a lasso of sorts in the middle of the clothesline and tried to rope the fixture, much like a cowboy would rope a horse. With the fixture well out of reach overhead, there could be no screwups, no second chances; no way to loosen a fouled knot.
It helped if she stood on the cot. After four or five flubs, she finally got it and in so doing, felt inexplicably elated. The next challenge would be to lean out far enough to actually extend her neck into the dangling loop of rope.
A bell rang somewhere, startling the hell out of her. “Roll call!” someone yelled. “All right, ladies, rise and shine!”
Carolyn’s heart raced now as she heard footsteps approaching down the hall.
“Front and center, Mrs. Donovan!”
Standing on tiptoes and straining like a kid trying to see over the fence at a ballpark, she just barely hooked the noose with the point of her chin and opened her jaw wide to drag her head in further. She filled her brain with images of Jake and Travis. The images she wanted to take with her. She whispered that she loved them.
“It’s a new day…”
That’s when she lost her balance. The noose came tight-impossibly tight-as she swung away from the cot in a wide arc, her toes straining instinctively to touch the floor, which remained just an inch out of reach. For an instant, she wondered if the thin clothesline might actually pop her head right off her body, and she clawed at the spot where the rope dug into her flesh.
Then her vision flashed red, and there was nothing more.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The Orion News Database was available to everyone who could afford the subscription fee, which was easily high enough to keep the riffraff from jamming the server. Such concerns were not a problem, of course, for the FBI, and once inside the database, Irene could locate every article written on any subject within the last fifty years, as compiled from over a thousand daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals.
Somewhere, buried among all those words, she figured there had to be an item or two about the Grant Plant’s past. Never much of a computer whiz, she was walking blind here, having always depended on staffers to take care of this kind of research. She learned right off the bat that success and failure lay in the selection of well- defined search parameters. Underestimating the scope and power of the database, she tried Newark+Arkansas in her first attempt and was greeted with an invitation to scroll through 627,838 items.
Yikes!
Her second attempt cut the number of hits in half by setting date parameters between 1980 and the present.
“Getting closer,” she told herself. She leaned back in the impossibly hard desk chair. There had to be a way to get a handle on this. Problem was, the 1983 explosion and its aftermath had dominated every news outlet for so long that those were the only references she could find. She needed to filter out that information somehow.
She concentrated her next search on a year-by-year examination of articles up to, but excluding, the date of the explosion, and even then, she was pulling up more than a hundred articles at a time, mostly from hunting and recreation magazines.
Finally, she surrendered to the inevitable. “Okay, Irene,” she’d grumbled, about forty-five minutes into the exercise. “Why don’t you ask it what you’re really looking for?”
She entered, “Newark+Arkansas+Frankel/1-1-80 thru 8-21-83.”
In her heart, she’d hoped the screen would flash an error message. Instead, she got seventeen hits, sixteen of which dealt with the same story: the apparent murder/suicide of an Army general named Dallas Albemarle and his wife, up in suburban Virginia. She decided to go back to those later and concentrated instead on the seventeenth hit, from a periodical called The Freedom Report: A Journal Dedicated to Preserving Democracy. The article quoted highly placed, unnamed sources in reporting that Special Agent Peter Frankel was actively investigating a plot to sell chemical weapons out of a “secret location” in Newark, Arkansas. The article went on to say that the investigation had been fruitful but that no arrests had been made, and from there, launched into a blathering tirade about the looming threat posed by Third World powers.
“Well, there’s his hard evidence,” Irene told herself. Frankly, she’d been hoping for something more concrete.
After a giant yawn, and yet another battle with the chair over control of her spine, she turned her attention to the list of suicide stories. As she read through them, they rang a distant bell. Seems that the kindly General Albemarle was the man responsible for overseeing the shutdown of the Ulysses S. Grant Army Ammunition Plant, back in 1964.
That’s why the name rings a bell. He’s the guy the EPA wanted to crucify, back when the hazardous waste site was first discovered.
Inexplicably, the general had shot his wife to death in the bedroom of their home in Clifton, Virginia, and had then driven all the way out to Manassas Battlefield Park, to blow his own brains out at the base of a statue paying tribute to Stonewall Jackson. Each of the articles quoted the same source-Special Agent Peter Frankel of the FBI-in reporting that General Albemarle had been distraught over the recent death of his daughter and by his likely implication in the then-developing chemical weapons scandal in Newark. According to Frankel, the general had made his intentions clear in a suicide note found in the couple’s bedroom.
“First in line with a quote even then, eh, Peter?” Irene mumbled, clicking on through the stories. The coincidence of the note was not lost on her.
Odd, she thought. Some guy nobody knows blows his brains out, and the story is picked up all over the country. Yet an investigation into illegal weapons sales pops up only once. What a telling tribute to the credibility given The Freedom Report by its journalistic brethren. Probably devoted the rest of the issue to flying saucers and Elvis sightings.
On a whim, she compared the dates on the weapons article to the one on the dead general. The story from The Freedom Report ran just three weeks before the general did the big nasty.
How about that?
Truth be told, Irene believed in mere coincidence. They happened all the time-sometimes so wild they defied logic. As a matter of fact, in a very real sense, most violent crime against innocent people boiled down to just that: a tragic coincidence for the victims involved.
She understood better than most, then, that the presence of two people in the same place at the same time didn’t necessarily reflect intent on anyone’s part. There comes a point, though, when coincidences stack up so high that it takes more effort to justify their randomness than to accept them as something more complicated. This business with Frankel was rapidly approaching that point.
It was time to stop being an investigator for a little while and become a casual observer. If she were to accept only Donovan’s side, she could place Frankel with at least one other dead party, and she could place him at the Little Rock field office with the opportunity to pull a fast one with his investigatory prerogative; all within the time frame when weapons could have been sold out of his backyard. Wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened, after all. Sadly, it wasn’t uncommon at all for a cop to get involved with the very crime he’s investigating.
Hmm…
She clicked back to the beginning and initiated another search, this one running permutations of dates, places, and names, but all with the common denominator of “chemical+weapons.” After half a dozen tries, the list became manageable, and within an hour, she’d found what she was looking for.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said. The coincidences just went over the top.
When the phone rang a minute later, she didn’t even jump. It was nearly six o’clock, and she’d been waiting for the switchboard to get around to their promised five forty-five wake-up call.
“I’m up, thank you,” she said as she lifted the receiver from the desk.
“Irene?” Hearing her name stopped her from hanging up.
“Yeah?”
