All the Devil's Creatures (36 page)

“I think I know where they got the name, by the way. Moth Wing.”

“Yeah?”

“The peppered moth, in England. Sort of the first great genetic experiment. These moths were mostly white, see. And they blended in with the lichens where they lived. Then came the industrial revolution. All the soot from the burning coal killed the lichens and turned the rocks black. So the white moths didn’t blend in anymore. They stood out on the rocks and the birds munched them. Almost died out. Except the small minority of moths that were born black—genetic freaks—they
did
blend in. And they survived and reproduced and within a few generations, almost all the moths were black.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And there’s more. When they passed environmental laws, the air got cleaner and the rocks got cleaner and the lichens came back. So the black moths didn’t blend in—”

“And they died out and, let me guess—now most the moths are white again.”

Geoff smiled and glanced over to the passenger seat, but Marisol peered out the window. He put his eyes back on the road and felt a little less gusto. “Right. Natural selection. People studied those moths for decades and learned a lot about genetics.”

“Wow. You know everything. About that sort of stuff, anyway.”

Did Geoff did hear sarcasm in her tone?

“Have you noticed a white Lincoln SUV?” she asked. “It’s been popping up off and on since Dallas.”

Geoff checked the rear-view mirror and thought he spotted the vehicle Marisol referred to in the right-hand lane, the slow lane, three car-lengths back. The driver looked young and small.

He said, “I think so. You think we’re being followed?”

“I’m not sure—it’s an Interstate highway, after all. So if a car started out with us, it could stick with us just as a matter of course—not intentional. But I’m keeping an eye on it.”

“Okay.” The thought made him nervous. His mind flashed to New Orleans—the hit man, Jimmy Lee Monroe. But Monroe was dead and Duchamp was dead and the cable news all said the Speaker went nuts with the pressure of trying to cover up some environmental crimes. End of story. The media moved on. And in the eyes of anyone who might still care, he had moved on himself. So when the Lincoln moved out of view behind a truck, his heart found its normal rhythm. As if the only predator left was within his own mind.

But he didn’t trust the Prince. He had heard nothing from him the since their meeting in the warehouse, but he sensed somehow the slick little man had not shirked from whatever had motivated him to try to convince Geoff to recover what Dalia had found. He would reemerge.

He did not share this fear with Marisol, who wore about her a grimness—whether based in fear or weariness he did not know. Her apprehension seemed to grow the further east he drove. Not since she gazed at him over the rim of her glass in Pirate’s Alley, their first cocktails in New Orleans, had he felt he knew her less.

“Anyway,” he said, “back to what you learned through your research.”

“Just that there are all sorts of rumors in certain circles, going back decades, about a secret government bio-weapons facility somewhere in East Texas. And the Department of Defense did buy up thousands of acres of swampland right around the refinery after world War II.”

“That’s one thing I don’t get. With so much federal land out west, why would they buy up private property in a swamp for any kind of research installation?”

“Well, officially it had to do with forest management. One of the last great virgin cypress swamps …?”

“Sure.” With a pang, a vision of Eileen came into his mind’s eye. The last time he saw her, at the lake after Dalia’s murder to meet with the sheriff. She spoke of the biodiversity of that ancient, pristine place with passion, the only subject discussed that day on which Geoff did not in hindsight doubt her sincerity.

He pushed those thoughts of his old lover away. “I would think it should have been Interior, not DOD, buying up the land.”

“I don’t know. But anyway the Feds have never done anything with it, at least not overt. Except lease it to—”

“Let me guess. Oil leases—to Texronco.”

“Yep. Back when it was known as Duchamp Petroleum, Inc., and the family still controlled the company.”

“I think they controlled more than the company.”

“And you’re thinking genetic engineering, as part of a bio-weapons program.”

“It probably started out that way. The Prince’s story is accurate, at least about the basics—the bio-weapons race between us and the Soviets during the Cold War, genetically engineered viruses and whatnot. The Texronco refinery could have masked a covert facility. But Jimmy Carter shut down that program in the ‘70’s. “

“Sure. ‘Officially.’”

