knows who might have done so.
Clearly, there has been deception on the part of your wife, but it is not the sort you believed.
As I told you when I agreed to this investigation, I could give you one month, but no more — at least not until I return from attending to other business.
Best of luck in sorting this situation out. I hope you agree with my conclusions and that I have been of service to you.
Ben packaged the summary along with a thick envelope of photos, documents, DVDs, and a final bill, payment of which would take care of his financial problems for some time to come. Of all his recent cases, this one had the chance to be the most rewarding. An up-and-coming congressman, Martin Shapiro was married to a woman nearly half his age — bright, beautiful, educated, and very much of a political asset provided they could work out their issues. One of those issues concerned his wife at age sixteen, unwilling to terminate her pregnancy, but unable to care for a child.
Both of the Shapiros seemed like decent people, and Ben was pulling for them. Now it was time to complete his work on Lonnie Durkin. It was surprising to sense such commitment in himself after not really caring about much of anything for so long. But since his trip to Idaho, he had been unable to shuck from his mind the images of the inestimable sadness and sorrow on the faces of Karen and Ray Durkin.
He was convinced that Whitestone laboratory technicians all over the country, and in all probability the world, were unwitting accomplices in what might prove to be a consummate evil, and he both wanted and needed to know what was going on.
With Althea Satterfield fluttering about his apartment, Ben packed some warn weather clothes and set out enough cat supplies for a couple of weeks. Then, after a hug for his elderly neighbor and a final scratch for Pincus, he hurried down the stairs and into his five-year-old black Range Rover. The car was battered with half a dozen dents that were too close to his deductible to bother fixing, but despite more than a little neglect, the engine was still sound. In fact, just yesterday, the mechanic at Quickee Oil Change had pronounced the car good to go for the thousand mile drive to Fadiman, Texas.
In addition to his suitcase and a pair of twenty 'five-pound dumbbells, Ben set his Moroccan leather valise in back, packed with some new equipment, including several listening devices, a used but serviceable monocular night scope, a hundred feet of clothesline, and a new Swiss Army knife. Finally, he transferred his Smith amp; Wesson.38 Special, freshly oiled, from its velvet pouch to a shoulder holster, and set the holster under some papers in the glove compartment.
Initially, Gustafson, who had finally stopped calling him Mr. Calkhan, had been as excited and enthusiastic as he was about the findings in Cincinnati and at the Whitestone lab in Soda Springs, but over the intervening weeks, she had become considerably more cautious.
'Ben, I think we should call in the FBI,' she had said during their last meeting together.
'And tell them what? We have no hard proof of anything. Chances are these Whitestone people could easily parry any thrust as feeble as ours. Then they just retool, or relocate, and restart.'
'I have some friends researching this company,' Gustafson had said, 'and what they've found really concerns me. Whitestone is based out of London, and financially spearheaded by their laboratories and a pharmaceutical business, they may be one of the fastest-growing privately held companies in the world.'
'Pharmaceuticals?'
'Mostly generics and medications that are legal in Europe and Africa, but not here — at least not yet. Ben, I think we're in over our heads.'
'So?'
'So, I don't want you to get hurt.'
'Believe me, I'm no hero, but folks are already getting hurt, maybe lots of them. And there'll be more and more until these people are stopped. A doctor orders a blood sugar and his patient unknowingly gets tissue-typed. It's like they're walking around with time bombs in their pockets. How many of those vials of blood — those so- called quality control tubes — are getting sent off to Fadiman, Texas, every day? How many profiles do you think are added to the database?'
Gustafson shook her head grimly.
'I'm worried, that's all,' she said. 'All those blood-drawing labs, that huge van, those weapons, that thug who almost killed you — these are not petty thieves.'
'Hey,' Ben replied, 'is this the woman who put on a nurse's uniform and marched into the operating room of a hospital in Moldavia to document the illicit trade of a kidney in exchange for a job? As I recall, from the article you wrote, it was a lousy, menial job at that and, I might add, a lousy, menial job that never even materialized. I think you succeeded in getting some arrests in that one.'
'One of the first cases where we actually put an organ broker and a surgeon out of business,' she said somewhat wistfully, 'at least for the moment.'
'Professor, Google and Yahoo have more than a hundred thousand entries about you, running around in disguises, making power brokers back down from hundreds of thousands in profits, putting yourself in harm's way for people that were staring up from the bottom of the barrel. It doesn't sound as if you've ever backed down from anyone.'
'I think most of the time I was too young to know any better.'
'Well, you are a great power of example, and for what I'm getting paid by Organ Guard, I would brave any danger.'
'Very funny. Okay, Ben, do what you have to do, but please, please be careful.'
'I will.'
'And speaking of getting paid.'
'Yes?'
'Here's my Sunoco gas card.'
Another night on the road playing detective, another budget motel — this one the Starlight in Hollis, Oklahoma. At three thirty Ben was still awake, staring into the blackness of room 118. By four thirty, he had showered, packed up, grabbed a cup of coffee from the desk clerk, and hit the road. He had always found the starkness and palette of the desert to be awesome, but never more so than this morning, with sand and sage washed by the pastels of early dawn, stretching out infinitely on either side of the highway.
He left the CD player off and the windows open, and thought of what might be awaiting him in Fadiman. Soon, he found himself reflecting on 'Fred and Ed,' a cartoon he had read religiously in his weekly college newspaper. In his favorite installment of the strip, slow, gangly Fred with a huge net and length of rope announces to his much smaller, sharper friend that he is going alligator hunting.
'If you catch one, what are you going to do with it?' Ed asks.
'I hadn't thought that far ahead,' Fred replies.
Totally silly, totally profound.
Ben reached Fadiman just after noon. The sleepy town looked as if it might have been used as the set for Bogdanovich's classic The Last Picture Show. It was definitely more substantial than Curtisville, Florida, home of Schyler Gaines's gas station and mini-mart, but the gestalt of the two places was not dissimilar. The wooden sign on the edge of town, peeling and punctuated with more than a few bullet holes, announced that Fadiman was firmly rooted in yesterday, with hands reaching out to tomorrow. From what Ben could discern from the ride into the center of town, the main industries bridging yesterday and tomorrow were mobile home and RV sales, and self- Storage facilities. There were three of each on this side of town alone.
With a growing need for food and a bathroom, but otherwise no more of a plan than the cartoon character hunting for alligators, Ben rolled slowly down Main Street — four or five traffic lights long, and wide in the way only midwestern Main Streets were wide. He counted five taverns, all of which served food, but none of which looked as if it would be sanctioned by any health authority to do so. He wasn't really that picky about ambiance, and he certainly was no gourmet, but he had only recently gotten off Zantac and Maalox, and was enjoying an uneasy truce with his stomach. On another pass up the street he spotted a couple of restaurants he had missed — Mother Molly's and the Hungry Coyote. The choice was easy.
Molly's, done in a motif of genuine cowboy and ranch regalia, was actually larger and quainter than Ben had anticipated. Booths with red leather and dark wood were arranged around the outside, tables with red checked paper place mats in the center. About a third of the seats were occupied. Ben was beginning to feel the fatigue of
