Amanda's Eyes (12 page)

Already planning my campaign to wear
her down, I pulled the cup and saucer toward me, set the tea strainer on the
saucer, and added a spoonful of demerara sugar and a dollop of cream to my tea. 
It was still piping hot, so I sipped gingerly, savoring the wake-up punch of a
hearty black with hints of malt and caramel.

Then I changed the subject.  “So how
long have you been in the boarding house business?”  Smooth, right?

“Four years,” she said without
missing a beat.  Smooth.

She went on to tell me how much she
liked cooking for people and taking care of them.  She briefed me on Hobson’s
Hope, filling me in on public transportation, giving me the name of a good
hairdresser, and suggesting I try lunch at Roma’s Sidewalk Cafe, home of
buttercup iced tea and the freshest focaccia in town.  In the meantime, Cosmo
inhaled half a muffin and most of my bacon.

Half an hour later, I left the house
feeling jazzed.  Between my plan to make life miserable for the Ferrymen and my
battle of wits with Sadie Carter, the next few weeks should prove interesting.

As it turned out,
interesting
didn’t come close.

Dawn was a rosy glow behind the
treetops when I slowed to a walk a block from the boarding house.  I paused in
front of a two-story brownstone, jammed my hands on my hips, and cocked one leg.
 Chuffing palm-sized clouds into the frosty morning air, I examined my mental
score card.

Two measly miles and they hadn’t
been pretty.  Well, at least I was running again.  Had been for more than a
week.  Okay, I was still going less than half my usual distance at half my usual
pace, but I was making progress.

Give it time,
I reminded my ego as a trio of bright
red maple leaves swirled onto the sidewalk to dance around my beat-up Nikes. 
Two
weeks ago you were in the hospital.

The
chill seeping through my damp, black-and-gold Chandler
U sweats put a period to the inner monolog and got me moving again.  When I reached
the house a minute later, Cosmo met me at the front door.

Shoving back my hood, I gave him a noogie. 
“Getting stronger every day, pal.  Another two weeks, I’ll be doing five miles again.” 
He snorted.  “Okay, three weeks.  You should come with me sometime.”  The cool,
flat stare I got in return made me laugh out loud.

I inhaled deeply, drinking in the
yeasty aroma wafting from the kitchen.  Sadie was going to deliver on her
promise of whole-wheat blueberry pancakes.  My stomach gurgled happily as I
gave Cosmo a quick, later-dude ear scratch and jogged up the stairs.

Sorry excuse for a morning run
notwithstanding, I felt strong and energized.  Ready for a fabulous breakfast,
then a few hours’ work.  My research on the Ferrymen hadn’t turned up any new
leads yet, but my gut was telling me the chink in their armor was there, and my
gut was seldom wrong.  Shamelessly mixing my metaphors, I wondered if this
would be the day I found their Achilles heel.

The rest of the morning followed the
routine I had fallen into since my arrival.  After my shower I scooted downstairs
for breakfast with Sadie, Cosmo, and Sadie’s four permanent tenants, an
eclectic bunch I had taken an instant liking to.

Pert, curvy Fannie Jordan was a
waitress who never met a stranger or a man she didn’t like.  Her sparkling eyes
were hazel, but her hair color changed weekly—powder blue one week, hot pink
the next, and so on.  These rainbow dye jobs spilled over onto her dog,
Jacques, a haughty teacup poodle evidently unfazed by the fact that he changed
colors more often than your average chameleon.  At least once a day, Jacques
would assert his imagined Alpha-dog status via a soprano snarl at Cosmo.  Biker
Dog did his part by totally ignoring Jacques’s existence.

Systems analyst Connie Eller was curvaceous,
too, but where Fannie curved in all the right places, Connie curved once—like an
apple.  She was short, wore her pale brown hair in a blunt pageboy with a zigzag
center part, avoided makeup like the plague, and apparently had a closet full
of boxy, mouse-gray pants suits.  When she squinted, and she squinted often, she
reminded me of a brilliant but slightly disgruntled mole.

Next we had Byron Waxman.  Tall,
lanky, and stoop-shouldered, hands perpetually stuffed in the pockets of faded
blue jeans, he gazed at the world through soulful brown eyes set under an
unruly mop of dishwater blond hair.  He had advanced degrees in world lit and
philosophy and taught both subjects at Whitfield Hobson High.  In his spare
time, Byron—never By
—
composed rambling nature poems and wrote the
occasional theater or art review for the
Hobson Herald
.

