Bug Man Suspense 3-in-1 Bundle (37 page)

“It's a good thing you did—I sure couldn't see you.”

They sat in a booth at a Waffle House in Gonzales, just off Interstate 10 a few miles from the town of St. Gabriel. It was almost 4:00 a.m. when Beth got the call from Nick to meet him here, waking her from a fitful sleep. A FEMA trailer truck had dropped them off, he said—could she meet him right away? He needed food and coffee, and he had no money to buy them with. More important, he needed a change of clothing and his extra set of glasses—and he said he didn't want to have to answer questions from nosy DMORT personnel about his appearance. She wondered what he meant.

Now she knew. She was astonished when she first saw him; his clothes were in ruins and his face was sallow and pale. He was barefoot, and his hair was plastered to the sides of his head as if he had shampooed it but never rinsed. And most startling of all, his glasses were missing. Beth had never seen Nick without his glasses before; he was functionally blind without them—he would have to be led around by the hand. That was exactly how she found him: shuffling toward her car in the Waffle House parking lot with J.T. hanging on to his arm.

“Where is Jerry?” Beth asked.

Nick turned and looked at the boy again; he had just finished off his waffle and was leaning back against the window now, beginning to doze off. “I tell you what,” Nick said. “Beth's car is parked right outside—why don't you stretch out in the backseat and get some sleep?”

“Don't need no sleep,” he said.

“Are you working with me tomorrow or not?”

“Sure I am.”

“Then get some rest. I can't have you falling asleep on me in the middle of a job. What if we need to blow up another house?” He stood up and let the boy slide out of the booth. “Lock the doors,” Nick called after him. “I'll be right here if you need me.” He sat down again and watched through the window until he saw the boy climb into the car and slide down into the backseat.

He motioned to the waitress and pointed to his empty coffee cup. “Okay,” he said. “We can talk now.”

“Nick, what happened? Where's Jerry?”

“Have you heard from Jerry in the last thirty-six hours—at the DPMU, at the Family Assistance Center? Has anybody seen him or mentioned him?”

“No. What's wrong? What happened?”

“Jerry is—missing.”

She didn't respond. She could tell that Nick was guarding something, either to prepare her or to protect himself.

“We went to the Superdome,” he said. “We were looking for J.T.'s dad. We got separated—I stayed with the boy, Jerry went off on his own. Jerry never came back. I waited all afternoon. I haven't seen him since.”

Her heart sank. “Oh, Nick.”

“It's my fault,” he said. “I was responsible; I should have anticipated; if anything happened to Jerry, it's all my fault.”

“No,” she said, “it's mine.”

He looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“The other night, when we were driving back from the bayou—you asked me if I had heard anything from J.T.'s social worker yet. I lied. I did hear back from his social worker, Nick—she told me that J.T. has no father. He did, once, a long time ago—but his father left the family when J.T. was only four. He hasn't been heard from since. The boy has no mother either; he's been passed from family to family in the Lower Ninth Ward, raised by a loose-knit assembly of ‘cousins' and neighbors who took turns taking him in.”

“Why didn't you tell me this before?”

“I should have—I know that now—but I saw the connection you were making with the boy and I wanted it to continue. If I'd told you J.T. had no father, you might have sent him away. The more you're around him, the more human you seem to become, Nick; I didn't want that to stop. He's the best thing that's happened to you in a long time.”

“You had no right to make that judgment.”

“I did it for you.”

“That's a load of crap—you did it for yourself. Do I really need to be ‘more human,' Dr. Woodbridge, or do you just like me better that way?”

“That's not fair.”

“Tell it to Jerry—if you can find him. If you had told me this when you first found out, Jerry and I never would have gone to the Superdome.”

“I know,” she said, “and it's eating a hole through my stomach right now. If something has happened to Jerry, it's my fault, not yours—how do you think that makes me feel?”

They both sat in silence, staring at the table.

“I've got about a thousand questions,” Nick said.

“So do I.”

“Me first: If the kid has no father, then what does he want from me?”

“He told you, Nick—he's looking for a father.”

“Make sense, will you?”

“He has no father, so he's looking for one—and I think he's found one.”

“Who?”

“You, of course.”

“Me? You must be kidding.”

“For an intelligent man, you can be really thick sometimes. When I first asked J.T. to describe his father, do you remember what he said? ‘Tall; smart; with glasses.' ‘
Like Nick
,' he said. Odd, isn't it, that his father just happens to closely resemble you? And haven't you ever wondered why J.T. doesn't seem to be in any particular hurry to find his father? He seems perfectly content to follow you around day after day.”

“I just thought . . . I figured that—”

“Like I said, Nick: He's looking for a father, and he's found one.”

Nick shook his head. “Some father. I almost got him killed tonight.”

“What happened?”

“I was set up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Somebody passed me a message about a strange body. I heard about it from a FEMA crew; they got it from the National Guard; somebody purposely fed the information to them because they knew the word would get to me. Whoever it was knew I'd go and check it out right away; when I did, somebody was waiting for me there. I was in the attic—J.T. was asleep outside in the boat. Someone approached from the opposite side—they fed a hose through the roof vent and pumped gasoline into the attic—then they dropped a match and the whole thing went off like a bomb.”

“How in the world did you get out?”

