Under the Beetle's Cellar (37 page)

The dog rested his head on her bare knee. His breath was hot on her leg. His head was heavy, as though the entire weight of the dog were behind it. She sat still, feeling the solidity of his head and the warm wetness of his jowls. After a few minutes she felt saliva slowly pool and dribble down her knee.

Molly rested her hand on his head. “Of course. You have your own dead to sit for, don’t you? It’s been only a few months and you’re still waiting for him to come home.” Molly looked down at the dark shape. “Join me. We’ll make a night of it.”

The dog turned around in place a few times, then thumped down at her feet.

Molly didn’t know if it had been hours or just minutes until the phone rang. She ran to catch it before the machine took over.

“Molly, thank God. Patrick Lattimore here.”

Her breath caught. “What’s going on? Did he call?”

“Yes. But we’ve got a major snafu, and it has to do with you. Could you come out here right now?”

“Why? What is it?”

“I’d rather wait until you get here to discuss it.”

“It will take me a few minutes to get dressed.”

“Molly, would you wear a skirt and a T-shirt, something that fits pretty close to the body? Nothing baggy. And flat shoes.” There was a jumbled conversation at his end of the speakerphone. His voice came back. “Oh, yeah, and panty hose.”

“Why?”

“We can talk about it when you get here. Bring the dragon robe, too, please, and let me talk to your officer. What’s his name?”

“Valdez. David Valdez. He’s outside. I’ll call him.”

Molly beckoned the officer inside to the phone and ran upstairs to get dressed. This was so crazy, to go running out there to Jezreel. But she’d let herself get sucked up in it. It was too late to say no. She pulled on a short, straight denim skirt. She could think of only one reason for the dress code—to show someone she had nothing concealed. This was dangerous, out of her area. She was no Rain Conroy. She grabbed a
white T-shirt from the pile of clean laundry. Her hands were shaking. She should not be doing this. She was a writer, an observer. Her job was to chronicle, not get involved. But how could she possibly turn her back on this?

She pictured Thelma Bassett and her pink-haired daughter who was having difficulty with long division. She thought about Walter Demming, who had taken a vow of noninvolvement. She thought about the little boy with the cowlicks—Bucky DeCarlo—she’d learned his name in spite of her efforts not to. She didn’t want all those names added to her vigil list.

That list was already too long, and Samuel Mordecai was adding to it daily. She thought about Josh dying with no medical care and no family to comfort him, the look of terror on Annette’s face as she was wrested into the open van. She thought of Gerald Asquith and what his last minutes must have been like. She pulled the T-shirt over her head and looked in the mirror. Those were compelling reasons to get involved, but they were not the reason she was going out there, the reason she would end up doing whatever they asked her to do. It was something else. She didn’t know what to call it, but it seemed to lie somewhere between obsession and acquiescing to fate.

She slipped her feet into black loafers, then stuffed a pair of panty hose in her bag.

Downstairs, she switched on the kitchen light and added the book of poems to the jumble in her bag. She picked up the box Dorothy Huff had given her and looked around. Copper was still lying in the dark living room, faithful to the vigil. Maybe after all these years she had found a partner as devoted to his dead as she was to hers.

Valdez greeted her with his usual lack of expression. They sped up I-35 at eighty miles per hour with the lights whirling. No siren.

When they turned off the Interstate, he turned off the light bar. A quarter mile before the compound entrance, they came to a new roadblock that was diverting traffic—a sign that things were on the move. The policeman manning it had their names and descriptions in his book and waved them through. As they passed the Hearth Jezreelite compound, Molly took a good look. The huge portable searchlights outside the front gates and all around the perimeter flooded the compound with a stark white light, bright as a baseball stadium. In the slit windows at the top of the stone towers, she thought she could make out gun muzzles. The covered windows of the boxy main building showed only faint light inside. Early on, the negotiators had threatened to cut off electricity to the compound, and Samuel Mordecai had replied they could do that, but if they did, he would send them a child’s finger each day they kept it off. The electricity had stayed on.

