The Fifth Vial Page 8

  It was five thirty when Anson slid the vial from his pocket, and drew up the first of ten doses, which he would administer over a week. If the child managed to survive, he might have to find a way to get ahold of another vial. The clinical trials were progressing so well that the optimum dose and administration schedule for several conditions had been worked out. Pinching off the child’s IV, he slid the needle into one of the rubber ports and injected the bolus of Sarah-9. He was flushing the medication through with the IV fluid when he became aware of another presence in the four-bed ward. The instant of warning kept him from a major shock.

  “How’s she doing?” Elizabeth St. Pierre asked.

  She was standing behind Anson and to his right. There was no way for him to be certain how long she had been there, but he gauged the angle to where he had held the vial of Sarah-9, and knew there was a possibility she could have seen.

  “She’s in bad shape,” he said.

  “I suddenly went from deep sleep to being wide-awake, so I decided to drive out here and see how you were doing. Want me to take over so you can get some rest?”

  St. Pierre, a native of Yaoundé, had returned home after receiving her MD degree and training in London. She worked with Anson and his team for two years in the hospital and in the lab, and then brokered the agreement with Whitestone to exchange the rights to Sarah-9 for their unrestricted support of the Center for African Health.

  Through the dim light, St. Pierre studied Anson with undisguised concern. She was a full-figured woman in her early forties, with aquiline features and smooth, ebony skin. Her tortoiseshell glasses always seemed too wide for her face, but somehow managed to underscore the sharp intelligence in her eyes. She was fluent in half a dozen languages in addition to several tribal dialects of her homeland.

  “I have a full day scheduled in the clinic,” he said, searching for some hint of whether she knew what he had just done, “but perhaps I could sleep for a couple of hours before then.”

  Considering the years of their association, Anson knew surprisingly little of the woman’s personal life, other than that she had been married briefly to a businessman in Yaoundé, and still had a home on a hill overlooking the city. He also knew that she was a dedicated, incredibly well-read physician, certified in renal diseases, and an acknowledged expert in the medical aspects of kidney transplantation.

  “Joseph, do you wish to tell me what is going on?” she asked, switching from French to English.

  Anson froze.

  “Pardon?”

  “Earlier this morning. Claudine tells me you had quite a difficult time of it for a while.”

  Anson’s jaws unclenched. He swept his hand across the pocket of his scrub shirt to ensure the vial was not obvious.

  “I have a little bronchitis,” he said.

  “Nonsense, Joseph. This is the natural progression of pulmonary fibrosis, and you know that as well as I do.”

  Anson became aware of some renewed tightness in his chest—just what was not needed. He gripped the seat of his chair and willed himself to breathe slowly. St. Pierre was a sharp clinician. It wouldn’t take too long for her to discern that he was in trouble once more.

  “I’m not ready yet for a transplant,” he said with determination.

  “Joseph, you’ll be as good as new once you have the operation.”

  “I’m doing fine most of the time as is.”

  “Is there nothing I can say to convince you?”

  “Not at this moment. Listen, Elizabeth, I really could use a little sleep…before the morning clinic. Do you think you could take over for me here? Marielle has gotten all of her meds.”

  “Of course.”

  Still battling the surging air hunger, Anson pulled himself to his feet, thanked St. Pierre, and with a posture of accentuated dignity headed off to his apartment.

  “Joseph?” St. Pierre called out as he reached the doorway.

  He spun quickly.

  “Yes?”

  “Use some oxygen for a while. Your respirations have sped up to twenty-four, air movement is down, and you’re stopping to breathe between sentences.”

  “I’ll…do that. Thanks.”

  Elizabeth St. Pierre made brief rounds on most of their hospitalized patients, then repaired to her office and placed a long-distance call to London.

  “This is Laertes,” a man’s deep, cultured voice said.

  “Laertes, this is Aspasia. Is it safe to speak?”

  “Please go ahead, Aspasia, I hope you are well.”

