Dust Devil (56 page)

“
Damn!”
she said softly, now more than ever certain this was, in fact, the
directory Lamar Rollins had somehow accessed and downloaded to the
diskettes he had sent to Renzo, that the information it contained was
why Lamar and Morse both had been murdered.

Making
random guesses, Sarah typed in
Field-Yield
and
then
fertilizer
and
Holbrooke.
When
those failed, she tried several other words that occurred to her.
Much to her despair, nothing worked. She couldn’t even be
absolutely
certain
this was the right directory. She might be wasting all her time and
effort. Still, her gut instinct told her this was, in fact, the
directory she needed to open. But how could she possibly hope to
succeed where even Morse Novak, a computer scientist extraordinaire,
had failed—at least, so far as she knew?

Sarah
stared at the monitor, chewing her lower lip and thinking hard. Maybe
she was going about this all wrong, she mused slowly. Somehow Lamar,
the whiz-kid hacker, had got into this directory. He would have
wanted to give his blackmail victim proof of that fact, she reasoned,
while leaving the files themselves intact, in case he should ever
need to access them again. Plus, he wouldn’t have wanted his
victim to be able simply to delete the files. How would Lamar have
accomplished all that?

“
Well,
how would you do it, Sarah?” she asked herself quietly.
Inspiration struck suddenly. “Of course. By changing the
victim’s password to one of my own, thereby locking him—or
her—out of the directory, while still being able to access it
myself.”

But
what password would Lamar have chosen?
Marijuana
and
all its nicknames seemed too obvious, but Sarah tried them one after
another, anyway, without success. Deeply frustrated and disheartened,
she was just about ready to call it a night, to give up and go home,
when, out of the blue—or out of sheer desperation, she thought
wryly—she suddenly recollected what Lamar’s grandmother,
Mabel Rollins, had told her and Renzo that day they had spoken with
her, about how Lamar had thought the sun rose and set in his little
sister, Keisha, and what the child, unable to say her name properly,
called herself.

Slowly,
her heart pounding with excitement, Sarah typed in the
words
Kiss-Kiss.
As
she had hoped and believed, they proved to be the key that unlocked
the directory. Once more, she asked for a list of files. When they
came up, she highlighted the first one, opened it, and scanned its
contents, absolutely sickened and horrified by what she read. This
was exactly what she had, in her heart of hearts, begun to suspect.
No wonder Lamar and Morse had both been murdered over this! Grabbing
a DAT tape from one of Bubba’s credenza drawers, she inserted
it into the tape backup machine and began to download all the files.

Sarah
was so engrossed in what she was doing that she never heard the
whisper of a door opening and then closing in the distance, or the
light tread of footsteps moving stealthily down the corridor beyond
Bubba’s office, in her direction.

Time
reveals all things.

Adagia

—
Desiderius
Erasmus

“
Did
you find what you were looking for, Coal Lump?”

At
the softly but viciously sneered epithet, Sarah’s skin crawled,
so the fine hairs on her nape and arms stood on end, and she was
suddenly just seven years old again, standing on the commons,
terrified, the secondhand lunch box clutched to her breast.

“
Evie!”
she exclaimed, stricken as she glanced up and spied her childhood
nemesis looming there in the doorway, holding a hunting rifle—a
30-06—almost casually in her hands. Like Sarah, Evie wore a
shell, a pair of jeans and sandals. But incongruously, a string of
pearls encircled her throat—as though she were on her way to
the Grain Elevator or the country club. In the dim lamplight, the
pearls seemed somehow alive, a lustrous, oyster-colored snake coiling
and slithering around Evie’s throat. A pair of surgical gloves
encased her hands. Her icy blue eyes glittered with a cold, cunning
light. “Have you gone mad?” Sarah cried—knowing
that of course, that was the only possible explanation, that Evie was
insane. “What do you think you’re doing, Evie?”

“
Oh,
I think you already know the answer to that, Coal Lump. You got into
the directory—just as Sonny and Lamar and Morse did. So now,
I’ve got to kill you, too, the same way I killed all of them,
so Daddy will be safe. He’s a brilliant man, my daddy. He’s
going to be president of the United States someday, you know, and I’m
going to live in the White House. And I won’t let you stand in
the way of all that. Not you, not anybody. Take the tape out of that
backup machine. Then shut down the computer and get up out of that
chair. Slowly, Coal Lump. No sudden moves, or I’ll splatter you
all over big, bad Bubba’s office.”

By
now, Sarah’s heart was beating so wildly and erratically in her
breast that she thought it was going to explode. Somewhere inside
her, a dam had burst, releasing a flood of adrenaline that gushed and
churned through her shaking body. Her mouth was dry; her breathing
was so rapid and shallow that she feared she was hyperventilating,
that she would faint, that her knees would give out from under her,
sending her tumbling to the floor. Her mind raced ninety miles an
hour, spinning out of control, the way Alex’s electronic car
had done at the Penny Arcade that afternoon when Renzo had—like
the dust devil that had danced on the distant horizon that
day—swept
back
into town, his arrival proving a catalyst. Vaguely, she expected to
see the words
Game
Over
flash
on Bubba’s monitor.

