Under the Beetle's Cellar (32 page)

“That’s a lot of supposing.”

“I know.”

“We’re a civilian agency, Miss Cates. We don’t kill people.”

“Bullshit.”

“Maybe you watch too many movies.”

“Maybe I do.”

“Where are you now?” Stein asked.

“San Marcos just zoomed by. With Bryan driving, we’re forty minutes from you.”

“Come back right now. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Bryan, do not stop at McDonald’s. We’re all dining here.”

“But what do you think?” Molly persisted.

“I think you need to come here. Grady will be back shortly and Lattimore should be back in an hour or so. We’ll talk about it then.”

——

Grady Traynor, Andrew Stein, and a slender bald man Molly hadn’t met were standing around the computer monitor eating fried chicken and watching George Curtis type words onto the screen. The bald man wore jeans and orange suspenders with palm trees on them over a lavender T-shirt.

Bryan Holihan immediately went to the bucket on top of the fax machine and took out a piece of chicken.

Grady kissed Molly on the cheek. Then he embraced her, holding on longer than usual. She looked up at him. His face seemed grayer than it had a few hours ago and the circles under his eyes looked engraved into the skin. “Bad scene?” she asked.

“One of the worst.”

Andrew Stein said, “Miss Cates, this is Jules Borthwick, just flew in from New York. Molly Cates.”

Molly shook hands with the bald man. His hand was fine-boned and soft. She’d never seen anyone who looked less like an FBI agent. “Are you an agent?” she asked.

“Don’t you just love those dark suits?” he warbled in a falsetto. He lowered his voice to a normal pitch. “I’m a consultant—makeup and special effects.”

“Mr. Borthwick is a celebrity,” Andrew Stein said. “He created the Elephant Man on Broadway, the Mantis Pieta, lots of movie and rock video monsters. He’s said to be a genius.”

Molly studied Borthwick with interest. “Is this true or are they playing with me?”

“Oh, it’s true, especially the genius part. I got an Obie for Methuselah the Dread.”

“What are you doing in Jezreel?”

Andrew Stein said, “It will all come clear. Wait until Lattimore gets back.”

She looked around. “He’s not back yet?”

“Plane was delayed,” Stein said curtly. “Just twenty minutes.”

“Who’s coming in?” Molly asked.

“The woman you were talking about—the fifty-year-old agent—Loraine Conroy.” Stein checked his watch. “They should be back here by eleven.”

Molly was breathless with surprise. “You had already—”

“Great minds,” Stein said. “But your idea of breaking it on the TV news is excellent, original with you. We were planning to call Mordecai with it direct, but this is much better because he’ll see it and call
us.
That
way, it feels like his idea. Go ahead and print that out, Curtis, so she can read it.”

Curtis hit a key; the light on the printer began to blink.

Molly tried to keep her voice even. “When did you decide to do this?”

“Early this morning, right after Lieutenant Traynor told us Samuel Mordecai was adopted and how far you’d gotten in searching for the mother. We’ve been sitting around here for days trying to figure out how to get someone inside there to take Mordecai out, and then you came into our lives and gave us the answer. Hallelujah. Lattimore called Quantico right then to ask if Rain could fly down. We had to get a green light on Mordecai, but the real problem is that we have a policy against risking agents’ lives to get hostages out.” Seeing her expression, he explained bluntly, “Hostages are considered to have one leg in the grave already and you don’t risk a fully alive person for them. But when children are involved, everyone goes all mushy.”

The printer spit out a single sheet.

“So,” Molly said, feeling hot anger building up, “you knew all along it didn’t matter whether we found the mother or not, but you let us make the trip to San Antonio.”

“Oh, no. We hoped you’d come back with a bona fide mom. It would be nice to have her in our pocket, just in case. But you know as well as we do this negotiation’s at a dead end. Mordecai’s just been leading us on, buying time. Any bargaining chip is worthless. He never intended to let any of the kids go.”

Molly looked at Andrew Stein’s plump face in wonder. She’d been considering herself ruthless. But these guys were way beyond her.

Stein picked the paper up from the printer and handed it to her. “Read it out loud.”

