Perfect Killer (16 page)

Greenwood loomed quickly ahead, and according to the map I had printed off the Internet, Jasmine's office was on Main Street, straight ahead at the looming cloverleaf. But Rex's warning about the dangerous neighborhood made me worry about parking there because stealing my laptop—which had my life on it—would be child's play.

So I took the ramp for west 82 instead and followed it over the steep viaduct spanning the mainline railroad tracks. I dialed Jasmine's cell phone as I came down to a red light where the highway made its way through a congested strip area lined with motels, fast-food restaurants, muffler shops, and other outskirts establishments.

Again she didn't answer, so I left another voice mail. The light turned green and I pressed on. The local newspaper, the
Greenwood Commonwealth,
passed by on the left and, next to it, the EZ-Sleep Suites.

I turned toward the EZ-Sleep and drove past a small brick building whose sign identified it as a cancer treatment outpatient clinic. The building was surrounded by people scattered in ones and twos smoking cigarettes.

The motel lobby was alive with the faint spicy fragrances of ginger, turmeric, cumin, and lime, which made my mouth water and reminded me it was after noon and I had eaten nothing in the past eighteen hours of travel other than Lilliputian bags of peanuts and pretzels. A middle-aged Indian man checked me in and directed me around the corner to my room.

As I parked near the stairs and got out, I noted a line of white panel vans with ladders on the roof and signs on the side marking them with the name of a large national contractor that laid and installed fiber-optic cables. Down at the far end of the building, people in orange shirts gathered in conversation, obviously the contractor's people here on extended assignment.

I lugged my laptop bag and duffel up to my room on the second floor and dumped them on the nearest bed, cleared off a table for my computer, connected it to the phone's data port, and turned it on. I entered the BIOS-level password, then plugged in a USB flash drive that governed the automatic encryption and decryption of everything on the hard drive. Without the flash drive plugged in, the hard drive was impenetrable to anyone save those with access to a supercomputer and advanced code-breaking software.

With this done, I connected to the internet and began downloading all my spam and e-mail. Next, I knelt beneath the desk, unscrewed the plastic faceplate from the electrical outlet, and replaced it with an invention of my own: a sturdy metal faceplate with an attachment point for a hefty security cable, which I secured to my laptop and set the combination. To steal my laptop, a thief would have to rip the entire electrical outlet junction box from the wall. Then I plugged in the laptop's AC power supply.

E-mail was still downloading by the time I finished settling in, so I stood in the door of my room for a moment looking out at the field behind the hotel. The heat of the day blushed my cheeks like staring into an open oven. Over to my left, next to the stairs, big red wasps with plump bellies filled with sting and pain hovered near a cranny under the eaves. Experience told me if I risked a closer look, I'd find a big paper nest filled with fat white larvae waiting to be more red wasps. I remembered long ago as a child using the garden hose nozzle at full blast to knock the nests off from under the eaves of our house and running like hell after about a dozen blasts until the nest finally fell and I could toss some gasoline on it to finish the job.

The vivid, painful memories of being stung replayed themselves now with an amazingly clear image of how a sting grew into perfectly round red welt with a little hole surrounded by white skin at the very center. With this memory vivid in mind, I closed the door and stood there uncertainly. I wanted something to eat, I wanted to talk to Jasmine. I didn't want to look at my e-mail, but I did, all 307 new messages.

My head spun bright and dizzy with travel fatigue and sleep deprivation. I didn't want to deal with the spam, so I went into the cramped little bathroom, stripped, and took a shower instead. Afterward, I put on the least-wrinkled blue, oxford-cloth, button-down shirt, tucked it into a clean pair of khakis, and sat down to deal with the e-mail vomit fouling my in-box.

Not needing to add a full cup size to my breasts and being comfortable with the size of my penis, I deleted large stretches of spam, including those from Tiffany, Brianna, and others who promised me a good time and had attached explicit photos. I quickly winnowed things dawn to about a dozen that really mattered, then focused on two from Jeff Flowers.

Flowers's first e-mail told me Camilla had not changed significantly. He had enclosed the links and account access information for me to access EEG scans on one of Pacific Hills' Web servers. In the second e-mail, sent about four hours later, he said her EEGs had taken a turn toward the bizarre, which had prompted them to conduct a PET scan. He enclosed another set of links for those files.