Last but not least, my personal
favorite, Ted Li.  The town’s pocket-sized deputy sheriff wore his black brush
cut at attention, his khakis creased to a razor’s edge, and his black shoes
spit-shined.  He tended to rock back and forth on the balls of his feet while
he talked, giving you the unsettling impression he was about to launch.  His
ever-present toothy grin and upbeat attitude had earned him the nickname Happy. 
Happy Li.  If you’re going to go by an adverb, there are worse ones you could
pick.

As soon as breakfast was over, I nipped
upstairs, grabbed my jacket, and headed for the nearest hover-bus stop three
blocks off.  It was still a picture-perfect fall morning.  The air had a pleasant
bite, the sky was as blue as a robin’s egg, and the sun bathed the world in translucent,
burnished gold.  The surrounding hills blazed with color.  It was almost like
Mother Nature wanted to give my eyes a treat on this first day without my dark
glasses.

I caught the 8:30 Mid-Town Express, found
a window seat near the back, and settled in for the twenty-minute ride.

As near as I could tell without an
aerial view, Hobson’s Hope was laid out like a wagon wheel, with downtown being
the hub and residential neighborhoods radiating out like spokes knobby with
cul-de-sacs.  Thick forests of oak, hickory, maple, and pine hugged the
outskirts of the city and filled the spaces between neighborhoods, giving each
tree-lined residential area a secluded, living-on-the-edge-of-town feel.

Center City, as the natives grandiosely
dubbed downtown, consisted of an orderly grid of clean, broad streets fronted
by well-kept buildings in the trademark twentieth-century style.  (Although I
noticed the town fathers had unbent enough to opt for high, wide, solar-collection
windows over old-fashioned glass.)  The skyline was low, no construction higher
than five stories, all the buildings static.  Personally, I preferred the dynamic,
shape-shifting skyline of New Frisco, but unto each his own.

As Jack had said, within city limits
transportation was ground-bound.  From seven to eight a.m., then again from
five to six in the evening, traffic slowed to the forty-five minutes of polite,
orderly stop-and-go Hopers called rush hour.  I had seen worse snarls in
parking lots.

Life-sized statues of Whitfield and
Abigail Hobson were all over the place.  They didn’t look like a fun couple. 
More like a variation on
American Gothic,
except he had hair and the
Missus was always portrayed sitting down, leading me to suspect Whitfield had
been shorter than his wife and touchy about the fact.

You couldn’t walk ten blocks without
coming across an undersized park, but my favorite nook was a cobblestoned
alcove sandwiched between the headquarters of the
Hobson Herald
and Mocha
Joe’s Coffee Shop.  A narrow, covered passageway between the two buildings
opened into a tear-shaped courtyard bounded on the far end by a curved,
ivy-covered wall.  With just enough room for a couple petite tables and four
chairs, it was a perfect place to work undisturbed and unobserved, weather
permitting.  I headed that way when I got off the bus at Main and Prince,
swinging by Joe’s for my usual caffeine fix.

Joe Stephanopoulos appeared to be in
his late forties, a dapper little guy who parted his wavy black hair on the
left and waxed his mustache.  He handled traffic at the counter, greeting regulars
by name with a cheery, “Hallo!”  Meanwhile, his plump daughter, Diana—as
painfully shy as her father was outgoing—pulled barista duty, doing her level
best to disappear into the cappuccino machine.  Despite the differences in
their personalities—or maybe because of them—father and daughter worked
together seamlessly.  Their steady stream of customers came and went in a
smooth, uninterrupted flow.

Joe lifted one hand in a wave as I
came through the door.  “Hallo, Ms. Gregson, Mr. Ellison!  What can we get for
you today?”

“Good morning, Joe.  Diana.  Large
organic chai, please.”  I smiled at the rail-thin redhead who had followed me
into the shop.  His long, horsey face was lined with fatigue and his gray
overcoat looked like he had slept in it.  “How’s it going, Hank?”

The
Hobson Herald’s
lifestyle
correspondent rolled bloodshot green eyes.  “Don’t ask.”

“Late night?”

“Those Garden Club ladies are
killing me!  Would you believe last night’s meeting didn’t break up until after
midnight?  Hydrangeas as a hot-button topic.  Who knew?”  He glanced at the
proprietor.  “Espresso, Joe, and make it a double.”

