The Cyclops Conspiracy (16 page)

“Didn’t the papers say he was drunk?”

“Yes, they…did.”

“Are you saying you don’t believe he’d drink and drive?”

“It wasn’t in him.” Jason saw Kader inch his glass closer to him with a fingernail. He snatched it up and downed it without thinking. “Unlike us,” he said, lifting the now-empty glass. “He didn’t touch alcohol. Why are you so interested…in this?”

“So then how did it happen?”

“I can’t explain that.” His skin was tingling. The room suddenly felt like an oven. He loosened his tie. His eyelids seemed to be attached to anchors, pulling them closed.

“I’m sorry,” she said, sensing his frustration. “So tell me about your girlfriend, Christine.”

“She’s not…my girlfriend.” His speech was thicker now, out of his control.

The waitress appeared and placed their orders on the table. “Will there be anything else?” she asked. They both shook their heads.

Kader persisted like a prosecutor cross-examining a witness. “She may not be your girlfriend, but there’s an attraction there.”

“Just…history,” he replied, cutting into his steak sloppily. He misjudged and spilled some green beans onto the tablecloth. He didn’t dare afford himself the luxury of assuming he and Christine could be together again.

He was agitated now. After three glasses of wine—or was it four?—the uncomfortable topics, combined with Jasmine’s overbearing presence, became a roiling brew. He jabbed at the food as if the steak needed to be killed all over again.

“Have I upset you?”

“I’m…fine,” he replied, ramming a square of meat toward his mouth, almost missing. “Just need…to eat something.”

“You don’t seem fine.”

Enough
, he thought. He rose unsteadily, removed his wallet, pulled out a hundred-dollar bill, and tossed it on the table. “Time for me to go! This should…cover it,” he said. He zigzagged toward the door, which he shoved open clumsily, banging his head on the glass. As Jason staggered to his car he knew he shouldn’t drive. He tried to decide what to do. The answer came moments later.

* * *

Jasmine smiled, sipped her wine, grabbed Jason’s wine glass with her napkin, and slipped it in the pocket of her lab coat before walking briskly after him.

Jason and Peter trailed Waterhouse single file toward the rear of his small Poquoson one-story bungalow. A large-breasted woman, wrapped in a frayed towel, emerged from the bathroom. Her hair, still dry, looked as if it repelled water better than Kevlar, and appeared to have been dipped in undiluted Clorox. Waterhouse filed past, foregoing introductions. The same strong scent of cheap perfume Jason had smelled on Waterhouse during their first encounter permeated the house. Jason averted his eyes and ran a hand over his throbbing head, but the woman showed not a scintilla of embarrassment at her state of undress.

Jason’s brain felt like an overinflated balloon pressing against his cranium. He’d woken this afternoon to Peter pounding on his front door. He had no recollection of leaving the Southern Belle, or of how he’d even managed to get home. But his car was in the driveway, and the keys were on the counter. What bothered him even more than the headache was that he didn’t remember anything that happened between leaving the restaurant and waking up. Had he done something with Jasmine he was going to regret?

“Have a seat,” Waterhouse instructed.

The cramped dining room had been converted into a command center, stuffed with a myriad of electronic assets. On a long table in front of a drawn curtain sat a large-screen computer surrounded by a digital video recorder and several cameras. Three telephoto lenses stood inverted, like oversized chess pieces. On the opposite wall, a desk with another computer was flanked by two large filing cabinets.

Three chairs huddled in the center of the room, surrounding a tattered, bulging, white banker’s box. The sides were dotted with gouges and lengths of duct tape.

“Here it is. Thomas’s pride and joy.” Waterhouse pulled a chunk of files from the box. He squinted against the smoke rising from his cigarette.

“You mind if I light up?” Peter asked, rubbing the scar over his eye. It was an unconscious habit, Jason noticed, his brother fell into when he was about to stress that gung-ho, “ooh-rah” brain of his.

“Be my guest,” the private investigator replied. Peter shook a cigarette loose, and with the two of them puffing away, a velvety cloud soon hung below the ceiling.

