Wounded Earth (26 page)

The second time Babykiller watched his videotapes, his eye rested on the man sitting next to Larabeth in the pink convertible. Babykiller knew him to be a private detective—Larabeth's bodyguard, as it were. His name was J.D. Hatten. Hatten never touched her and they spoke rarely, but there was something about him. It was barely perceptible but disturbing nonetheless.

He popped in another tape and watched Larabeth collapse again. Hatten scooped her up off the ground and hustled her away, fending off reporters. That's what she paid him to do. Still, there was something else. . .

Babykiller was good at intuiting the fuzzy aspects of human behavior. It was just that skill that had kept him alive and helped him prosper. He watched his videotapes one more time and he knew. The man was in love with his Larabeth.

He had thought Larabeth was utterly alone. Her self-imposed isolation, so like his own, had been one of her most charming qualities. Then he'd found out about the daughter, but everything was still okay. He could use the daughter. He had used the daughter. But a lover, no, a lover was too risky. People did foolish things for love. People in love felt invincible and acted that way. Adding another person into the equation, one with selfless motivations, left him with too many variables.

It was time to bring the world down around Larabeth's ears.

He called Gerald and told him to dispose of J.D. Hatten. He also told Gerald to be prepared to pick up Larabeth and Cynthia at any time. And he was to make sure Cynthia's boyfriend—that Ricky character—never saw another sunrise. Babykiller couldn't abide a man who would rat on a woman he was sleeping with.

His guts ached. Maybe tomorrow he would succumb to the easy pleasures of painkillers. Maybe he would relax and accept the end. But he didn't want drugs and he didn't want death, not yet. He wanted Larabeth. Her pale slender hands could soothe his pain. They had done it before. And her sweet voice, with its exaggerated courtesy and silly drawl, could drive dark death away. He decided to call her. He had nothing to say, but it didn't matter.

* * *

The telephone roused Larabeth. She hadn't slept, not since J.D. left. She had just reclined her fancy executive's desk chair, cranked up the footrest, and waited in the dark. She should go home, shower, and pack a few things to take with her when (if?) the FBI took her into protective custody, or to prison, or whatever they chose to call it. She didn't feel like going home alone, so she didn't go at all.

When the phone rang, she knew it wasn't J.D., calling to calm her nerves. It was Babykiller, calling to frighten her out of this malaise, and she answered the phone with an odd sense of welcome.

“Tell me you love me, Doc, and all the insanity will be over.”

“I don't believe you.” Larabeth rubbed her hands together, trying to achieve some warmth, somewhere.

“You're right. You shouldn't believe me. My insanity will end when I do, and not before.”

“I would kill you if I could.” She wondered when her fear of the man on the other end of the phone had mutated into the need for murder. It was a rare thing, she thought, in civilized modern humans, this falling away of manners and conventions and civil behavior. The clich called it a ‘thin veneer of civilization’, but it was more than that. It was a protective shell, an armor. She heard it clatter as it struck the floor.

“I'm absolutely petrified,” he hissed. “But perhaps I should take your threats seriously. You've killed at least one man in your life.”

“That was an instinctive act of self-defense. This is different. You've killed people. I don't know how many. You've killed my good friend and endangered God knows how many others. You're making a mistake, Babykiller. I'm not the kind of person you can safely box into a corner. You're liable to get hurt.” Larabeth had never heard such coldness in her own voice.

“You don't scare me. I'm older and wiser than you are.”

“Were you this ‘wise’ as you call it—I would call it twisted—before you went to Vietnam?”

“I was just like anyone else, except smarter, before they doused me with Agent Orange. And then the bastards refused to acknowledge what that did to me.”

Larabeth had heard enough self-pity from too many people to be suckered by their whining. “Grow up and get on with your life. I did.”

“Yes, you did, and I hate you for it. Vietnam destroyed my life and it should have destroyed yours. And everybody else's.”