I leaned back in the chair and let out my breath in a loud, heavy rush. Again guilt wrestled with feelings of relief. I did not want to look at the EEGs and scans. I really wanted to let Camilla's condition take its course without any further intervention. But my heart told me that if she simply slipped away without me doing all I could, I'd never get rid of the guilt. Regrets were always for the living.

So I launched Firefox, double-clicked on the links Flowers had sent, and logged in to the server using the user name and password he had sent. The EEG scans would download okay on this connection in half an hour or so, but the PET scan files were huge, multigigabyte monsters. I realized I needed to make contact with someone at the Greenwood Hospital who would allow me to use their connection.

I stood up, looked at my watch, and found the time creeping up on 1:00 P.M. Jasmine's failure to return my calls nagged at me, but I decided I had left enough voice mails. I pulled out the small notebook I always carried with me and scribbled in it the necessary information from Flowers's e-mails and shut down my laptop.

Next, I pulled two small Targus motion detectors from my laptop bag and locked one to the laptop and the other to the security cable where it attached to the wall. Then I pulled out a laminated Day-Glo orange placard in English and Spanish warning people not to touch or the alarms would go off. I armed the laptop's motion alarms, made sure their blinking red LEDs were immediately visible to anyone who might enter, and left a light on so the warning note was clearly visible.

In the far corner of the EZ-Sleep Suites' parking lot, hidden among the cable vans, Jael St. Clair sat behind the wheel of her white rented SUV, took a deep hit off a fresh cigarette, and watched the door to Brad Stone's room open. He walked out, emptyhanded, closed the door, then headed toward the stairs.

St. Clair smiled as Stone turned back to check the door, then got into his truck and drove away.
"Surprise, asshole," she said quietly, thinking about how nice it would be to watch the reception she had arranged for him and his black beauty. But there was work to be done. St. Clair opened her door, stood up, and took another drag on the cigarette. Then she ground it out on the pavement with her shoe and made her way to Stone's room, pulling on a pair of latex gloves as she walked. At his door, she wiggled a plastic shim in the lock; the door opened in the blink of an eye. Jael closed the door behind her and turned on the lights. The multiple flashing lights on Stone's laptop drew her attention.
Her anger rose as she examined the cables and alarms. She'd need cutters and a way to muffle the alarms. The heavy, braided steel cable meant a bolt cutter wouldn't work. She'd need a Dremel with an abrasive cutoff disk.
And fast-setting acoustic foam for the alarms. What a mess.
"You pig-fucking shit-bird."
She walked to the bathroom, where her frown softened as her eyes fell on the short, graying-brown hairs gathered at the drain. St. Clair gathered the strands and put them in one of the Ziploc snack bags she had brought just for this. Running her hand across the cigarette-scarred fake-marble counter, she found another half dozen hairs.
Then she left.

About a mile northwest of my hotel, Highway 82 crossed a wide stretch of railroad tracks. Moments later, I turned right on Strong Avenue and caught sight of the hospital in which I had been born. According to Mama, lightning from a passing thunderstorm had hit the building pretty near to the time I had been born.

The hospital was a pale yellow brick affair towering over the street and the green, green levee that ran behind it along the Yazoo River. Suddenly, I looked through a sevenyear-old's eyes at my grandmother, Mamie, the Judge's wife, lying in one of the hospital's darkened rooms under a plastic oxygen tent that looked pieced together from dry-cleaner suit bags. A cerebral hemorrhage had nailed her like a stroke of lightning and sent her there to drift out of our lives for a terminal day or so. Mamie slept so peacefully to my young eyes.

This vision washed over me like muddy floodwaters from a breached levee. Something like this happened every time I visited Mississippi, home no matter how long I lived elsewhere. I shook my head and tried to focus on my mission. I decided to start with the emergency room, which always had sharp people able to deal with the unexpected— such as some California doctor coming and asking to use their computer system. I put the truck in gear and pulled into sparse eastbound traffic.

