Cape Disappointment (36 page)

I went into the other room and called a cycling pal I'd known for years. “Bill? Thomas here.”

“Thomas. It's good to hear your voice. How are you doing? Sorry I couldn't make it to the funeral. Had a surgery scheduled that day. Did you get my card?”

“Yeah. Look. If I brought a patient around, do you think you could treat that patient without telling anybody?”

“Unless it's a gunshot wound. You know I have to report those.”

“It's not a gunshot.”

“I'll make room in the schedule.”

“Be there in about three hours.”

“No problem.” Bill was a GP in a small clinic in Ballard, a Seattle neighborhood. I was still trying to figure out how Kathy had missed the plane. When and where she might have been involved in an automobile accident. And why Bert felt the need to hide her, even from me. Had the car accident been his fault? Had he felt I might take it out on him if she died? Or had he just gone batshit crazy and decided to drug her and keep her for himself? None of the likely scenarios made much sense.

Back in the sick room, I held up the hypo. “What's in this?”

“It's a sedative.” Her eyes drifted back to the window.

“Don't worry about Jimmy. You're not going to see him again unless it's in court.”

“We took the very best care of her. I was with her night and day. The best care.”

“I ever find out different, I'll hunt you down. Both of you.”

She took a step back. “I took care of her.”

“We'll see. Snake, get her information. There's a camera in my car. Take pictures of her and this place. The car registration. Her driver's license. Everything.”

“We going to let her leave?”

“Just take the pictures.”

“Who's going to pay what's owed?” she asked.

“We'll get back to you on that,” Snake said.

It took fifteen minutes to bundle Kathy up and get her into the backseat of the Taurus, where she lay like an animal that had been hit by a car; another ten minutes to search the house for incriminating evidence concerning the doctor. The house didn't have a phone, and he'd left little except fingerprints, but we bagged a drinking glass and an empty beer bottle we knew he'd handled and stashed them in the trunk for future reference. As we were driving off the property, I flipped open my cellphone and tried to call Bert, but he didn't answer. Snake said, “Why would Bert let you believe she was dead?”

“I'm sure he'll pull some explanation out of the ether involving conspiracies and nine-foot-tall men from another planet.”

We took Highway 4 east, and just before we got to I-5 a caravan of law enforcement vehicles passed us heading due west, blue lights
twirling, sirens singing. I examined the other cars carefully as they passed. I said, “Wasn't Winston Seagram in that unmarked car?”

“Who's that?”

“Head of the Seattle branch of the FBI.”

“I didn't get a look. Think they're headed to the house?”

“That's exactly what I think.”

“Who tipped them off? Had to have been hours ago. Seagram works in Seattle. And don't be thinking it was my brother, because it wasn't.”

Even though Bert would have been calling the authorities on himself, I didn't put it past him to sic the FBI on us. As long as we were going to find Kathy anyway, the resulting confusion might have worked to Bert's advantage. In the face of this lie, I was no longer sure Bert had told me the truth about anything.

In the backseat, Kathy continued to lapse in and out of consciousness. When we pulled into an official rest stop, I climbed into the backseat with her while Snake unexpectedly got out of the car and slid under the Taurus on his back. When he rolled out he had a small black rectangular object in his hand. “Is that what I think it is?” I asked.

“GPS locator. Probably been there awhile. No wonder they knew you was tailin' Deborah. Somebody knew exactly where you were and they know where you are now. To within a meter.”

“Government, you think?”

“It wasn't the FBI, because they were going the other way. And I don't know why the government would be tailing you.”

“Maybe Bert is working for the feds.”

“This is a pretty expensive piece of gadgetry. And I don't think my brother's working for the feds anymore. And why would he keep asking where you were if he knew?”

“Maddox was the one who called the cops on me when I was at Deborah's. Maybe it was planted by the Maddox team.”

“But you were working for them.”

“And asking too many questions.”

“He owns a security company. They're bound to have access to this kind of equipment. This model here is about five hundred dollars retail.” Snake walked across the lot and affixed the device to the underside of an eighteen-wheeler.

For the duration of the trip, I sat in the back with Kathy, who was
like a surgery patient coming out of anesthesia. She didn't seem to be in pain but was increasingly agitated. I was beginning to wonder if anybody else from the plane was alive. Sheffield's body had not been recovered. Was she alive? I'd seen the plane go into the ocean. It had been a near-vertical dive. Nobody could have survived the impact. Kathy couldn't have been on the plane. But had she been in a car wreck? Only one person knew the answers.

As we passed through Tacoma, Kathy looked up at me and smiled. “I thought you were dead,” she said.

“How did I die?”

“Car accident.”

“They're quite popular these days.”

“Bert told me you were in a wreck. He was sad.”

“I bet he was. Were you sad, too?”

“I was so sad they had to sedate me.”

There
had been
a conspiracy; a conspiracy of one. Bert was the conspirator, not the United States government. Bert had been leading me around by the nose in an effort to conceal the fact that he was holding my wife captive. What his long-range plans were, I could only guess.

BILL, WHO WAS BETWEEN PATIENTS
just then, had me place her on an examining table in one of the small rooms, and then, after I told him everything I knew about her condition, sent me out of the room. He knew who the patient was, even if nobody else in the building did, and the recognition left him shocked and pale.

