Under the Beetle's Cellar (31 page)

“This seems very strange,” Sandy Hendrick said. “The only really private place to talk is one of the personal exercise rooms. We might as well do that.” She picked up her cup and headed toward the door. They followed her upstairs, through a huge room carpeted in purple and filled with shiny chrome-and-black machines and no people. She showed them into a small room. One wall was mirrored from floor to ceiling and the opposite wall had a ballet bar. Sandy Hendrick closed the door, turned on the overhead fan, and unrolled three plastic mats. “Sorry there are no chairs, but you said this required some privacy and this is really the only
place.” In one graceful, continuous motion, she lowered herself into the lotus position.

Molly assumed an identical position.

Bryan Holihan looked down and turned around once like a dog looking for the right position. Then he went down to one knee on the mat and stayed like that, looking as if he were going to make a proposal of marriage.

“Does this have anything to do with my latest DWI?” Sandy said, looking at Bryan.

“Oh, no, ma’am,” he said. “Nothing like that.”

“Mrs. Hendrick,” Molly said, “this is a most delicate and difficult matter. I believe in a woman’s right to privacy around matters of reproduction, but we have some extraordinary circumstances here. I’m going to tell you something that only a few people in the world know and, except for me, all of them are in law enforcement. Whatever you tell us will be shared only with those few, very discreet people.

“Thirty-three years ago, in the summer of 1962, when you were in summer school at the University of Texas, a newborn baby was abandoned. A male baby. Now a grown man. He needs to know the identity of his mother.” Molly paused and watched the woman’s face. “I have reason to think you might be his mother.”

Sandy Hendrick’s face had lost some color, but her expression remained totally impassive. Not a muscle twitched anywhere. Her skin had suffered the ravages of the years, the Texas sun, and alcohol, but her features had survived intact: her full lips, slanted blue eyes, and her delicately sculpted nose, which rose at the tip and seemed to pull the upper lip along up with it, revealing even white teeth.

“That’s it?” she asked. “That’s what you came for?”

Molly nodded.

“I’m sorry y’ll have come all the way from Austin for this,” she said. “I could have told you over the phone. This has nothing to do with me.” Under her black jog bra, her breast heaved as if she’d just run a marathon. “I
was
in summer school in 1962. That’s a matter of record. I failed French III, and”—she had to stop for breath—“I had to take it over. I had nothing to do with any baby. This is all so bizarre.” She picked up her coffee cup, but her hand was shaking so violently she had to bring the other hand up to help hold it steady. Even using both hands, she was unable to get the cup to her lips. She set it down.

“Mrs. Hendrick,” Molly said, feeling a stab of compassion for the devastation these questions were causing, “you and your roommate, Gretchen Staples, moved out of the sorority house even though you’d both paid through the summer and couldn’t get a refund. Why?”

“That’s none of your business. This has nothing to do with me. Let’s finish up here.”

“Mrs. Hendrick, when I was nineteen, I got pregnant. I wasn’t married and my parents were dead. I remember the panic like it happened this morning. It can happen to anyone, and it’s very scary. I still find it difficult to talk about.”

“I’m sorry for your misfortune, Miss …” She shrugged.

“Cates. Molly.”

“As I said, this has nothing to do with me.” She started to get to her feet. “And I’m going to be late for—”

“Wait a minute,” Molly said. “Please sit down for a minute more. I want to tell you about this baby—who he is now.”

The woman remained standing.

“Please sit.”

With a grimace of annoyance that was the first real expression she’d shown, she sank back down to the mat.

“Now I’m going to tell you something that you may find upsetting. The baby that was abandoned that summer is now the cult leader who’s holding a dozen people hostage in Jezreel.”

Sandy Hendrick kept her expression frozen, but her face paled, making the black eye shadow and liner around her eyes stand out like soot smudges on parchment. She looked like a woman who’d just had all her blood sucked out.

Molly moved in for the kill. “Have you been following that situation in Jezreel, Mrs. Hendrick?”

