facility Julian Jefferson's tanker had been servicing at the time of Tom Blaine's death. The proper business of Frederickson and Frederickson, namely making some money, could not be postponed forever, which meant I was going to have to go back to the city. However, between Garth and Mary, and maybe one or two college students home for the summer and looking for easy work, we could make sure that somebody was always at the camera during daylight hours to take photographs of incoming and outgoing Carver tankers, and then note the date and time in a log. If Carver Shipping was still transporting water, we would have our own photographs and witnesses. It was a first step. If we could get proof of a company policy to flout the law, a conspiracy first uncovered by a man killed by a vessel that most likely belonged to that company, then we would see what we could make happen next. There were always the newspapers, and Garth and I had plenty of contacts in the media.
Mary's strained voice came from the beach below the deck. 'Garth? Mongo? Are you up there?'
Garth and I looked at each other, and Garth called, 'Yes. What is it?'
'I think you two should come down here right away. There's something you should see.'
Alarmed by the tone of Mary's voice, we hurried out of the house and down the path leading to the beach. We came to an abrupt halt when we rounded a corner of the boathouse, startled by the sight in front of us.
It was low tide, which meant that fifteen to twenty yards of beach were exposed. Left in the sand by the receding waters were what looked to be hundreds of hypodermic syringes littering the beach like some kind of malevolent glass and blue plastic sea creatures that had come ashore to spawn terror at the least, and maybe slow, agonizing death. Strewn among the needles like strands of poisonous afterbirth were long strips of bloody bandages. Mary, ashen-faced and with her arms wrapped around her, stood at the far end of the field of needles and bandages, which seemed to be confined pretty much to the area of beach around the boathouse.
'Mary, you didn't touch any of that, did you?' Garth asked tersely.
Mary slowly, almost solemnly, shook her head, then started walking toward us, giving the field of syringes and blood-soaked cloth a wide berth.
'I'm going up to the house to call the health department and the neighbors,' Garth continued, turning to start back up the path. 'From the looks of things, most of that shit ended up on our property, but the other people around here should be warned.'
Garth hurried up to the house, and I took Mary's hand as she came up to me.
'I didn't exactly tell Garth the truth,' she whispered hoarsely.
'What are you talking about?'
In reply, she lifted her left foot to show me the sole. It was stained with blood. 'I was just walking along, thinking about this new song I'm working on, not watching where I was going. I stepped on one of the needles that was sticking up out of the sand. I. . My first reaction was just not to frighten Garth.' She paused, and the giggle that came out of her mouth was just a note or two short of hysteria. 'Not telling him was certainly kind of silly, wasn't it? He's going to have to know sooner or later.'
I ran up the beach and into the boathouse. With trembling hands I tore off a large strip from a roll of plastic sheeting we used to cover the catamaran in the winter. Then I hurried back out on the beach, carefully picked up three syringes and a strip of bloody bandage, rolled them up in the heavy plastic. 'Come on, babe,' I said, grabbing Mary's hand. 'We're going to get Garth, and then we're taking you to the hospital.'
She staggered after me up the path, looking back over her shoulder at the ugly array of needles and bandages. 'It's starting, just like I said it would,' she said in a hollow voice. 'Bad things;
I told you Sacra makes bad things happen.'
The nurse in the emergency room at Cairn Hospital wasn't much impressed by the small puncture wound in the sole of Mary's foot; he, and the doctors on duty, were, though, appropriately shaken by the bundle of syringes and stained bandage I had brought with me. Dr. Angelo Franconi, a friend of Garth's, immediately took the package, told us he would see what he could determine about the contents from examining the debris under a microscope. The nurse disinfected and bandaged the wound in Mary's foot, and he gave her a pair of paper slippers to wear. Then we went downstairs to the coffee shop in the basement and waited nervously.
Fifty-five minutes later Angelo Franconi, looking both relieved and puzzled, joined us. He pulled a chair up to our table, laid a hand gently on Mary's forearm, spoke to my brother. 'We can't tell for certain that the needles are clean until we try to grow a culture, which I've already ordered done. But, from examining them under a microscope, I'd say the chances are ninety-nine out of a hundred that the needles were never used; one of them was still in its original plastic package. Somebody with a boat must have lost a lot of syringes overboard, and the carton broke up in the water somewhere very close to you. Wind and tide were just right to wash most of the stuff up on your beach. It certainly is a freakish kind of accident, but I don't think you have much to worry about.'
Garth asked, 'What about the bloody bandages?'
The dark-skinned doctor ran a hand back through his close-cropped black hair, shook his head. 'Now, there's a real mystery. I can tell you the blood isn't infected with any pathogens you can see under a microscope. It isn't even human; it's chicken blood. I can't imagine where surgical bandages covered with chicken blood would come from, and it really is curious how that combination of garbage washed up on your property.'
I didn't think it was curious at all, and I didn't consider it much of a mystery. When I looked at Garth, I could see he felt the same way.
'You said you wanted me to leave him to you, and I'm doing that,' Garth whispered to me as we walked out of the hospital. 'But you'd better be quick about it, because if I stumble across him before you do, I promise you his corpse will be the next piece of garbage that washes up on somebody's beach.'
Chapter Eight
There were a number of messages waiting for me when I got back to New York, but there was one in which I was particularly interested. It was from Captain Perry Farmer of the NYPD, and he wanted me to get back to him as soon as possible. I picked up the phone, dialed his precinct station house, and asked for his extension.
'The prints you gave me matched up, Mongo,' Perry said after some preliminary chitchat. 'Your guy's name is Charles 'Chick' Carver.'
Well, well. I cradled the receiver under my chin as I wrote it down, underlining the last name. 'That's great news, Perry. What have you got on him?'
'He spent five years in Greenhaven for-now get this, Mongo-aggravated malicious mischief. He'd gotten fines and short jail sentences a few times before for similar things, so the judge in the last case decided to throw the book at him. It seems that when Mr. Carver takes a dislike to somebody, he just can't leave it alone. He served three and a half months in a halfway house rehab program and got out on parole nine months ago.
He also had an extensive juvenile record. Some of that is sealed, but from the kind of flag on the file, I'd say he may have been sent to a mental hospital, probably Rockland Children's Psychiatric Center up near where Garth lives now.'
'You got an address for him?'
'Yeah; it's a walkup on the Lower East Side, but if s a phony. It's a real enough apartment, and the rent's paid up, but he hasn't been there in six months. I had one of my men talk to some of the neighbors. His probation officer isn't too happy about it, and he's going to have some explaining to do the next time he talks to her.'
'You've spoken to his probation officer?'
'Yeah. I got kind of curious about what kind of guy can draw a five-year prison sentence for malicious mischief.'
'A very malicious guy. Hey, Perry, you're a prince for taking the time you have.'
'I haven't forgotten I owe you, Mongo.'
'What did his probation officer have to say about him?'
'She says he can be a real charmer when he wants to be-like most sociopaths. He's pretty bright, but he has a real child's outlook on life. He wants to be a big man, but he doesn't have the patience or self-discipline needed to acquire the skills to become a big man. And so he's a schemer, a manipulator. He apparently has this witchcraft gig he likes to do on people he thinks will swallow it. Anyway, he may yet turn out to be a big man, because somebody arranged for him to get a job with the shipping company his family is connected with. It sounds to me like some