“You got it, Mr. Ellison.”

Hank leaned against the counter,
facing me.  “So what are you up to?”

“Not much.  Enjoying the life of
leisure, soaking up the local ambience.”

“Nice work, if you can get it.  I’ll
bet it comes with all kinds of benefits.  Like sleep, for example.”

I punched him lightly on the
shoulder.  “Come on, Hank.  Real reporters don’t need sleep.”

He snorted derisively as Joe handed
me a cup.

“Three credits, Ms. Gregson.”

“Thanks, Joe.”  I pressed my index
finger to the biometric pad mounted on the counter, authorizing the debit from
the numbered account Dickson had set up for me at the National Trust Bank of
Nassau.  Untraceable, he said.  Hopefully, nobody was trying.

“Have a good one, Joe and Diana,” I
said as I turned to leave.  “You, too, Hank.  Good luck with that Garden Club
piece.”

“I’ll need it,” he sighed.  As I
went out the door I heard him ask, “Hey, Joe, what do you know about
hydrangeas?”

According to my stomach, it was a
quarter ‘til lunchtime when I logged off the computer function on my disposable
UpLink.  The holographic interface vanished as I leaned back in my chair, stretched
out my legs, and closed my eyes, mentally reviewing my progress.

I had been combing my private slush
files, this reporter’s equivalent of a Swiss bank account, except I deposit
information instead of money.  Thanks to a hacker acquaintance, my special
stash is heavily encrypted, triple-password-protected, and registered under a
numerical alias.  You can’t be too careful when it comes to private property in
Cloud Land.

My file on the Ferrymen was massive,
a couple hundred gigabytes, at least.  It included the police reports for each
hit, as well as any piece ever written or broadcast about the Ferrymen
and/or
their victims.  I had notes from all my interviews, be they with law
enforcement, law breakers, witnesses, or next of kin.  Some of the information would
never see the light of day—stuff like anonymous tips, off-the-record
information, and the few unsubstantiated rumors I managed to pick up.  But it
was all there.  I probably knew as much as about the Ferrymen
as the high
and mighty CIIS did.  Maybe more.

My plan in was to scour the files
item by item and line by line on the off-chance I would spot some commonality
or clue I and who knew how many highly trained professionals had previously overlooked. 
Not saying it was a
great
plan, but it beat doing nothing.  I had been
batting a big, fat zero for a week now, but I was nowhere near ready to give
up.  Which is why I wanted to take a minute to go over today’s assignment one
more time.  The Yanos case.

Dirk Yanos.  Thirty years old,
Greek-god handsome, fabulously wealthy.  He’d had it all by anyone’s standards—a
brilliant mind for business, a heaping helping of élan, and a globe-trotting
lifestyle guaranteed to inflame both the imagination and benign envy of your
average working stiff.  Dirk’s chiseled features routinely appeared in business
journals, posh monthlies, and fanzines alike.  And that was
before
he
threw the fairytale wedding of the century in Monaco, hitching his already
blazing star to that of stunning Rita Winston, a watercolorist renowned for paintings
of simplicity and grace.  Her works were regular fixtures in museums from the
Louvre to the Metropolitan.

To say Yanos had a lot to live for
would be akin to saying water is wet, and he had been poised to sweeten that
pot in a big way.  Yanos Pharmaceuticals, one of a hundred subsidiaries of DY
International, was hot on the trail of a new medication designed to wipe out
the scourge of drug addiction now and forever, amen.  The company had been
holding its cards extremely close to the vest, but rumor had it the new
treatment worked on the genetic level, switching off the genes that kept the
addict hooked, regardless of the drug of choice.  An instant cure without the
agony of withdrawal or threat of relapse, to be distributed free of charge?  Dirk
had been a Nobel shoo-in, guaranteed to go down in history as one of the
greatest humanitarians of all time.

Predictably, South America’s five major
drug cartels were less than thrilled to hear their fat, healthy demand curves were
about to flatline.  Equally predictably, they didn’t intend to let that happen
without a fight.

So nobody was particularly surprised
when Yanos Pharmaceuticals’ main research lab was broken into, twice.  Delicate
equipment was trashed, electronic files wiped clean.  All this despite the
facility’s top-of-the-line security system.  Fortunately, Dirk had been several
steps ahead of the opposition, stockpiling reserve equipment and creating hot-
and cold-backup systems with continuous data protection capability and
redundant storage—all discrete and off-site.  The research forged ahead.