All around the complex, for hundreds of yards in all directions, the ground was flat and barren. There was no place to take cover. How would the tactical force make its approach? Molly wondered. Maybe they’d crash through the fence in tanks or personnel carriers. It was ten-thirty. They must be getting ready to move in, but there was no indication of it. The only sign of life was the usual DPS and FBI contingent standing guard. And the press, of course. On the outer circle, they sat in groups outside their vans and trailers drinking and talking. Her colleagues of the Fourth Estate keeping their own sort of vigil, waiting for disaster.

A mile down the road, there were more cars than usual parked in front of the old farmhouse. All lights were blazing.

The communications room was packed with people, and it was hot, vibrating with tension. Grady Traynor leaned against the wall with his arms crossed tight over his chest, glowering at the activity. Molly knew that body language well; it meant he was totally hostile to something going on. She thought she could anticipate the issue.

Curtis was working at the computer. Holihan and Stein stood in front of the diagram of the compound, talking to two burly men dressed in full night-assault gear—black jumpsuits, black balaclavas and ballistic vests, holsters worn low on their thighs, gas masks hanging around their necks. Stein kept his left index finger on the barn and his right one on the main building just to the left of the front door. Molly’s stomach dipped. They were really going to do it. She stopped to glance at the photographs of the children whose names she had tried not to learn. Someone had updated the label under Josh Benderson’s photo. Under his name and age was typed: “Deceased.”

Pat Lattimore was watching Rain Conroy, who stood in the middle of the room. She was naked except for a pair of black bikini briefs. Molly was transfixed by a body that gave only a grudging nod to her sex. Small breasts and the slightest suggestion of flare at the hip marked her as female. But the rest of her seemed beyond gender. Broad shoulders and a flat belly that had never even thought about pregnancy. Long legs with pronounced muscle definition down the thigh—runner’s legs. Her arms were long and muscled, ropy with veins—the arms of a woman who could do push-ups all day.

She looked less naked than most people would in such a setting, maybe because her skin was olive-colored, maybe because she seemed to have a total lack of self-consciousness.

Jules Borthwick was squatting next to her holding a bizarre object that looked like a vest or a teddy made out of her own skin, but several sizes too big.

Lattimore was saying, “The bulk isn’t a problem. It’s an asset. Just look around you at the mall, Jules. Don’t you ever go to the mall? Most women of this age are broad as barns. It’s expected. This is a woman with a thirty-three-year-old son. She’s had a hard life, eaten lots of junk food. She’s fat, frumpy, and nonthreatening, the absolute last person in the world who might be carrying a concealed H and K P7 automatic. We want her to look solidly middle-aged.”

“Middle-aged is no problem,” Borthwick muttered. “It’s making her look like a woman that’s hard.” The makeup artist was scowling.

Rain smiled down at him fondly. “It would be easier for us to make you look like one, Jules.”

“Yeah, but I’m not sufficiently nuts. You, however, are going to walk through that gate with a gun and explosives concealed where your boobs would be if you had boobs! Ah, sweetheart, what a job you’ve got.” He wrapped the vest around her torso.

Patrick Lattimore said, “If only you could figure out how to add a Kevlar layer, Jules, it would be perfect.”

Borthwick paused for a few seconds. “Patent pending,” he said.

Rain studied Molly with level gray eyes. When they had met the night before, the agent had barely glanced at her, but now she looked Molly over, assessing her, as if she were choosing up sides for some very important athletic event.

Pat Lattimore approached her. “Molly. You’re here.” Crisis, she noted, had got them to first names. His face was gray with tension. “Molly Cates, meet Blumberg and Kroll.” The two men in fatigues turned and nodded impassively at her. “This is such a zoo. Let’s go in the other room so we can talk. I need to tell you what’s happening.”

Grady pushed away from the wall. “I’m coming, too.”

Lattimore shrugged. He led the way to the back of the house, through a kitchen that looked and smelled as if it had been turned into a laboratory. The counters were covered with gallon cans of gooey-looking substances, jars, tubes, rolls of gauze, clumps of clay, brushes, knives and spoons, and tools she couldn’t identify. The room reeked of turpentine and Elmer’s glue. On the linoleum table sat a statue that looked like it was made of gray cement. It was clearly an exact life model of Rain Conroy from crotch to shoulder.

Lattimore took them into a small room that contained a few file cabinets, four folding chairs, and a telephone on the floor. “Sit down,” he said.

