Prayer (13 page)

I promise to write again when I have time. But for now, that’s all. I love you.

Your loving father

T
he following morning, checking through my voice mail, I found an urgent message from Andrew Newman, the medical director at UTHCPC, asking me to call him at his office.

“Uh, thanks for calling us back, Agent Martins. I appreciate it. I’m sorry to tell you that Philip Osborne died at 4:31 this morning. I have to say it came as a real surprise to us here at Harris County Psychiatric. We were pretty sure we had him stabilized. At least physically. It’s too bad. I was a major fan of his writing.”

“What was the cause of death?”

“Cardiac infarction. Followed by a massive pulmonary edema. It looks like his heart just stopped.”

“I see. So, did you try to revive him?”

“No. There are certain occasions when it’s clear there would be little point in trying. I don’t want to go into too many details, but I’m afraid this was one of those occasions.”

“All right, sir. Can I ask you this: Would you say that his death was caused by the same mental trauma that put him in an acute state of catatonia?”

“From the amount of adrenaline we found in his system, sure, that would be my guess. But it is just a guess, you understand, Agent Martins. There will, of course, have to be an autopsy.”

“When will that be?”

“First thing tomorrow a.m., I would imagine.”

I was about to hang up the telephone when I realized that Newman was still on the line.

“It’s probably nothing important,” he continued, “and in a way it’s nothing unusual, but for a brief moment, just before he died, Mr. Osborne regained consciousness. According to the computer monitoring him, and the nurse who was summoned by his patient alarm, he was conscious for almost four whole minutes.”

“Did Osborne activate that alarm himself?”

“No, it’s automatic. His conscious state would have activated an alert on the duty night nurse’s computer, which summoned her to his room. Not that she really needed it under the circumstances.”

“What circumstances were they?”

“Er, he screamed. And kept on screaming, like he was taking a dive off a tall building. That’s what I’ve been told. The nurse was pretty spooked by it. Then again, it’s not that unusual for people to scream in a psychiatric hospital. But perhaps it’s a little unusual to scream for so damn long. According to the nurse, perhaps as long as four minutes.”

“You mean he screamed for the entire time he was conscious again?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to speak to the nurse if I may, Dr. Newman. What’s her name?”

“Nurse Kendall. But she’ll have to call you. Her shift was supposed to end at midday, but she was sent home early.”

“Oh? Why is that, sir?”

“The screaming was followed by a massive pulmonary edema. I guess it shook her up a bit.”

“What exactly is a pulmonary edema?”

“Usually, it’s caused by heart failure. As the heart fails, pressure in the veins going through the lungs starts to rise. And as the pressure in these blood vessels increases, fluid is pushed into the air spaces in the lungs, which interrupts the normal intake of oxygen in the lungs. He coughed up some blood. Onto Nurse Kendall, who happened to be bent over his bed at the time.”

“So she got some blood on her uniform. Isn’t that what you might call an occupational hazard?”

“Yes. But it’s like this, Agent Martins: The guy coughed his guts all over the woman. She was covered in blood. Like someone threw a beer glass full of it over her. It’s possible there was some preexisting cardiomyopathic condition. Or lung ailment.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Dr. Newman. He wasn’t a smoker. And he had kept himself reasonably fit. He was still only in his forties, I believe.”

I thanked Newman and reminded him to have Nurse Kendall call me and send me the result of the autopsy.

I put the telephone down and stared at my computer for a moment before Googling “pulmonary edema” and “Philip Osborne.”

The stuff about pulmonary edema was disquieting and convinced me that sometimes the human body goes wrong in a spectacular way.