“I dived down into the house and swam out.”

“You
what
?”

He shrugged.

“Is that how you lost your glasses?”

He nodded.

“Then how did you ever find your way out? How could you see? Wasn't it dark?”

“The point is, J.T. was outside in the boat—what if that guy had spotted him? He would have killed him for sure. Some father I am—he should have picked somebody else. I don't want him to get hurt, but I'm not sure I can protect him.”

She patted his arm. “You're talking like a father already.”

“So what do I do with him now, send him away somewhere? He has no family—where would I send him?”

“Maybe he'd be better off in Houston, with the people they're relocating to the Astrodome.”

“They went after Jerry in the Superdome,” Nick said. “What makes you think J.T. would be safe there?”

“Do you think he's any safer with you?”

“At least I know I'll look out for him. Who would look out for him in Houston? I can't protect him if he's someplace else. No, I'm keeping him with me—but I can't keep putting him in danger.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to expose the guy who tried to kill me tonight—it's the only way to get rid of him. I'm betting it was the same guy who fired on us in the bayou—the same guy who killed Jerry. I know who it was, Beth.”

“Who?”

“His name is John Detwiler. He works for the DEA.”

“Detwiler? Was he one of the agents you met in Denny's office? The ones who told you not to recover any more bodies?”

“I never saw Detwiler. I only met his partner, Frank Turlock. I think that's why he had Detwiler follow me—he knew I wouldn't recognize him.”

“You think the DEA is trying to kill you?”

“I don't think, I know.”

“But why?”

“I'm not quite clear on that one yet.”

“They wouldn't try to kill you just to keep you from recovering bodies—that would be insane.”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On
why
they don't want me to recover bodies. They told me it would interfere with a major investigation—but maybe that's not the real reason. Maybe they don't want me to recover bodies because they put them there.”

“Nick, if that's true, we need to go to the authorities.”

“I plan to, the minute I have proof—and I should have it in just a few minutes.”

“What proof ?”

“Did you bring my laptop?”

She opened her briefcase and took it out. “I can't believe you. If I went through what you did tonight, I'd be curled up in a fetal position.”

“It's hard to type that way.” He opened the laptop and turned it so they both could see. When the desktop opened, he double-clicked on an icon with the letters
GPS
beneath.

“What are you doing?”

“I tagged the guy's boat.”

“You what?”

“Somebody must have followed Jerry and me to the Superdome, Beth—that's the only way they could have known we were there. I think the same guy has been following me around the Lower Nine—I spotted him yesterday.”

“What did you do?”

“I circled around and rammed him—knocked him right out of his boat and into the water. It was beautiful, you should have seen it. Then, when he wasn't looking, I planted a GPS transmitter in his boat.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to keep track of him, that's why. Are cell phones working up here yet?”

“They work pretty much everywhere except in New Orleans.”

“Good.” Nick made a cellular connection to the Internet and switched over to the GPS program. He entered the zip code 70112 and a map of the city of New Orleans appeared; he repositioned the map and zoomed in closer, focusing on the Lower Ninth Ward. Now he hit Download Data, and a series of multicolored dots began to appear like pushpins all over the map—some red, some green, some yellow, each color connected by a thin black line.

“What are those dots?” Beth asked.

“The present location of every floater I've tagged since I got here. The bodies drift in the current—this is how we keep track of them. The GPS units are battery-powered; once every hour they send out a signal that a satellite picks up—sort of like the EPIRB units the Coast Guard uses for marine rescue.”

“EPIRB?”

“Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon. Didn't they teach you anything useful in medical school? Each unit sends a different signal, displayed here as a different color of dot; each dot indicates the exact position of the unit every hour. See there? Beside every dot there's a date, a time, and a set of GPS coordinates. When DMORT finally gets around to recovering bodies, this program will lead us right to them.”

Nick traced his finger across the screen. “This is where I was a few hours ago; that's the approximate location of the house that went up in flames. These green dots—they represent the signal from Detwiler's boat.” He leaned closer and studied the screen. “Wait a minute.”

“What's the matter?”

“They don't match. The green dots—the ones from the GPS unit in Detwiler's boat—they don't even come close to where I was tonight.”

“Nick, I'm not following you.”

“Don't you get it? If Detwiler was the one who tried to kill me tonight, there should be a green dot near that house, but look—he never even came close.” He put his finger on the screen and traced the series of green dots. “Here's the first dot—see it? That would be the place where I first dropped the GPS unit into his boat. From that point he went—here,” he said, following the black line to the second dot. “This is where he was one hour later—that's the levee. Maybe he left his car there—he probably stopped to change clothes. Now look—he headed back into the Lower Nine again. It wouldn't have taken him an hour to get to the next location; he must have stopped along the way—or maybe he was doing something once he got there. There's the third dot, then the fourth and the fifth; looks like he zigzagged back and forth across the Lower Nine. He must have spent the whole afternoon there, until he finally headed—here. Look—he crossed the Industrial Canal and headed downtown.”

“Back to the Superdome again?”

“No—look at the dot. That's not where the Superdome is; it's a few blocks west of there—he stopped somewhere else. Then he backtracked again, but he didn't go back across the Industrial Canal—he headed northwest this time, up into this neighborhood here. That's a residential area; I wonder what he wanted up there?”