A couple scientists went missing. 
Yanos promptly packed up the rest of his people and their equipment and moved
the whole kit and caboodle to an undisclosed location.  He had started to
receive death threats by then, but instead of joining his employees in hiding,
Dirk went right on living his life, although he did unbend enough to let CIIS
surround him with a hand-picked security detail.  Somebody had to stand up to the
cartels, he said, and it might as well be him.

A noble sentiment, but one morning Dirk’s
wife woke up to discover her young husband lying stone cold dead over on his side
of their massive round bed, not a mark on him.  The Ferrymen obit popped up in
the Badger, Iowa,
Bugle
before the echo of her screams died away.

According to the autopsy report—the
unexpurgated version I managed to sneak a peek at—high concentrations of an extremely
potent synthetic poison were found in the victim’s bloodstream and respiratory
system. 
Elegantly engineered
was the phrase the medical examiner used
to describe the sophisticated toxin formulated to react exclusively with Dirk’s
DNA.  A thousand other people could have sucked it in by the lungful, no harm,
no foul.  This stuff was designed to kill one man, and one man only, but not
right away.  The assassins had micro-concentrated the poison and packaged it in
nanobots programmed for remote activation according to their personal timetable. 
In point of fact, said the ME, it would be all but impossible to determine when
and where Yanos had actually inhaled the concoction.

Dirk was a high-profile, heavily
guarded target already alert to the threat.  Far from an easy hit, but the Ferrymen
pulled it off.  The imagination, expertise and technology needed to dream up
the plan, then produce and package the toxin, hadn’t come cheap.  The Ferrymen’s
client or clients had deep pockets.

Nobody seriously liked Dirk’s
obviously devastated widow as the contractee, but the feds had to rule her out,
since at least six murders out of ten can be traced back to an enraged spouse. 
Rita was cleared quickly.  Ditto the fifteen house servants.  They all passed
the background investigations and truth scans with flying colors.

Nice, but not too startling, because
investigators had already narrowed the list of probable clients to five major
players, i.e., the cartels.  Following the money was the obvious next step.  If
only it were as easy as it sounds.

Now that the world’s economy runs
exclusively on digital currency, billions upon billions of electronic financial
transactions take place every hour of every day.  Yes, international drug
cartels constantly shuffle massive sums, but filtering even one day’s transactions
takes a few minutes—more than enough time for an army of pros to make the money
trails vanish almost at their points of origin.  With the right encryption,
dirty deals can disappear (
Now you see them, now you don’t!)
into a labyrinth
of offshore accounts.  The launderers keep the funds moving, washing and
rewashing them until they trickle out of some distant branch in the pipeline,
whiter than snow, in the form of untraceable diamonds or perfectly legal bearer
bonds or profits from Pappy’s Sporting Goods Store.

All of which put the odds of
following the credit stream between the obvious suspects and the Ferrymen
somewhere
around a million to one.

Rita Yanos had gone into seclusion,
but I dug until I came up with the law firm handling her affairs and asked them
to pass along my request for an interview.  Sure, I know how that sounds, but
part of my job is putting crime into context.  Take murder, for example.  Homicide
doesn’t end with the corpse; there’s always collateral damage.  Call it the
ripple effects of man’s inhumanity to man.  We’ve got to understand that, if
we’re going to learn anything at all.  But if the press doesn’t show the world the
stunned, shattered survivors, who will?

Broaching the subject of an
interview during some poor soul’s darkest hour isn’t easy or comfortable.  My
least favorite bullet point on the job description, for all kinds of reasons. 
I can charge up San Juan Hill with the best of them, but walking softly makes
me feel clumsy and inept.  And, yes, I do feel like an intruder.

Plus, if friends and family decide
to talk to me, I have to keep what happens between us real.  Drop the shield
and admit I care.  Day to day, I can’t operate on that emotional plane. 
Without the shield, I would either burn out or go crazy or both.  But whether I
allow myself to acknowledge it or not, I always care.  More than I can say. 
The day I don’t will be the day I know I’ve been on the job too long.

