Brigands Key Page 16

  “Only when I’m right. Trust me on this one.”

  “I’m kind of busy here, Dr. Grant.”

  “Carson. I know you’re busy. You’ve quarantined the whole damned island.”

  “That wasn’t my doing. And if you hadn’t noticed, I’m stuck here too.”

  “I noticed and that’s why I’ve decided to help.”

  “I doubt you can help with forensics and epidemiology.”

  Grant gestured at the other diners. “Oh. Right. You’ve got such a good feel for the locals.”

  “My approach is calculated, Doctor. Well-meaning people tend to cloud issues and get in the way.”

  “You don’t get out of the lab much, do you?”

  “To the contrary. My job takes me all over the country.”

  “To New Mexico?”

  She stiffened. “What do you know about that?”

  “Not much. I remember the headlines. Charley Fawcett, now that kid’s got a gift for mining the Internet.”

  “So I’m outed. Here’s a little clue. Don’t believe everything you read.”

  “I don’t. With what Charley found, some of it internal to CDC, I’d say you were hung out to dry.” He leaned in. “Know what? I’ve been there.”

  “That’s very comforting.”

  “You don’t have the full support of CDC, do you?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You’re here by yourself. Hardly a big commitment.”

  “I like it that way.”

  “You have no choice but to like it.”

  “CDC field units are spread thin, what with the New Mexico containment. They’re breaking a full unit loose for Brigands Key any minute now.”

  “Waiting for the cavalry, huh? Listen, here’s your surrogate team in Brigands Key. Charley and me.”

  “Hmm. You know what they call unofficial problem solvers?”

  “I can guess.”

  “Vigilantes. Thanks but no thanks. I’ll work with the mayor, the chief of police, and the medical examiner.”

  “Work with them, by all means and by daylight. But you’re already running into the logjam of small-town politics. You need to work both with them and without them.”

  “Duly noted.”

  The waitress brought Cokes and set them on the table. Grant watched her go.

  “Getting an eyeful, Doctor?” Kyoko asked. “What is she, seventeen?”

  “He did a real number on you, didn’t he?”

  “Who?”

  “Your husband. You’ve got a suspicious streak a mile wide.” Grant reached into his hip pocket and withdrew a flask, jiggling it at her. “Vodka. Dinsmoor, of course. I was watching the lass to make sure she wasn’t watching us.” He poured two fingers of the clear liquor into his glass. “If she witnessed me sneaking a drink she’d be too timid or nice to say anything and she’d jeopardize her job. Now I’m having my drink, no two ways about it, and protecting her employment.”

  “You’re a regular Sir Galahad.”

  “Lighten up, Kyoko. Have a drink.”

  She shook her head.

  Grant reached out and poured vodka into her glass and pocketed the flask. “Drink, damn it. I don’t know how much more of you straight and sober I can handle.”

  She stared at him, wanting to punch his smug face. But she picked up the glass and took a sip. An angry sip, a bigger sip than planned. The fire of the vodka burned her throat and the heat of the alcohol singed her nostrils. Her eyes watered.

  It boiled anger away and she felt wonderful.

  She finished it off and slid the glass toward Grant. “Another, smart guy.”

  He obliged, and by the time she finished it, they got along fine.

  “You’re uneasy in a small town, aren’t you?” Grant asked.

  Kyoko leaned back. “Okay, Freud. Yeah. In big cities, too.”

  “Chip on your shoulder.”

  “No. I just don’t like people.”

  “That’s the chip. Where did you come by it?”

  “Naturally. My mother instilled it in me.”

  “And your father?”

  “I didn’t have a father.” She looked at him challengingly.

  He passed on the biological impossibility. Smart move. “Tell me about yourself, Kyoko.”

  “You already know my history, it seems.”

  “Yeah, I know written outlines. I don’t know you.”

  Kyoko looked at her drink, finished it, signaled Grant to pour another. “Okay, but not here. Let’s go for a walk.”