As I neared the emergency room entrance, I spotted a prominent sign at the road's edge for Giles Claiborne, M.D., and the past lurched in front of me again. Claiborne had to be as old as the hills because he had been my family physician in Itta Bena not long after Uncle Doc had died. Uncle Doc was the husband of Mamie's sister and took care of everyone regardless of color or their ability to pay. I remembered shots, stitches, and the back entrance that led to a separate waiting room for Negroes Only. I do remember getting entirely unsatisfactory answers about this from Al Thompson and Mama.

As I parked next to Claiborne's office, my cell phone rang.
"Where you at, boy?" I recognized Rex's voice.
"Greenwood. Camilla's in a really bad way. I'm at the hospital seeing if there's a

way to have them pull up her scans"
"Y'mama said a prayer for her every damned day. I'da said some myself, but God'n
me, we don't get along."
I wanted to laugh, but Camilla's shadow chilled my heart.
"Okay, look. I've been doing some checking," Rex said. "Nothing for sure. I just
wanted to say you better watch your back. I—"
My phone beeped a "no service" tone. I tried to call Rex back, but got nothing. "Nuts." I got out and made my way into the clinic. A young woman with intensely
dark skin in a white uniform sat behind the receptionist's desk and gave me a smile filled
with brilliant, even teeth set in gums the color of blueberries. I introduced myself and
asked for Dr. Claiborne.
"Across the street in the little broom closet he calls an office," she said. "I'll call
him"
As soon as she finished punching in the numbers, she looked up at me. "You one
of his old patients?"
"I think maybe his father's." I smiled. "A long time ago!"
She gave me a warm laugh and shook her head. "Dr. Claiborne has three
daughters, no sons."
The surprise played across my face.
"He retired once, back when my mother worked for him. It didn't take so—" She
stopped to leave a voice mail to tell Dr. Claiborne about me, then she drew me a map to
his office.
I thanked her took the map, and hurried across the street, where a uniformed
security officer directed me straight on back. I passed through a set of double doors
guarded by another security officer and followed the hand-drawn map's zigzag along the
fluorescent-lighted, tiled corridor to the first landmark, a lighted sign for radiology. Across
the hall sat an unmarked wooden door with louvered vents in the lower panel. I stopped by
the door and raised my hand to knock when it opened, leaving me to stare straight into the
timeworn face of Dr. Giles Claiborne.
The wrinkled familiarity of the past froze me for another instant. I figured he must
be at least eighty-five, but his cool, glacial blue eyes lit up his face and made him appear
decades younger. Claiborne stood imperially straight and unbent by time and crowned
with a full shock of white hair.
He wore a cotton broadcloth shirt with a weave as fine as silk and a three-letter
script monogram instead of a pocket. A gold collar bar made sure the knot in his silk,
regimental stripe tie remained perfect. His khakis had knife creases, where mine
resembled tired aluminum foil someone had tried to press into respectability. His knife
creases broke perfectly above stylishly comfortable and obviously expensive burnished
leather loafers.
My old feelings of social insecurity rebounded with a vengeance. Even though I
had been wellborn into a family with a distinguished Mississippi heritage, I had come
along at a time when the family fortunes had slipped away in a latter-day Faulknerian
crisis that had left too many of my relatives clinging to nothing more substantial than
ancestral bloodlines. As a result, I had grown up uneasily among the privileged classes
from the planter culture of the Delta and, later, the moneyed movers of Jackson. I had always felt
from
those classes but never
of
them. I tried to belong to those
classes as a child, but never found a comfort level with their patrician attitudes and their
casual, nonreflective acceptance of superior entitlement granted by the natural order of
things. I'm sure that played no small role in my ultimate rebellion and rejection of my
heritage.
Despite my professional and financial achievements, I had never completely
exorcised my desire to be accepted by them. I didn't understand that flaw, but it played a
major role in my avoidance of my home state and most of those with whom I had grown
up. Clearly, I had rejected this culture but had not escaped it.
"Bradford! What an unanticipated pleasure!" Giles Claiborne extended his hand. I
took his powerful, warm grip. It subtracted yet more years from my perception of him and
made me feel almost like his child patient again.
"Dr. Claiborne," I managed as I returned his handshake.
"Please call me Clay. You're an accomplished physician yourself now; I've run