Molly read: “
MOLLY CATES
:
I was working on a story about Samuel Mordecai for my magazine when I learned he had been adopted as an infant. I went back and researched it. It was difficult, but I finally located his birth mother yesterday. She lives in Houston now and had no idea that Mordecai was her son until I talked to her yesterday.

“
NEWSPERSON
:
How can you be sure that the woman you found really is his mother?

“
CATES
:
Because I was careful not to give her any of the details I knew about where the infant had been found and when and what was found with him. She was able to tell me all that, every detail. There’s no question—this woman is Samuel Mordecai’s real mother. She wants more than anything in the world to speak with him, explain things to him.

“
NEWSPERSON
:
What are the circumstances of his birth? You said he was found?

“
CATES
:
At this point in time I’m not at liberty to talk about that.
” She stopped reading and said, “I’d never say ‘at this point in time.’ I’d—”

“Just read it,” Grady said.

Molly shrugged and continued: “N
EWSPERSON
:
Have you passed all this on to the FBI negotiators?

“C
ATES
:
Yes, I have. I gave them copies of my notes and tapes.

“N
EWSPERSON
:
What do they intend to do about it?

“C
ATES
:
I don’t know.
”

Molly finished reading and looked up. “Why me?”

Grady said, “Have some chicken. We’ve got plenty.”

She shook her head. “Why me?”

Andrew Stein said, “First of all, it has the advantage of being as close to the truth as we can stay. This version is true up until the last step. Makes for less lying, more chance of it being believable, less chance of getting caught. But the main reason you’re the one to do it is that he’s talked about you in our conversations.”

“He has?” She looked at Grady; he hadn’t told her this.

Grady shrugged.

“He trusts you,” Stein said.

“Trusts me! Oh, no. You’ve got your wires crossed.” She walked to the fireplace and studied the selection of photographs they had managed to find of the estimated hundred and fifty Hearth Jezreelites believed to be inside the compound. At the top was Samuel Mordecai standing with Annette Grimes outside the compound. He was smiling, golden-haired and radiant, a sun god on top of the world. Next to him, Annette looked tiny, pretty and shy.

“No,” Stein said. “He sees you as ungodly, unfeminine, wrong-headed, and doomed. But he also sees you as ruthlessly honest and struggling to tell the truth as you see it. More honest than the people who call themselves Christians and do nothing about it. He thinks your interest in exploring faith is more religious than most people’s watered-down or fake belief.”

“He said that?”

“Yup. Curtis, find her the transcripts of the relevant phone tapes, please. Mordecai says you didn’t try to misrepresent yourself and you quoted him accurately. He says you tried to get at the truth, but it was impossible because your magazine, your audience, and the world you live in are hopelessly materialistic and corrupted. So you had no chance.”

“Well, that may be true,” Molly said. “There are days I think that myself. But how did my name even come up?”

“At one point we approached him about outside, neutral people to serve as possible go-betweens. Mordecai insisted you are the only one he’d trust. But like everything else we’ve tried with him, that collapsed.”

Molly was flabbergasted. She’d assumed Samuel Mordecai had hated her as much as she hated him. It was pathetic. If he had no one he trusted more than her, then he was truly alone and besieged in this world. “Well, he couldn’t be more wrong, could he? I’m clearly an inveterate liar and now I’m collaborating on fraud and murder.”

Andrew Stein said, “The problem here, Molly—may I? I’m tired of saying Miss Cates.”

“I wish you would.”

“The problem, Molly, is what we in the business call divergent worldviews. Mordecai sees what he’s doing as leading the world to its glorious, millennial rendezvous with God, and you see what he’s doing as butchering innocent children. In divergences this extreme, normal morality doesn’t apply.” He looked at Grady. “Lieutenant, Mr. Borthwick and I have some work to do. We need Bryan, too. Could you take Molly through the script idea?”

“Sure,” Grady said. “Can we use the computer in here?”

“Yes. And it would be nice to have a draft before they get back from the airport. Curtis, you man the phones, please. Come on, Jules.” The three men left. Curtis slipped a pair of earphones on and sat at the hostage phone control panel.