So here’s the way I go after an
interview with a survivor.  I make the offer, back off, leave the door open. 
You would be surprised how many grieving relatives jump at the chance.  They
want to speak for the dead and put a face on the dearly departed.  I let them. 
Flesh out the vic, you make it harder for the viewing public to write him or her
off as one more unfortunate statistic.  Numbers are easy—digest and dismiss.  Some
creep wastes a waitress who reminds you of your neighbor or some old guy who
reminds you of your Uncle Al?  That’s tougher to ignore.

Dirk Yanos was nobody’s uncle Al,
but he
was
one of our favorite sons.  He and Rita were glamorous,
exciting, the romance of the century.  Icons of the good life.  They were also
human beings, and I wasn’t going to let Dirk’s murder be reduced to a tabloid
sensation.  Killing him was a crime against flesh and blood, his death a bitter
loss that shattered at least one heart.  I wanted Mr. and Mrs. Tri-America to get
that.  Rita must have wanted it, too, because she accepted my offer with an
invitation to meet her at Pinnacle House, the couple’s Rocky Mountain retreat
and, as it happened, the final scene of the crime.

My videographer, Fast Eddy Cho—so
called because the long, lean Asian is a Wunderkind with the camera who never,
ever misses the perfect shot—set up for the interview while Rita and I waited
in chairs set cater-corner to one another.  She watched him, I studied her. 
The famous heart-shaped face, surrounded by a cloud of auburn hair, was pale to
the point of translucence.  Her eyes looked swollen and sodden, hazel irises swimming
in a sea of pink.  She was probably around five-six, but she seemed smaller.  Fragile. 
Like she might break in pieces if you bumped her.

When Eddy gave us the thumbs-up, Rita’s
eyes shifted to my face.

“I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs.
Yanos.”

“Thank you.  And it’s Rita, please.”

“Did you and your husband come here
often, Rita?”

“Not often enough.”  Her fingers
plucked at a damp, balled-up tissue as she smiled a sad, secret smile.  “This trip
was supposed to be a romantic getaway.  We’d had so little time together … just
the two of us, I mean … since we got married two years ago.”

“Busy people.”

“Too busy.  If we had known ….” She
shook her head and pressed her lips together, as tears beaded her lower lashes. 
She brushed at them with her fingertips.  “But there was so much to do, and it
seemed so important at the time.  My art.  Dirk’s research.”

“Making the world a better place is
always important.”

“Is that what we did?”

“You doubt it?”

“I doubt everything now.  Our
priorities, our decisions … even God.”

“Most people would, in your place.” 
When she didn’t reply, I moved on.  “I don’t know if it’s any comfort, but the
outpouring of public grief and sympathy has been unprecedented.”

“It helps—of course, it helps—to
know so many people welcomed Dirk and me into some corner of their hearts.  That,
on some level at least, they care about what happens to us.”  Tears welled
again, again she swiped them away.  “It gives me hope that Dirk will live on somewhere
beyond my personal memories.”

“I’m sure he will.”  Inching closer
to the heart of the interview, I said, “But the adoration came at a price,
right?  Life in a fishbowl.”

“You get used to it.  Catching the
public eye is bread and butter for artists and research companies.  Reporters,
too,” she added with a tiny smile.  “Besides, we were having fun.”

“Sure, but we all need a break from
the unrelenting stare now and then.”

“If only for a short while.”

“So you came up here.”

“It was my idea,” she admitted. 
“Dirk wanted to wait.  He was afraid people would think he was running away.  Hiding
out.”

“Because of the threats on his
life.”

“Yes.  But I pleaded until he gave
in.”

And blamed herself for it.  Would until
she could think clearly enough to realize Dirk had probably been exposed to the
toxin before they got within a thousand miles of the Rockies.

“You didn’t leave the grounds at all
during the past two weeks?”

“No.  But we
weren’t
hiding
out!” she insisted.  “I hope you’ll make that clear.  It’s important.  To both
of us,” she finished softly.

“I’ll be sure to include this
segment in the broadcast.”  Then, “Can you tell me about that day?”

“I … I’m afraid don’t remember
much.  Just … waking up next to him.  He was so cold.  So absolutely …
inert.
” 
A tremor shook her.  “The body I knew as well as my own—eyes, lips, hands, that
tiny mole on his left earlobe—it was there.  But
Dirk
wasn’t.”

“No indication that he hadn’t been
feeling well?  He didn’t moan or seem restless during the night?”