The afternoon sun had come out and was warming the wooden bench in the enclosed grotto, where I chose to wait. From time to time through the open doorway I could see Bill or the nurse bustling back and forth in the corridor. By the time one of the assistants wheeled Kathy into the grotto in a wheelchair, I was cold despite the sunshine. Wrapped in a blanket, Kathy was wearing hospital greens and a pair of wool socks to keep her feet warm. She smiled and reached out to hug me. I leaned down and kissed the side of her cheek until she turned and made it lip to lip.

The bandages were gone, her hair compressed and misshapen. The cast on her arm had been removed, as had the one on her leg. A moment later, Bill came out clutching a sheaf of paperwork and looking more confused than concerned. “We X-rayed the arm and the leg. We took off the cast on the arm first. As far as I can tell, there wasn't any reason to cast it. Same with the leg. I've never seen anything like it. We ran her through the usual blood tests, and her sugar was a little low
but otherwise everything seems normal. Nothing wrong with her head, either.”

“Those bandages were—”

“Strictly for show. It's my guess somebody's been pumping a fair amount of diazepam into her system at regular intervals.”

“Dia—?”

“Valium.”

“Jesus.”

“She has close to no memory of the last ten days.” Bill and I stared at each other for a few moments. “Thomas? What's going on?”

“She's okay to leave, then?”

“It'll take a while for the diazepam to get out of her system, but other than that, she's fine.”

“You don't think she was in a car accident two weeks ago?”

“Not a serious one. There aren't any signs of it. You're not going to tell me what happened, are you?”

“I don't know what happened.”

“Okey doke. We'll keep this on the QT until you say otherwise.”

“You're the man.”

Outside, Kathy managed to walk to the car, but it had been so long since she'd used her muscles she was like a baby. We sat down next to each other and I kissed her. Snake was snoring in the backseat. “Thomas? I don't remember all of it, but I remember somebody calling me at the landing strip and saying he was in trouble.”

“Bert?”

“Yes. I guess it was Bert. He said he thought he'd killed somebody. That the police were after him and he wanted to turn himself in, but only if I came with him. He said he needed to show me some evidence before the police saw it.”

“When was this?”

“A few minutes after you left, but before the plane took off. First he called my cell, and then he showed up in person and convinced me he'd shot somebody. I believed him. He was in a panic. I went with him in his truck. I didn't even get one of my bags off the plane. From there it gets hazy. The last thing I remember is opening a bottle of water he gave me. When you showed up, I thought a day or two had passed. At one point I woke up in a strange room and Bert was there
with some doctor. My arm was in a cast. I couldn't move my leg. I believed them when they told me I was hurt.”

“And your nurse, Dorothy?”

“She took me out to Cape Disappointment. I had to go there after they told me you were dead. I assumed you and I had both been in the same car accident, but you weren't in an accident, were you?”

“No.”

“Was I?”

“Doesn't look that way.”

“So what happened?”

“I'd say Bert drugged you and hired that phony doctor to keep drugging you. I'm guessing the casts on your arm and leg were to convince you and the nurse you really were hurt and to keep you from trying to escape.”

“Why would Bert … ?”

“That's one of the first things I'm going to ask him after I knock all his teeth out.”

“Thomas, it's not worth going to jail over.”

“I think it is. My biggest question is, how did he know the plane was going to crash? And if he knew, why not figure out a way to ground the flight and save everybody?”

“Tell me about the plane crash again.” I'd given her the story during the drive to Seattle, but her short-term memory was like a sieve, so I rendered it once more.

When I finished, she said, “You thought
I
was dead?”

“I thought you were dead.”

“It's kind of Shakespearean, isn't it?”

“You could say so.”

“Good thing neither of us committed suicide.”

“Good thing.”

The knowledge that Bert had saved Kathy's life was the only thing that kept me from calling the police.

THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON
passed in the blink of an eye, beginning with a phone call from Bert Slezak before we were even out of the clinic driveway. The timing was so spot-on I looked around to see if he was following us. “Thomas?”

“Where are you, you little bastard?”

“Listen, I know you got Kathy back, and I'm happy for you both. It was killing me that you were in so much pain.”

“Killing you so badly you told her I was dead?”

“Now, that's a complicated little evolution to try to expand on over the phone.”

“I bet.”

“Malcolm called. He thought you were going to kill him.”

“Who's Malcolm? Your fake doctor?”

“You scared the hell out of him.”

“You're the one who should be scared.”

“I was protecting her. Don't worry. We're going to have a face-to-face, and I'll catch you up on all of it as soon as you calm down.”

“You mean as soon as I catch you.”

“Now, don't be angry, old chum. Remember, I saved your wife's life.”

“You kept her drugged for almost two weeks.”

“If she'd been running around free she'd be dead now— she'd be peripheral damage— just like Ponzi's husband. We've got a job to do, you and I. They're still out there, and they're still going to whitewash that plane crash unless we do something about it. I was hiding her for a reason. And now that you have her, you have to hide her, too. Trust me, the last thing on earth these people want is for your wife to turn up on national TV explaining how it came to be that she wasn't on that plane. She'd be dead inside of two days. Swear to God.”