Sensing this, Jack had no interest in talking.
Fletch hummed “What a swell party this is …”
As soon as Fletch stopped the car in the shopping mall’s parking lot, Jack was out the door headed for an electronics store. Separately, Carrie headed for a supermarket.
Fletch took the cellular phone from under the car seat and pressed in Andy Cyst’s office phone number at Global Cable News in Virginia.
“The California earthquakes,” Andy mused, as if asked to discuss something that had happened in sixteenth- century France. “Considerable.”
“Considerable what? Damage?”
“Yes. No estimates yet. Covered a wide area along the southern coast. Power lines, water lines disturbed, some fires, a small bridge fell in, no major buildings collapsed, although many will have to be inspected before being occupied again, two deaths reported so far. Two aftershocks reported. Geologists are saying there is no more to worry about than there was before. That’s reassuring, isn’t it? The governor of California has issued a statement reminding people that most of California is not affected by earthquakes at all. I suspect that bit was written for him by the Chamber of Commerce goaded by amusement park operators.”
“That’s called a positive spin.”
“Anyway, the California earthquake story has knocked out much interest in your prison escapees story. Ordinarily, that story would be getting a big play. But, as it is, there’s almost no coverage of it.”
“Why would it have been getting a big play in particular?”
“Because of who one of them is. By the way, I was wrong. There were three escapees.”
“Three?”
“Yes. Kris Kriegel, the most interesting, who would be drawing the most attention, if it weren’t for the California earthquakes, fifty-three years old, a native of South Africa, son of once-wealthy landowners with banking interests. He has his doctor of philosophy degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Warsaw, Poland. In South Africa, he was an apartheid activist, and a leader of the neo-Nazi movement there. He is suspected as one of the originators of the plan to instigate warfare among the tribes. He was present, in a neo-Nazi uniform, at the so- called ‘trod-through’ in Soweto, when, as you remember, seventy-two blacks, men, women, and children, were massacred by a white gang for which the old South African government denied all responsibility, and, damn their eyes, knowledge.”
“Yes.”
“Immediately thereafter, Kriegel spent some years based in Poland, without known employment, with frequent trips to Germany, France, and England. After that big riot in Munich on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, if you remember, in which forty-eight people—Jews, Slavs, homosexuals—were stabbed and beaten to death randomly in the streets, nine Pakistanis were burned to death in their boardinghouse, Kriegel came to this country, essentially as a fugitive from justice. The German government wanted to ‘interview’ him regarding these murders. Almost immediately after his arrival in this country he was apprehended, indicted, tried, found guilty, and sentenced for murder in the second degree of a prostitute in his hotel room. I guess in the throes of some sort of sexual whatever, maybe frustration, he strangled her to death. Incidentally, she was a black woman.”
“You’re making me sick.”
“And Kris Kriegel seems like such a friendly name. Doesn’t it? Kris Kringle. Sleigh bells ring, all that.”
“Roasting …”
“In prison, incidentally, Kriegel has continued his old ways. He took to calling himself ‘Reverend’ and preaching ‘ethnic cleansing,’ racism, I guess, the same old ordure of the anal retentive. There have been two race riots in the federal penitentiary at Tomaston, Kentucky, in the last five months.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“The prison system tries not to give such incidents much PR. A black guard was murdered in one. He was hung upside down until dead.”
Sitting in his car in the Alabama parking lot, his door open to catch a breeze, Fletch envisioned the pudgy, little man, gray hair standing out above his ears, the blue birthmark saddle over the bridge of his nose, whom he had seen mostly quietly asleep, sitting up, hands folded in his lap, like any grandfather dreaming up plans for his grandchildren and their friends.
He had plans for the children, all right.
“Juan Moreno, thirty-eight years old, a citizen of Colombia,” Andy Cyst droned on, “believed to be a member of the Medellin drug cartel. It is believed Juan Moreno is not his real name. Mostly, it says here, his job was to buy airplanes and boats for smuggling, and to establish landing situations in this country. He was caught driving an ambulance loaded with cocaine in east Texas. The uniformed driver of the ambulance was dead on the gurney in back. He had bled to death from the hole made by a screwdriver through his throat. Moreno was not found guilty of his murder, but of just about everything else. A full briefcase of bankbooks, real estate deeds, other documentation was found in the front seat of the ambulance with him. Various names were on the documents, but all the significant signatures were in his handwriting.”
And Fletch thought of “Moreno,” his throat swollen, his body bloating, twisted among the debris in the gully, snake-bitten, drowned, blank brown eyes staring up at a blank blue sky.
Fletch said, “Moreno has been found, right?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No report of it. And our last report is twenty minutes old.”
“Oh, boy.” Tiredness flowed against Fletch like a warm breeze.
“John Leary,” Andy Cyst said. “He almost doesn’t exist as a person. He’s just a rap sheet. He’s almost never been free. Thirty-two years old. He has been in institutions since he was eight years old. He was first institutionalized as an ‘unruly child.’”
“At age eight?”
“There is a notation here that he is a very large and physically dangerous person.”
“Even at age eight no one could handle him?”
“While waiting for Juvenile Court in Pennsylvania to dispose of him, as it were, he fractured the skull of a child psychologist assigned to test him. Wouldn’t you call that just a bit ‘unruly’ of an eight-year-old child?”
“Pesky.”
“His rap sheet is amazing. The authorities would put him out in foster care, and he would attack someone. They’d institutionalize him, and he’d attack someone. A great one for inflicting bodily harm.”
“Antisocial.”
“Psychotic? ‘Armed robbery, armed robbery, armed robbery,’” Andy read. “‘General mayhem, assault, assault, assault. Arson. Assault upon an officer of the law.’ His last conviction was for kidnapping a teenaged girl, transporting her across state lines for immoral purposes, keeping her captive for immoral purposes, multiple rapes, and slavery. What does ‘slavery’ mean?”
“He tried to sell her in a bar. A pool hall or something.”
“Oh, you do know something?”
“Of course. Why do you think I need to know more?”
“Mister Fletcher, you haven’t come across these people, have you? I mean, do you know where they are?”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Fletch said.
“What’s that?”
“Leary hasn’t much future as a matador, either. Even a bull he attacks from the wrong end. I remain puzzled. You’re only telling me about three escapees, Andy. The local sheriff said there were four.”
“There are only three.”
“Isn’t there another name on the printout you’re reading?”
“I’ve read you everything I have. There are three escapees: Kriegel, Moreno, Leary. This isn’t a new story now. It’s almost twenty-four hours old. These are the facts. There were only three escapees from the federal penitentiary at Tomaston, Mister Fletcher.”
“I don’t get it. Why did the sheriff say four? He even had a name.”
“You know better than I, news stories at first are often garbled.”
