Cold Quarry (27 page)

More than three years had passed since Camille’s addiction to crystal meth, and the legal fallout from her involvement in Dewayne Turner’s murder had turned her life to this. The sky outside was gray and the winter cold uninviting.

“How’s she doing today?” Nicole plunked herself down in a chair next to Camille’s bed opposite the nurse, who occupied the Barcalounger in front of the darkened television.

I hung back in the doorway for a moment. I wanted to see both Camille’s and the nurse’s response.

“She ate Oreos for breakfast,” the nurse said, crossing her arms with a look of disgust on her face. “Wouldn’t eat nothing but Oreos.”

For maybe just an instant I thought I saw a tiny smile crack across the placid mask of my ex-wife’s face. Same old Camille.

“Mom.” Nicole reached across the bedsheets and took her mother’s hand in her own. “You have to eat. You have to keep up your strength, you know that.”

Camille looked on impassively.

“I don’t know,” I said, stepping into the patient’s line of sight. “Oreos sound pretty good to me.”

The container with cookies still lay on the bedside stand.

“I fix her a perfectly good breakfast of oatmeal, toast with honey, and orange juice,” the nurse said defensively. She looked to be in her thirties, dark brown skin, about fifty pounds overweight but with a proud chin and a determined stare.

“I’m sure you did,” said Nicole.

“How you wanna play this, Camille?” I asked. “You going to make your own daughter have to spoon-feed you?” I was remembering an image of Nicole in a high chair in our kitchen in New York and Camille trying to feed her a jar of baby food squash, or maybe it was peas. Nicole had grabbed the glass jar and tossed the entire contents on the floor.

A darker look crossed the patient’s face this time, accompanied by a slight shaking of the head.

The nurse roused herself from her chair. “I’ll warm up her cereal again.”

She disappeared out the door.

Nicole lifted her mother’s hand a little and patted it gently. “I’ve missed you, Mom.”

The placidity returned to Camille’s face. She reached with her free hand for a small white board with a large felt marker on the bedside stand. Nicole anticipated this move and helped her retrieve the board and uncap the marker. Then we waited while Camille slowly scratched out a barely decipherable message. When finished she shifted the board toward Nicole so she could read.

MIS U
2, it said.

“This is a new daytime nurse. What happened to your old one?”

Camille took the board again and slowly wrote.

MOVE 2 SC

“She moved to South Carolina. Too bad, I know you liked her. Her name was Josephine, wasn’t it?”

YES I MIS HER

Another pat of the hand.

The new nurse returned. “Need to get Miss Rhodes set up for her meal,” she said.

“We’ll just step outside for a minute,” I said.

“Dad and I brought you something we thought you might like,” Nicole said.

She stood and she and I stepped out into the hall. Along the wall we’d propped a large flat parcel covered in brown wrapping paper.

“You know, Dad,” Nicole said. “Wendy told me once that she believes people with severe disabilities who are forced to spend a lot of time in one place develop a kind of sixth sense for people and for things going on in the world around them.”

Wendy was the creator of the object beneath the paper, a stunning watercolor painting of a pastoral countryside framed by the Blue Ridge with quarter horses grazing in the foreground. Wendy was also a quadriplegic, a luminous former student of Marcia D’Angelo’s, injured when her boyfriend’s motorcycle, on the back of which she was riding at the time, skidded beneath a passing eighteen-wheeler. The now ex-boyfriend had walked away without a scratch and had gone on to other more important things in his life a few months later, but rather than turn to bitterness, Wendy had turned to her faith—Marcia and Nicole sat with her at church every Sunday—and her painting. She held the brush with a special rig between her teeth.

“Could be,” I said.

We took the package back into the bedroom. The nurse now had Camille sitting upright in bed and taking a bite of oatmeal. The nurse had to help her eat and wipe her mouth.

“Thas a whole lot better Miss Rhodes. You should be takin’ company more often. Maybe then we could get you to eatin’ halfway decent.”

Camille waved a feeble hand across the sheets at her as if to swat the entire notion away. Her countenance brightened a little, however, at the sight of the package.