  Grant motioned to the waitress and paid the bill. Kyoko gathered up her papers and they slipped out into the warm, salty night. The scent of the sea intoxicated Kyoko every time she inhaled it. Or maybe it was the vodka.

  They walked to the dock in silence and took a seat. The breeze blew steadily, rippling the water, and the gold of the street lamps danced on the dark shivering water. Grant was at ease, comfortable with silence. She envied him for that. She had never been that way, but liked it in him.

  “I’m the child of a hibakusha,” she finally said. “Know what that is?”

  Grant shook his head.

  “Hibakusha literally means ‘explosion-affected people.’ Survivors of the atomic bomb.”

  Grant whistled softly.

  Kyoko touched her earring, jiggling it slightly. “See this? My mother made this earring for me. It’s one of a kind. Mother found this pale green stone in the burning wreckage of Nagasaki. The stone is glass, fused from sand by the blast of the bomb.

  “Mother was nine when the bomb fell. The city was obliterated. Seventy-five thousand people died. The unlucky ones survived. Mother was unlucky. Her entire family perished and she was charred, disfigured by the blast of heat. The flesh on her upper arm literally melted off. But she lived. She stumbled alone through the wreckage—there were no streets left—for a day, delirious, near death. Rescuers entered the smoldering city and saved her, removed her to a nearby town. She was clutching this stone when they found her.

  “And she lived. She grew up in an orphanage, shunned. No one would adopt a hibakusha. The hibakusha were feared and were unpleasant reminders of the blast and the great defeat.

  “She grew to adulthood, surrounded but alone. In 1955, twenty-five young hibakusha girls, the Hiroshima Maidens, were taken to America. They received cosmetic surgery and were celebrated and both nations felt a little bit better. My mother was not among them. Hibakusha received support from the government, but Mother worked, cleaning floors, to survive.

  “One night, the boss got drunk and came to her. She resisted so he raped her and threw her out. No one would take her in. She managed, somehow, to flee to America and I was born shortly thereafter. I was her only happiness in a world that defined her by her ugliness.

  “She put everything into me and I was her life. But cancer caught up to her like it does with all hibakusha and she died on my eighth birthday.

  “I grew up in three foster homes. I went to college and med school. I married a brilliant, politically connected physician. He liked the idea of an obedient Oriental wife, but I didn’t. And here I am, special operative for the CDC, on assignment in Brigands Key.”

  “Rumor has it that your ex is not unhappy that you’re trapped in a hot zone.”

  “Word gets around in a small town, doesn’t it?”

  “It does when you’ve got a hacker sidekick like Charley.”

  “It’s true; Ted could have gotten me out of quarantine. If he wanted. Greer could have too, for that matter.”

  “I know.”

  “How about you? Any significant others?”

  “Yes. Everyone. They’re all significant.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Why, Dr. Nakamura, I do believe you’re flirting.”

  “Shut up,” she whispered, slipping closer. He pulled her close and kissed her.

  * * *

  A watcher followed at a distance, sticking to the shadows, as Grant and Kyoko returned to M
orrison Motel and entered his room. The lights blinked out. The watcher lingered for a moment, then headed down the street.

  These two outside meddlers, for all their supposed brilliance, were pretty damned careless, the watcher thought.

  Sex was careless, and carelessness made for easy prey.

  * * *

  Grant’s cell phone chimed softly, playing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” He fumbled for it in the dark, recognized the number displayed on the LED, flipped it open. “Rolando,” he said sleepily. “What you got for me?”

  Kyoko stirred next to him, rolled over. Her fingers delicately traced lines down his back.

  Grant listened intently, reached for a notepad, and started writing quickly, the phone cradled by his shoulder against his ear. He mumbled his thanks and turned to Kyoko. “Rise and shine, sweetheart. Got something to work with.” He dialed Sanborn’s number. “Meet us at your office in twenty minutes. Call Hammond. We have a lead for you.”

  * * *

  Grant rapped twice and let himself in. The aroma of coffee greeted him. Hammond poured them each a cup. Kyoko took a sip, grimaced, and dumped a few spoonfuls of sugar into it.

