Power Play (24 page)

“Some support,” Jake sniffed. “It’s not much past eleven o’clock and he’s conceding the election.”

Cardwell raised his eyebrows, then said, “Well, at least with Arlan Sinclair out of the picture you can get support from the people actually running the MHD program.”

Jake nodded, realizing that Lev was right. Bob Rogers and Tim Younger had no qualms about backing Tomlinson.

Now that Arlan Sinclair was, as Lev put it, out of the way.

CAPE CORAL, FLORIDA

It was hot in Florida. Summertime hot and humid, although it was only late April.

Glynis had insisted on going to Florida to see Dr. McGruder and question him about Mrs. Sinclair’s cancer. Jake thought it was a wild-goose chase, at best, but once he realized how utterly determined she was, he decided to go along with her. So on the Friday after Tomlinson’s victory in the primary, the two of them flew to the Southwest Florida International Airport, in Fort Myers, and drove a rental car to McGruder’s home in Cape Coral.

“What do you expect to find?” Jake asked, as he followed the car’s GPS directions through the unfamiliar streets. The sun was glaring, the car’s air-conditioning up to maximum. Jake was surprised at the traffic. Fort Myers was a considerable city. The people ambling along the streets were all in ultracasual T-shirts, tank tops, shorts, sandals. Just about everyone wore sunglasses.

“I want to know if she actually had cancer,” Glynis replied. “And if she did, who her oncologist was. McGruder’s just a GP. She must have been attended by a specialist—if she really had cancer.”

“You think Harraway was lying,” Jake said. It wasn’t a question.

“I
know
he was lying,” Glynis said, absolutely certain. “I just don’t know if he was telling the truth about her condition.”

The address turned out to be a modest bungalow on a palm-lined street that ran along a canal. Jake could see boats moored behind several of the houses, mostly small outboards for fishing, although there was one sleek cigarette boat hanging from davits across the waterway.

Feeling uneasy about this expedition, Jake rang the bungalow’s doorbell. In the Florida humidity, he felt as if a hot, wet towel had been wrapped around him. Glynis seemed unaffected by the heat; she had had the foresight to dress for the climate in shorts and a sleeveless blouse.

A thickset swarthy woman opened the front door a crack. She was short and blocky as a bag of cement.

“Que?”

“Dr. McGruder, please.”

The woman frowned. “No here. They take him away.”

“Away?” Glynis asked. “Where?”

“Two days ago.”

“Where? Where is he?”

Jake searched his pitiful Spanish vocabulary.
“Dónde está?”

That brought a burst of rapid-fire Spanish. Overwhelmed, Jake made a pacifying gesture with both his hands. “Slower! Uh …
lentamente, por favor.
”

It took several minutes, but at last they figured that McGruder had been taken to the Alhambra Hospital, in Cape Coral.

As they slid back into the car and Jake revved up the engine—and the air-conditioning—Glynis said, “I didn’t know you speak Spanish.”

“Just a few words. Comes in handy now and then.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Dos cervezas,”
Jake said. “That’s my favorite Spanish phrase.”

Glynis looked up the hospital’s address with her cell phone and Jake punched it into the oblong gray box of the GPS system.

Alhambra Hospital turned out to be a hospice center, a place where people went to die.

“I hope we’re not too late,” Glynis muttered as they hurried across the cool lobby to the front desk.

They were.

“Dr. McGruder died last night of a coronary infarction,” said the elderly woman at the desk. “He was suffering from Alzheimer’s, poor man.”

“Coronary infarction?” Glynis echoed.

“Heart attack,” said Jake.

Looking at her computer screen, the receptionist shook her head sadly. “Poor man. He had no family at all.”

“Who brought him here, then?” Glynis asked.

“A friend of his, apparently. From back in his hometown.”

“And he had a fatal heart attack last night.”

“Yes,” the woman answered. “His friend was visiting with him at the time. Poor man, his Alzheimer’s was so advanced he didn’t even recognize his friend.”

Jake asked, “He didn’t recognize the man who was with him when he had the heart attack?”

“That’s right.”

“Who was he? How can we get in contact with him?”