“Vietnam and its aftermath didn't stop you from accumulating more money than anyone could acquire legally. Isn't the score even yet?”

“You can't even the score on an insult, Doc. And they slapped me in the face. They asked me to participate in a study on how Agent Orange affected Air Force veterans. ‘At last,’ I thought. ‘Some recognition of what I went through. Some admission of responsibility for making me the monster I've become.’ I'd nearly quit using my real name by then but, real name or not, I jumped at the chance to participate in this study.”

Larabeth held her breath so no sound could betray her excitement. Babykiller mustn't realize how important this information was.

“I filled out a long questionnaire and waited, for years I waited, for the next stage of the study,” he continued. “When the lab tech called me in for a physical exam, she let a critical piece of information slip. I, and all the men I served with, were the control group. I walked out of the hospital. I wasn't about to be part of their bogus study.”

His voice lost its customary control. Larabeth closed her eyes. This was it. It had to be. “They said we'd never been exposed to Agent Orange, but the other guys—the ranch hands, we called them—had been. It was a blanket denial of everything we suffered.”

He went on talking, but Larabeth was half-listening. She'd twisted around to face her computer and asked it for the database program. It took too long to get running. She was ready. She had what she needed. Babykiller's name was within her grasp. Also his age and rank. Probably his blood type.

“If you have suffered, Babykiller, then I'm sure it's because you deserved it.” She worked with mouse and keyboard, hoping he'd shut up so she could work.

“Does that mean you have deserved your suffering?”

Larabeth was silent. Even hunting dogs tire of toying with possums who play dead.

It worked. “Keep suffering, Doc,” he said. “It becomes you.” She was relieved to hear a click and a dial tone.

For the first time in more than a week, Larabeth was in charge. She was used to being in control. Hundreds of employees depended on her for their livelihood and she delivered. She liked being the boss.

Babykiller had been so very careful, tantalizing her with hints that couldn't be traced. But once, just once, he had forgotten who he was dealing with.

She had wasted hours and precious energy toying with her database all week, knowing that she hadn't a prayer of ferreting Babykiller's one name out of a cast of millions. And, all along, the answer could be summed in three words that narrowed the field a thousandfold: Operation Ranch Hand.

He was talking about the infamous Ranch Hand study. He had to be. It was government-funded. It was a long-term study. The dates were right. The branch of the military was right; the Ranch Hand subjects were Air Force veterans. Everything fit. And she had all the Ranch Hand records.

It had been a carefully thought-out study. Operation Ranch Hand had been the code name for the aerial spraying of herbicides between 1961 and 1972. Ranch Hand veterans who had handled herbicides for at least one year were chosen for the study group.

The control group, Babykiller's group, was made up of C-130 air and ground crew personnel. They were selected because they were Air Force veterans, they served in Southeast Asia, they were not exposed to herbicides in Vietnam, and their training was similar to that of the Ranch Hands.

Larabeth shivered. This was the first piece of hard evidence on Babykiller she'd gotten from the database: He had served on a C-130 air or ground crew. His name might be only a few swipes of a mouse away.

She instructed the computer to call up only those veterans included in the Ranch Hand study. And there they were, all 2,494 of them. She put her hand to her mouth. This was going to work.

She got rid of the test group, the ones who had been exposed to Agent Orange. That left 1,299 men. She looked for men who, like Babykiller, had completed the questionnaire but dropped out of the study before the physical exam. That narrowed her list to 448 men.

What else had Babykiller ever said? Once, he'd said that he hadn't used his given name since 1982. She pulled up the full VA files on each remaining Ranch Hand veteran and eliminated anyone who had been treated at a VA hospital or applied for benefits or even answered a goddamn survey since then. She got rid of 124 men that way. Then she dove back into the Ranch Hand data, looking for ways to shorten the list still further.