Waterhouse continued, “It’s his collection of material on any kind of conspiracy he could get his hands on. The moon landings, the Kennedy assassination, crop circles, September 11, UFO sightings of all kinds, Freemasons, the Illuminati, Operation Valkyrie, the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg and anything else he could think of.” He paused. “Did you know he actually spent four days, on two separate trips, at Dealey Plaza investigating Kennedy’s murder? He stood behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll with his camera and tape measure. He also visited Ground Zero a year ago. Claims there’s evidence that the Twin Towers and the smaller buildings were intentionally brought down by preset explosives, not the planes crashing into them. He also went to Shanksville to see the crash site of Flight 93. Said no bodies were ever recovered from the site.”

“He was a conspiracy theorist?” asked Peter, giving Jason a look. “Is that what this is all about?”

The next twenty minutes were spent leafing through the dog-eared collection of papers. “I have to admit, Walter. This doesn’t look good,” said Jason. “The man
was
paranoid.” He tossed a stack of papers about a UFO crashing somewhere in Pennsylvania in the fifties on the floor beside the box. A sliver of doubt entered Jason’s mind about Thomas’s activities.

“I show you this so you know what kind of man Pettigrew was.”

Peter fanned through paper, pamphlets, and brochures. “It looks like he was a quack. How did you know him, anyway?”

Waterhouse leaned back and clasped his hands behind his graying head. “Thomas and I became friends about six years ago. He hired me to investigate the death of his wife—”

“His wife died of cancer. She wasn’t killed,” Jason declared.

“I know that,” Waterhouse replied. “But Thomas was convinced her chemotherapy was diluted. Asked me to investigate her outpatient intravenous pharmacy.”

Peter leaned forward. “And what did you find?”

The naked woman had emerged from the bathroom, clothed now, and was rummaging around the kitchen. “You’re leaving, Becky Sue,” Waterhouse called to her.

She grunted in the negative.

“He paid me to become a certified pharmacy technician and infiltrate the pharmacy. It took me three months to get my qualification, then I applied. They denied me at first, but eventually I got the job. Meanwhile, he was paying me eighty dollars an hour to do this undercover work.”

“Again, Walter, what did you find?” Jason was growing irritated.

Walter rubbed his beard stubble. “I couldn’t find anything wrong.”

“What made Pettigrew think that the pharmacy medications weren’t correct?”

“He’d read about some pharmacist in the Midwest who was mixing IV bags with subpotent medications to save money. Thomas thought this pharmacy was doing the same thing. In fact, he started
accusing the doctors who owned the pharmacy before we had any hard evidence. It turned out to be very embarrassing. Luckily, I—and his attorney—convinced him to apologize and zip his mouth.”

“This is ridiculous,” Peter mumbled. “This guy was a fruitcake.”

Jason held up a hand, quieting Peter. “So you took his money to investigate this pharmacy, and it turned out to be nothing?”

“Mind you, I didn’t know it was nothing until I got in there. Once I realized they were legit, I stopped taking payment. By that point, I felt sorry for him. I began to stop by the pharmacy once a week to talk to him. We became friends, started meeting for chess and dinner.”

“How much did he pay you before you stopped accepting his money?”

“About thirty-eight thousand dollars.”

“Sweet Mother of God,” Jason whispered. The guy’s stock dropped several points in his eyes; was he trustworthy?

He looked hard at Waterhouse. “I thought you wanted to keep this quiet,” he whispered, jerking his head toward the kitchen, and the girlfriend.

Waterhouse waved the comment off. “She doesn’t care about this stuff. She’ll be outta here in a few minutes.”

Jason squinted then said, “You were saying?”

“His money paid for a lot of the equipment you see here. I’m a retired police officer, moved down here from Massachusetts after my divorce. Worked homicide in Boston. I was just starting out in the racket when I met Thomas. At the time, I needed a break. Thomas gave it to me.”

“And once you found out the scam was bogus?” Jason’s tone left no doubt about how he felt about Waterhouse’s actions.

“I told you, I stopped taking his money! I didn’t call Thomas. He called me!” Waterhouse, now agitated, sat up. “Listen to me, you good-for-nothing pill pusher. Who the hell do you think you are?”

Waterhouse and Jason locked eyes. The tense, testosterone-laced moment passed. Waterhouse blinked, and Jason continued. “How do you know his daughter, Christine?”

“I don’t know her very well,” the private investigator replied, relaxing a bit. “I went to the house because I overheard her inviting other people. I told her the truth. I was a friend of her father’s. Since I was curious about his death, I wanted to check out folks at the Colonial, see if anyone might be a person of interest.” Waterhouse handed Peter the drug report with the handwriting on the back he’d already shown Jason.

