A Clean Kill (21 page)

“Must have lots of traffic.” Kai-Li shuddered and walked around the desk to sit on the tufted leather sofa. “I’ve seen enough of that.”

The page popped up. This time, the same finger-dipped-in-blood font spelled out the title on a black background: B
LACK
A
NGEL OF
D
EATH
.

I started reading. Seconds passed.

Kai-Li broke the silence. “What’s it say? I mean,” she hesitated, “does it say anything useful?”

“Maybe.”

“Is it about Zion Thibbodeaux?”

“Oh.” I realized Kai-Li had the wrong idea. “No, no. This is something Dr. Adderson mentioned early on when she was, I think, just kind of grasping at straws to explain what had happened to Kate Baneberry. When I asked how Mrs. Baneberry could have died without anyone knowing it was murder, she said to read up on the Black Angel of Death.”

“So.” She sat up straight and searched my eyes. “What’s it say?”

“You want the details?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Okay, then. What it says it that some limp-dick nurse in New York murdered at least ten hospital patients by injecting something called Pavulon—whatever the hell that is—into their IVs.”

Kai-Li stood. “It’s a paralytic agent.”

“Yeah, it says here they found one of his victims gasping for breath.”

She grimaced. “Paralyze the muscles, and the patient suffocates. The really hideous thing about that particular
drug is that the patient remains mentally alert and fully aware of what’s happening.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. Oh,” she said. “And there’s a variation on the theme. Sometimes the killer gives a paralytic agent to the victim and then administers a potassium push so the death looks more natural.”

“What’s a potassium push?”

“A syringe of concentrated potassium solution. The idea is that the paralytic agent—some of which are absorbed by the body with no trace—keeps the victim from convulsing when the potassium is administered.”

“But the potassium …”

“Is a naturally occurring substance within the body and would not set off alarms during the autopsy.”

I logged off the Internet, shut down the laptop, and closed the cover. As I shoved the laptop away from me, Kai-Li motioned at the computer with her chin. “Are you going to burn it, too?”

I hadn’t thought about what I was doing. “Maybe just hose it off.” I stood up. “Look, you seem to know about this stuff.”

“Just what I’ve read.”

“Well, tell me this, what does this potassium push—which I guess is what actually kills the person—what does it do? I mean, I understand the killer is giving the victim too much of the stuff. But what is the actual cause of death?”

“Oh. I thought you got that from the web page.” Kai-Li turned toward the living room. Over her shoulder, she said, “The flood of potassium causes cardiac arrest. You know, a heart attack.”

Endless dreams of floating, serial-killer trading cards had filled the night, leaving me feeling a little grumpy—and a little ridiculous. You never know what’s going to get to you.

“I want someone inside Russell and Wagler.”

Joey had come over with a handful of paperwork on a Mr. Zion Thibbodeaux and ended up joining Kai-Li and me for breakfast. Sheri was still sleeping off her holiday cocktails. When the food was gone, the three of us had wandered into the living room to talk things over.

Kai-Li said, “I could do it. Law firms have a huge turnover in secretaries. I could just walk in …”

I interrupted. “And say, ‘Hello. I have a Ph.D. in behavioral psychology and can type eighty words a minute.’ ”

Kai-Li sat up a little straighter. “Well, as a matter of fact, I can. And I wouldn’t have to give them the right name.”

Joey sat his mug of morning coffee on the end table and leaned forward. “Wouldn’t work. If we’re right about what they’re doin’, these folks are breakin’ the law seven ways to Sunday. They’d be bein’ careful, and they’d check you out and find out you volunteered evidence at Tom’s hearing that they been buyin’ juries.”

Kai-li said, “I wouldn’t have to give them my real name, I could …”

Joey was shaking his head.

“Who then?” A note of aggression had crept into Kai-Li’s voice. She wanted to play undercover cop and wasn’t happy about Joey’s attitude.

Joey answered her with two words. “Loutie Blue.”

Kai-Li asked, “Who is Loutie Blue?”

Joey was on to something. I said, “Can she type?”

Kai-Li asked again, “Who are we talking about?”

