Placing my palm over the phone, I said, "Yes. Why?"
"That's crazy. You should stop!"
"I'm-"
"Trust me on this. I was in Chattanooga, where the news guys came in like a herd of elephants and raised so much dust things never got right again. The investigation ground to a halt! I'm telling you. We've got a couple of days to move like lightning. Don't gum up the works."
I told the folks at the TV station I would call back. Maybe Donovan had a point. He'd been through this before; I hadn't. I had a strong inclination to hold a press conference, but maybe he was right.
Donovan interrupted my thoughts. "I'm planning to run down some leads here in the valley. I want to look over the accident site from last winter. I also want to interview McCain's friends. And Feldbaum's. Maybe yours, too. Sometimes you can get something verbally that you can't dig up with test tubes and science."
"I told you before. It's got something to do with Jane's California Propulsion, Inc. It has to."
"I know. I know. And we think there might be something to that. I've already done a quick read-through of my lists from three years ago, and I can't find their name. I'm going to have Achara work on that this afternoon. She'll check out the various components to rocket fuel and see what the health implications are. She'll also make some calls about Jane's. We have a few contacts in the industry, so we might be able to learn something."
"Thanks."
"Don't mention it. We want you well, pal."
"Thanks."
He winked. I glanced at Achara to see what her take on this was, but she didn't seem to be paying attention.
"If you're still thinking about calling the media," Donovan said, "don't. I'm telling you. They show up, they'll turn this into a circus. You want to give a hundred interviews a day? That's what the chief in Chattanooga was doing. And they didn't get one pertinent piece of information from the public. Not one."
Stephanie came out of the station in time to hear this. "You're not not going to call the media?" she asked. going to call the media?" she asked.
"I was. Donovan's got another take on it."
"I think you should."
"What do you think, Achara?" I asked.
She turned to me. "It's your call. I'm not going to vote on a thing like that." Everybody waited for my decision, Stephanie, Donovan, Carpenter, Ian Hjorth, who'd also come outside and joined our group.
"I'm going to talk," I said.
Stephanie patted my shoulder. "Good. Somebody out there might know something."
Shaking his head with a conviction that almost changed my mind, Donovan said, "It's your call. But first give us a twenty-four-hour period without interference."
"I don't think so. Tomorrow's day six."
"You don't know that for certain."
"Tell you what, Scott. When you contract this, you take a chance on which day you're on."
"You're right. Sorry. Forget I even said that. Jesus. I don't know what I was thinking."
I set up a press conference for ten o'clock the next morning outside the fire station.
Soon after my decision, Achara took her briefcase and notes and walked the two blocks to the North Bend branch of the King County Library; she said she was looking for a place to spread out her notes and work. Donovan climbed into his Suburban and drove off without telling us where he was headed.
Stephanie and I dropped the girls off with Morgan at my house, exchanging tearful kisses with both. Morgan, who'd been all but unreachable for almost two days, was suddenly eager to baby-sit.
The most frustrating task that afternoon was locating firefighters from the Chattanooga Fire Department willing to speak candidly. Already one firefighter was being sued by one of the litigants for speaking out in public, and just about everyone and their mother had been subpoenaed to the trial.
Once again, I found myself in a long, rambling conversation with Charlie Drago, who now filled me in on the LPG disaster that happened two weeks after Southeast Travelers, the explosion he'd forgotten to tell me about during our first conversations. The fact that he'd forgotten to mention it the first time around spoke volumes about his mental acuity.
He also said there'd been a fire in his garage shortly after he began looking into the syndrome, blamed it on powerful unnamed forces, said he'd been followed by men in black for weeks, that his phone had been tapped, that they might be listening to us that very minute. The more we spoke, the more I realized Charlie was a full-blown paranoiac.
"You gotta listen to me," Drago said. "Whatever anybody tells you about that LPG incident, it was not not an accident. It was a an accident. It was a trap trap. You know who responded? The same group of guys went to Travelers. It was only luck it didn't kill more than the six of them and the two civilians. You wipe out half a battalion and you suddenly no longer have anyone who cares about Southeast Travelers. Specifically, you wipe out the guys who responded to Southeast, and you got no one left to come down with this syndrome and start suing. That was the plan all along."
