Authors: Noreen Ayres
“He's a genuine multitalent, this Blackman,” she said. She set the pot back in its well and paused to scan the remaining doughnuts in the box. Not taking one, she faced us then, the whole imposing bulk of her solidly confident, mothering, and smelling slightly of floral perfume. “There's another outbound we want him for,” she said. “Pig semen. Illegal export of pig semen.”
A man died at the Canadian border last year trying to smuggle bull semen, she said. “You think this isn't big business? It is,” Agent Vogel said. She settled again onto the couch, moving her hands as if conducting some unseen orchestra. “This guy at the border was a real Rhodes scholar. The port-of-entry agent was asking him the normal stuff, nothing fancy, when what does the idiot do but accelerate through with his Styrofoam ice chest bouncing on the floorboards. Some cowboy in a Previa ran him off the road head-on into a pine tree. Turns out he was a twenty-two-thousand-a-year laundromat owner, but guess what? He had records in his apartment showing a fifty-thousand-dollar profit in two years from, yo-ho, âtransportation services.'”
“Wait now,” Joe said, lacing his fingers over his knee and casting a look at the ceiling with a look that said he was being goofed on. “He smuggles pig semen and precursors, that right?”
“Can I help it,” Christine Vogel said, “if he's an entrepreneur? Listen, we get weirder cases than this every day. Come by my office sometime.” She said it without irritation, just fact.
Joe's hands went up in a Who, me? gesture. “Oh, I'm not doubting you, nuh-uhh.” But he grinned.
She patted her dress into place on her lap. “In 1983,” she said, “a Texas boar sold for
fifty-six thousand dollars
, and you can bet it wasn't for his bacon. Fourteen billion sperm in a single shot, Number One Big Daddy of Pig Daddies.”
Speechless, the two men sat looking at each other.
Joe said, “I can do that.”
We laughed, and I realized it was the first time in what seemed like a very long time.
“We think Blackman's shipping stuff off his farm to the Philippines,” Christine said. “Pork producers are after a disease-resistant, lean pig, and if they can cut corners on development, all to the better. Never fear, U.S. meat producers steal genetic technology too. Unfortunately, government agencies have a tendency to bump into each other. We've got the departments of Ag and Commerce who'd have interest in this kind of transport, we've got the FDA's APHISâthat's Animal, Plant, and Health Inspection Serviceâand even Treasury, for taxes and tariffs. And us.”
“And now us,” Captain Exner said. He was resting on his forearms, wagging his handsome head. From that position, he changed, put an elbow on the desk and curled a finger over his mouth, and I knew he didn't quite know what he was going to do with this situation, and was waiting for Christine to lay it all out.
I said, “So what is it, exactly, that you want
me
to do?” looking between Agent Vogel and the captain.
“We want you to hang near Blackman,” she said. “We want you to stick with the creeps who killed Bernie Williams.” She looked at Exner as if expecting either objection or a nod of strong support.
“What if someone saw me out there? I mean, I don't think anyone did, butâ”
“Call him up,” she said. “You have to give him a reason for splitting, right? Do that, and listen to his tone. The way he talks. You'll be able to figure it out.” The pillows of her body moved with grace.
“What if,” I said, hesitantly, “he doesn't know about the murder?”
“If he doesn't know about the murder,” Captain Exner said, “he's too dumb to run an operation like Agent Vogel's talking about.”
Joe said, “What kind of backup are we giving her?”
“She'll have what she needs, of course.”
Christine said, “I'd like you back out there as soon as possible.”
“The farm? Why?” I felt my breath come shorter.
“We have to know what they did with the body,” she said, and then dropped her gaze.
“Keep an eye out for newly turned earth,” the captain said. “There's a good chance, even with everything going on out there, they stashed it on the property.”
“Don't underestimate the stupidity of creeps,” Christine said. “Besides, it's familiar ground. They could be more afraid of being seen by moving it. We just need somebody up close and personal.”
Joe said, almost apologizing, “You may be able to get physical evidence. The knife. Bindings.”