The receptionist shook her head. “He’s probably gone back north by now. He just left instructions for the body to be cremated and then he headed for the airport.”

“Has the body been cremated?” Glynis asked.

The woman said, “In two days. State law.”

“We’ve got to stop the cremation,” Glynis said urgently. “Get an autopsy.”

“Why?” Jake asked.

“To see if he really had Alzheimer’s!” she snapped. “This is all too damned convenient to be true.”

“You don’t think that—”

But Glynis was already asking the receptionist, “What’s the friend’s name? How can we get in touch with him?”

The woman tapped at her computer’s keyboard. “No information on his address. He must live back where Dr. McGruder lived, though.”

“His name?” Jake repeated.

“Um … Perez,” the woman said. “Ignacio Perez.”

HOMEBOUND

Jake still felt stunned as he sat beside Glynis in the cramped coach section of the flight out of Florida. He was in the middle seat, Glynis on the aisle. The middle-aged woman drowsing in the window seat was grossly fat. Jake hoped she wouldn’t awaken and have to get up during the flight.

Leaning so close their heads nearly touched, Glynis asked again, “And this Perez person works for Senator Leeds?”

“I got the impression that he works for somebody who supports Leeds,” Jake said. “Somebody connected with the casinos on the reservations.”

“Someone connected with gambling.”

Jake nodded. “There are five casinos across the state, all owned by Native American tribes.”

“I wonder how much money they rake in,” Glynis mused. “I suppose I could look it up.”

“It’s not how much they report,” Jake pointed out. “It’s how much they skim off the top. The money that doesn’t get reported. The money that they don’t pay taxes on.”

“But that’s illegal!”

With a crooked smile, Jake told her, “Amy Wexler told me that the casinos are actually run from Las Vegas. Big-time operators.”

“Mafia?”

“They don’t use that term, but—yeah, the Mob, organized crime. Big time.”

“And this Perez person was sent to Florida to silence Dr. McGruder,” Glynis said.

Jake sighed. “Nacho didn’t go to Florida to inquire about McGruder’s health.”

“He must have murdered Arlan and his wife, then.”

“He, or somebody like him.”

“I was right,” Glynis whispered. “We’re dealing with murderers!”

Jake nodded, knowing that the closer they got to uncovering what really happened, the closer they came to facing their own deaths.

*   *   *

Once back home, Jake tried to reach Nacho Perez. The man was nowhere to be found. Nobody in Senator Leeds’s office even admitted to knowing his name.

Sitting in his messy little office, Jake thought about the possibilities. There was one person he knew who would know where Perez was, but contacting that person would open a can of very dangerous worms.

Jake tussled with the possibilities for the better part of a day. He sleepwalked through his class, graded exam papers like a robot, his mind turning over the risks of what he knew he had to do.

As the sun was setting on a perfectly splendid day in late April, Jake picked the phone off his desk and called Monster.

To his surprise, Monster not only answered the phone on the second ring, but cheerfully agreed to meet Jake for dinner.

“Zorba’s, okay?” Monster suggested.

The Greek restaurant in the old neighborhood. Sure, Jake thought. Nobody’s been shot in Zorba’s for a couple of years.

“Zorba’s,” he agreed. “Seven o’clock good for you?”

“Make it seven thirty, Jake. I got business to take care of first.”

“Seven thirty, then.”

“And come alone. Just me and you, Jake. We got things to talk over.”

Jake’s blood ran cold.

*   *   *

Zorba’s was the best restaurant in the old neighborhood. Also the only restaurant, unless you counted the fast-food eateries on a couple of street corners or the Chinese joint that had been there since the Lewis and Clark expedition passed by.

It was a quiet place. No bouzouki music, no belly dancers, just the muted murmur of conversations and the occasional shout of “Oopah!” as men tossed down thimble-sized glasses of ouzo.

It got even quieter when Monster came in. All the conversations stopped in mid-sentence; everyone seemed to hold his breath. Monster spotted Jake at the table where he was sitting and strode across the half-empty restaurant to him.

People started talking again as Monster sat down and said, “Hey, Jake.”

An elderly waiter in a stained white apron immediately placed a menu the size of a newspaper’s double sheet in front of him.