Molly sat at the table. Grady leaned against the wall and folded his arms over his chest. Lattimore pulled a chair close to Molly and sat knee to knee with her. “It worked perfectly. You did good. He called before
the news was even over, at six-twenty. Said he wanted her to come see him. Molly—his voice was shaking. We got him by the short hairs.”

Watching a tic at furious work in Pat Lattimore’s cheek, Molly wondered who had whom by the short hairs. The agent was wired.

“Here’s the problem: He wants proof. We anticipated that, of course. Stein told him no problem, we’d send it in. But that’s not enough for him. Mordecai says he wants
you
to bring it in and walk him through it.”

A chill swept through Molly. “I can do that over the phone, can’t I?”

“That was our first suggestion. No go.”

“How about a videotape?”

“Our second suggestion. He said he wants to look in your eyes while you tell him about it … in person.”

Molly’s arms were prickling with goose bumps. She wished she’d thought to bring a jacket.

Grady was staring down at the floor. Molly could feel his anger radiating out. She tried to will him to look at her, but he refused.

Lattimore said, “We told him that sending a civilian into a hostage situation was against all agency rules and regs. He said then the deal was off. He needs you to guarantee that this woman is his mother. He wants you to take him step by step through your search.

“Lieutenant Traynor got on the phone to say that he had done most of the work in tracking her down, and he could come in and show him the documentation. Mordecai just laughed. He wants you, Molly. He thinks you will tell him the truth. And he sees you as someone on the edges of the power structure, not part of it. Also, he knows we have allowed members of the press into some situations in the past. There is some precedent.”

Molly rubbed her arms to warm them. “So, Pat, you want me to go in there?”

“I’m not asking you to do it because—”

“The hell you aren’t!” Grady sprang up from his slouch. “This is so fucking
dishonest.
Of course you’re asking her. You’re putting her in an impossible situation.” A man who rarely lost his temper and never shouted, Grady was shouting now. His face was darkening.

Lattimore held a hand up to stop the outburst. “Hold on a minute, Lieutenant. Molly, you need to know we’ve been going back and forth on this for”—he checked his watch—“four hours. Lieutenant Traynor dissents from everything I’m going to say. If he will wait until I am finished he can have his say and I know he has an inside track with you. So if he will just let me finish.”

He shot Grady a harsh look, then turned back to Molly. “Ordinarily
I wouldn’t even consider letting you do this. It’s risky. But I am convinced that the only way we have a prayer of getting the children out alive is if we take Mordecai out first. If we buy what Annette Grimes told you, and I do buy it, he’s the one who has to do the killing tomorrow. If he’s out and we get in there quick, we could grab the kids before the others decide what to do. Also it will make things easier for our strike force. All available intelligence agrees there’s no chain of command in there, just Mordecai at the top. If we neutralize Mordecai, their resistance will flag. The assault could be over quicker, with less loss of life.

“Molly, we’ve been brainstorming this for six weeks, and the only way is Operation Mom. Our only chance is to get Rain inside and give her a shot at him. The problem is he insists on you to authenticate her.”

Molly was overwhelmed. She looked up at Grady. “Do you agree with that reasoning?” she asked.

He continued to stare at the floor as he answered. “In dealing with someone as wacko as Mordecai, reasoning is beside the point.”

In a low, gruff voice, Lattimore said, “If you were to take the evidence in to Mordecai, here’s how it would work. He agreed that you could do it right at the door. It has to be inside the door, though, because he won’t show himself. He suspects that we’re trying to snipe him. Imagine that.”

“Pat,” she said, finally giving in to a gnawing fear, “that article I wrote about him. You’ve read it?”

“Yeah. Several times.”

“It worries me. I know from past experience that when people read things about themselves that contradict the image they want to project, they never forgive it. There is something about the printed word that stings worse than spoken words. Mordecai may be harboring a big grudge. I know this sounds paranoid.”

“Molly, if you aren’t paranoid, it’s because you aren’t paying attention. These are all things we’ve thought about, believe me. We certainly considered that possibility. We just listened to the old tapes where he talks about you. Even Lieutenant Traynor here agrees with this: Mordecai thinks you’re as honest as it’s possible to be given the corruption of society. You did skewer him, but I don’t think he realizes that. The man has a sixth-grade reading level and that article was too sophisticated for him. He doesn’t read or think well enough to pick up on your underlying theme.”