The nurse took Camille’s bowl away momentarily and gathered up the tray that had been in front of her patient and set it on the dresser. “You see if you can keep that down, Miss Rhodes. I’ll just be down in the kitchen doin’ up the dishes if you need anything else.” She shuffled quickly from the room.

Nicole lifted the parcel onto the bed. “This is something very special, Mom, from a friend of mine. She’s bedridden, like you, except she’s lost the use of all of her limbs.”

Camille scratched at her board again.

PARLYZD

“Yes. Her name’s Wendy and she’s a quadriplegic. Would you like some help opening this?”

Slow nod.

Nicole and I helped Camille tear away at the paper, beginning carefully at the corner. The watercolor was mounted in a frame of light wood that offset the artist’s use of color. The changing textures and brushstrokes would have been striking and unusually appealing, even if you hadn’t known how painstakingly the painting had been crafted.

Once it was completely revealed, Camille seemed to look in the direction of the picture for a long time. Was she thinking of the magnificent view down her own driveway, of the wide-open fields, the riding she used to do? Her eyes filled with tears. Nicole moved in to put her arms around her mother.

She scratched out
THNK U SO MCH IS BUTIFUL
on her board.

“You’ll always be my mom,” Nicole told her.

“You got that right, kiddo,” I said. I was proud of her, proud of the young woman she’d become, about to graduate from the university, a whiz when it came to finance and computers, even if the part-time job she currently held, working for me, wouldn’t have been my first choice of things for her to do. But the truth was I was getting used to her prowess around the office and beginning to wonder what I’d ever done without her.

I checked my watch. “Ladies, I hate to have to break up the party, but we’ve got to get going.”

Camille slowly took up her white board and scratched out another message.

WHRE

Nicole looked at me. “Jake’s in trouble,” she said. “Dad and I need to go help him.”

A gust of cold wind shook the windows outside the bedroom.

“Got to be turning up the heat,” the nurse, who’d suddenly reappeared in the doorway, said. “S’posed to be getting colder tonight.”

Camille had one more message for us.

B CRFL

Then her face became virtually expressionless again. I wondered where her mind must be turning. I wonder now if she’d somehow seen the cemetery on the hill, birds in flight, the last dangerous change in illumination night would bring, how much the future held or didn’t.

30

No one answered the phone at Damon Farraday’s place. I still didn’t have enough evidence to go to Grooms or the police. Hopefully, the ATF had gone through the cave by now, and if the amount of spilled ANFO I suspected was present there turned out to be substantial, somebody’s eyebrows should be raised. The Stonewall Rangers’ plans Toronto had told me about included nothing to do with a big bomb. Such a device, assuming it had been put together there, could now be headed, or have already been placed, virtually anywhere within a radius of a few hundred miles or more.

My cell phone went off just as I crossed the Kanawha River on I-77 headed back into Charleston. No number was displayed on the caller ID. Thinking it might be Nicole, I punched the answer button and said hello.

“Pavlicek? Where in the hell are you?”

“Agent Grooms. Well, I’m, ah, a bit busy at the moment,” I said.

“Busy. You’re in a car, right? It sounds like it.”

“I have been moving around a little today.”

“I want to know where Toronto is.”

“Jake?” A stab of fear shot through me. “Aren’t you in a better position to be able to know that than I?”

“Don’t get cute with me, Pavlicek. Is he there with you right now? I want to talk to him.”

“With me? What are you talking about?”

“You mean you want me to believe you haven’t seen him?”

“No. Why?”

“Because if you’re lying. …”

“Did you release him or something?”

“Release him? Hell no. He escaped custody.”

“Escaped federal custody.”

“To add to the growing list of charges against him.”

“But how—?”

“Don’t ask how. If you’re harboring a fugitive, Pavlicek, not only will you never be doing any private investigation work again, you’ll be joining your pal out in Leavenworth for a few years.”

“I haven’t seen him, Grooms. Haven’t seem him or heard from him.”

He was silent for a moment.

“Did you people check out that cave I sent you to?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Still got a team up there.”

“I was right, wasn’t I? It’s ANFO.”

He said nothing.

“Was someone building a big device?”