Geoff glanced over and chuckled a little at the air quotes Marisol formed with her slender fingers. “I’m not so cynical. We’ve seen no evidence that the government hadn’t completely divested itself of whatever it had going on at the refinery. I mean, if we were screwing around with a DOD or Homeland Security program, they’d be all over us thicker than fleas. No, I think it’s morphed into a non-governmental deal, controlled by the Duchamp family and associates and maybe some Texronco dummy corporation.”

“Okay, whatever. But what are they
doing
?”

Geoff considered for a minute and rubbed his face with one hand as he drove. He kept his eyes on the highway ahead. “I think it’s got to be organs.”

Marisol waited a beat. “Explain, please.”

“The thing you found in Eileen’s Pod—that Dalia had taken from the site. You said it was like a baby, a fetus …”

“Right.” Marisol looked between her knees to the floorboard, as if the memory of the thing made her nauseous. “But with no fully formed limbs, just nubs. No eyes. And its head was, like … caved in.”

“Like it didn’t have a brain …”

Marisol did not look up. When she spoke, her voice was phlegmy and barely above a whisper. “Back home, in the Valley a while back, there was an epidemic of birth defects—conditions called spina bifada and anencephaly. Babies born without brains, or hardly any brain. Maybe just enough of a spinal column to keep the involuntary functions going. Breathing, the heartbeat. The rumor was that some kind of pollution from the maquiladoras along the border caused the deformities, but nobody could ever prove it. And … God, Geoff. The thing—the baby—I saw. It looked like that.”

Geoff did not look over to his passenger. It felt good to be working up a theory of the case. He said, “Yes, just like that. But I think they’re doing it on purpose here. I think they’re growing these brainless, limbless babies to harvest their organs. Like … an organ orchard.”

“Why?”

The catch in Marisol’s voice cut through Geoff’s excitement and he knew that she cried. But when he looked to her she had turned her face toward the window and gazed out at the passing landscape, the green prairie. As if she did not want him to see her face. When he spoke again, his tone was delicate. “There’s a black market for organs. The waiting lists for transplants is long, and unless a you’re young with a good chance of recovery, you may never get the heart or lung or liver you need.”

“So they’re creating these poor sick babies just to kill them? To give some old fucker with cirrhosis a new liver so he can stay drunk a couple of more years?”

Marisol had turned and her dark eyes now bore right through him. Her cheeks were moist. Taken aback by her sudden rage, he said, “Well, something like that. But … you know, most people don’t choose to get sick. I’m not saying—if I’m right about what they’re doing at the refinery—I’m not saying it’s ethical. Particularly since I’m sure it’s just for profit, they’re selling to the highest bidder. But all the same, I wouldn’t blame the sick people, who are desperate. And anyway, in principal, if they have found a way to grow organs … and these, these creatures … well, if they don’t have brains it’s not like they’re really alive in any human sense. And all the lives that could be saved if this were out in the open and regulated—”

Marisol looked at him with angry astonishment. “Are you justifying this? No, unh-uh. If they’re creating human life just to destroy it, that is never okay. Ever. It’s … the worst possible sin.”

Geoff drove on without speaking. In a bar, over beers with Tony Abruzzo, he enjoyed bringing his secular humanism and agnosticism to battle against Tony’s observant but hardly devout Catholicism. But in this car, with his private investigator, where the issue at hand was immediate and not hypothetical, he held his tongue.

After a while Marisol sighed and said, “I’m sorry. It just hits a little too close to home is all. My sister in Brownsville—she gave birth to one of those babies. Salvador—he lived for almost a year …”

“Dang it, Marisol. I’m sorry.”

She had returned her gaze to the window but then she looked at him and gave him a smile—not her usual smirky grin, but something sadder. And deeper.

“Not your fault. You’re one of the good guys. One reason I took your case was the environmental angle—you seemed to be going after the sort of corporate polluters who did that to my baby nephew.” She paused and looked out at the road ahead. “It’s grown bigger than that, though. And since New Orleans …”

“I understand. Too close to home, like you said. And besides, you almost died.”

“It wasn’t the brush with death, though. I’ve been through worse. It was coming face to face with the
enormity
of death. Like I saw a chasm open up before me. That wasted landscape …”

“Eileen’s neighborhood.”