across your papers in the literature any number of times now, and I have to confess, a lot
of what you have written sails right over the head of this old country doctor." His broad, self-deprecating smile further rattled my emotional equilibrium. "Of course… Clay."
"Well, then, come on in." He motioned me into a small, windowless room
overstuffed with an Oriental rug, dark mahogany furnishings, and all the professionally
decorated accoutrements that went with the look.
Broom closet indeed. I saw from a quick glance at the walls that he was on the
hospital board and had been for a several decades.
"Here." He motioned me in the direction of his desk, to an armchair upholstered in
burgundy leather and studded with brass. "Have a seat." He closed the door and followed
me, settling his tall, lanky frame into an identical chair facing me.
Claiborne gave me an intense silent stare that made me feel like a patient again.
Then he leaned closer to me, studied my face, then sat back in his own leather-upholstered
chair.
"Lordy, Bradford, you
do
have the Judge's eyes," he said finally "You have that
look
that…
demeanor
he had which made people do what he told them to, made them
instantly believe he was right about most anything." He nodded to himself as he continued
to fix my face with his gaze. "Call it charisma or presence if you like, but it clearly made
him such a successful lawyer and a political force that lives on today."
Given the Judge's political leanings and the ways he enforced his power, I did not
want to say "Thank you," so I nodded and asked, "You really think so?"
I knew my noncommittal, equivocal response fell right in with how good people
could stand by and let evil things like segregation happen. I reminded myself, I had not
come to refight the Civil War, but to find a way to look at my comatose wife's brain scans. "Lordy," Claiborne said again. "Why, I remember the last time I saw you, you
were about this high." He raised his left hand about three or four feet off the floor. I caught
the gold Piaget on his wrist. "Yes, yes," he mused to himself. "That would have been
about the time you were in the first grade and we were giving everybody Salk vaccines. I
remember one other time your mama brought you in bleeding like a stuck hog where you
had stepped on some glass barefoot." His eyes went distant for a moment and I sensed he
was watching some version of the same memory in my own head where I'd played in tall
grass down by Riverside Drive near Eddie Stanton's house, I thought for sure I had been
bitten by a water moccasin and was going to die right there.
"Your mama had a cute little Nash Rambler and you lived in the Judge's house
then. Lordy, your mama sure was proud of you." His face went blank for a moment and
showed me his professionally sympathetic gaze. "I sure mourned her passing." He nodded
again, then returned to studying my face.
"Yes, yes, you certainly do have the Judge's eyes." Then he laughed. "Fortunately
for you, you don't have his hairline." He combed his aristocratic fingers through his white
thatch. The Judge had been cue-ball bald.
Claiborne mined this particular historical vein for another eternal ten minutes
before finally asking me what had brought me into his office. "Got just the thing." I followed Claiborne to the radiology department.
"We've got a terrific system allowing us to send digitized X-rays and scans down
to the medical school in Jackson for consultation, or Ocshners or anywhere else for that
matter."
I followed him through the waiting room, smiling and nodding politely as he
introduced me in glowing terms as a local boy made good, all the while letting everybody
know I was the Judge's grandson and he had been my physician. Somehow that seemed to
matter, and once again it astounded me how eagerly people here allowed their lives to be
shaped by dead men.
We made our way to the back corner of a long, claustrophobic supply closet,
where we found a young man in a white coat intently tapping at a keyboard. A giant, highresolution, flat-panel plasma screen dominated the room.
Claiborne cleared his throat. "Tyrone?"
The young man turned toward us.
"Tyrone Freedman, this is Dr. Stone. He's one of my old patients, but he's from
California now." Claiborne said nothing about the Judge this time.
When Freedman stood up and shook my hand, I tried not to look at a ragged scar
that puckered its way from the corner of his left eye and made it across his temple before
disappearing into his hair above his ear.
"Tyrone here is a surgical resident from the University Medical School, a local boy
who proves Valley State can produce more than famous NFL stars. He wants to be a
trauma surgeon." Claiborne paused. "We have plenty of practice for him unfortunately." "Pleased to meet you," I said
"Likewise," the young man said.
"Dr Stone wants to know if we can help him view some scans from back in
California."
