Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101) (12 page)

“Get Alex a pair of these,” I said, reaching for my Travel-Aid box off the bedside table where I'd left it. “You can buy them in the gift shop, and they really do work. I'll be putting mine back on as soon as we pull away from the dock.”

She examined the box for a moment and then handed it back. “These work?” she asked.

“They do for me,” I told her. “But getting back to business—you're telling me that the case you're working has nothing to do with Margaret Featherman's disappearance?”

“May have nothing to do with it,” she corrected. “Our main concern right now is that what's happened with her may compromise what we've already got going. As I said before, there'll be another agent coming on board later today who'll be assigned to the Featherman disappearance. Alex and I won't be making contact with him for fear of blowing our own cover. If it turns out there is a connection, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime, what Alex and I need is for someone to act as an informant for us, someone who's actually inside Margaret Featherman's circle of friends, someone who can keep us up-to-date on what's happening with them. From the looks of things, you appear to be the most likely candidate—if you'll agree, that is.”

Acting as an informant without any kind of official credentials didn't sound like a good idea to me. “I'm not agreeing to anything until I have some idea what this is all about and until I get a look at your badge.”

Nodding, she pulled a thin ID wallet out of a zippered pocket and passed it across to me. After examining it, I handed it back. “Looks legit to me,” I said.

She smiled and tucked it back away.

“So what's the deal?” I asked.

“Have you ever heard of an organization called LITG—Leave It To God?”

“I've heard of ‘Leave It to Beaver,' ” I told her.

She gave me a blank look. I had the sudden sense that once again, just as with Sue, Rachel Dulles and I were standing on opposite sides of a yawning generation gap. “You know,” I added lamely. “The TV series.”

“Never saw it,” Rachel resumed. “But you do know about right-to-lifers?”

I nodded. “I have heard about them,” I told her.

“Most right-to-lifers are perfectly ordinary and decent folks,” Rachel continued. “They also don't happen to believe in women having abortions.”

For obvious reasons, I'm glad my own unwed mother didn't take the then-illegal-abortion way out of her predicament. But I don't think of myself as a right-to-lifer, either.

“But beyond those regular people, there's the lunatic fringe,” Agent Dulles went on. “They're the people who blow up abortion clinics and use sniper rifles to pick off abortion-performing doctors as they back their cars out of their driveways on their way to work. The Leave It To God folks qualify as the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe. They're opposed to progress in everything from genetically bred corn to computer chips. They call themselves Leave It To God, but as far as we know, they're not related to any church or church-affiliated organization. They refer to themselves in their manifesto as Secular Humanists.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Right-to-lifers are opposed to doctors who perform abortions. Members of Leave It To God are opposed to doctors who save lives.”

“What do you mean?”

“Their position is that God put sickness and disease on this earth as a lesson in suffering for everybody. Sort of as a device to keep us in our place. As cutting-edge techniques become available, doctors are saving lives that would otherwise have been lost. Leave It To God believes that's wrong. Their members maintain that God and God alone should decide who lives and dies. They don't approve of someone like Dr. Featherman, for example. He's invented a new surgical technique that allows patients who would otherwise be crippled by grand-mal seizures to return to living productive lives.”

“Like Marc Alley,” I breathed.

Rachel nodded. “Exactly.”

“You're telling me these Secular Humanists are targeting Harrison Featherman?”

“That's right,” she said. “The Agency received a tip to that effect. The problem is, Marc Alley may be targeted as well.”

“Why, because he didn't die?”

“Correct,” Rachel replied. “Marc Alley is back to living a normal life. In LITG's book, that's wrong. He isn't bearing his assigned cross and serving as an example of suffering for everyone else. That qualifies him as a target, too.”

“That's crazy,” I said.

“It
is
crazy,” Rachel agreed. “But it's happened before—four times that we know of so far. Dr. Aaron Blackman was a cancer researcher at Sloan. Blackman allegedly committed suicide. Two weeks later, one of Blackman's patients—a woman whose supposedly incurable brain-stem tumor had gone into remission after Blackman's tumor-shrinking treatment—was fatally creamed in a crosswalk by a hit-and-run driver. And one of a team of Atlanta doctors using a new in utero surgery for spina bifida drowned in a swimming pool at a resort down in Scottsdale. His death was initially ruled accidental. Then one of the first babies he helped with those surgical techniques was snatched out of a grocery cart at a Wal-Mart in Savannah. The child was found dead in a ditch two days later. It was after that last incident that the Agency received a letter—the manifesto, as it's called—from Leave It To God in which they take credit for all of those incidents. After the letter, the investigations into the deaths of the two doctors were reopened. Both are now listed as homicides.”

“What makes you think Featherman will be targeted?”

“A list of names accompanied the letter. It contained the names of one thousand doctors from all over the country, including six in the Seattle area—two at Swedish, one at the U Dub, and three at Fred Hutch. Featherman was one of the two from Swedish.”

“Does he know about it?”

Rachel Dulles nodded. “All the doctors have been notified.”

“And the patients?”

She sighed. “No. My superiors decided that letting all the patients know about the situation might cause wholesale panic. It would involve far too many people—far more than we could handle or protect. We're doing what we can to keep all targeted doctors under surveillance, but even that is leaving the Agency spread pretty thin.”

“This is rich. Some smart doctor figures out a way to save people from dying or being crippled by some appalling disease and then somebody else comes along and knocks the patients off because they had nerve enough to get well?”