Grady pulled out the chair in front of the computer. “Sit down, Molly. We need to get some notes and tapes put together. We want evidence that will convince Samuel Mordecai that you did in fact track down his mother.”

Molly looked at her watch. “This sounds too much like a term paper, and it’s ten-thirty, Grady. I was planning on taking my dog home to bed.”

He patted the chair. “Sit down here and rest your weary self. Your shoulders look all tense. Let me work on them.”

Molly sat. Grady stood behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders. Slowly he began to knead the tight muscles at the base of her neck. She closed her eyes and relaxed into his familiar hands. “Good thing the dog’s outside,” she murmured.

“Yeah, it would be nice if Curtis were, too.”

“Mmmmm,” she said, letting her head fall forward, “that’s good, right behind the bones there. Ooo. Perfect.”

“This job is right up your alley,” he said into her ear. “A bit of writing and a bit of acting.” His thumbs were working their way down her spine. “We want you to write a script, Molly. An interview between you and Samuel Mordecai’s mother. You come in and tell her what’s led you
to her and then she tells you—eventually—the details of his birth and abandonment and you get convinced she is the mother. She ends up saying she’s regretted leaving him every day of her life and wants to tell him about it and why she did what she did. Make it convincing and make the mother contrite and loving.” He used the heels of his hands to press into her lower back.

“When Agent Conroy gets here, we’ll want to record the two of you reading your parts into your little recorder.”

He took his hands off her back, picked up a file folder and opened it. “Her name—the mother—is Cynthia Jenkins. She lives in Houston, on Terrace West in the Memorial area. She’s a third-grade teacher, a widow with no kids. She has spent her life mourning the infant child she abandoned. The interview took place last night, around eight, at a restaurant near Hobby Airport. You flew in to talk to her.” He handed her the folder. “We’ve got a driver’s license and a passport for her right here. The photo on them is Loraine Conroy’s.”

Molly picked up the passport and opened it. The woman in the photo had gray eyes with thick, dark eyebrows, short brown hair going gray, a straight nose, wide mouth, and sallow skin.

“What’s her story?” Molly asked.

“Apparently she’s legendary. The best marksman in agency history. She once shot two possibles in a morning.”

“What’s a possible?”

“I guess it’s like shooting off a gnat’s eyelash; it’s theoretically possible, but rarely done, and never twice in a row. Conroy’s a former nun, quit the Church and joined the agency in ’72, when they started taking women. Speaks three languages, has been everywhere in the world—foreign counterintelligence, all kinds of undercover assignments. Now teaches at Quantico. She’s done this sort of thing before, although it never gets any press—very hush-hush. A real stand-up guy, they all say.”

Molly looked at the photo again.

“Can I get you anything to prime the creative process?” Grady asked.

“I lie better with a Coors Light on the desk.”

“It shall be yours.”

Molly raised her hands to the keyboard and started to type:

M
.
C
.:
I have something very difficult and very urgent to talk to you about, Mrs. Jenkins. I believe in a woman’s right to privacy about matters of reproduction, but we have some extraordinary circumstances here. It has to do with a baby boy who was abandoned in the summer of 1962.

C
.
J
.:
Oh, my God. My God.

M
.
C
.:
Mrs. Jenkins, I hate to cause you distress, but I have to ask if you are the mother of that child.

C
.
J
. (with a sob):
What happened to him? I have wondered about him every day of my life.

M
.
C
.:
I’ll tell you about him, Mrs. Jenkins, but first would you tell me the date and some of the circumstances surrounding the birth? So I can verify it.

Grady was reading over her shoulder. “Don’t you think C.J. should stonewall a little? She collapses awfully quick.”

Molly took her hands off the keyboard. “You promised me a beer, Grady. Go fetch it. You can critique when I’m finished.”

“Okay, but don’t forget to include—”

“Grady!”

The scene flowed out of her fingertips into the keyboard and surfaced as a line of words moving across the screen. Molly moved her lips, saying the words as she typed them. In the scene, the tough but empathic journalist pushes for all the details. The miserable and tender repentant mother tells about the birth, the panic, the need for secrecy, the two bewildered and terrified young girls not knowing what to do, the beer cooler, the robe, the creek—vivid details only the mother could know.