Babykiller had said that he was older than she was. She sorted the group by age. It didn't help, but that made sense. She had gone into the military right out of high school, in the last stages of the war. There could hardly be many Vietnam veterans younger than she was.

“Try again, Larabeth,” she whispered.

She eliminated the veterans whose survivors had notified the VA of their deaths. Only 94 names of living veterans were left.

She had one last ace in the hole. Her final assumption was based on her own opinion, but she believed in it. Strongly. The man she was coming to know was brilliant. Deranged, but brilliant. She cross-referenced her final candidates with their full military records and sorted for intelligence test results. She was looking for a genius. The testing people said that an IQ of 140 was the cutoff for a genius. All right, she thought, one-forty it is.

She held her breath as the computer searched. This should do it. She only had a hundred men left. What were the odds against more than one genius in a group that small? Larabeth was no gambler, but she would have bet on victory, And she would have won.

A single name popped up on her screen. Dickinson Byron Trigg, an enlisted flight engineer. She slapped her desk in excitement and the mouse skidded off into her lap. She called up every record she had on him and started to read.

It wasn't much, but it was a start. She had his parents' names and their home address—in 1965. He had been decorated, including a Purple Heart. He had sought psychiatric help at a VA hospital in 1977 and, for the next five years, he had filed one complaint after another, claiming that Agent Orange had given him panic disorder and Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. He claimed his Air Force service had rendered him both impotent and sterile.

When she was done, the name on the computer screen stared back at her as if to say, “What now?” She had worked so hard for this, for Babykiller's name, but it was only a piece of data. What could anyone do with it?

She wished for J.D. “The Czar of Missing Persons,” he'd called himself. Come daylight, he would have been hot on the trail of Babykiller—Dickinson Trigg. Well, she didn't have J.D. and she wasn't even “The Duchess of Missing Persons,” although she was more than a bit proud of her achievement in getting Babykiller's name.

Getting other information was different. She'd built this database, but she didn't know how to look for someone in the real world. No matter. In the morning, she'd be talking to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and, if she was lucky, they would hide her someplace that Babykiller would never look. They'd know how to find a man with the unlikely name of Dickinson Byron Trigg. It was time to go home and pack for an indefinite period of hiding. By noon tomorrow, she could be sitting across a lunch table from Agent Yancey.

And by bedtime tomorrow, Cynthia and J.D. would be safe somewhere. She prayed J.D. wouldn't have to ask the Feds to protect him and Cynthia, too. One political prisoner in the family was enough.

* * *

One-Eye was tired. It had been a long time since 1969 and he was a long way from the A Shau Valley. And this group of deadbeats bore no resemblance to the Rangers he had commanded. They were long on anti-government rhetoric, which was worse than useless to him. They were long on firepower, which was assuredly not useless. But they were short on discipline, maybe fatally so. He would have traded a good deal of firepower for a smidgen of discipline.

When the phone rang, he knew it was a message from the boss. Maybe it was the boss, himself. How would he know?

He went into the office and shut the door behind him. He didn't want the others to overhear, not even his half of the conversation. If they knew any details of the operation, one of these militia nuts might go off half-cocked and try to take charge.

It could happen. The rank-and-file members owed him no loyalty. They were pleased he had come to them, all right, and they were excited over the prospect of finally taking a potshot at the government. Hell, they were excited just to make use of their ridiculously overstocked arsenal. They followed him now, but they would throw him over in a second if one of their “real generals” gave the word.

One-Eye, not being stupid, knew these things, so he kept key elements of the plan to himself, sharing them only with Beetle Bailey, the former Navy SEAL leading the other portion of the mission. And with the anonymous voice at the other end of the phone.

“We move today. Now.” The voice was flat this morning, as usual. Emotionless. One-Eye found the lack of passion refreshing. For weeks, while training the Army of the Resurrection, he had been surrounded by people who hated the government fervently and resented bitterly the society whose conventions got in their way. They also loved weapons with a sexual passion.