Joey looked at me. “Yeah, she can type. Used to work some as a temp after she stopped stripping.”

Kai-Li stood up and raised her voice. “Who the hell is Loutie Blue and why was she stripping?”

Joey looked amused. “You don’t know Tom that well, but he dates a lot of strippers. Poor bastard proposes marriage to one about once a month.”

I told Joey to shut up and then explained that Loutie Blue was Joey’s best operative,
his
girlfriend, and someone who once took her clothes off for a living.

Kai-Li crossed her arms. “And I guess it doesn’t matter if she can type because she’s such an unbelievable babe that they’ll hire her just for office decoration.”

I looked at Joey, and he nodded. “That’s about the size of it.”

Kai-Li turned to leave the room. On the way out, I’m pretty sure I heard her utter the word “neanderthals.”

A few minutes later, Joey left to make arrangements for Loutie Blue to wear something short and tight to the offices of Russell & Wagler Monday morning. Knowing Kai-Li was smart as hell and wanted to be useful, I handed over Joey’s research on Zybo and asked her to take another whack at the Internet.

An hour later, when my sleepy and slightly hung-over guest, Sheri Baneberry, stumbled into the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee, I carefully explained to her exactly why she was going to fire me. To her credit, she thought it was a hell of an idea.

Freezing rain had fallen the night before. Now, as Sheri Baneberry bid us farewell, a light snow blew in from the bay, spreading a perfect white sheet across slick roads and crystalized winter grass.

Back inside, Sheri’s lighted tree filled the house with some kind of hope. Logs crackled in the fireplace. I walked into the study, unlocked the gun closet, and pulled out insulated boots and a heavy Marmot ski coat with fleece lining. I grabbed a hunting cap off the top shelf.

Kai-Li stuck her head into the room as I was dressing to go out. “You look like Elmer Fudd.”

“I was thinking more Jeremiah Johnson.”

She propped her hip against the door frame, crossed her arms, and smiled. “I’m sticking with Elmer.”

“I’m going to check outside.”

She didn’t ask a lot of questions. And she didn’t lecture when I pulled my Browning nine-millimeter out
of a drawer, loaded the clip, and seated it in the gun. She simply nodded.

As I walked through the living room to the front door, I spied my twenty-gauge over-and-under leaning in one corner. It was stupid, really. I’d relied on the bird gun for protection—carrying it from downstairs to upstairs at night, keeping it empty, carrying shells in my hip pocket—instead of arming myself properly.

My father told me as a kid, “If you’ve got a handgun, you’ll be tempted to use it when you could better talk your way out of trouble. Or when a bigger guy takes a swing at you, it’s easier to reach for a gun than take a beating. But,” he said, “the prisons are full of people who would rather’ve had a hundred ass whippings than to’ve pulled a trigger and ruined their lives.”

Sam was never a font of fatherly advice, but I’d always remembered that one. And, truth be told, up until now I hadn’t worried about getting shot by the Cajun. He could have done that any time he wanted. Instead, the man had locked into my fears with waking nightmares—what my mother used to call “day-mares”—of vile poisons and blind-alley attacks and, worst of all, horrible mental pictures of my disabled form lying in a hospital bed at the mercy of shadowy strangers.

But now, things were beginning to come together. Loutie Blue would, with any luck, be in one camp with Russell & Wagler and their ties to Judge Savin; Sheri would be in another, sitting by her father’s side where she could keep an eye on Jonathan Cort and company; and it would be up to Joey to find out enough about the final point of the triangle, Zion Thibbodeaux, to
give us the edge and the opportunity to fold one of the triangle’s points in on itself.

I pulled open the front door and stepped back out into the frigid December air. Tiny, drip-shaped icicles lined bannisters and hung from the front edges of snow-powdered steps. Stepping carefully down the steps and out to the driveway, I paused and looked for tracks. I could see Sheri’s small footprints leading up to the tire treads of the taxi that took her away. Nothing else.