I was quiet but thinking, How am I going to bag anything? Put on my rubber gloves and bag bloody feed sacks, haul out my tape and say, Excuse me, Paulie, while I just run a measure here, okay?, and by the way, will you hand me that blade?, I have to hang an evidence tag on it. My silence must have told.
“If you get out there,” Joe said, “and these guys are there and acting the least bit hinky, leave.” He looked at the captain then, for contradiction, but didn't get any.
The captain said, “We'll have plainclothes out. Repairmen, feed suppliers, somebody. Just keep us informed as to when you're going back.”
“What's my excuse for showing up?”
“Say you lost your wallet. You got suddenly sick, couldn't find him, left without your wallet. Bring one you can plant if you need to. If that doesn't work, say you guess somebody lifted it. How are you at lying?”
Agent Vogel's face showed the slightest amusement when I answered, “I passed the department polly for the background investigation okay.” She set her coffee on the corner of the captain's desk next to her while she dipped into each pocket of her sweater. Then she bent over for her tiny hard-leather, metal-studded purse that looked like she lifted it off her teenage daughter, and poked inside for a moment, saying, “I'm out of cards, but for one.” She handed it to me. “Call me if you need to. Anything at all.”
“Don't carry that with you,” the captain said. “Memorize it.”
“Good plan,” Christine said, checking her watch, and while sitting there for another five minutes, managing somehow to always be in motion.
When Joe and I left Captain Exner's, I was awash in images, concerns, and confusions, and remained silent most of the way back. Joe hoped to cheer me up by giving commentary on a new lunch place nearby. At the hallway where we split off to go to our separate offices, Joe said, “All this because your brother has interesting taste in women. Do you ever think whatever you're doing at a given moment in time will have great significance downstream?”
“I try never to think at all,” I said.
“You're trying to sell me swampland, baby.”
“It's just real hard,” I said, “to imagine how Miranda Robertson could figure in all this. The
only
connection to anything is that she by mere chance knows Monty Blackman. We smooge up to Blackman and find all this other stuff.”
“That
was
her car in the canyon,” Joe said. “She still has some explaining to do, if she's alive to do it. But that does seem a whole different horse, doesn't it?”
“Jolene told me one of Monty's girlfriends was named Miranda. She didn't know any more than that and I didn't have time to ask.”
“Back to square one, then, aren't we? Listen, hon,” he said, stepping nearer, “are you going to be all right today?”
“Sure.”
“Don't go anywhere, now, without backup. Wait till Captain Exnerâ”
“Right now I'm going to go hide under my desk,” I said, “and not come out.”
“I'll come too.”
“Get to work, you slouch,” I said.
I didn't have to go to my desk, but I did. I was relieved to find nothing urgent needing to be worked on, but for a moment wondered how much effect I had in the lab's scheme of things, since there wasn't work piled on my desk.
Pulling out my sketch pad I began mapping what I remembered of the Avalos farm, the stables, and the shed. But I couldn't concentrate, and I kept going over and over the images from yesterday, kept going back to the pigs huffing and chattering in their pens; the murkiness in the shed and then the horror; thistle weaving against clouds; and barbed wire shish-kebobbed with dead things.
I got up and walked downstairs to Property and asked the clerk for evidence sent over from Dr. Schaffer-White on the Blue Jay case. He brought out a sack, and I opened it and dumped the section of wire on a piece of white paper on his desk. A metal strip of shark's teeth. A broken wire hooked through a drilled hole in the end, somebody's dream of a choker. It was like one of the pieces Joe and I found in the trash barrel. I asked the clerk, “Ever see anything like that before?”
“Nope,” he said, brushing his chin with a thumb. “What is it?”
“A not-very-successful weapon of destruction. We found it on somebody's neck.”
“Yuck.”
I asked if he had a Polaroid, and he opened a drawer and took out a camera and let me take a picture of the piece with a ruler next to it for reference. I thanked him, left, and walked the half block over to the library and looked up “wire” on the computer index.
The screen was black with orange letters, and my eyes weren't focusing well. Only sixteen hours ago I'd been witness to a gruesome murder, and here I was in the sanctuary of a library, civilization all around.