A smile broadened Freedman's face. "Of course we can."
"Tyrone's something of a computer genius," Claiborne said. "He was actually a
programmer before premed."
Freedman nodded.
"Well, that's beyond this old country doctor," Claiborne said as he sidled his way
out of the confined space. "Tyrone, you take good care of Dr. Stone so he'll have nice
things to say about us when he gets back to Los Angeles."
Tyrone turned to me, "Okay, Dr.—"
"Please call me Brad."
The young man gave me an odd raised-eyebrow look, then nodded. "All right, uh,
Brad. Let's get down to it. What site do we head to first?"
"Head to http://ConsciousnessStudies.org —three s's in the middle—and click on
the
private data
link."
Instants later, my Web site appeared. Tyrone brought up the account entry box
when he clicked on the data link.
"My user name is
bstone,
password,
jambalaya."
"Those are way too obvious," Tyrone said. "I mean, my apologies, but anybody
who wants into your private data would be deterred by like ... seconds."
"You're right," I said as the scan files began downloading.
"You want me to change it for you?"
"Let's wait."
Tyrone shook his head. "What do you want first, the MRIs, the PET, or the EEG?" "Let's do the EEG."
If you want privacy, I can show you what to do and leave."
I thought about this for a moment. "I can walk you through things if you're
interested,"
"Wow? Really?" He turned and looked up at me. The scar presented itself again.
He caught my glance.
"Drive-by shooting," he said casually. "My own damn fault. I fell in with some
older gang members, hacked bank accounts and school grades for them. When the police
caught me, the trails all led to the gang. I needed to be zeroed out ... fourteen years old and
sitting on my uncle's front porch in Balance Due when it happened."
Balance Due had been the black section of Itta Bena. I had been a small child the
last time I'd visited there, but I still remembered the smell of raw sewage, which raised
sulfurous bubbles in the stagnant, scum-carpeted ditches alongside muddy, unpaved roads lined with weathered wood shacks, rusted corrugated metal roofs, and wood-fire smoke
coming out of battered tin stovepipes.
"Killed my uncle and aunt," Tyrone said. "Left me with this souvenir." He swept
his index finger casually across the scar. "Made me want to be a trauma surgeon." "I thought drive-bys were a big-city thing."
He shook his head and returned to the keyboard and display, talking as he worked.
"Every small town in the Delta has got its Crips and Bloods, or a bunch of drug-thug
wannabes who are half as smart and twice as dangerous." He paused. "That's why I live
way out in the country, at the end of a dirt road." He nodded to himself.
"What happened to the people who shot you?"
"Dead," Tyrone said without emotion. "They crossed somebody. Somebody zeroed
them out. End of story."
An instant later the EEG appeared on the screen.
"Okay, that's the new one," I said. "Can you display the reference file for
comparison?"
An instant later, we had the two files on-screen.
"The reference EEG's been consistent for almost six years, consistent with a
persistent vegetative state in this subject, a forty-four-year-old female suffering from
profound brain damage resulting from a motor vehicle accident." It felt odd to describe
Camilla in the dry, impersonal language of grand rounds, but it focused my objectivity and
made me reach deeper for details than I might otherwise have.
"Okay, you can see the new EEG from yesterday differs significantly, indicating a
substantial increase in higher brain function."
"How do you know it's higher brain function from looking at this and not brain
stem or something else?"
"Good question." I traced the jagged-line patterns with the cursor. "Notice the P15
peak absent on one side and markedly prolonged in latency on the other." He nodded.
"And here, BAEPs show neither wave IV nor V on either side."
"Meaning?"
"I have an idea, but let's see what the scans tell us," I said uneasily. An increase in
higher brain might mean an end to her coma.
"Why would things be the same for six years, then suddenly change?" Tyrone
asked. "I thought once you got this far into PVS, nothing ever improved." I recalled my last conversation with Flowers.
"Well, the patient recently suffered from a severe, antibiotic-resistant bacterial
infection resulting in temperature spikes over one hundred and five degrees. Sustained
high fever can dramatically affect the brain."
Tyrone nodded. "PET or MRI now?"
"MRI."
I grew increasingly uncomfortable as we went through the MRI and, later, PET
scans.
"It looks familiar, the pattern here," I told Freedman when we had gone over the
scans for the third time.
When I finally recognized the pattern, the significance hit me like a hammer. "Oh, Jesus," I whispered. Freedman turned in his chair, his face full of startled
concern. I grabbed the back of the chair for support.