The plan was to make a straight-line walk of my property’s perimeter—not to wander around leaving a confusion of footprints. Nature, or maybe Santa Claus, had been nice enough—finally—to powder the ground so that anyone approaching my house would leave telltale prints. The least I could do was not screw it up.

Frozen turf snapped and squeaked beneath rubber soles, bouncing small echoes into the empty afternoon air. Pausing every twenty yards or so, I swept my eyes over the yard and then the beach. I stared down the shoreline, looking for nothing in particular, and watched my breath fog against the charcoal water of Mobile Bay. My neighbor’s floating Christmas tree bobbed out on the bay, and I wondered how in the hell they lit something like that. Finally, after trudging through snow-covered brush along the far side of the house, I found what I hadn’t wanted to find. And I found it in the place where I had started my armed search.

Just inside the driveway, maybe a hundred feet from where I stood, sat a generic, black automobile. And leaning against the center of the hood was Mr. Zion Thibbodeaux. Zybo to his friends.

Fingering the nine-millimeter in my pocket with freezing fingers, I walked across the front of the house and stopped at the walkway. Thibbodeaux had a long, heavy revolver in one gloved hand. The gun pointed at the ground. Inside my pocket, I eased the safety off the nine-millimeter.

He raised his empty hand and, with his palm facing the sky, made a cupping motion like he was squeezing a ball.

I raised my voice. “You want me to come there?”

He nodded.

I shook my head and pointed at a place midway between us.

He nodded again and began walking. His gun still hung loosely from his fingers, pointed at the ground but swinging in an arc as he walked.

I walked forward, feeling at once ridiculous and deadly—like a grown man playing at being a gun-slinger.

Maybe he wanted to talk. Or maybe he just wanted me inside the killing range of his handgun. I had, after all, tried to pull his nuts off. But I didn’t think he wanted me dead. If he had, as Joey said, I never would have seen him coming. Just in case, though, as we came within
my
killing range, I raised the barrel inside my pocket and aimed it at his chest.

When we were six or seven feet apart, he stopped. “Lower your muzzle.” Puffs of fog followed each syllable into the winter air.

I never took my eyes from the oversized revolver hung casually from his gloved hand. “No.” I breathed deeply and caught the barest whiff of something like
the scent of smoke or soot coming off the man’s dark clothing.

“Okay, Tommy. What you say I point mine at you to make it be fair?”

I moved my jaw from side to side without taking my eyes from his revolver. “That gun moves, even a little, and I’ll empty my clip into your chest.”

His free hand moved slowly to his crotch, and he gingerly gripped his package like a teenage rapper. “I owe you one.”

“And I owe you about six.”

He said, “Could be,” and slowly moved the gun behind his back, where he tucked it into his waistband. “You met with Judge Savin.”

“How would you know?”

“Don’ waste time, Tommy. You and him had a sit down at de Mandrake Club. His two gofers dey were there. Yeah, I hear tell you taught dat Billy some manners.”

I studied Thibbodeaux’s dark eyes. “What’s it to you, Zybo?”

Something small and serpentine flickered behind the Cajun’s black irises when I said his name. “I wanna know what de old man he had to say.”

“Ask him.”

“I’m askin’ you.”

I was locked into his eyes, but tried to keep his black-gloved hands inside my peripheral vision. “You’re asking me to screw my career.”

Thibbodeaux smiled. “Screwed career. Fuggin dead. Up to you, Tommy.”

I pulled the Browning out into plain view and pointed the muzzle at his nose. “Get off my property.”

“I gotcha now.” He nodded. “You don’t tink I’m bein’ serious, or you more nuts than I tought. Either way …” He stopped to think. “I believe I’m gonna nose ’round some. You get a call from somebody sayin’ dey … what? Lookin’ for a good university psychologist? Somethin’ like dat. You know I wanna meet up.”

I thought of Kai-Li inside the house. “You start threatening my friends and I’d just as soon shoot you right now.”

Zybo grinned and held up gloved palms. “No threat, Tommy. Jus lettin’ you know dat there’s
nothin’
you do I don’ know ’bout.” He turned his back and walked away—slowly, deliberately. When Zybo reached the car, he turned to find my gun still trained on his head.