“And the two women who took me in, who saved my life. It’s like they opened my eyes to an eternal emptiness I’d never been aware of.”

As Geoff drove, Marisol’s gaze remained far away. No response came to him, and it seemed improper to interrupt her dark reverie. So for a while then they were silent. They passed by the small city of Tyler, halfway along their journey. In the Piney Woods now. And even through the air conditioning and the highway fumes, the air smelled sweeter.

Then she said, “Geoff, did you ever have any kids?”

His lawyer-brain dissected the question, its strange syntax. With that in mind, he did not hedge. “Janie, my wife, was pregnant when she died. I think I’ve told you it was a car wreck. Drunk driver blindsided her. She died instantly. But at the scene … the paramedics delivered our son. He was born alive. A single heartbeat, and then he died.”

Marisol looked at him wide-eyed. “Oh God, Geoff. That’s awful.”

“Since he was born alive, he got a birth certificate. We were going to name him Geoff, Jr., but I named him Janie Love. I don’t know … it sounded right at the time. I’ve thought about him every day for two years.”

With that understatement, Geoff fell silent. He did not merely think of his dead boy daily—he raised him in his mind. From diaper rash to little league and summer camp, to teen angst and college—the lost life of fatherhood replayed as an obsessive loop. He could acknowledge it as obsessive now—not healthy grieving. For the first time, he had relayed the story of his wife and son’s death without falling into hopeless despair or dark rage. Only sadness.

Marisol placed a hand on his knee. It warmed him, and he loosened his foot on the accelerator in an involuntary relaxation.

When he sped up again, she said: “We can’t fix everything but we can maybe stop one horrible thing.” He looked at her and the crooked smile had returned. “Let’s shut down these fuckers and their little mad science lab.”

•

Geoff and Marisol pulled into the gravel and clay lot beside Dunlap’s Marina. A few yards across the swamp, Geoff caught a glimpse of the marred cypress where Dalia Bordelon had suffered and died. Bobby Henderson, whom they saw backing a trailer down the boat ramp, had pointed out the spot. The deputy had himself carved away the bark around the vile markings the Tatum twins, or possibly Jimmy Lee Monroe, had left on the tree. He had filled in the gash he left with black tar, leaving a strange specimen. As if a mad arborist had been at work on the bayou cauterizing the wounds of the silent trees.

The trailer held a twenty two-foot modified bass boat with the Sheriff’s Department logo painted on the side. To the side of the ramp, Willie Kincaid stood with his hand on his grandson Joey’s shoulder, seeming to gauge the deputy’s progress with silent foreboding.

They left the crisp, refrigerated air of Geoff’s old Mercedes and stood with it between them for long seconds without speaking. Geoff watched the private investigator. She surveyed the scene as if preparing for battle, or for a heist. She donned a military-grade backpack.

Then she turned and looked at him across the hood of the car and gave him her half smile. “The kid’s here.”

They did not speak the obvious truth that this was not the time or place for children, for they both knew that Joey was no ordinary child. And that this—they did not know exactly how or why—was where he must be.

They walked together to the ramp through air thick but not too hot. The sun had burned away the morning’s mist but did not glare off the surface of the dark, still water. Having left the pickup truck and the trailer, Bobby stood by the boat and waved to them. He said
hidy
as they approached the ramp, but his greeting lacked any good humor. As if he welcomed them to an execution, or an untimely funeral.

The group joined together then at the boat and began stepping in one by one. Willie sat fore in a raised fishing seat. Marisol sat beside Joey, talking to him. But before he boarded himself, Geoff asked Bobby: “What does the sheriff know?”

“He knows I have the boat, doesn’t know what for. Doesn’t want to know. Doesn’t want to muddy his britches.”

“Okay.” Geoff felt again a twinge of disappointment but did not blame Seastrunk for bowing out. No question remained that the sheriff was more politician than lawman.

Then they boarded the boat and made a slow trip down the bayou toward the island, cutting a path through the mossy water. The May sun warmed their backs, and the air smelled of new life. Lilies bloomed, and water bugs skittered along the surface, but Geoff did not observe any of the odd oversized metallic dragonflies that he now saw as the harbingers of a something unnatural and profane.