I printed out the first level of book titles, thinking I'd file it and come back when I wasn't so tired and when I didn't have Monty on my mind, knowing I'd have to call him, and then I hit the wrong key to exit and got another level of menu, and a book title jumped out at me as if it read my mind:
The “Bobbed Wire” Bible.
Quickly, I wrote down the call number and went in search. Positive that it would be just my luck that this branch wouldn't have the book, I searched the shelves anyway, and there it was. Tan, softcover, printed by Cow Puddle Press, Sunset, Texas. I went to a table in the corner and started turning pages. Hundreds of drawings of wire, in brown ink, with names and patent dates under them, filled the pages.
I found Les in a room at the lab with a tech at a comparison microscope. The tech was a young man who never said much, and out of his lab coat looked like he spent all his spare time trying out for powerlifting championships.
“Smokey,” Les said, “how's it going? You lightened your hair. It was redder.”
“Red doesn't hold very well.”
“Go natural, like me.”
“What do we have new on the Carbon Canyon?”
“Records on the mammo-whammy.”
“The what?”
“The mammogrammy. Boob-tube prints on your very-ex-sister-in-law. Now don't take offense. You're a pretty good egg, you know that? She's a good egg,” he said to the tech, who looked embarrassed as he set aside a broken screwdriver he'd been examining. “Dr. Robertson was good enough to get me a report in no time at all.”
“You mean Miranda
did
have implants?”
“That's right,” Les said with a gleam in his eye.
I couldn't believe it. That meant Nathan
knew
when I asked him, and he didn't tell. Maybe he encouraged her; maybe he liked her big knockers. And it meant the body in the horrible fire was Miranda for sure. I didn't let Les Fedders know what I was feeling. I just said, “Can I see the report?”
“Come on down to my digs.”
In an empty office the investigators use when they're in the lab, Lester lifted the briefcase he'd stashed between a desk and the wall and extracted a clasp envelope. He slid out several stapled pages. “Pictures from
Penthouse,
” Les said. “Here we are.”
There were no pictures. Only a written statement by a plastic surgeon. I barely had the pages in my hand before Les was around behind me, leaning over my shoulder and tapping with one long, knobby finger on the word “silicone.” “She had silicone. It makes a mess in the crematoriums. Remember, the woman in the car had only a little melted plastic. The woman in the car is not Miranda Robertson. Oingo-boingo.”
“Les, this is wonderful!”
“Not for Miss Crispy Critter, it isn't.” He moved back a decent distance and when I turned, he was standing with one knuckle on the edge of the desk, looking like a thin and haggard Kewpie doll.
“Thanks for this, Les.”
He came forward and took the papers back from me. “Hey,” he said, “I missed you at the pigout we had for Turrell's b-day Friday.”
“Have you ever seen me at one of those things?”
“I will, someday.”
“You're a real missionary, Les.”
“I try.”
“What about the dentals again?”
“Oh,” he said, unflapping another envelope and slipping out a paper with a map of teeth predrawn in red ink, on which a dentist would notate wherever cavities were filled, crowns awarded, roots tunneled, or appliances screwed. The open red mouth for Miranda's chart was free of marks. “Like I said, this woman has her teeth cleaned, nothing more,” he said. “One of those God-given mouths that can gnaw billiard balls.”
“How close is Meyer Singer to coming up with anything, do you know?”
“Meyer takes his own good time. By the way, he goes to my church. I didn't even know that. Our church is so big. You been there? Crystal Cathedral?”
I shook my head no. “Now I have something for you,” I said. I took out the book on barbed wire I had slipped in my jacket pocket and turned to item number 494: Textile Carding Wire. I put the snapshot down next to it. “Wire on the Blue Jay victim.” I slid another Polaroid down beside it that I'd taken of the wire roll found in the trash barrel and that I'd stopped back at Property to get. “Wire Joe and I brought in.”
Skeptically, Les looked at them and at me, and said, “Okay-y?”
“I'll get back to you,” I said brightly, no time or inclination to tell him about yesterday. Let Joe do it. “Just thought you'd like to know. Thanks again for the good work on the med charts.”