboard box from a low shelf onto the floor. With her foot, she slid the box across the floor and stepped onto it. Cupping her hands on either side of the metal cylinder, she leaned forward and exhaled her warm breath against it through teeth that sounded like rattling bones. Her shaking hands threatened to knock the cylinder loose.

  Inhale . . . exhale. Inhale . . . exhale.

  The frigid air stabbed at her lungs, but she kept going. Inhale . . . exhale . . . again and again.

  Hyperventilating, she began to feel light-headed. Inhale . . . exhale. Her temples throbbed and the sound of her breathing thundered in her ears. Inhale . . . exhale. Everything grew fuzzy.

  Ring, damn it. . . . Ring.

  The dull roar in her ears grew louder and its pitch went up to a shriek. And then there was no more noise, only black velvet.

  20

  “This is Matt Easter at the Agrilabs building. I got a woman here suffering from hypothermia. . . . I don’t know how to answer that.”

  Kit’s eyes fluttered open. “No . . . I’m fine.” As she struggled to a sitting position from where she lay on the floor, Easter turned from the wall phone and looked down at her. “Oh man, am I glad you woke up. But we can’t be sure you’re okay. You may have frostbite or something.”

  Kit’s hands and feet were so terribly cold, she couldn’t say he was wrong. Though her mind was working poorly, she was also aware that whoever had trapped her in the freezer might still be in the building and that Easter’s presence alone might not prevent them from a more direct attack. By all means, get more people in here. “You’re right. Ask them to come.”

  Easter recited the institute’s address into the phone and hung up. He came to Kit’s side and squatted on his haunches. “I got some instant coffee in my lab. It tastes like shit, but I can make it, well, instantly.”

  Matt Easter . . . Kit vaguely remembered meeting him on her first day when Jenny had shown her around. “What kept the freezer door from opening?”

  Easter gestured to a point behind her with his chin. “That cart full of crap. Someone must have moved it and accidentally wedged it against the door while you were in there.”

  There was no point explaining things to him, so she didn’t respond to this.

  “How’d you make the alarm go off?”

  “I breathed on it. I think that’s why I passed out—from hyperventilating.”

  “Lucky for you I was here and had things in the freezer I couldn’t afford to lose if the thing failed.”

  “Yeah, everything’s going my way. Thanks for the help.”

  “You never answered me about the coffee.”

  Kit didn’t want to stay in the building a second longer. “I’d rather just go out front and wait for the ambulance.”

  Easter assisted her to the front entrance and out onto the steps. By now her circulation had improved to the point where she was convinced she didn’t need medical assistance. Nor did she want any well-meaning paramedic discovering the Ladysmith. “Actually, you know . . . I’m feeling much better. I don’t think I need that ambulance after all.” She began backing away. “I’m just going home. I appreciate what you did . . . really. Thanks a lot.”

  As she turned and hurried to her car, she saw only one other vehicle, which she presumed belonged to Easter. That was good, because it meant she wouldn’t be followed.

  It was only when she reached her car that she realized she didn’t have the keys. Damn. After putting the serum in the freezer, she’d planned to dump her lab coat in her locker and get her bag. Damn.

  Fortunately, Easter had been so puzzled at her rapid departure, he was still on the front steps when she returned.

  “Change your mind about getting checked out?”

  “My handbag is in my locker, but I don’t want to go back in there. Will you get it for me?”

  “Which locker?”

  She told him the number
and the combination of the lock and he went back inside. But now she was left alone outside the place. Surely no one would try anything out in the open like this where a passing motorist might see it. Of course, this late, there wasn’t all that much traffic going by. If they waited until just the right moment . . .

  Suddenly feeling far too vulnerable, she thought about going back inside and waiting in the reception area. But then that seemed worse. In the distance, she heard the wail of a siren.

  Come on, Matt, get me out of here.

  Finally, Easter came out with her bag. Leaving him with a hurried thanks, she ran to the car and piled in. She pulled onto the street just as the ambulance arrived.

  “HOW FAR BACK IN here is this cabin?” Broussard asked.

  Noell inched the car to the left to avoid a large branch from a tree that had fallen beside the two dirt tracks they’d been following for the last twenty minutes. “We’re almost there.”

  The tracks made an abrupt right turn around a rotted stump and then dropped into a moist hollow filled with ferns. Fifty yards farther on, they followed a gentle rise into an old-growth forest of great oaks. A few minutes later, when the canopy overhead thinned and the dirt tracks curved both right and left around a poplar that had probably been a sapling long before Broussard was born, Noell eased the car off the tracks into a patch of scrubby weeds.

  “Is this it?” Broussard asked, seeing no cabin.

  “That’s got to be the tree they described.” She looked to her left, where the land sloped sharply. “And there’s the footpath to the cabin. But where is everybody?”

  “Could be they finished and left.”

  “Damn . . . of all the times to be without a radio.”

  She was referring to the already-discussed fact that they had come in her personal car because the official car she’d been driving had developed a mechanical problem earlier in the day and the department had not been able to come up with a replacement. “I wonder if some of them are still down at the cabin?”