She
had to stop panicking and think, she realized, her survival instinct
suddenly shifting into high gear—or Evie was going to kill her.
Determinedly, Sarah licked her lips to moisten them and swallowed
hard to force down the lump in her throat, which seemed to be cutting
off her air. She had to play for time, to try to get Evie to talk.
Abruptly, it dawned on her that Evie had confessed to
three
murders.

“
Sonny?”
Sarah murmured disbelievingly—for surely that couldn’t be
right, could it? “You said you killed your brother Sonny, Evie.
Was he the first one, then, to discover what Field-Yield, Inc. was
doing?”

“
Yes.”
Evie’s chillingly distorted face slowly softened, took on a
trancelike, dreamlike quality as she remembered. “He had come
home that summer from Harvard, stuffed full of idealism and
righteousness, a gloriously burning ambition to change the world—as
though anybody ever has. Or could. He was like a pure, shining golden
flame. Sonny thought Man was a noble creature, blessed with a mind
that could soar to infinite heights, envision boundless dreams—and
then make them real. His head was always in the clouds. Books,
poetry, music. He sought perfection, never realizing that even if it
were possible to achieve it, it’s not in Man’s nature to
endure it. He never understood that we’re all savages under the
skin, that the only true law is the law of the jungle, that the weak
are always winnowed out, that it’s only the strongest, the
fittest of us who survive, those who’re willing to fight for
whatever they can, however they have to do it—like Daddy and
me. Once he found the directory, Sonny couldn’t live with it.
He was going to make the files public, tear down everything Daddy had
ever scratched and struggled to build. I couldn’t allow that.”

“
So
you killed Sonny. But how can that be, Evie? He
died
that summer at the old quarry. He fell off the seventh rock, plunged
underwater and broke his neck in a terrible, tragic accident.”

“
No,
it was no accident. I was there that day, remember? I had my hunting
rifle in the trunk of my car, because Daddy and I had been skeet
shooting earlier that morning. When Renzo began to taunt Sonny,
goading him up the rocks, I realized then how I could kill him and
nobody would ever know. They’d think it was an accident—
or that Renzo was to blame. There wasn’t any risk at all,
because even if Renzo survived, who would believe him innocent, a
Dagotown boy like him, with a mobster father? So I slipped away to my
car. No one was watching me. Their attention was riveted on the
diving. I took out my rifle, crept away to the edge of the woods,
where I climbed a tree, so nobody would see me make the shot. I
couldn’t afford to leave a bullet in Sonny’s body, of
course. So at first, I wasn’t sure exactly how I would do it.
But then I saw how the two of them were standing, that if Renzo were
startled, he’d probably lose his footing and fall, taking Sonny
with him. So when I heard Junior Barlow driving up in his backfiring
clunker, I pulled the trigger, grazing Renzo’s shoulder. He and
Sonny fell.”

“
And
Sonny broke his neck and died.”

“
Yes.
And then Renzo ran away, and everybody blamed him, just as I’d
known they would. It was the perfect crime. Sonny was never half so
clever as I. And neither are you, Coal Lump. I know what you’re
doing, how you think you can keep me talking, play for time until
help arrives. But help isn’t going to come—at least, not
in time for you.”

“
You
won’t get away with it, Evie,” Sarah insisted, her fear
now a dull, gnawing worry at the pit of her stomach, no longer
controlling her. “You won’t be able to blame Renzo for my
death.”

“
Of
course I will. I only have to suggest that you’d grown
frightened of him, that you were going to testify against him at the
trial. I’ll say you came to me, desperate, looking for Bubba,
that Renzo had attacked you and tried to kill you, but you had
managed somehow to escape and wanted Bubba’s help and
protection. Everybody in town knows what a jealous temper Renzo
has—especially where you’re concerned. Everyone knows
how, that day in the sheriff’s office, he tried to beat Bubba
to death over you, and then knocked down Hoag for calling you a
whore. Nobody will doubt my word. It’s the big lie. If you tell
it often enough, everybody eventually believes it. So you see, Coal
Lump, I
will
get
away with murder, just as I always have. Now, take the tape out of
that backup machine, then shut down the computer.”

While
Evie had talked, Sarah had, with a start, realized Renzo’s
pocket tape recorder, lying by the computer, was still switched on
and in the Stop-Record position. So because it was voice activated,
it had recorded every word Evie had spoken. Now, as Sarah leaned
forward to
remove
the DAT tape from the backup machine, she laid her hand unobtrusively
over the tape recorder, hoping Evie wouldn’t notice
her
action.
At the same time as she pushed the button on the backup
machine
to
release the DAT tape, she also popped the microcassette from the tape
recorder, quickly slipping it into the pocket of her jeans.

“
Just
out of curiosity, what’s Lamar’s password?” Evie
inquired casually as Sarah turned off the computer.