She said, 'I'm sorry-that was crude. Shall we start yet again?'
'It wouldn't do any good. Turn around and watch the game.'
She turned around, and we watched the game and had a beer. At halftime with a 7-7 tie, she looked at her watch and said, 'I have to go meet this Department of Agriculture guy.'
If you're wondering about this Department of Agriculture thing, Plum Island is officially a Department of Agriculture installation, and they do things with animal diseases, anthrax, and all that. But rumor has it that it goes beyond that. Way beyond. I said, 'Don't keep the Department of Agriculture waiting.'
'Do you want to come along?'
I contemplated this invitation. If I went along, I'd get deeper into this thing, whatever it was. On the pro side, I like solving murders, and I liked the Gordons. In the ten years I've been with homicide, I've put twenty-six murderers behind bars, and the last two guys are eligible to take advantage of the new death penalty law, which adds another whole dimension to homicide cases now. On the con side, this was something different, and I was way off my turf. Also, a Department of Agriculture guy, like most government bureaucrats, wouldn't be caught dead working at night, so this guy was most probably CIA or FBI or Defense Intelligence or something like that. It didn't matter, and there'd be more of them later tonight or tomorrow. No, I didn't need this case at a buck a week, or a thousand bucks a day, or at any price.
'Detective? Hello?'
I looked at her. How do you say no to a perfect 10? I said, 'I'll meet you there.'
'All right. What do I owe you for the beers?'
'On me.'
'Thanks. See you later.' She walked toward the door and with the game at halftime, the fifty or so guys in the OTT finally noticed that there was an incredible babe on the premises. There were a few whistles and invitations to stick around.
I watched a little of the halftime stuff. I wished they
In truth, my health, once robust, had taken a decided dip since the April 12 incident. My eating, drinking, and sleeping habits were never good, and the divorce and the job had taken their toll. I was starting to feel forty- something, starting to feel my mortality. Sometimes in my sleep, I remember lying in the gutter in my own blood, lying on a storm drain and thinking, 'I'm circling around the drain, I'm going down the drain.'
On the upside, I was starting to notice things like the waitress with the NordicTrack ass, and when Elizabeth Penrose walked into the bar, my little meat puppet sat up and stretched. Truly, I was on the road to recovery, and for sure I was in better shape than the Gordons.
I thought a moment about Tom and Judy. Tom was a Ph.D. who didn't mind killing his brain cells with beer and wine, and he cooked a good steak on the grill. He was a down-to-earth guy from Indiana or Illinois or someplace out there where they have this sort of twang. He was low-key about his work and joked about the danger, like last week when a hurricane was headed our way, he said, 'If it hits Plum, you can call it Hurricane Anthrax, and we can kiss our asses goodbye.' Ha. Ha. Ha.
Judy, like her husband, was a Ph.D., a Midwesterner, unpretentious, good-natured, spirited, funny, and beautiful. John Corey, like every guy who met her, was in love with her.
Judy and Tom seemed to have taken well to this maritime province in the two years since they'd been here, and they seemed to enjoy power boating and had gotten involved with the Peconic Historical Society. In addition, they were enchanted by the wineries and had become connoisseurs of Long Island wine. In fact, they had befriended some of the local vintners, including Fredric Tobin, who threw lavish soirees at his chateau, one of which I attended as the Gordons' guest.
As a couple, the Gordons seemed happy, loving, caring, sharing, and all that 1990s stuff, and I really never noticed anything amiss between them. But that's not to say they were perfect people or a perfect couple.
I searched my memory for something like a fatal flaw, the kind of thing that sometimes gets people murdered. Drugs? Not likely. Infidelity? Possible, but not probable. Money? They didn't have much to steal. So it came down to the job again.
I thought about that. It would appear on the face of things that the Gordons were selling superbugs and something went wrong, and they were terminated. Along the same lines, I recalled that Tom once confided to me that his biggest fear, aside from catching a disease, was that he and Judy would be kidnapped right off their boat one day, that an Iranian submarine or something would come up and snatch them away, and they'd never be seen or heard from again. This seemed a little far-fetched to me, but I remember thinking that the Gordons must have a lot of stuff in their heads that some people wanted. So maybe what happened was that the murder started out as a snatch job and went wrong. I thought about this. If the murders were related to the job, were the Gordons innocent victims, or were they traitors who sold death for gold? Were they killed by a foreign power or were they killed by someone closer to home?
I mulled this over as best I could in the OTT with the noise, the halftime crap, the beer in my brain, and the acid in my tummy. I had another beer and another Maalox. Gastro-doc never said
I tried to think of the unthinkable, of handsome, happy Tom and beautiful, bouncy Judy selling plague to some nut cases, of water reservoirs filled with disease, or maybe aerial crop sprayers over New York or Washington, of millions of sick, dying, and dead…
I couldn't imagine the Gordons doing that. On the other hand, everyone has a price. I used to wonder how they could afford to rent that house on the water and buy that expensive boat. Now maybe I knew how and also why they needed a high-speed boat and a house with a private dock. It all made sense, and yet my instincts were telling me not to believe the obvious.
I overtipped Ms. NordicTrack and returned to the scene of the crime.
CHAPTER 4
It was after eleven as I drove along the lane that led to the Gordons' house. The night was lit by a nice three- quarter moon, and a pleasant breeze brought the smell of the sea through the open windows of my new moss green Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited, a $40,000 indulgence that the nearly deceased John Corey thought he owed himself.
I stopped fifty yards from the house, put the vehicle into 'park,' and listened to a few more minutes of Giants-Dallas, then I shut off the engine. A voice said, 'Your headlights are on.'
'Shut up,' I replied, 'just shut up.' I switched off the headlights.
There are many options in life, but one option you should never choose is the 'Voice Warning and Advisory Option.'
I opened the door. 'Your key is in the ignition. Your emergency brake is not engaged.' It was a female voice, and I swear to God it sounded like my ex-wife. 'Thank you, dear.' I took my keys, climbed down, and slammed the door.
The vehicles and crowds on the small street had thinned considerably, and I figured that the bodies had been removed, it being a fact of life that the arrival of the meat wagon usually satisfies most of the spectators and signals the end of Act One, Also, they all wanted to see themselves on the eleven o'clock news.
There was a new addition to the police presence since my earlier visit: a Suffolk County police mobile van was parked in front of the house near the forensic van. This new van was the command post that could accommodate investigators, radios, fax machines, cell phones, video equipment, and the other high-tech doodads that make up the arsenal in the never-ending battle against crime and all that.
I noticed a helicopter overhead, and I could see by the light of the moon that it was from one of the networks. Though I couldn't hear the reporter's voice, he or she was probably saying something like, 'Tragedy struck this exclusive Long Island community earlier this evening.' Then some stuff about Plum Island and so on.
I made my way through the last of the stragglers, avoiding anyone who looked like the working press. I stepped over the yellow tape, and this immediately attracted a Southold cop. I tinned the guy and got a half-assed
