Wounded Earth (9 page)

J.D. wondered if he was getting old, because all he wanted at that moment was a woman to talk to while he brushed his teeth. He didn't even want sex. Well, yes, he did. But after his lover had brushed her hair and slipped on a cute but comfortable nightgown. And only after they'd discussed the day's triumphs and disappointments—which in Larabeth's case might mean signing a multi-million-dollar contract to restore the Everglades.

He wanted someone to listen when he spent all night on a stake-out and nothing happened. He wanted someone to cry when he recovered a kidnapped child.

He might as well tell himself the truth. He didn't want just anyone to listen to him. He wanted Larabeth.

He met women all the time, at the gym, at clubs, even at the grocery store. They asked him out. He took them to dinner. Sometimes he took them home with him. They were all the same. They talked a lot, but they had nothing to say.

Before they argued, all those years ago, he hadn't really considered romance with Larabeth. He'd never once dated a client, before or since, but that wasn't the real obstacle. She'd had plenty of money and he was eking out a bare living, but that wasn't the problem, either.

When J.D. first laid eyes on Larabeth, he was a few years out of college and she already held three patents. She had made him feel like a little kid. No, she didn't. He had made himself feel like a little kid.

Then they'd argued and he hadn't seen her since. He missed her and he thought of her often, but it was years before he realized that he held every potential lover to Larabeth's standard. They all fell short.

That was when he realized that he wasn't a kid any more. He'd tripled his business in two years. Even he was surprised at the size of his profit margin. Maybe BioHeal's net service fee still dwarfed his, but that didn't bother him. He was a success. He was finished with being intimidated by the beautiful Dr. McLeod.

That was when he started watching the business pages and the society pages to see if she had married. He started keeping an eye out for her silly pink car. He had nearly worked up the nerve to call her when his secretary handed him the blessed message slip that said Dr. Larabeth McLeod had called. She wanted his help. Well, it had taken many years, but he was ready.

Dirk
Hogood walked in his bathrobe through the front hall of his father's Washington townhouse. He liked spending his summers here, away from his mother's expectations and away from Eastover Prep's rules. Dirk hoped the current presidential administration approved of the way his father ran the EPA, because Dirk loved D.C. With a high school diploma from Eastover and a couple of degrees from someplace equally snooty, he'd be well on his way to a happy life inside the Beltway.

He turned the front doorknob, intending to step onto the front stoop, nab the morning paper, and relax with the sports page. The door felt heavy, as if a big man were leaning against it with all of his weight. Dirk put his shoulder to the door and shoved. He heard something heavy slide across the stoop and the door opened another notch, just enough for him to slide through.

A huge, gray mass blocked the front door—a huge, gray, bloody mass. Someone had sliced a manatee's throat and left its carcass on the doorstep of EPA Administrator Hogood. Dirk shook his head to clear it and backed slowly through the front door.

There was going to be hell to pay for this. It wasn't smart to leave not-so-subtle messages for a man with his father's political connections. Dirk went to summon a maid to clean up the bloody mess.

* * *

Aurora Jabloski was up before dawn, packing her gear for the Cascades Area Audubon Society's annual hike and workday. She was nine now and big enough to help, but she'd gone to workday every summer since she could walk. Sometimes having an activist for a mother could be a real pain, but on days like this she was glad her mom was the president of the Audubon Society. She opened the front door to check the weather and saw a small bundle on the porch steps.

She plopped down on the top step and indulged the nine-year-old girl's love of surprise packages. When she ripped the bundle open, a stiff spotted owl carcass fell onto her lap.

“Mommy,” Aurora wailed, running into the house and leaving the front door wide open. “Mommy, come see what some bad person has done!”

* * *

Guillaume Langlois was late. He was due in Baton Rouge at a breakfast fundraiser for Save The Whales in forty-five minutes and if he didn't leave immediately, he'd be lucky to make it in time for a cup of coffee. That was fine. Guillaume had made a career of exquisitely timed entrances, and he was capable of bringing an audience to well-paying tears solely on the strength of his closing remarks. But in order to pull it off, he had to leave now.