The woman spoke, barely opening her mouth. “Yes. Of course.” Her breath was coming raggedly. Molly was fascinated by the contrast between her attempt at impassiveness and the upheaval her body was caught in. We think we have our bodies in check, but our breath and blood, our tears and tics—those involuntary functions have a life and will of their own, Molly thought. They betray us every time. All the exercise in the world will not bring our bodies under control.

Sandy Hendrick was saying, “Everybody knows about that. I think about those children all the time.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, of course. It’s terrible, just terrible.”

“He’s planning to kill them. The negotiators have not gotten anywhere. If they knew the identity of his birth mother, they might be able to use that information to bargain with him. When Samuel Mordecai was twenty-one he searched for his real mother, desperately, but he never found her. It’s very, very important to him.”

“I’m sure it is, but there’s no reason to be telling me this. You’re
wasting your time, and mine. I’m not the woman you think I am.” She turned her head and looked at herself in the big mirror.

Molly studied the woman’s profile, giving special attention to the finely molded uptilted nose and the upper lip that pulled up slightly to reveal her teeth. Molly had spent two hours watching Samuel Mordecai, and she’d had ample opportunity to admire his profile. She had always found it astounding when a genetic code imprinted itself on an offspring in some exact reproduction of a parental feature: mother and daughter with identical tufts of hair between their eyebrows, father and son with indistinguishable chin clefts. What bad luck for this woman that she had produced and abandoned a child whose upper lip was the mirror of her own, an undeniable link between them.

The resemblance took your breath away.

“Have you seen photographs of Samuel Mordecai?” Molly asked.

“Yes. I suppose. In the paper.”

“I wish I had a good, clear photo to show you, Mrs. Hendrick. No one could miss the resemblance. I believe you could tell us the date you gave birth that summer and where you left your baby and what he was wrapped in. Mrs. Hendrick, have you listened to what he said on the radio? He talked about being wrapped in the mantle of the Beast. I think you could explain that.”

Sandy Hendrick leapt to her feet, her slender body vibrating. “This is ridiculous!” Her voice shook with rage. “I don’t have to stay here! I’m leaving.”

“There’s a grandchild,” Molly continued. “A boy. His mother was murdered today. His father will not come out of this alive. That baby will be an orphan. You wouldn’t have to get involved, but you could if you—”

“No! I never had a baby until my Sarah was born in 1967, and I’d been married for two years. I was a virgin when I got married! I never—”

Bryan Holihan spoke up. “We could do this privately, Mrs. Hendrick. No one would have to know.”

“Listen!” she cried out. “I’m not the woman you think I am.”

Molly studied the taut, high-strung body, the tense, self-preoccupied, ravaged, humorless face. The woman was about to break. Sandy Hendrick was right—she was not the woman Molly thought she was. She was certainly Samuel Mordecai’s biological mother and a DNA test would prove it, but she was not the right woman. It would do no good to continue tormenting her, or to try to coerce her to speak to her son. And, anyway, it didn’t matter. She had come to the end of the strand. She had found what mattered.

Molly stood. “Sorry we bothered you, Mrs. Hendrick. You’re right. This is a misunderstanding and I apologize.”

Bryan Holihan reached up and grabbed her arm. “But—”

“Agent Holihan, it’s clear Mrs. Hendrick is not the woman we thought she was. We need to let her get on with her evening.”

He struggled to his feet.

Sandy Hendrick looked incredulous, as if she’d received a last-second reprieve from certain disaster.

Molly handed her a card, her usual practice. “If you want to talk to me, later on,” she said, “give me a call. Thanks for your time. We’d appreciate your not talking about this matter to anyone.” No danger of that, Molly thought.

They returned to the car in silence. As they pulled out of the lot, Holihan demanded, “Have you lost your mind? That’s her. Even I could see the resemblance to Mordecai. And she was just starting to break down. All the signs were there. You had her where you wanted her. In two more minutes she would have admitted it.”

“Probably,” Molly said. Copper was leaning into the front seat resting his head on Molly’s shoulder and she was scratching behind his good ear.

“Then why—”

“Because I saw that it doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter! Then why have we wasted all this time?”

“Nothing is ever wasted, Bryan. Haven’t you learned that? How old are you?”

“Thirty-one.”