The Web images of Philip Osborne showed a man with a large bushy beard, and also without a beard, and he looked progressively stronger and more buffed than he had been in his twenties. The man had biceps like a stevedore, but these were not as big as the biceps of the other gay man he was sometimes pictured with—a very muscular-looking guy, also with a beard, holding Osborne’s hand, both of them wearing the same white linen shirt and blue pin-striped pants. It looked like one of those beachside civil ceremonies that you read about in the celebrity magazines, and I wondered why there was no mention in the case file of this man, whose name was John Cabot; and so I Googled him, too, and discovered that they had indeed been civil partners and that Cabot had died of AIDS more than five years ago.

There were also a couple of more recent pictures of Osborne shaking hands or sharing a joke with Bishop Coogan, and remembering that they had been friends, I thought to give him a call.

“Sorry, Eamon. But Philip Osborne died this morning.”

“Thank you for telling me. I’ll go over there and say a prayer for him. Since Osborne was admitted, they’re quite used to seeing me at that hospital. Did they say how he died?”

“The doctors say he had a cardiac arrest that occasioned a pulmonary edema. But whatever happened left an experienced night nurse feeling like she needed to go home.”

“Look, I have to go now. There’s a little local difficulty we’re having here right now. Which is why His Eminence is here with me now. Perhaps I might discuss that with you when I call you back.”

“By all means, Bishop.”

I put down the telephone and then headed for the men’s room to wash and sanitize my hands while asking myself what the “little local difficulty” might be that required a federal agent to advise a bishop. Returning to my office a few minutes later, I met Jesus Guttiérrez coming the other way.

There were five bomb techs working in the Houston field office and Guttiérrez—the Gut—was the most experienced, despite also being the youngest and least senior. He was wearing a blue field jacket, and since DT agents and bomb technicians often worked the same cases, I stopped and asked him if there was something going down I should know about.

“It’s probably nothing,” he said, quietly shifting his bulk from one foot to the other like an impatient boxer. “But we got a call from the Pasadena police. It seems like someone found a suspicious object in the Armand Bayou Nature Center, and Mel and I have to go down there and check it out.”

Mel Karski was the Gut’s line supervisor.

“It’s a strange place for a suspicious object,” I remarked.

Guttiérrez shook his head. “This job has JAWOFT written on it in neon letters,” he said.

JAWOFT was “just a waste of fucking time,” like most of the investigations that came the way of the FBI’s bomb technicians. Every time the Counterterrorism guys flushed out some raghead with a bomb in his sneakers or his underpants, the FBI’s bomb technicians were obliged to field more false alarms than a maternity hospital.

“But surely the alternative is worse,” I said.

“You sound just like Mel. He’s checking out the van before we go all the way down there. I don’t know why they think this is BT shit. There’s no package and there’re no wires or panties on show. What do the Pasadena cops think I’m going to do with this thing? Kick it, maybe. Or try to make it fly again.”

“Fly?”

“They said the object looks like some kind of fucking model airplane. Hell, it probably is a model airplane. Like I’m an expert on fucking UFOs.”

“Is that how it arrived in the nature reserve? It flew there?”

“Looks like, yeah. Lucky it landed in the wetlands, otherwise it might have started a fire.”

I went back to my desk. There was something about what the Gut had said that troubled me. A moment passed before I realized that Vijay Persaud was hovering over my desk and that he’d asked me a question. Vijay worked in DCS Net, the FBI’s dedicated wiretap system.

“What’s that you said?” I asked.

“I asked if I could have a word with you?” he said. “In private.”

“Now?”

“If that’s okay.”

I stood up. And grabbed my jacket, and my cell phone.

“That’s cool.” Still hardly listening, I started running down the hall. “But it’ll have to wait.”

“Where are you going?” Vijay shouted after me.

“The Armand Bayou Nature Center,” I said. “In Pasadena.”

Mel Karski steered east off the Sam Houston Parkway onto Genoa Red Bluff Road. The van was none too clean, with empty fast-food bags and cigarette packs on the floor and a piece of chewing gum stuck to the dashboard like a shiny gray limpet that had lost its shell. For a while, I rested my head on the passenger-side window; at least I did until I realized that the bird shit on the outside of the window was actually on the inside. After that, I kept my hands in my pockets.