The sun was just up and its light had not yet penetrated the depths of his front veranda when he opened the front door. The air was quiet, as usual, and oppressively damp, also as usual. The odor, however. . .the odor of the morning was far more fetid than the simple mildewy smell of his hundred-year-old home. His foot brushed something and he flicked the porch light on.

There before him was a tableau worthy of the most twisted Mardi Gras float. A huge mass of sticks and twigs lay at the top of his porch steps. It was a bald eagle's nest, he knew, because an eagle's body was lying mutilated beside it. The nest was still attached to a tree branch as thick as Guillaume's thigh and Spanish moss was arranged artistically around it. But the
piece de resistance
, the apex of the terrorist's art, was inside the nest. The eagle's chicks were resting there. Their necks had been wrung and the headless bodies posed around the perimeter of the nest. Their heads were laid neatly in the center.

Guillaume was famous for his blustering rages, but there was no one to witness his reaction, so he didn't waste energy on a tantrum. He sat on the porch swing and clapped his hand over his mouth to hold in the anger and to still the nausea.

He tried to think. Someone hated him badly. He knew that already. Lots of people hated him and lots of them were capable of violence. But not so many of them were this creative. Very few were willing to undergo the kind of risk involved in pulling off this stunt. And damn near none of them had such a finely developed sense of the absurd.

Manipulating absurdity was Guilllaume's stock-in-trade. He felt a grudging respect for the monster who had pulled this stunt. There were so few worthy adversaries on God's green Earth.

Guillaume stood quietly for a moment. If he wasn't going to throw a tantrum and he wasn't going to throw up and he wasn't going to scream, what would be the most appropriate action at this point? Slowly, he began to smile, then to laugh his big, deep, famous laugh. He laughed until the tears came.

* * *

Larabeth was drying herself with a scratchy hotel towel when she heard a noise outside her hotel room. She figured it was a bellboy throwing the complimentary daily paper outside her door. He hadn't been very quiet about it the morning before, either.

She wrapped herself in a bathrobe and set to work with a blow dryer, which required her to face a mirror. Her eyes and skin said she was tired, and they did not lie. There was something about being stalked and terrorized that disturbed her beauty sleep. Maybe a perky shade of lipstick would fool her into feeling perky herself. God knew she needed to perk up. A bunch of regulatory bureaucrats dominated her agenda for the day.

More specifically, her agenda included schmoozing with employees of the Nebraska Department of Environmental Control, pumping them for any information on the herbicide spill that might help her find Babykiller. And while she was at it, maybe she could position BioHeal as the obvious firm to clean up any residual Agent Blue contamination. She was certainly motivated by money, but there was more to it than that. There were those rare projects that offered more than money. This one offered the chance to heal, to take a devastated spot of ground and restore it to some semblance of its former self. She had no illusion of restoring the land to its long-gone prairie ecosystem. But if some farmers could use their land again, and wildlife could use the Platte without filling themselves full of toxins, well, that would be the kind of accomplishment she had in mind when she named her company BioHeal.

Larabeth was mentally engineering the cleanup and fluffing her hair when J.D. called. Slipping on her shoes as she talked, she said, “Of course, I'm ready. I can't imagine what takes you men so long.”

He grunted. “Yeah, right. I've been listening through the wall—unwillingly, I might add—to your morning routine for an hour. When it got quiet in there, I thought it might be time to give you a call.”

“Good Lord,” she said. “Did I snore, too? Don't answer that. This is the last time I sleep anywhere close to a detective.”

She hung up the phone and started stuffing spare makeup and a bundle of laboratory reports into her briefcase. She was damned if she'd give him the satisfaction of waiting even a second for her to get ready.

