I did some mental math. “So he was in Vietnam. Was he a helicopter pilot?”
“Funny you should ask.” Not Tom Latimer smiled at me, a nice, slow, conspiratorial smile.
“He was the guy in the picture at George’s house,” I said.
“Smart woman. The police missed that one, but I caught it when I went through the house yesterday. I called up George’s service record, and there was our man Teague. George was part of an intelligence unit, and Teague was part of his crew. But things didn’t go well for them. They got into trouble for trading army rations to starving villagers for their family heirlooms. Antique altars, artifacts like that. Not that such peccadilloes were all that unusual, but George forgot to polish the right brass, and the two did a little time in the brig.”
“George, George,” I said, shaking my head. “And this Teague. Missing for twenty years, you say. Which means he’s not dead, but you’ve been looking for him?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It seemed he used his helicopter to drop napalm on the villagers’ crops, just to make sure they were hungry enough to part with the goods. And he had certain other rather antisocial proclivities.”
“Such as?”
“Such as ‘liberating’ land mines from the army base they rotated him to back home, that sort of stuff. Oh, and aggravated assault, but that’s more a matter for the police.”
“And good old George had a picture of this guy in his house.”
The FBI agent leaned back and smiled pleasantly. “Kinda makes you wonder.”
“And this phantom’s fingerprints were in the storage unit. Where?”
“On tools. Digging equipment. But there were no fresh fingerprints in the house except George’s and yours, and there
were none on the stolen car. We lifted a partial of another man’s thumb print off one of the shell casings we found in it, though, which suggests the shooter loaded it a while before and wasn’t thinking about covering his tracks when he did that.”
I said, “Then it was probably a hunting rifle.”
“Yes, or something you’d carry in your pickup if you wanted to be armed but blend in with the crowd. We had reports of a beat-up green pickup with gun racks in the neighborhood earlier that evening, but no guns, and by the time we got that report, it was nowhere to be found.”
I said, “I saw him yesterday.”
“Who?”
“Teague.”
Not Tom Latimer’s eyes went wide. “Where?”
“At the conference. Hiding in a van out behind the Cliff Lodge. Officer Raymond called in the license plate numbers. What ever became of that?”
Carlos said, “Detective Bert just wrote a note on that. Clean. They found the van farther up the canyon, parked at a private home—no one in it, no one around. It was registered to a Frank Smeely.”
The FBI agent sat up and grinned. “Gotcha, you dirty lowlife!”
“Who?” I asked.
He said, “Smeely is another commercial collector. Into the high-stakes stuff like the guys we prosecuted for the Sue case. I got fingerprints and prints from military boot in Dishey’s storage unit and I got my military escapee in Smeely’s van. Connect the dots.”
“The guy with the Australian hat.”
“That’s his style, yes.”
I said, “But that doesn’t prove who killed George.”
“Not.”
I saw again in my mind’s eye the piercing look the man in the van had given me—an outrageous, soul-consuming come-hither stare—and felt a tour through a witness protection program looming in my future. I began to fidget with the salt shaker on the table, focusing my eyes on it, wishing it contained the whole universe within its simplicity. I said, “I had a glimpse of the guy who was following me. The shooter. He was wearing gloves—that’s what made his fingers seem so thick—but he wasn’t the man in that photograph. Well, I mean, not exactly. They looked kind of alike, maybe.”
“Kind of like they were brothers, maybe?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes, I saw your Identikit make. Our disappearing man had a kid brother. Also of the disappearing variety.”
The memory of Nina’s face in full reverie filled my mind. The high cheek bones, the riveting stare. Were these men her kin? “What do you know about him?”
“Dropped out of school at fourteen. Not a mental giant.”
I sighed, remembering how easily I had spotted him, and how quickly he had panicked and fired on me and Ray. “That fits.” What had the man in the house been looking for when I came back more quickly than expected and interrupted him? “So you looked for George’s paperwork in the storage unit, but it wasn’t there. Were there any file cabinets at all?”
“Yes, a small two-drawer. But both drawers had been emptied. Except for one sheet of paper that had slipped down underneath the bottom drawer.”
I opened a palm upward. “Which said …”
“It was an order form for Perma-Pak. That’s nitrogen-packed food.”
I squinted. “Explain.”
“If you want food with a nice long shelf life, you get it dried and packed in cans in nitrogen. Number-ten cans, in this case. Imagine what you’d do with a number-ten can of egg
mix, for instance. It’ll keep up to five years until you open the can, but then you have to use it pretty fast. So it would help to have a big family, right? That’s about fifteen dozen eggs, as it turns out.”
“How do you know that?”
“I phoned the contact on the order blank. It’s a place out in California. Nice woman answered the phone. She said she was surprised that I actually had an order blank, because their sort of customers usually phone her up from a pay booth and order it by the truckload—they get fifteen percent off that way—but they want to pay by cashier’s check and arrange a dead drop. You getting the picture? No paper trail.”
“Militiamen?”
“Militias, yes; she said Perma-Pak was number one on the gun-show circuit. She said someone had put her name and number down on some Web site as the woman to call for the dried foods. She calls them the ‘YTwoK crazies.’ They’re all certain that Armageddon’s going to hit in the year 2000. So you pack your basement full of canned foods.”
Manna,
I thought.
Dried food …
“But wait,” I said. “George lived alone. And I looked in his basement, and his refrigerator, for that matter. All he has is a week’s supply of frozen burritos.”
“Then that means he’s either stockpiling somewhere else or acting as the go-between for somebody else.”
“Beans for bones,” I said.
