“She doesn’t fit at all.” Dyson almost foamed at the mouth, he was so furious. “Elderly, alcoholic, lives on the streets.”
“Fredericks and Hardcastle didn’t fit either.”
Dyson spun around, his fists clenched, and glared at Paul. “Don’t you think I know that?” He stormed off.
Paul could hear him ranting for long minutes after the man left the apartment. Dyson acted like Paul and Keren had deliberately set out to thwart him.
Higgins said, “We’ll keep our focus on tracking Caldwell. I don’t care if he’s living in a bunker under a nondescript building, I’ll find him. You two go check the rest of the laboratory supply stores. He still needs a shipment of locusts. And it’s a cinch he won’t have them shipped
When they came out of the tenement house, they ran into reporters.
They fought their way through the crowd and got onto the street, only to have cars staked out to follow them.
“They know my car,” Keren said quietly, her voice carrying below the racket of shouted questions. “Do you have one?”
“Nope. Let me drive yours again.” He held out his hand for the keys. “I’d forgotten how much I like it.”
“Do you have a license?” They got through the throng of reporters and set a fast pace toward Keren’s car.
Paul shrugged. “I don’t think it’s lapsed.”
Keren gave him a long look. “But do you have it with you?”
“I’ve got forty-eight hours to produce it if I get ticketed for driving without it. You know that.” Paul held out his hand again.
“But driving without it is still illegal,
“What’s your point?” Paul wiggled his fingers impatiently.
Keren glared at him, but she could see inaction right now would drive him right to the limit of his self-control. She handed him the keys.
The reporters gave chase, and a little parade formed in the passenger’s side mirror. “Head for the expressway so you’ve got room to maneuver.”
“Way ahead of you.” Paul gave her a
“How do you survive without a car?”
Paul pulled onto the expressway and moved across three lanes of traffic to the fast lane. “I take the El. A car is an albatross around my neck in this city.” He swerved in front of a car in the slower lane then cut sharply onto an off-ramp and left the few remaining reporters in the dust. He turned around and backtracked, changing directions until he was sure he’d shaken any tail.
“They’re going to make it hard to do our job.” Keren glanced at her watch. “I had hopes of getting to all these places today, but we won’t make it now.”
They went to the first address on the list.
An hour later, as they left the second supply store, Keren said, “I can’t believe how many people wanted this strange combination of bugs. What are the chances that a dozen companies in Chicago were in desperate need of gnats, flies, and frogs all at the same time?” She stared at her notes, but they stayed the same.
Paul had taken his own notes but didn’t check them because he was driving again, trying to get to the next place before it locked down for the night. “But these orders were all for other things, too. And there is no order for locusts. And what about the beasts? What in the world will he do for that?”
“I can’t stand to think of it.”
“And boils, and good grief, hail. How’s he going to produce a plague of hail?”
“He’s an artist,” Keren said dryly. “I’m sure he’s very creative.”
“He may have ordered other things to throw us off.” Paul tapped the steering wheel as if he were listening to music. “We may have to track down every name we’ve been given, but a lot of these orders add up to serious money. And most of these ordered test tubes and microscope slides and a variety of chemical solutions worth thousands of dollars.”
He veered across two lanes of traffic and swerved onto a side street. He wasn’t dodging reporters now, so he was just driving like a lunatic for the fun of it. Keren vowed to take her keys back as soon as he stopped.
“The orders are mostly connected to schools or medical labs.” Paul took a corner so fast the tires whined. “We won’t track down any of these large purchases unless we have to. Let’s hope we find an order that matches what we need.”
“What do we stake out for beasts? Is it possible he’ll go back to the park? Or back to someone’s apartment that he wants to torment?” Keren grabbed the armrest on the door beside her to keep from tipping over toward Paul. “We found LaToya because we anticipated his hunt for frogs.”
“We found LaToya because we got lucky.” Paul straightened the car out and floored it. “Caldwell brought his own frogs, and we just happened to be close at hand.”
“We found LaToya,” Keren said, “because God wanted her found.”
Paul glanced sharply at her and seemed to lose his focus on their conversation for a minute. He looked back at the street and tightened his hands on the steering wheel and slowed down a bit.
“So beasts, does that mean sheep, cattle?” Keren didn’t know whether to pursue the conversation about God or not. They were almost to their destination.
“In the Bible it says plague of beasts or livestock or animals, depending on which version you read.” Paul seemed to shift mental gears as he spoke of the Bible. Keren hoped it lasted. “If Caldwell wanted to be true to the meaning of the Bible, he’d go to the nearest cattle ranch or stockyards and leave Wilma there.”
Keren’s stomach twisted to think of what might be coming. “But he wants to stay close to the mission. That’s been the only thing he hasn’t deviated from. Even my apartment isn’t that far.”
“So where do you find animals?” Paul pulled up to the lab supply store.
“There is a petting zoo at that same park. But he hasn’t been back there since LaToya.” Keren was relieved to have arrived alive.
“We can stake it out.”
They got out and got to the front door just as it was closing for the day. Keren used her badge and Paul let them assume he had one, too. He did a lot of bullying to get the manager to stay around and let them check the recent orders. Keren called the last lab supply store, but there was no answer. “We’ll have to try that one tomorrow.”
They left the building. Paul went to the driver’s side as if it were his right. “Let’s track down the name of the guy who runs that last store and get him to let us in.”
“It’s too late, Paul. We took forever in that last place, and I thought the manager was going to wring our necks. It’s almost sundown. We’re going to have to wait until tomorrow.”
Keren would have wrestled him for the keys but decided he needed to bolster his spirits, so she let him drive like a lunatic for a while longer. He seemed to enjoy that. “We’re closing in on him. We’ll find him through the place we check tomorrow, or we’ll find him in the lists we already have.”
“Maybe, unless he went out of town for this stuff.” Paul’s foot tapped, and he stared unseeing into the lowering sun but he remained in the parking space.
“Let’s go see how LaToya’s doing.” Keren waited.
Finally Paul started the car. “If there was any change I’d have heard,” he said, as if going to see her was unnecessary. With a shrug of his shoulders he added, “We might as well go there and sleep on the couches. We’re both as good as homeless.”
As he drove, Keren wondered if she shouldn’t give him a pep talk about not being such a cynical jerk. She remembered very vividly now why she’d been left with such a bad impression of Detective Paul Morris.
They drove through a fast-food joint and ate in the car on the way to the hospital. Paul wondered if he could call this a date. He nearly smiled at the thought.
Since Keren paid for both of them… since Paul had no money… it was a real modern kind of date.
The cop was in full control of him after the day he’d spent, and he decided he liked it, at least for now. He
