Wounded Earth (4 page)

She paused in the doorway. “I don't know what to say.”

“Say good night.”

Larabeth smiled uncertainly and turned to go.

“One more thing,” he said. “I'm glad you called me today. I'm glad you felt like you could ask for help, after everything we said the last time we saw each other. And Larabeth,” he said, turning his attention from the window latch to the woman in the hallway, “tonight was not a business call. It was a favor to an old friend. These services are on the house.”

He returned to his work. She murmured “Good night,” and hurried down the hall.

Chet
Dorsey piloted his fork lift smoothly around the Louisiana warehouse of Happy Farmer, Inc. He loved the night shift. At night, he was boss of the whole place. Actually, Frankie was boss of the whole place, but Frankie was exercising the night foreman's prerogative. He was sleeping.

Chet didn't care. There was nothing hard about his job, as long as all the pallets were loaded right. He did hate it when he had to get off his fork lift and heave a few bags of fertilizer back on the pallet so he could haul an order to the loading dock.

Other than that small irritation, he had to say it was a good job. No physical labor to speak of. No stinking boss hanging around all the time. The pay wasn't great, but it was okay. And the opportunities for extracurricular pay were more than he could have dreamed.

For example, there was a shipment waiting for him outside, right that minute, even though Wednesday wasn't the usual night. He'd heard the truck pull up to the loading dock, the one that was closed up so he couldn't see outside, then he'd heard someone unloading something. He didn't rush out to get it. Never did. No sense in making them think he was trying to get their license number or something.

When Chet took over this job, his predecessor had told him the little bit he knew about the guy behind these income opportunities. Chet knew one thing for sure. He wasn't interested in messing with a man who called himself "Babykiller". He also knew that he was definitely interested in the extra money to be made in processing “night shipments.” He was an okay warehouse technician, but he was extremely good at keeping his mouth shut.

When he was sure that enough time had passed, he ambled over to the out-of-service loading dock and raised the door. A pallet loaded with unlabeled fifty-five-gallon drums sat waiting. It looked just like the shipment he'd handled the night before and several nights before that. Chet had enjoyed a very busy week. An unmarked envelope was taped to the pallet's plastic wrapping. He tucked the envelope—his payment—into his shirt pocket, mounted the fork lift, and moved the shipment inside. Chet liked busy weeks.

He ripped a bar-coded shipping label off the printer, slapped it on the drums' plastic wrapping, and maneuvered the pallet into the semi he'd been loading all night. The shipment was now bound from Gretna, Louisiana, where Chet lived and worked, to Lincoln, Nebraska. It was utterly indistinguishable from the other palletloads in the truck's trailer.

Chet slapped the envelope in his shirt pocket. Easy money was a good enough reason to keep working the graveyard shift. Too bad his last wife didn't understand that.

Now he had just one thing left to do. Since he hadn't come up with a way to outsmart the new inventory computer, he had to get rid of the legitimate drums originally destined for Nebraska. Fortunately, that was easy.

There was nothing in them but agricultural pesticide and he had friends who farmed. He could sell the pesticide cheap and pick up a few extra bucks. He stood outside the door of the supervisor's office to make sure he could hear Frankie snoring, because the next part was a little risky. Convinced that Frankie was asleep, he hurried to the parking lot and pulled his pickup over to the small loading dock.

Climbing back in his fork lift, he loaded the pallet onto the bed of his pickup. Then he rushed to pull the pickup into the darkness of the parking lot, where he covered the drums with a tarp. While he was out there, he slid the manila envelope under the floormat on the driver's side.

He almost whistled as he walked back in the warehouse, but he didn't want to wake Frankie. Nothing, thought Chet, keeps a night-shift worker alert all night quite so well as easy money.

* * *

Frankie the boss kept making snoring noises as he watched Chet through the supervisor's window. Gerald would be pleased to know that Chet was performing adequately. Chet was ideally suited for his position on the lowest rung of the organization. He was intelligent enough, though just barely. He didn't ask questions. And he would do just about anything for money.

* * *

“So BioHeal's LAN needs expensive software to keep the hackers out, our human resources people are far too free with personal information, and you think we should pressure our landlord to hire a security guard for the parking garage. This is only the first day of your security audit. How many other ways do you plan to cost me money and heartache?” Larabeth unlocked the outer door to her office.

“Consider it insurance against the next stalker who chooses you,” J.D. said.

Norma was gone for the day, but she had left the coffee pot loaded and ready-to-brew. She had also left a note saying she hoped Larabeth had better sense than to hang around deserted buildings. Unless accompanied by a handsome detective.

Larabeth trashed the note and turned on the coffee. She stood at her computer and pushed the mouse around for a minute before calling J.D. over.

“I've been trying to figure out who Babykiller might be.”

“Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know,” J.D. said, hanging over her shoulder and peering at the computer screen.

She leaned forward, trying to maintain a comfortable distance between them. There was no comfortable distance.

“The lab's still working on the dye sample from my kitchen sink and we've got no other useable information yet. For lack of anything better to do, I embarked on a wild goose chase this morning.” She gestured at her computer screen, which was covered with database entries.

“These data are old friends of mine,” she said, holding her finger on the down key and letting scores of names, ranks, and serial numbers scroll by. “Meet my Vietnam veterans database, the basis of my doctoral research. I had our CIS department reload it on BioHeal's system.”

“So tell me about your wild goose chase,” J.D. said. He took the mouse from her and paged through the data.

Larabeth noticed that J.D. had stopped chewing his nails, but he still had the same fine golden hairs scattered across the backs of his hands.