Without even glancing at the menu Monster ordered the braised lamb. Jake did the same.

“And to drink?” wheezed the waiter.

Monster looked at Jake questioningly. “I’ll have a glass of red wine,” Jake said. Monster shook his head. “Water’s okay for me.”

Once the waiter left their table Monster hunched forward and said in a lowered voice, “Jake, you’re headin’ for trouble, you know.”

“Me?”

“You. What’re you snoopin’ around for, tryin’ to find Nacho?”

Jake ran the possibilities through his mind in a millisecond. What the hell, he thought. Monster already knows a lot more about this than I do. No sense holding back anything.

“Monster, the guy might have murdered somebody. Maybe more than one.”

Monster straightened up in his chair, his face suddenly stony. “So?” he said. “What business is that of yours?”

“Did he kill Professor Sinclair? And Sinclair’s wife?”

“You think I know?”

“Do you?”

Monster stared at Jake in silence. As if to break the tension, their waiter brought two dishes of braised lamb to the table, steaming with the aroma of spices and fresh green beans.

“Jake,” Monster said, “eat your dinner and forget about this whole business. I like you, Jake, but you’re messin’ with things that’re gonna get you in trouble. You and that girl you went to Florida with.”

Jake’s insides clenched. They know every move I make! he realized. They’re watching me.

He wondered who “they” might be. It’s not just Senator Leeds, he thought. There’s more to this. A lot more.

But he said nothing further. He followed Monster’s advice and ate his dinner. They talked about old times, high school days. Monster merrily recounted the fights he had been involved in. He went into some detail about the bones he had broken.

JUNE

STRATEGY SESSION ONE

April gave way to May and then to June. The weather warmed to pleasant summertime temperatures and Jake followed Monster’s advice. He stopped asking about Nacho Perez, paid attention to his classes and his students. He even started working again on his proposal for the Mars lander’s sensors.

Political activities had slowed after the primaries. Both Tomlinson and Senator Leeds were making preparations for the campaign that would culminate in November’s election, spending most of their time raising money. Jake saw Amy Wexler once or twice a week, but only to talk about the science planks in Tomlinson’s platform.

Dant’s concerns during the primary about abortion forced Jake to work out a position for Tomlinson on stem cell research. After talking it over with the biomedical scientists on campus and a private company spun off from the university, Jake advised Tomlinson to emphasize two things: one, that stem cell research held enormous promise for future treatments of everything from Alzheimer’s to heart disease, and two, that stem cells were being produced from ordinary blood and skin cells; there was no longer any need for harvesting stem cells from human embryos.

Once she heard that, Amy Wexler clapped her hands joyfully. “That should quiet the right-to-life people!”

Genetically engineered corn was another issue that sent Jake scurrying to the biology labs. Corn was a major crop in the state and improving its resistance to frost and insect pests was highly desirable. But conservatives raised specters of uncontrolled mutations that could ruin the corn crop. Even Tomlinson’s father huffed about “Frankenstein on the cob.” Jake worked out a reasonable approach that, he hoped, would allay the fears of the farmers and the general public.

Climate change, space exploration, even a controversy between archeologists digging into the state’s past and Native American activists who protested their intrusions into sacred ground—Jake had to work out positions for Tomlinson that would alienate the least number of voters and perhaps even help to get some science accomplished.

And, of course, there was the MHD program.

“They’ve finished the transmission line from the big rig to the grid,” Jake reported to Amy in mid-June.

She nodded uncertainly. “How does that help us?”

They were sitting in one of the booths at the Roosevelt Club’s bar. Jake hadn’t been to Amy’s apartment since before the primaries, nor had she come to his place. The quiet, darkly paneled bar was as intimate as they had been for months.

“Whenever the generator runs, they can send the power into the state’s electrical system. The local utility companies get fifty megawatts for free.”

“As long as the generator is running,” Amy said.

“Tim’s had it going for a hundred hours at a stretch,” Jake said. “He’s talking about going for two hundred hours.”

“More than a week,” Amy muttered.

“A little over eight days,” said Jake.

She shrugged. “I suppose that’s good progress for you science jocks, but what does that mean to the average voter?”

“Progress,” said Jake.