“It’s a possibility,” the agent replied. “And George made notes on the bottom of the sheet: he’d evidently divided his allotment.”
“With whom?’
“With a guy named Lew.”
I spun the salt shaker in the center of the table. “The geology department tech at the university here. He went on digs with Dan Sherbrooke.”
The FBI agent whistled. When I looked up, he was smiling blissfully. “So Dan’s in this after all.”
I said, “Could be. Running a dig’s expensive. And there’s all that prep work, and you got to pay for storage, and—but wait. Two drawers of filing is next to nothing. Anyone with a Ph.D. makes notes. It’s ground into you. A love of data. Information is power. Even if George didn’t like being pinned down on
his
facts, he had a roomful of books at his house, so he’d have records somewhere. So where were the rest of his files?”
“Right,” said the agent. “There weren’t any marks on the floor to suggest that any other file cabinets had been removed, either. So where were his sales records? He had to have something to show the IRS, even if they were cooked records, because we’ve got his income-tax returns, and he lists sales to Smeely’s delightful little enterprise, among others. George didn’t have sales papers at home, either, and there were nothing but magazine articles, profession-related E-mails, and video games on his computer. Which all suggests he had another storage unit somewhere else. Where? If you were a person who liked your privacy and you’d just committed murder, you’d want those records, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And if you were in the business of selling fossils but you’d lost your middleman, you’d want to find out whom to contact. And then the mysterious Mr. X tosses the house. And then Bert tells Sherbrooke where I’m staying. And then someone tries to get into my motel room. And then I see your disappearing man at the conference in Smeely’s van.”
The FBI agent grinned. “Interesting, huh?”
I hung my head in misery. “Ver-r-r-y interesting.”
AT THE SALT Palace, I waited inside the six-story-tall cylindrical glass entrance foyer, which was in fact a sounding chamber.
Eight glass doors opened inward to the convention hall, and sixteen opened outward onto West Temple. Over each pair of doors was mounted a tall wooden acoustic sound box, like an organ pipe. Outside, along the sidewalk, stood a row of windmills, cocked at differing angles turning at differing rates in the morning breeze. As each blade completed a full rotation, an electronic pulse was transmitted to a corresponding sounding box, and a soft, ethereal tone reverberated through the chamber. I had never experienced anything like it before, and I was transfixed, soothed, in love. My stomach had been in a knot since speaking with the FBI agent, and I wanted to hang on to this fragile bit of tranquillity. Just as with the moment of looking into Ray’s eyes, I did not want to leave and face the outside world again, the world of professional jealousy and scientific scrutiny and child beating and renegade helicopter pilots with gun fetishes, but neither did I want to go farther inside. Just then, inside scared me even more. How much sweeter to remain in this place between in and out, in the comfort of man-made shelter, but soothed by this acoustic reminder of nature’s power and presence.
Ray waited with me. We were both silent, savoring our moment of safety.
At 7:30, the bus arrived—the first of two, in fact—and I nodded good-bye to Ray. “I see old what’s-his-name getting on the second bus,” I whispered, carefully not looking toward Not Tom Latimer.
Ray continued to stare up into the sound chamber, his lips moving silently.
I said, “If he’s along, you don’t have to worry about me, right?”
Ray’s eyes tightened with worry. “That’s not the message I get.” He lowered his gaze to me. “You have the phone number?”
“Yes,” I said, patting the pocket that held a slip of paper
with his mother’s phone number on it. If anything went wrong, I had promised I would call him there. He would be spending the day there baby-sitting Nina.
“Go if you must,” he said.
AT THE TOP step of the bus, I was greeted by that usual moment of social stress in which I, as newcomer, must make eye contact with a miscellany of strangers and decide which of the open seats I shall occupy. Two seats on each side of the center aisle, four columns of faces, eleven rows, all regarding me blankly, or staring out the windows, or falling back asleep, or focused in conversation with the persons nearest them. Dan Sherbrooke looked up briefly from where he sat up near the driver, his eyes magnified into his usual look of doelike surprise by his jury-rigged glasses. They held no special spark of recognition, let alone guilt. His face hung with apparent uninterest. I hurried past him.
I found a roost about four rows from the front, next to a tall man of about sixty who had a full head of gray hair and a kind, thoughtful face. We introduced ourselves. His name was John, and he was curator of the vertebrate fossil collections at a large midwestern natural history museum. “So you’re into dinosaurs,” I said.
John smiled. “Dinosaurs. You want to know what I think of dinosaurs?”
“Yeah.”
John pantomimed spitting on the floor. “I think
that
of dinosaurs. Now, fish to amphibian, early tetrapods,
that’s
where the interest is.”
“Oh, really? Why?” I asked as the bus pulled out into the stream of southbound traffic and began its turns toward the highway.
John regaled me for a space of fifteen or twenty minutes
with
a string of multisyllabic Latinate words I could only tangentially understand, and that much only because he spoke as often with his hands as with words, and larded his descriptions with more familiar words, such as
jaw
and
leg.
But his enthusiasm for his topic was infectious, and it was a pleasure to indulge, for the time being, in the safe, orderly life of the intellect. As he chatted away, I watched out the window for indications of where the bus was going. It turned south onto Interstate 15, whizzing past the rush-hour traffic flowing north from Provo.
As John wound up his dissertation on the marvels of early land-dwelling four-limbed creatures, I said, “Thanks, I enjoyed that. But let me ask you: What do you say to people who ask you to justify your work?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m talking about the people who don’t believe in science, or in the work for its own sake.”