  “Things with A’s health are getting worse,” St. Pierre said. “I don’t know how much longer he can last like this. Even if we had his notebooks and could translate them, the project would be terribly delayed if he should die. I think we must find a way to break through his fear and move forward with a transplant.”

  “The council agrees.”

  “Then I will do what I must to convince him.”

  “Excellent. We know we can trust you.”

  “Just remember, Laertes, it must be a perfect or near-perfect tissue match, no worse than eleven out of twelve. I don’t want to proceed with anything less.”

  “We have word there is such a donor.”

  “Then I will proceed.”

  “Very well. We will get the details to you shortly.”

  “Please extend my warmest regards to the rest of the council.”

  Six

  The justice of the State consisted in each of three classes doing the work of its own class.

  —PLATO, The Republic, Book IV

  “Mrs. Satterfield, what do you mean Pincus is gone?”

  Bracing the receiver between his shoulder and ear, Ben bunched the thin pillow beneath his head.

  “He wanted to go out, dear, so I let him go out, and he hasn’t come back.”

  Ben groaned and stared up at the ceiling of room 219 in the Okeechobee Motel 6. It was just after eight in the morning of yet another day that was going to be cloudless and hot. The motel, fifty-two dollars a night for a single, was just off the highway, twelve miles from where Glenn had been hit face-on by a speeding tractor-trailer. Although Ben had no more idea of the man’s identity now than he had when Alice Gustafson first presented the case to him, he found it easier to motivate himself with a name other than Unknown White Male, or even John Doe.

  He chose Glenn because of the vanity plate GLENN-1 on a black Jaguar convertible that cruised past his rented Saturn as he left the Melbourne International Airport on Florida’s Atlantic coast. Perhaps that Glenn won the Jag in a raffle. Maybe he had won the lottery. Whatever the case, the man had to have had some good luck along the way, and Ben knew he was going to need more than a little of that. So far, though, over his five days in Okeechobee County, and several counties surrounding Okeechobee, good luck had been in depressingly short supply. Dogged by a lack of enthusiasm, he had nevertheless worked long hours every day. Still, he had come up with absolutely nothing that would shed any light on who Glenn was or what had happened to him.

  The unpleasant conclusion persistently nagging at him was that despite some modest successes in stalk-and-gawk domestic cases, as a real private eye, he left much to be desired.

  And now, his cat had gone missing.

  “Mrs. Satterfield, remember what I said about Pincus being an indoor cat and not having any claws, and how he couldn’t climb trees to get away from things like dogs?”

  “But he wanted so desperately to go out, dear. He was crying.”

  Ben sighed. Althea Satterfield, his next-door neighbor, was Pop-Tart sweet and as kind as St. Francis, but she was also on the north side of eighty, and a little shaky on details. Her voice reminded him of comedian Jonathan Winters doing ancient Maude Frickert.

  “It’s okay, Mrs. Satterfield,” he said, “Pincus is a really fast runner. Besides, it’s my fault for letting his claws be removed in the first place.”

  And, he reflected ruefully, it was. He and Dianne were still a few years from the big split when sh
e caught his long-time pet having its way with the hem of one of her slipcovers. All right, Ben, either that cat of yours gets declawed, or I’m out of here! As always, the memory of her words brought a bittersweet smile. It could never be said that she hadn’t given him a chance to take the initiative.

  “So, how is your latest investigation going, Mr. Callahan?”

  My only investigation.

  “I haven’t cracked the case yet, Mrs. Satterfield.”

  “You will.”

  I won’t.