“That's the way it works. Dr. Featherman isn't exactly keeping his ground-breaking treatment under wraps. Neither was the spina bifida guy. He was in Scottsdale at the conference for the express purpose of expounding upon and expanding use of techniques that originally came from Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. And since Marc Alley is such an outspoken supporter of Dr. Featherman's treatment, we're assuming that makes him a likely target as well.”

“And you're expecting the same kind of thing might happen here?”

Rachel nodded. “As soon as we learned about the shipboard conference, we tried to talk Dr. Featherman out of coming on the cruise, but he wouldn't hear of it. He has a big grant from the National Institutes of Health riding on this conference. He was afraid if he backed out of attending, the grant sources would dry up.”

“So what are you and Alex doing about all this?” I asked.

“Starfire Cruises gave us a list of all passengers and crew members. While we're on board, the Agency is running checks on all of them, but that takes time. So far nothing has turned up on any of them, but we did learn from the purser's office that Margaret Featherman received two separate faxes. One was delivered to her the night before last, and another one yesterday afternoon. When the agent from Juneau comes on board, we're expecting he'll have a court order giving him and eventually us access to the text of those two faxes.”

“You're thinking Margaret Featherman may have been involved in this plot to target her ex-husband?”

“There is an outside chance of that,” Rachel Dulles said. “From what I've learned about the former Mrs. Featherman, she could be capable of almost anything.”

That's how she struck me, too
, I thought.

Just then there was a knock on the door. I looked through the peephole and was dismayed to find Lars Jenssen standing there. “What is it?” I asked, opening the door.

“Can I come in for a minute?”

I glanced back at Rachel Dulles, who shook her head. I have a feeling Lars got a glimpse of her at the same time. “It would probably be better if you didn't,” I told him.

Lars gave me a lopsided grin, along with a conspiratorial wink. “So it's like that, is it,” he said. “Ya, sure. I yust wanted to tell you that there's a Friends of Bill W. meeting getting together in the library in another half hour or so. Beverly's on her way to high tea with the Wakefield girls, which means I'm free to go to my meeting. I was wondering if you'd like to come along, but I can see that's a bad idea. I'll yust go on about my business.”

Right
, I thought.
And go straight back to Beverly and tell her that her grandson couldn't come to the AA meeting because he was entertaining a woman in his cabin
.

Lars started down the hall.

“Where did you say the meeting was again?” I called after him.

“In the library. Four o'clock.”

I closed the door and turned back to Rachel Dulles. “What exactly is it that you want me to do?”

“Keep an eye on Marc Alley.”

“Like I kept an eye on Sue Danielson, you mean? I didn't do her much good, did I? What makes you think I'd have any better results looking after Marc?”

Rachel Dulles let that one pass. “Why was he waiting for you at the bottom of the gangplank earlier today?”

“To tell us—Naomi Pepper and me—about what had happened to Margaret Featherman, that she had disappeared.”

“And why do you suppose he told you?”

“I give up.”

“Because he trusts you, Beau. And so do I.”

She glanced at her watch and stood up. “I have a meeting, too,” she said. “So I'd best be going. Here's my cabin number,” she said, pressing a card into my hand. “And remember, as far as the ship is concerned, I'm Phyllis Nix. Call me right away if Marc mentions anything unusual or disturbing.”

“What about telling him what's up?” I asked.

Agent Dulles shrugged. “I may be under orders not to warn the patients,” she replied, “but that doesn't mean you are.”

I opened the door for her. Once she was out in the corridor, Agent Dulles turned and offered her hand. “Thanks for the help, Beau. And by the way,” she added, “most of my friends call me Rachey.”

I watched her go until she turned into the elevator lobby, then I closed the door and shook my head. I might not have taken the attorney general up on her offer to go to work for the Special Homicide Investigation Team, but one way or another, it looked as though J. P. Beaumont was back in the game.

T
HERE ARE ALMOST
as many reasons for going to AA meetings as there are meetings themselves. That day I went because I wanted to prove to Lars Jenssen that there was no hanky-panky going on between me and the attractive young woman he had spied sitting in my stateroom. I arrived at the
Starfire Breeze
's book-lined library only a few minutes after he did. With Lars there's no such thing as presumption of innocence, but even he had to admit that I couldn't possibly be that smooth or fast an operator.

“Another woman from your table, I suppose?” Lars asked when I sat down beside him.

“No,” I said with no further elucidation.

Lars sighed. “If I'da only known this was what cruises were like, I would have taken them years ago when I was a lot younger.”

“What does Beverly have to say about your wanting to play the field?” I asked.

“Who's playing?” Lars asked. “Since when does it hurt to look?”

Because we were still in port, the library was officially closed. Glass doors had been pulled shut and fastened over the shelves, locking the books inside. Upholstered chairs and love seats had been moved into a loose semblance of a circle which was gradually filling with people. When the library doors were finally pulled shut several minutes later, there must have been twenty-five or thirty people gathered in the room, about the same number of attendees that show up for most AA meetings on land.

Lars had called this a Friends of Bill W. meeting. In AA circles that means it's an open meeting where anyone involved in a twelve-step program is welcome to attend. Sobriety is a catch-all term that can apply to any number of issues. Looking at the attendees gathered in that room, I noticed that a few of the older guys sported bulbous, thickly veined noses that spoke of years of hard drinking and hard living both. During introductions, a couple of the younger people mentioned that they were involved in Narcotics Anonymous. Several others came from the Al-Anon side of the spectrum.