  “Randy’s coffee is legendary,” Hammond said. “He’s been poisoning tourists with it for years.”

  “No Starbucks here, Kyoko,” Grant said.

  “I’ll survive.”

  “Down to business. Rolando got back to me. The sample from the nightstick is an ash wood. Rolando knew that the second he laid eyes on it. Each type of wood has its own grain and coloring. This one was discolored from time underwater. Ash is a hardwood, ideal for clubs and baseball bats and such. That was the easy part. This wood is European ash, harvested from the Letea Forest in coastal Romania.”

  “You got to be kidding,” Sanborn said. “You expect us to believe he pinpointed its origin?”

  “Rolando spectro-analyzed it, scanned the cell structure. The guy’s a genius. Then he ran everything he found against his database of wood grains. His computer has the fingerprints of ninety thousand wood samples from all over the world, and he receives new samples from colleagues every day to expand his database. Identifying the species is easy; finding the home of the individual tree is trickier. The wood records what sort of environmental stress the tree has endured. He could probably identify a board made from a live oak right here on Brigands Key.”

  “How?”

  “The wood would exhibit traces of the salt content in the air and ground. It would pick up minerals from the soil. It would exhibit a grain typical of long growing seasons. It would show the stress of constant sea breezes.

  “This truncheon was made from a Romanian ash tree, probably in 1940.”

  “He sees all that in the grain?”

  “No. He’s brilliant but not psychic. He emailed his results and photos to a dozen European military historians. This truncheon was manufactured for the Wehrmacht, the German Army. Romania joined the Axis Powers in 1940 in the hope of avoiding Hitler’s wrath and army, and supplied him with resources and raw materials for the war effort. Including wood. Including this piece of wood. This was shipped to a plant in Germany for fabrication into a truncheon. The hole down length of the club was for the insertion of an iron rod, to give it a lethal weight. The iron has completely rusted away. The plant at which this was constructed also manufacture other weapons, and was bombed into oblivion in an Allied air raid in 1942. So this stick was made between 1940 and 1942.”

  Sanborn whistled. “I need to get out more.”

  “The wood is in such good condition,” Hammond said. “Mint condition, almost. It can’t have been in the water very long.”

  “False assumption,” Grant said. “Wood can be preserved a lot longer under water than in the air. If fungi can’t get at the wood and survive, the wood doesn’t decay much. There are dugout canoes that have been found buried under silt in rivers, canoes thousands of years old.”

  “This wasn’t buried under silt,” Sanborn said. “It was laying on the sand bottom.”

  Grant thought for a moment. “Yet it’s been there a long while.” He held up the club. “The iron rod that filled this club is gone, rusted completely from contact with water. That didn’t happen overnight.”

  * * *

  Julie Denton squinted, trying to focus on the mock-up she’d just finished for the morning paper. She rubbed her eyes and glanced at the clock. Oh what the hell, she thought. She was exhausted. If the paper didn’t arrive at the doorstep, it wouldn’t really matter. She was going to be on the air.

  CNN wanted her live in twenty minutes.

  So did ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox…

  America wanted the story and she was the only person that could give it to them. She had to script it, deliver it, and shoot it, all by herself.

  The National Guard was keeping the networks well away from the island. She was the only journalist in the whole world with access to the hottest story in the nation. Yesterday, she was nobody. Today she was the plucky voice of the damned.

  The Bigs peppered her with anxious, breathless questions. Any leads on the killer? Will the standoff between the mayor and the governor and the President lead to violence? How many have died in the plague? Are the terrorists behind it?

  What if Celeste hits?

  Broadcast journalism. What a kick. She was out of her element with it but figured she could pull it off. She would write her piece, rehearse it once or twice, set up her web-cam in front of the frothing Gulf of Mexico or the damned Coast Guard boat and deliver it. The island didn’t have a TV station, or even a radio station, but she could email her reports directly to CNN. They’d be airing it globally minutes, maybe even seconds later, after making sure she didn’t drop any F-bombs. Then she’d start working on an angle for the next report due an hour later.