"Carl Steding told me the same thing. That it was a trap. Or at least that's what he hinted."
"Trouble is, we're practically the only two people in town who think that."
"Wasn't the LPG incident ruled accidental?"
"Sure it was. That's what they wanted."
"That's what who who wanted?" wanted?"
"The people who lit up my garage."
"And who were they?"
"Whoever stands to lose their pants over Southeast Travelers. It could be any one of thirty corporations. Or their investors. Thousands of investors. In fact, investors are usually the worst. I should know. I was an investor once."
Toward evening a battalion chief from Chattanooga named Frost called in response to messages I'd left. He told me I could cheerfully disregard anything Charlie told me, that Charlie had been spouting nonsense about Southeast Travelers for so long, nobody listened to him anymore. When I mentioned Charlie's garage fire and his thoughts on the LPG truck accident, Chief Frost said, "Charlie started it hisself, left a sack of hot ashes from his woodstove too close to a wall. And that LPG truck driver? He reached over to change the radio station, got a bee in his briefs, whatever. Nobody but Charlie and some asshole works over at the paper ever thought there was anything odd about it.
"The tank itself must have ruptured with the crash, which would have weakened the double-wall construction. Burned real hot. We went in like we're taught, hard and aggressive, two teams on two hose lines, each spray pattern protecting the team behind it, but the tank blew before we got it cooled. The explosion was unbelievable. Hey. Out of those eight guys, six died, which was a miracle in itself, because they all should have been blown to Kingdom Come. One escaped with minor burns, and one had to retire. Helluva deal. We also lost the truck driver and a news photographer who happened to be in the way. I didn't get there myself until minutes later, but I saw it from a distance and believe me, I thought twice about turning around and heading on outa there. You ain't lived until you've seen an LPG tank go up. It hadn't been mostly empty, we would have lost a lot more people. Damn lucky."
"The same shift had the LPG fire as went to Southeast Travelers?"
"Yeah."
"The guy at the paper seemed to think that was significant."
"I don't know why."
I spoke to several more fire officers who either had been at the tanker fire in Chattanooga or were intimate with the details. Unfortunately, the details shed little light on our problems in North Bend. Even though Drago told me at one time he had a complete list of the companies involved in the Southeast Travelers fire, he couldn't confirm or deny JCP, Inc., had been involved. So far, neither could anybody else.
We fielded several calls from people in the upper Snoqualmie Valley asking to confirm Scott Donovan was working with us, so we knew he was making the rounds.
At five-thirty people began disappearing to go home and have dinner with their families. By six-thirty there were only three of us left, myself, Stephanie, and Cherie, God bless her. She'd been with us all day.
Stephanie looked across the conference room table at me and said, "None of these doctors has called back. I told their people this was a matter of life and death."
"They'll call."
"Know what else?"
"What?"
"I sure wish we could have done an autopsy on your friend."
"Why not wait and do one on me?"
"Not funny. And please don't talk like that."
"Yes, ma'am."
"I spoke to the CDC today. I was honest with them. I shouldn't have been. I told them most of these cases had been officially attributed to something other than a syndrome. For instance, your chief dying out in the woods. Or the two car accidents. They're real busy. They need more conclusive evidence of a syndrome before they'll send someone out."
The girls called every half hour or so to make sure I was all right and to find out when Stephanie and I would be home. Later they called to tell me they were going to a movie with Morgan.
At a few minutes after six o'clock we got a call back from one of the doctors Stephanie had been waiting on, a neurologist in Biloxi who'd treated a young woman who had been brain-dead for three years; after complaining of dizziness and ringing in her ears, the woman had gone down in a matter of days, her only outward symptom waxy-looking hands. Stephanie kept the doctor on the line for half an hour.
When she hung up, she turned to me. "She's exactly like Holly and the others."