  Alice Gustafson’s former student, coroner Stanley Woyczek, had been as helpful as he could be, but the police in Port St. Lucie and Fort Pierce, as well as those in the sheriff’s office and, for that matter, the state police, had a serious resentment against a private investigator whose very presence suggested they were not able to do their job. There wasn’t a single question he could ask nor a single way to ask it that didn’t sound condescending or patronizing. After five days of repeated visits to the various stations and substations, attempts to chat about the Marlins, Devil Rays, Buccaneers, Jaguars, and Dolphins, and several dozen doughnuts, he had failed to cultivate even one dependable source of information. Ultimately, he was forced to conclude that, had he been one of the policemen, he would probably have reacted and sounded just like they did.

  “Mrs. Satterfield, don’t worry about Pincus. I’m sure he’ll come back.”

  “I wish I shared your optimism, dear. Even your plant is sad.”

  “My plant?”

  “It’s the only one in your whole apartment.”

  “I know that, Mrs. Satterfield.”

  “It used to have such a big, beautiful pink flower.”

  “Used to?”

  “I’m afraid it’s fallen off.”

  The plant, an aechmea, was a gift from a violinist in the philharmonic, his significant other for ten weeks before she took up with a French horn player, claiming, quite correctly, that Ben simply had no direction to his life. Not surprisingly, over the intervening two years, a replacement significant other for him had simply failed to come forward.

  “Mrs. Satterfield, you have to water that plant every d—” He stopped himself midsentence, imagining Jennifer Chin stretched out naked on red satin sheets with her French horn blower. “You know what, Mrs. Satterfield?”

  “What, dear?”

  “Just give the cat’s food to the plant and everything will be fine.”

  “Anything you say, dear. And don’t worry about your case. You’ll solve it.”

  “I’m sure I will.”

  “Just start with what you know.”

  “What?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Never mind, Mrs. Satterfield. You’re doing great, I’ll be home in a few days.”

  “I’ll see you then, dear.”

  Start with what you know.

  With Althea Satterfield’s oddly cogent words roiling about in his brain, Ben pulled up in front of a modest beige stucco house on a quiet side street in Indrio, just north of St. Lucie. A small red neon sign in one window read simply, READINGS. The door was opened by a tall, slender woman in her forties with bronze skin and straight, jet-black hair down to the small of her back. A colorful, artfully done zodiac was tattooed inside a half-moon across her forehead, the arc extending from the ends of her brows to just below her hairline.

  “Madame Sonja.”

  “Well, Mr. Callahan,” she said in a dreamy voice, “come in, come in. I couldn’t remember if you were to be back this morning or tomorrow.”

  “You could have just read the future,” Ben said, careful not to stare at Libra, his sign, which he knew from his last visit was just above her left brow.

  It took a few seconds for Madame Sonja to gauge his expression. Then she grinned.

  “That was funny.”

  “I’m relieved you think so. Sometimes, most of the time, in fact, I say things that are meant to be funny, but I’m the only one who thinks they are.”

  “That is a curse.”

  She led him past a heavily draped reading room, complete with a card table, tarot deck, teacups, and nearly as many arcane artifacts as were in Alice Gustafson’s office, into a cluttered den with overfilled bookcases, several computers, scanners, banks of electronics, and a professional-grade artist’s easel. Except for a computer workstation and a small desk chair, there was no furniture, but in one corner was a potter’s wheel, well used and splattered with dry clay.

  “Any luck?” he asked.

  “Perhaps. I’m quite pleased with what I have for you.”

  “As I mentioned, Dr. Woyczek spoke very highly of your work.”

  “He knows I appreciate his referrals. I only wish that his regard for me carried over to his friends, the detectives at the police department. I’m afraid they think I’m something of a quack. They have their own artists, and even with numerous examples of my superior accuracy, they refuse to send their business this way.”

  Woyczek had understatedly described Madame Sonja as something of an eccentric, who used the latest in computer graphics to create or re-create faces, but often then modified her renderings with something she just saw in her mind. Three days before, Ben had brought the hideous photos of Glenn’s nearly obliterated face to her. For a time, she sat across the table from him in her reading room, studying the pictures, sometimes with her eyes totally closed, sometimes open just a slit. He sat patiently, although he considered her actions a complete charade. Despite Woyczek’s glowing endorsement of the woman, Ben had confessed his heavy, cynical bias against clairvoyance, mental telepathy, telekinesis, fortune-telling, and the supernatural.