“You should wash this van,” I said. “It’s like a petri dish in here.”

“Blends in nicely the way it is,” said the Gut.

The land on either side of the highway was uniformly flat and arid, and apart from the odd McDonald’s restaurant, gas station, trailer park, and rig hauling a tank full of milk or pesticide, or maybe both, it was mostly empty. There was the occasional church, too, of course; you never have to drive more than five miles in Texas before you find a place of worship.

A few minutes later we were heading off the main road into the ABNC, which is one of the largest urban wildlife refuges in the United States and named after the river or bayou that runs into Galveston Bay. A white Pasadena Police Ford Crown Vic was waiting for us at the visitor center and two cops wearing black uniforms led the way on foot along one of the meandering trails to where the suspicious object had been found. The local police had missed their breakfast in order to wait for us and they weren’t feeling very gabby about anything very much, which suited me fine. It gave us a chance to enjoy the quiet and the sea breeze off the bay a mile or two to the east. It made a pleasant change from the heat and dust and in-your-face cacophony of the city. The ranger didn’t say much either, although it’s possible we might not have heard him on account of the sizable mustache that covered his whole mouth. Possibly it was this that scared a big white egret out of the tall grass that grew on either side of the trail; as it took off and headed south across Clear Lake, it blotted out the sun for a moment.

At the end of the trail we climbed aboard a pontoon boat, which wasn’t much more than a rectangular deck with handrails and a steering wheel on top of a couple of long floats. As the ranger started the engine, something living sank silently under the emerald carpet of weeds that covered the surface of the water and moved slowly away with an almost indiscernible wake. On the other side of the bayou the ranger nudged the bank with the square bow of the boat and let us step off onto dry land. He stayed on the pontoon and the cops showed us to the clearing where the object had been found. One of the cops drew his pistol and looked around carefully.

“They use this clearing to leave meat for the gators,” said the other. “Which is how they found it in the first place.”

“That’s a comforting thought,” said the Gut. “I wondered why the ranger stayed on the pontoon.”

It was about the size of a large dead egret and similarly colored. Two feet long with a four-and-half-foot wingspan. The tailspan was maybe two-thirds that width. The fuselage was long and cylindrical and unmarked and resembled nothing so much as a small cruise missile. Most of the ground underfoot was waterlogged, which probably explained why the object hadn’t scorched the grass when it landed.

“The hell is that?” said Mel, kneeling down beside the object. He carefully laid a hand on the metal fuselage and then quickly took it away again. “Hot. Most likely from the sun, though.” He squinted at the rear end of the thing and made a noise. “Interesting. No sign of combustion back here. Looks like it might be electrically powered.” He leaned over the front. “Jesus. There’s a little camera in the nose.”

“It’s called a Switchblade,” I said, “and it’s the latest in high-tech battlefield wizardry: a miniature drone that you can take out of your backpack and deploy quicker than a grunt’s fucking mess tin. You just fold out the wings like a picnic table and then use a miniature guidance system to fly it through someone’s bathroom window. Assuming the hajis have bathroom windows. The Pentagon calls this little toy plane their magic bullet.”

“Looks like one hell of a bullet,” said the Gut. “Sure give some Big T a wake-up call.”

Big T was what people like the Gut who’d served in Afghanistan called the Taliban.

I shrugged. “This one must have been unarmed, otherwise it wouldn’t have been found.”

“All the same,” said Mel, “we’d best let the army deal with it. This looks like one for the Too Hard Box. Okay, Gut?”

The Gut nodded. “I only fuck with that which I know of and about this I know fuck all. I’ll call Explosive Ordnance Disposal at the army base when we get back to the van.”

“Yeah. Do that.”

“Even so, I’d like to hang around and see how they do it, if you don’t mind, boss. Just in case there’s a Windows upgrade I don’t know about.”