  The happy irony stung. She’d been dying to get off this sandpile and move to a real paper. Now she was stuck on the sandpile and was the hottest journalist on the planet. Christiane Amanpour would die for this gig.

  Of course, Julie thought darkly, so might I.

  The next story...

  The mayor had his shot. He’d puffed up like a blowfish and came off like one. It made good look-at-the-small-town-politician stuff for the networks. Johnson thought he was working it. Julie knew better. She wouldn’t let him make a mockery of himself again. Sure, he was a small-time windbag. But he was a small-time windbag with a penchant for screwing up colossally. And he was theirs. She wasn’t about to let him make Brigands Key look foolish, or worse, like it deserved this nightmare.

  The next story…

  CBS had dug up dirt. Carson Grant, it seems, had a checkered past. A rising star in the academic world at one point, he’d managed to get his closest friends and colleagues killed on his last expedition to Guatemala. No one believed his story. Too many inexplicable things. And here he was, neck-deep in death once again. Bad luck seemed to follow him.

  Or maybe he brought it with him.

  The next story...

  Nakamura was a piece of work, too. Something didn’t add up. Like Grant, bad luck seemed to follow her. Misdiagnosis in New Mexico. Seventeen people dead as a result.

  The next story...

  Celeste was plunging ever more eastward...

  An unexplainable corpse. A murderer prowling the streets. A deadly "plague." The storm of the century. The single most critical moment in the history of Brigands Key was upon them and instead of the cavalry riding in to save the day, they got the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  Chapter Eighteen

  There was no big chain supermarket on Brigands Key, and most of the island’s residents drove thirty miles inland every week to shop for groceries. Charley’s mother was no different. But Friday morning was different. No one could get off the island. She sent him hurrying over in the Chevy to the island’s tiny general store to buy whatever he could to get ready for the hurricane.

  The Island Mart was pretty much picked clean by the time he got there, the shelves nearly e
mpty, like the sun-bleached bones of a rat. Mister Faraday was putting up plywood on the windows. “There’s a box of Snickers bars behind the counter,” he told Charley. “Take what you want. And you’ll find a few batteries and a case of bottled water. Take it and get your folks over to the gym, son. This is going to get bad.”

  Charley nodded, mumbled his thanks, and collected the items into a box and headed for the door.

  “Just a minute, Charley,” Faraday said. He disappeared into his storeroom and returned with three bright orange life jackets and stuffed them into the box. “Don’t know if these will help, but they sure can’t hurt.”

  Charley drove back home. His mother burst from the house as he pulled up and ran to the car, her eyes glistening behind tears. “Charley, come quick. It’s your daddy.”

  Charley jumped out of the car and bounded up to the house and to his parents’ bedroom, his heart suddenly racing.

  His father lay unmoving in a pool of vomit, his eyes open, glazed. Charley ran to his side. Trembling, he reached out and touched his father’s face. He was warm. Charley felt his neck for a pulse. Finding none, he listened for breath.

  He leaned back, tears welling in his eyes, and reached for the phone to call Doc Hammond.

  His mother came in, cried out, and threw herself onto her husband, sobbing uncontrollably. “Why’d you let him die, Charley? Don’t you care about nothing but yourself?”

  * * *

  Hammond hurried over to collect the body of Ben Fawcett. The door hung open and he rapped once and let himself in. Charley was sitting at the dining room table with his mother, his arm around her. She was shaking. Charley nodded to him and waved him toward the back room without getting up.

  Hammond felt for a pulse and a breath, but he knew at a touch that Ben Fawcett had been dead for a half-hour. Within two minutes, Hammond had assured himself that Fawcett was certainly another victim of the illness that was killing Brigands Key. He decided not to question Charley’s mother about the illness. That was too much for her to handle.

  He went back to the dining room and sat with Charley and Phoebe Fawcett for a few minutes, quietly consoling her. He stood, tapped Charley on the shoulder, motioned him to follow, and began to move toward the door, and turned and waited.