  “I’ve done one set of renderings in color, and one in black and white,” Madame Sonja said. “As you will see, the sets are somewhat different from one another. I can’t explain why.” She sat down at her computer with Ben studying the screen over her shoulder. “Here is your man.”

  The first image, face-on in full color, materialized on the screen. It was essentially three-dimensional, done by a remarkable program, and clearly drawn by a woman with talent. The man depicted had a round, youthful face; pudgy, ruddy cheeks; rather small, widely spaced eyes; and somewhat low-set ears. There was little about the face that Ben found interesting, but it did have a certain childlike aura. Madame Sonja rotated the electronic bust 360 degrees.

  She allowed Ben a couple of minutes to study her handiwork and then put the black-and-white drawing on the screen. Few would have said the drawings were of the same man. The face was narrower and more intelligent, the eyes fuller.

  “How do you explain the differences?” Ben asked.

  “I don’t try to explain anything. I draw what I see—on the photos and up here.” She tapped a long, scarlet fingernail against Gemini. “I wonder if this man has—make that had—diminished intelligence. Perhaps I have drawn him as he was at the time of his death, and then as he might have been save for some accident of birth.”

  Another strikeout, Ben was thinking. Woyczek might be right about this woman, but as far as he could tell, her uniqueness began and ended with the zodiac on her forehead. He wondered how many customers had paid how much money for her “wisdom.”

  “I have hard copies of five views in each of these envelopes. My charge would usually be a thousand dollars per set, but because Dr. Woyczek sent you, I’ll give you both of them for five hundred.”

  Shocked, Ben hesitated, about to refuse, when the woman added, “As you are thinking, you can refuse to pay and leave these here. But I tell you, Mr. Callahan, these renderings are what you are after.”

  Ben’s eyes narrowed. Anyone could have known what he was considering, he finally decided. It was logical and obvious—pure deduction from his hesitation and probably his expression. Anyone could have known. Reluctantly, he took his checkbook from his briefcase.

  “I’m afraid I only take MasterCard and Visa,” she said with no sheepishness whatsoever, “and, of course, cash.”

  An entrepreneur with a tattoo acros
s her forehead. What happened to the simple, carefree antiestablishment types he had hung out with in college? A little grass, a little beer, a little rock and roll. Ben checked his holdings and handed over the cash. It was extremely doubtful that Alice Gustafson and Organ Guard would reimburse him in full for this one, but what the hell.

  Then, in a move that totally surprised him, Madame Sonja reached out and took his hand.

  “Mr. Callahan, I’m sorry you feel as uncomfortable about me as you do. You have a wonderfully kind face, and I can tell that you are a good man. If you will, please come and join me for a cup of tea.”

  Ben wanted nothing more than to hit the road. He had visited every hospital within twenty-five miles of the accident site, as well as every police station. Now, as long as he had sprung for these pictures of Glenn, he might as well use what time he had left before returning to Chicago to show them to some people—perhaps starting with the hematologists. But there was something compelling about the woman’s touch. Reluctantly, he followed her into the den and took a seat. A minute later, she was pouring a rust-colored, aromatic tea into two Oriental cups, each with a different Asian symbol on the side.

  “Please, drink it down,” she urged. “I assure you there is nothing in it but tea. When you have finished, please pass your cup over to me.”

  Ben did as she asked. Madame Sonja stared into the cup for a few seconds, then wrapped her hands around it and looked intently across at him. Finally, she closed her eyes.

  “I’m not getting much,” she said.

  Since when is five hundred dollars not much?

  “I’m sorry,” he replied.

  “I keep hearing the same words over and over, though.”

  I’ve got to get out of here.

  “What words?”

  “Just start with what you know.”