A moment later, J.D.'s voice came through the door. It was muffled, but her name was distinct. “Larabeth.” She thought it odd that he didn't knock. “Stay put. There's been some trouble and I need to check things out.”

She didn't quite stay put. She pulled the draperies back an inch and peered through the sheer white curtains beneath. There was nobody outside except J.D., but when he drew his handgun and started to search the stairwell, she let the curtains close.

Larabeth backed to the bed and sat down. Guns, rifles, revolvers, weapons—how she hated them all. God knew she had seen enough of weapons and their victims. It was just like Vietnam all over again. She sat there, hoping some faceless enemy wasn't waiting outside for her, hoping J.D. would be safe, dreading shots and groans and blood.

She wished she could forget the things that bullets do to human beings. She couldn't forget, so she just sat on her bed and tried to leave the insanity in the past. Her fingernails left red crescents in her palms that said she would never be wholly free of the past.

A few minutes later, J.D. knocked quietly and called her name. She released the chain and turned the knob, but the door only opened a crack. J.D.'s hand was keeping it nearly shut.

“Larabeth,” he said, “Something has happened. Let me come in for a minute.” He opened the door a few degrees more and slid inside, closing it behind him. He was pale and his lips were a firm gray line. “Someone is sending you a message.”

“What kind of message? Let me see.” She reached for the doorknob, but J.D. didn't take his hand off it.

“Someone wants you to know they are capable of violence. They want you to realize that they know where you are. They want you to know that they are willing to destroy something you hold dear and throw it in your face. I want you to know that I will never let this bastard harm you.” He opened the door. “This is going to be hard for you.”

She could see three heaps on her doorstep. She couldn't tell, but she thought they were bloody, somehow. She rushed past him and knelt beside the objects.

“It's a sea turtle,” she said, “an Atlantic Ridley, I think. Probably a juvenile. I don't know for sure. I keep people on my payroll to tell me things like that. I do know they're an endangered species. But why would somebody do this?”

The turtle was dismembered, or at least it was as dismembered as a two-foot-long turtle can be by an attacker who isn't armed with a sledgehammer or explosives. Someone had thrust a large knife as far into the openings in its shell as possible, carving off the head, the legs, the tail. They had brought the remains to Larabeth's doorstep in a black plastic bag, which lay discarded on the sidewalk. Blood, still in the process of coagulating, pooled around the bag's opening.

The pieces of the turtle itself were arranged neatly on Larabeth's morning newspaper. The shell rested on its belly in the middle of the paper and the body parts, coated with blood, were stacked in two piles on either side of the shell.

She looked up at J.D. He had holstered his gun, but he kept his hand on it as he stood over her, scanning the ridiculously ordinary motel courtyard for signs of a killer. Still on her knees, she laid a trembling hand on the turtle's shell.

It was gemstone-smooth and precisely curved, a magical work of nature. The sticky, clotted blood surrounding the turtle shell was a work of nature, too, but the beast who had spilled that blood was nothing natural. She knew who that beast was. Certainly a babykiller was capable of murdering an innocent animal.

How could she fight this shadowy figure who knew her secrets, who tracked her everywhere she went? And if he could do such violence to a harmless creature, what might he do to her?

* * *

Larabeth sat in J.D.'s room, nursing a warm soda and suffering the odd, suspended sensation that she remembered so well from Vietnam. The dead turtle crisis had passed, but the overall Babykiller problem was unresolved. Once upon a time, she remembered working with all her might to save each wounded soldier, knowing all the while that there was still a war going on outside. The feeling was the same.

The police had interviewed her quickly; she didn't have much to say. She had seen nothing and heard nothing but a bump outside her door. She had no way of knowing whether she'd heard the turtle or the newspaper being left on her doorstep.

At any rate, the noise she heard had established the earliest possible time that the turtle could have been deposited. The bellhop might be noisy, but he probably wasn't so stupid that he would have tripped over a dismembered animal without mentioning it to someone. The police had gone to question him immediately after leaving Larabeth.