“Well,” she said, “we know that Babykiller is a Vietnam veteran. At least we think we know that. He didn't deny it. I have a list of two and a half million names loaded onto this computer. The best thing I can say about this database is that it contains information on most of the people who served in Vietnam.”

“Most?” J.D. asked.

“Yeah. It drives Vietnam veterans crazy. The government claims its records are incomplete, but the vets think there's a conspiracy afoot. Maybe so. Maybe it's just evidence of bureaucracy in action. I do know this much. I worked extensively with the recordkeeping arms of all branches of the military. At every turn, I encountered people who couldn't or wouldn't help me. I was entitled to that data, either through the Freedom of Information Act or through the special clearances that came with my research grant, but,” she shrugged, “it's not always easy to prove you're being stonewalled.”

“So what did you do?”

“Perhaps you've noticed that I'm slightly obstinate.”

“Perhaps.”

Larabeth hit the page-down key and let a few hundred more names scroll by.

“Sometimes I called the same office back until I got somebody more willing to talk. Sometimes I went to their supervisors. Sometimes I bypassed official channels and contacted veterans' organizations or people who served on draft boards. Even I don't remember where I got all this data. I'd have to check my dissertation for the references.” She moved the cursor back to the top of the file. “I believe this to be the most exhaustive compilation of data on Vietnam-era veterans in existence. It beats the hell out of the VA's official database. Babykiller's name is very probably somewhere in this mountain of data. But I call this a wild goose chase, because I don't know how to look for it. And even if I knew how to look, he might not be here. He might be part of the small percentage that the VA lost and that I couldn't find.”

J.D. pulled up a chair. “Shall I light a candle to the patron saint of lost causes?”

“And who might that be?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I'm not Catholic.”

“Then lighting a candle would do us precious little good. I'm not Catholic, either.”

“Then why don't we forget about candles and saints? Just fire this thing up and show me how it works.”

Larabeth closed the file and opened another. “I'm approaching this by the process of elimination. Here's the list of assumptions I made.” She handed him a short printout. “First, I sorted by sex. I'm virtually certain Babykiller is male, so that was a high-probability assumption. Unfortunately, not many women served in Vietnam, so that step only cut the original list by a percent or so.”

“It beats making the list a couple percent longer," J.D. said.”

“Yeah. Now we've got a population roughly the size of Mississippi. I kept going, but the farther I get into this, the more doubtful my assumptions get.”

“An assumption is only bad when you stick to it too long.” J.D. grinned. “Detective's proverb.”

Larabeth was successful in ignoring J.D.'s disarming smile, because she was immersed in something she loved, the work that had kickstarted her career. She was ridiculously pleased by the magic that the simple power of modern computers worked with her database, her baby, the product of four years of labor.

“I think he's a white guy,” she said. “I know, voices can be deceiving, but I'm trying long shots. And his accent says 'Midwest' to me, so I eliminated men from New England and the Deep South. I left the Westerners, though. Their accents are too iffy.”

“Sounds like a fair guess.” J.D.'s eyes said that this exercise had started his detective's juices flowing. “What did that do for us?”

“It cut the list by more than half.”

“Go ahead. Give me a town with that population, just for perspective.”

“I don't know. New Orleans, maybe, minus a suburb or two. And that's where I've stopped for the moment.”

J.D. rocked back in his chair to think. “That's nearly a million people. I don't believe I'd get on the phone or go door-to-door looking for somebody in a town that size, but it's not a bad start and you did it without the expert assistance of the Czar of Missing Persons.”

“And where might I find this Czar?”

The disarming smile flashed again. “You're looking at him, Czarina.”

* * *

It was hot unloading postal trucks in Atlanta, but it was a good job. Jessup was glad to have it. Good insurance, solid retirement plan, paid vacations and holidays and sick leave. Of course, a man could always use a little extra money. Speaking of which, this truck spelled a nice wad of extra money. Tomorrow was Friday. Maybe he'd take his kids to Six Flags this weekend.

He spotted one of the packages right away. It was small—six or eight inches on a side—and addressed to the maintenance supervisor at the Yankee Rowe power station. He didn't put it right on the conveyor belt. Standard procedure was to put several boxes that size into a bin and send them in together. That was convenient, because he was expecting several more boxes just like it.

They came, one by one, addressed to maintenance supervisors at power plants across the country. He filled the bin with all the small boxes. Then, when no one was looking, he slid the bin under the conveyor belt and pulled out a second bin, filled with the boxes that had arrived at his house last night. It was simple.

He took his coffee break as the boxes in their bin traveled slowly into the post office for sorting. Later that day, six small boxes containing very, very slightly defective gauges left the main post office in Atlanta, bound for a half-dozen nuclear power plants scattered across the country. The odds were good that they would pass all routine quality assurance inspections and be installed. Into very, very critical control panels.

* * *

Larabeth missed her desk. She sat on her office couch and tried to work, because J.D. had commandeered her desk and her computer and her phone. She'd been reduced to balancing a month's worth of productivity reports on her lap.

Trying to work was, of course, a smokescreen, but she was following J.D.’s suggestions to the letter. He'd picked up the photographs lying on the floor at her feet and, right away, he'd known what he held in his hands. She hadn't needed to say it.

“Cynthia's father,” he'd said. “If he's the one doing this to you, I can find him. What's his name?”

She had only shaken her head.

“Larabeth. Finding missing people is what I do for a living. Tell me his name, then go take a shower. Fix yourself a hot breakfast and bring me some of it. Do some mindless paperwork. I can find this guy by lunchtime and, if he's the one tormenting you, we can make him stop. But you have to tell me his name.”