"They ever track down the source?"
"Nope."
"Do they know anything?"
"Nope."
46. THE DEEP BLUE DREAD.
The shower shut off with a bang of the pipes in the wall, and for some minutes there was no sound from the bathroom. When the door finally opened, Stephanie's silhouette was limned by the light behind her. She walked toward me as relaxed as if she were shopping for groceries.
She padded barefoot across the room, stood beside the bed for a few moments before I felt her weight on the mattress. Slowly, she crawled next to me, smelling of soap, toothpaste, and shampoo, pressing the length of her body against mine. It was at times such as this that I usually came up with my dumbest comments, as if the occasion inspired the idiocy. Tonight was no exception.
"This is a mercy fuck. Right?"
"Yes, it is, sweetie."
"Then it's not going to happen."
"What? You don't want to help out a socially maladjusted doctor who's been so busy putting herself through med school and residency and establishing a practice, she never had time for a social life?"
"You're only doing this because you feel sorry for me."
"No. You're doing it because you feel sorry for me me." Her faulty logic forced a laugh from me. I could see by the look on her face that she liked me. It always came as a surprise to discover a woman liked me. Any woman. Maybe my reluctance to accept love came from those years after my mother vanished, for whatever else was going on in her life, my mother had certainly abandoned her only child. Lorie's disappearance probably didn't help. Or maybe somewhere down deep, all guys felt that way. I'd never talked to another man about it, so I couldn't say for certain.
Running my fingers over the silky skin of her hips and stomach, cradling the hint of her belly with my palms, wrapping my hands around her waist, encircling her girth with my hands, I tried to lose myself in the moment. It would be the first time all day I'd stopped thinking about the syndrome.
She began helping me off with my T-shirt, then unbuckled my pants and began wrestling them off. I was so ready to make love, it was embarrassing.
"I can see there's going to be no mercy here," she said.
I took her in my arms, rolled over, and kissed her. As we played, I began having flashbacks to all the times I'd made love with Holly. Holly had been more relaxed in life, more uptight in bed, more serious making love, while Stephanie, so solemn in life, took immense delight in every little nuance of our bodies.
Still, I couldn't shake visions of a naked Holly from my brain.
Holly lay in some dank nursing home, alone and forgotten the same way I would lie alone and forgotten in just a few days. I had treated her terribly, and now I was about to pop her sister. Looking at it in this new light, our tryst seemed wrong in the worst of all possible ways.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
"I can't."
"Oh, it's pretty obvious you can."
"I don't think so."
Grasping me, she said, "What's this?"
"Some sick cosmic joke."
She rolled on top of me.
"Stop."
"Hey, don't turn this into a big moral issue." She hovered over me and stared into my eyes. "Let's not analyze this. I'm sick to death of analyzing every little thing in my life. It's the reason I don't have a life. I think it's the reason you don't have one, either."
Thinking had always been my downfall, and I found I couldn't stop now. Ironic, because in three days I wouldn't be able to think. "I feel so bad about my life. The way I-"
"Shush," she said, her hair tickling my face as she leaned over, her small breasts brushing my chest. "Don't talk. That's the secret, big boy. Just lie back and enjoy the night."
"Did you call me big boy?"
"Okay, medium-to-slightly-above-average boy."
"Let's go back to big boy."
"Sorry. You lose what you question."
Later, lost inside her, I felt her hot, moist breath on my ear, her legs wrapped around mine, her hands on the back of my neck. It was an animal thing making love, but it was magnificent, too, and I wanted it to be so deliciously slow, we would both explode with desire before it was over.
And then, just for a moment, I thought my heart stopped.
Afterward, twined together, wet and sated and full of warmth we'd each appropriated from the other, I found myself beginning to drift off. I struggled to remain alert but failed. Lately, each time I went to sleep, I was just a little afraid I wouldn't wake up. Then Stephanie was shaking me, and I was half-awake but still dreaming. A weird sensation.
It seemed forever before I got my eyes open. "I was worried," she said.