'What's impossible?' I asked. 'Are you saying Nuvironment doesn't have the dirt, or are you denying that you helped them bring it into this country?'
Valley's response was to wag his head repeatedly. His mouth with its thin lips opened and closed, but the only sound he managed to produce was a kind of whimper. He resembled nothing so much as a very ugly beached fish that had been brought up from some very deep, lightless layer of a poisonous ocean.
'No, I don't think that's what he means,' Garth said, his voice soft and oddly distant. My brother's matter-of- fact tone and lack of visible expression were beginning to make me feel decidedly uneasy. I'd learned that with Garth, since his poisoning with nitrophenylpentadienal and his eventual recovery, it was best to read his emotional and behavioral traffic signals in reverse from the way they would be read with most other people. 'I do think he means that what I said was happening to the girl is impossible.' He paused, tightened his grip on the botanist's shirt ever so slightly. 'If you don't want to talk about one kind of dirt, pal, then we'll talk about another. Tell us where the good Reverend William Kenecky is holed up.'
Craig Valley finally found his voice-and it sounded haunted. 'It's impossible. The reverend is a man of God; he would never do such a thing.'
Garth yanked Valley to his feet, ripping the man's shirt. My brother let go of the tattered fabric, wrapped his fingers around the other man's throat. 'He's repeatedly raping a girl by the name of Vicky Brown, Valley-and I assume you know who she is too. Jesus Christ, man, if you care anything about children, or even just this child, tell us where to find Kenecky and the girl. Where is Nuvironment storing the dirt?'
'God, I'm going to be sick,' the botanist groaned, and put a hand over his mouth as he retched dryly. 'Please let me go to the bathroom.'
Garth released his grip as I rose from the footstool and stepped away. Valley staggered across the living room and through another archway into the dining room. Garth and I followed, watched as he entered a bathroom adjacent to the kitchen at the rear of the town house, slammed the door shut behind him. A few seconds later there was the sound of water running.
'Damn, Garth,' I said, my heart starting to pound with excitement. 'He damn well knows where the girl is. We're going to find her.'
'I'd say so,' Garth replied flatly as he stared at the closed door.
A minute went by, then two. The running water could clearly be heard, but there was no sound of retching. 'He's had enough sick leave,' I said tightly. 'Let's go get him.'
'Right.'
We were almost to the door when we both stopped suddenly, virtually paralyzed for an instant by the sounds that came from the other side of the closed door. The voice was clearly Craig Valley's, but there was something inhuman, animal-like, in the eerie, ululating howls that were a mixture of shrieking and thick-syllabled words I knew instinctively were not a part of any language spoken on earth.
Garth hit the door with his shoulder, smashing it off its frame and inward at almost the precise moment that the howling turned into a wet, wordless, gurgling sound. Blood sprayed and spurted over our faces and clothing. I gazed past Garth in horror at the figure slumped backward on the toilet seat over the water bowl, and knew that there was going to be no saving Vicky Brown this day, because there was going to be no saving Dr. Craig Valley.
Valley had really done a job on himself. One edge of a double-edged razor blade was embedded in the index and middle fingers of each of Valley's hands, the result of the force he had exerted to punch two holes in the carotid arteries in his neck, one on each side of his jugular. He'd certainly known what he was doing when he'd decided to leave this vale of tears, for there was no way a team of surgeons, much less my brother and me, could have found a way to stop up those spurting holes before his life leaked out of him. There was a last spasm of heartbeats, causing more blood to spray over us, the floor, walls, and ceiling, and then he was dead.
With trembling hands, I wiped at the warm, sticky blood covering my face, but only managed to smear it. And then the air in the bathroom was suddenly filled with the thick, green odor of feces as Valley's sphincter let loose and his bowels emptied; brown stains began to darken the legs of his slacks. I wanted to look away, and couldn't; I was transfixed with horror, strangely fascinated by the fact that a man could actually will himself to use his bare hands to punch holes in his neck with razor blades. He was a man who'd been in a very big hurry to die, and he'd certainly taken care of business.
Garth was also taking care of business. If I hadn't been so shaken by the horror of what Craig Valley had done to himself, I'd probably have seen the blood-coated, cordless telephone that had dropped onto the carpeted floor beside Valley's left foot. But it was Garth who had seen it first, and now he rudely kicked the head botanist's foot to one side, picked up the telephone and examined it. Then he held it out for me to examine its face.
The mode control button was switched to
'Hello,' Garth said evenly into the mouthpiece. 'Who's this? Anybody there?'
Even from where I was standing, I could hear the dial tone suddenly come on. Garth cursed with disgust, then hurriedly punched the REDIAL button. I moved closer, listened as the handset whirred and clicked, automatically redialing the last number that had been called. The noises stopped, and a phone at the other end of the line began to ring. A woman answered on the third ring.
'Nuvironment. Good afternoon. How may I help you?'
Garth glanced at me, raised his eyebrows slightly. My heart was pounding even more rapidly, and I imagined that if I'd tried to speak my words would have caught in my throat. But not Garth.
'This is Dr. Craig Valley,' my brother said evenly. 'I called a few minutes ago, and my party and I were cut off. Please reconnect me.'
There was a pause, which to me seemed ominous. When the woman spoke again, suspicion was clearly evident in her voice. 'Dr. Valley? Craig? You sound very different.'
'I have a sore throat.'
'I see,' the woman replied coldly, and from the tone of her voice I was afraid that she did. 'Whom would you like to speak to, sir?'
'Just reconnect me to whoever I was speaking to before.'
'You have to give me a name.'
'Let me talk to Mr. Blaisdel.'
'This isn't Dr. Valley,' the woman said tersely. 'Who is this? I demand to know who this is.'
So much for cute private detective tricks. Garth pressed the hook button, got another dial tone, and called the police.
While we waited for the police to arrive, we took turns availing ourselves of Valley's kitchen sink to wash the blood off our hands and faces as best we could, drying ourselves with a roll of paper towels we found in a cabinet. I was still trembling, but Garth seemed more outraged than shaken. We didn't talk much, probably because there didn't seem much to say; there was no question in our minds that Craig Valley had opted to kill himself rather than risk supplying us with information under the duress Garth had guaranteed he would supply. As obviously mad as Valley had been, suicide still seemed a rather dire means of trying to keep one's mouth shut. It had to make us both wonder just how much else was involved besides the sexual abuse of a child.
Craig Valley hadn't punched holes in his throat because he'd been worried about a load of dirt, or because we'd labeled one of his religious idols a child molester; he had to have been afraid of us finding out something else-a secret he had given his life to protect. All we'd wanted to know was the dump site of a load of Amazon rain forest soil, and Valley's decidedly bizarre response to our inquiries made me strongly suspect that when we did get to the site we were going to find a lot more than just a big pile of bug-infested dirt.
It certainly appeared that something big and complicated was afoot, as it were, and that didn't bode well for our relatively small and simple quest.
'Shit,' Garth said dispassionately as he tossed a wad of paper towels into the garbage can beneath the sink, then glanced at his watch.
'Yeah, shit,' I said in agreement. More than twenty minutes had passed since Garth had called the police to report Valley's suicide, and there was still no sign of officialdom. We had other things to do, to say the least. With a little luck, and a lot of pressure, if need be, applied in the right places, there still seemed a chance that we could find Vicky Brown before nightfall; it wasn't as though we didn't know where to go next. 'You can never find a cop when you need one.'
'We've got better things to do than wait around here,' Garth said, looking down at his blood-stained shirt, tie,