Peter read the report and looked quizzically at the two men.

“There’s more,” Waterhouse said. “Turn the page over.”

Peter turned the page over and saw the note. He handed it back to Jason. “What is it?” Peter asked.

“That’s what I was hoping your brother could tell me,” Waterhouse replied, looking at Jason. “Here’s the rest of what was in that particular file.” He handed over a thin sheaf of documents and six paper prescriptions. “Then there’s this.” He handed Jason a DVD in a thin, clear plastic case. “It’s a video of a day at the Colonial taken from a security camera. I’ve looked at the thing four times. I didn’t see any unusual activity on it. But I’m not a pharmacist.”

“What day was it recorded?” Jason flipped the case over, remembering the video equipment in the pharmacy.

“September 15.”

“That was the night Pettigrew died.”

“Exactly.”

“What’s this?” Peter asked, holding a palm-sized device.

“It’s a GPS. Evidently, Thomas tracked one of the pharmacists the night he died. Sam Fairing. I believe you’ve met him. There’s only one file on the hard drive. The trail ends at the Lions Bridge.”

“Pettigrew left this box and these reports the night he died?”

Waterhouse nodded once more.

“What time did he leave them?”

“I was on an assignment that night. I left the house about eight thirty. I didn’t return home until about half past midnight. That’s when I found the box inside the door. He had a key to this place.” Waterhouse
snapped his fingers. “Oh, yeah, there’s one more thing. He left a message that night on the landline at a quarter to twelve. He called my cell, but I leave it off when I’m on assignment. I saved it.” Waterhouse moved to his equipment and pulled a CD from a stack on the table. Placing it in a tray, he pressed a button, and the message played.

“I found one, Walt. I found one. I know I’ve been wrong in the past. But this time it’s real. It’s urgent, very urgent!”

Pettigrew’s deep, scratchy voice competed with the harsh background noise. It sounded as if he was in a hurricane. He might have been driving fast with the windows down. The recording stopped and left the three men in smoky silence. These were some of the man’s final words, now spoken from the grave.

“What did he find?” asked Jason.

“That’s what I was hoping you could help me with. It’s in these papers somewhere and on the DVD.”

“You haven’t gone to the authorities?”

“With what? There’s no evidence of foul play. All we have are some reports and a message left by a man notorious for jumping to conclusions about wild conspiracies. They’d boot me out on my ass.”

“If he was killed, what would be the motive?” Peter leaned back and stroked his eyebrow.

“I don’t know. But these reports and invoices are the only documents in his file box that aren’t of national or international scope.
They involve the Colonial. The last entry on that report was for the day before he died. It’s the only connection I have right now.”

Jason shuffled the reports again. “I’m going to need a few minutes to review these. Don’t you two have some death sticks you need to smoke?”

“That’s our cue,” said Peter, slapping his hands on his thighs. “Walter, my man, let’s go take a few minutes off our lives thanks to the United States tobacco industry.”

Jason sat at Waterhouse’s desk and inspected each document, placing it neatly in a pile before moving on to the next. After he had reviewed each, he rummaged in the desk and found a writing pad and a pencil. He began again at the beginning of the stack and hastily scribbled notes.

An hour after he’d begun, Jason walked outside. Waterhouse was on the tail end of telling Peter about a firefight outside of Khe Sanh.

“What did you find?” asked Peter.

“There’s a pattern to the paperwork. But I’m not sure I’ve found anything yet. I’ll walk you all through it.”

Back in the makeshift command center, Jason explained. “These are six prescriptions for the same medication written over the course of more than a year. They are all for the same patient, some guy named Douglas Winstead. And they’re all for the same medication, a chemo drug called Prucept. It’s used for liver cancer. And they were all written by the same doctor, Dr. Jasmine Kader.”

Jason held the report in his hand uneasily. If Jasmine Kader was somehow involved in Thomas’ death, the implications were enormous. But Jason needed more. If Thomas was following a trail of prescriptions written by Jasmine, the old pharmacist must have suspected something was amiss. And, according to this sleazy private eye, he had literally followed Sam Fairing the night he died. The anxiety Jason felt was growing as he dealt the prescriptions, laying them out as if he were playing solitaire.