“I want you to drive straight to downtown Charleston to the FBI office,” he said. “I want you in here now.”

“But what if someone’s about to set off a bomb?”

“Pavlicek—”

“What if it’s not Toronto and it’s not even the Stonewall Rangers?”

“I don’t care. You want to stop ‘em, you need to get in here. Now. Do you hear?”

“I gotta go, Grooms.”

“Listen! You—”

“I gotta go. I’ll try to find Toronto for you,” I said, and punched the line dead and the power off.

Kara Grayson lived in a third-floor unit of a condo complex near the golf course in South Charleston. Lights glowed from her windows. A couple of stars were beginning to shine overhead. A peaceful setting for a quiet winter Sunday night. I climbed the outside stairs and rang the bell.

A dark spot moved across the peephole before she pulled open the door.

“Frank. Finally come to give me the scoop, huh?” The question was all business but there was a hint of a gleam in her eye.

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“Well, I, uh, wanted to check and see if you found out anything about that lab company. And I thought I ought to come by and explain a little more.”

“You mean about why you and your friend were there.”

“Yes. And I wanted to tell you again how sorry I am about what happened to Dr. Winston.”

“No, please … it’s okay.” She rubbed her shoulders against the cold. She was dressed in a heavy sweater under a bathrobe and blue balletlike slippers, neither of which did much to camouflage her trim, athletic figure. Unlike the night before, she wore no makeup. It gave her a clean, more youthful appearance. “Please come in,” she said.

I entered and she shut and locked the door behind me. A fat white tomcat with pearly gray eyes padded across the hallway in front of us.

“Fresco, meet Mr. Pavlicek. … Oh, it’s Frank, isn’t it? Is it okay if I call you Frank?”

“You bet.”

Fresco narrowed his eyes at me for a moment and arched his back.

“Now, don’t you be like that, Fresco. Don’t worry, he always does this to strange men. He’ll get used to you.”

The cat probably still smelled hawk on my jacket or something from the day before. I tried the stare-down technique, but Fresco wasn’t about to be budged. Not yet anyway.

“Would you like something warm to drink? I just put on some hot water for tea.”

“That would be great, thank you,” I said.

She led me into her living room, which had a high ceiling and very tall framed photos of mountains and people skiing. Fresco retreated up a flight of stairs.

“You’re into skiing, I see.”

“Yes. I used to race.”

“Not anymore?”

“No,” she said. “I gave it up.”

I nodded.

“Have a seat on the couch, if you’d like. I’ll be right back with the tea,” she said, and disappeared through an archway and around a corner toward what must’ve been the kitchen.

The living room sofa was one of those huge overstuffed affairs with gargantuan pillows you could sink into. The only other piece of furniture in the room was an oversized furry beanbag that looked like someone had dropped a grizzly bear pelt in the middle of her floor and forgotten to take out some of the bear.

In a few moments she was back carrying a tray with two steaming mugs of hot water.

“I didn’t know what kind you liked or what you wanted in it, so I brought a selection.”

I picked Twinings English Breakfast tea, no sugar, a little milk, and after she’d put it together she sat down on the edge of the couch a few feet away from me.

“That looks sore,” she said.

“Oh, you mean my face.” I’d almost forgotten about it.

“You wanted to know about the lab company.”

“Yes.”

“I talked to Betty Ann—she’s my friend the nurse. Everyone’s in shock, of course, over what happened. But she said the company the clinic uses is Princeton Medical.”

“Okay. Did she give you contact information?”

“Yes. I’ve got it in the other room. Are the tests Dr. Winston ordered on the blood sample from Chester Carew’s bird the reason why you think he was killed?”

“Yes. How well did you know him?”

“Dr. Winston? I knew him from the clinic.”

“He have any other friends or family in the area?”

“Greg’s main friend was his work … that and his sports. He was really into biking. I mean really into it.”

“Mountain biking?”

“Umm-hm.” She swallowed a sip of tea. “Road racing.”

“Sure. He was never married then? No children or anything?”

“No. Me either,” she added quickly.

“Dating?”

“Dr. Winston? Not that I knew of.”