“Well, see, you’re too young.” Molly leaned back and closed her eyes. “I need five minutes of silence to think some things through before we call in. Okay?”

The dark landscape whizzed by. One good thing about Bryan Holihan was that he drove like a bat out of hell. Another was that he didn’t feel he had to make conversation. That made for perfect thinking conditions. Molly sat cross-legged in the passenger seat and contemplated deceit and homicide. Or, more accurately, she decided, ingenuity and assassination.

The dog slept on the back seat, occasionally making little whines and twitches in his sleep. Molly glanced back at him and wondered if police dogs had worse dreams than other dogs. According to Grady, this one had had his fair share of nightmare experiences during his career. But this morning, when he’d gone after the attackers in the garage, he had seemed joyful in his ferocity, totally alive, an animal doing what he was born to do. Bred and trained for such action, he would kill easily and without remorse if the occasion required it.

Just like most people.

Molly had never had the slightest problem understanding why people killed one another. There were times in her life when she had been angry enough or scared enough to commit murder; if the conditions had been right, she probably would have. On the
Patriot
police beat, she had seen the results of countless murders—murders for money, revenge, love, drugs, and in one memorable case, murder for bottle caps. Her reaction had never been surprise or outrage, but a grim acknowledgment that it happens because that is the kind of animal we are.

Now she was going to do something she’d never done before: try to persuade others to commit a homicide. “Bryan, I’m ready. Let’s call the command post. I need to talk to Lattimore and Stein.”

He glanced over at her and grunted an assent. When he got Andrew Stein on the radio, he handed the mike to Molly. She asked, “Who else is present, Mr. Stein?”

“Curtis, and Borthwick.”

“Would you get Lattimore in and Traynor, too, and ask Borthwick to wait outside? I want to tell you what happened, and I have an idea I’d like to talk about.”

“Traynor’s still at the Grimes scene and Lattimore’s on his way to the airport in Austin.”

“He’s not leaving?”

“No. Just picking someone up. Jules, could you wait outside. Go ahead, Miss Cates, it’s Curtis and me.”

“Is this frequency secure?”

“It’s supposed to be. Go ahead. Have you found Mom?”

“Oh, yes. Sandy Hendrick is the mother all right. She didn’t admit that she was, but she looks so much like him you could pick her out from a hundred other women. Also she was so stressed by our questions, she was ready to explode. She’s really tried to repress the event. If we’d stuck with it, we could have broken her down, but I could see that it doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter?” Stein sounded impatient.

“I needed to complete the line of inquiry to see what the point really was. This is probably immoral and unethical, but I’ve got to tell you what I’m thinking now, while we still have time.”

“We’re all cynical adults here,” Stein said.

“Here’s what I’m thinking. Mr. Stein, I’ve heard the FBI has agents who are trained as assassins.”

“Miss Cates, I—”

“No. Don’t respond to that. I know that you do, but you probably call it by some other term, like rearrangement specialists or mortality
adjusters. Here’s my real question: Have you got any middle-aged women, around fifty, who have that kind of experience? Who can go into dangerous situations and take someone out? That’s the way you say it, isn’t it? Take them out?”

There was silence at the other end.

“Do we all agree that launching an assault on the Jezreelites without taking Samuel Mordecai out is likely to give us dead hostages?”

“Miss Cates, where are you going with this?”

“First answer me. Do we agree?”

“We could get dead hostages even if we did figure out how to take him out,” Stein said evenly.

“I know, but we would have a better chance with him out.”

“We’re all nodding,” Stein said curtly.

“Okay. You said Mordecai always watches the Channel 33 news at six, right? And you’ve used that to feed him information.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Suppose they carried a news item tomorrow that Samuel Mordecai’s birth mother had been located and that she wanted to talk to him before the end.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And suppose he bit on it and contacted you and said he wanted to talk to her, too. And suppose she said it had to be face to face and private, and she wasn’t afraid to come in where he was. And suppose she went in there, into the compound.”

“Yeah.”

“And suppose she gets him alone, away from where the kids are, sort of diverts him. And suppose she kills him. And right then you start the maneuver, take the barn, and swoop down to protect the agent.”