Sleepwalk (21 page)

Jed shook his head slowly, a memory already stirring in his mind. Then it came back to him. It was fuzzy at first, but as he focused in on it, the scene etched itself sharply in his mind.

There had been lights on in the Morelands’ house, and he’d sailed closer.

A form, darting away from the house.

Dropping lower, following the running figure.

Suddenly, starkly, like a black-and-white landscape emerging in a photographer’s darkroom, the scene came clear in his mind. From the shadows, the face of the figure came into focus.

“Randy Sparks,” he said out loud.

Judith stared at him. “Randy Sparks?” she echoed.

Jed nodded. “I—I saw him,” he said Then, slowly, trying not to make the tale sound too unbelievable, he told her what had happened to him the previous night. When he was done, though, he could see that she didn’t believe him.

“I see.” Her voice was cold. “In that case, I think maybe both of us should go talk to Randy and see what he has to say.”

To her own surprise, Randy Sparks looked almost guilty when he saw her, and only reluctantly responded to Jed’s beckoning wave. They stood just outside the cafeteria, Randy slouching nonchalantly against the wall.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“What’s up is that you threw a rock through a window in the Morelands’ front door last night,” Jed said, fixing as closely on Randy’s face as Judith.

Randy shook his head, his eyes averted. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about—” he began, but Jed cut him off.

“I saw it, Randy,” he said. “I saw you running away from the house.”

“Bullshit!” Randy exploded. “There wasn’t anybody out there! I made sure—” Too late, he realized his mistake.
He swallowed hard, then managed to glare truculently at Judith. “What the hell did you expect?” he muttered. “After what you did to me yesterday …”

But Judith wasn’t listening. Her mouth slightly agape, she was staring at Jed, her eyes searching his. Finally, impatiently, she turned back to Randy. “You’ll pay for the window,” she said, “and apologize to Mrs. Moreland. You scared her half to death.”

Randy stared at the floor, but nodded miserably. “And you might also be interested to know,” Judith added, “I wasn’t even there. I was out for the night. So the next time you have a problem with me, make sure you know where I am before you come to—” She hesitated, searching for the right word, then went on, her voice sarcastic: “Shall we say before you come to ‘talk’ to me about it?”

Randy’s head came up. “You mean you’re not going to tell Beckwith?” he asked, his voice trembling like a guilty eight-year-old’s. “Or the cops?”

Judith shook her head. “Let’s just call a truce, okay?”

Randy swallowed once more and nodded. Then his eyes shifted to Jed. “Where the hell were you?” he demanded. “If you were close enough to see me, how come I didn’t see you?”

Jed said nothing. A slow, sardonic grin spread over his face. “I’m a half-breed, remember?” he drawled. “Us Indians can sneak around where you guys can never spot us.” Leaving Randy staring at his back, he turned and followed Judith back to her classroom.

“So do you believe me now?” Jed asked when the door closed behind him.

Judith dropped into the chair behind her desk, regarding him thoughtfully. “You know,” she said, her voice vague, as if she were thinking out loud, “this kind
of thing isn’t exactly unheard-of.” Jed frowned uncertainly. “There’s a phenomenon called an out-of-body experience. There are a lot of reports of them from people who have come close to dying. They say they actually leave their bodies and can watch what’s going on around them. There are reports of people who almost died in surgery—some of them
did
die, but were brought back to life—who can recount what happened when they died. What was done, what was said—everything. Yet they were completely unconscious at the time.”

Jed looked doubtful as Judith fell silent, lost in thought. Then, softly, he asked, “You believe me, don’t you?”

Judith sighed, nodding reluctantly. She glanced up at the clock on the wall. “Do you want to get some lunch? We still have twenty minutes.”

Jed was about to agree, then remembered the note his third-period teacher had handed him. “I can’t,” he said. “I have to go to the nurse’s office and get my shot.” His eyes narrowed quizzically. “What was going on this morning?” he asked. “Why did you shove me out of there?”

Judith’s expression hardened. She glanced toward the door as if she expected to see someone standing outside, listening. “I got you out of there,” she told him, her voice dropping, “because I don’t understand what those shots are all about, and I don’t know why the kids are being given them.”

“They’re just flu shots—” Jed began, but Judith didn’t let him finish.

“Maybe. But something is wrong.” She told him about the conversation she’d had with Sally Rosen the
day before. “The thing that really got to me,” she finished, “was the UniChem label on the boxes.”

Jed’s eyes narrowed. “UniChem?”

Judith nodded. “It just seems strange to me that on the day UniChem is taking over Borrego Oil, they’re also giving shots to every kid in town. Especially when someone I trust tells me there is no effective inoculation against the latest strain of flu.”

“Jesus,” Jed whispered, his tongue running over his lower lip. “What are you going to do?”

Judith shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “In fact, I don’t even know what I
ought
to do. But I know I’d just as soon you skipped that shot.”

Jed smiled crookedly. “That’s okay by me,” he said. “The last time I had a shot I passed out.”

Together they headed back to the cafeteria, but as Judith toyed with the limp sandwich that was all that remained by the time they passed through the line, she kept thinking about those shots.

By the time her afternoon classes began, she had come up with an idea.

Judith stepped out into the hall, closing the door of the lounge behind her. It was almost four, and the school was nearly deserted, only a few teachers left in the lounge, lingering over gossip rather than work.

Across the hall, the door to Laura Sanders’s office stood slightly ajar. Inside, Judith could see the boxes of syringes sitting on the table where Laura had apparently left them. Laura herself had come into the teachers’ lounge a few minutes ago, looking harried and announcing that she intended to take a good long
break. “I missed lunch waiting for Jed Arnold,” she grumbled, rolling her eyes balefully at Judith, “and he didn’t even show up. Can you beat that?”

Judith had shrugged sympathetically, then waited until Laura had settled into conversation with Elliott Halvorson. Certain that she had at least ten minutes to herself, she had finally slipped out of the lounge.

Now she hesitated, glancing in both directions.

The hall was empty.

Quickly, furtively, Judith crossed the hall, slipped into Laura’s office and quietly shut the door behind her.

On the table, neatly stacked, were all the class lists of the day, duplicates of her own. Beside each name there was either a five-digit number or a notation that the student had been absent that day. Clipped to each class list were the permission slips that had been collected from the students.

On the floor by the table next to the window, boxes with the UniChem logo were carefully stacked. All but one of them were empty, but on the table itself were two more boxes. The seal on one of them was broken. Judith opened it. The box was nearly full. Good! No one would notice if one of the syringes disappeared. Making up her mind, she took one of the needles out of the box and started to slip it into her purse.

And then she saw the serial number neatly printed on the tube of the syringe.

She frowned, then picked up the class lists once more. Scanning through them, she counted the number of students from throughout the school listed as absent that day.

Twenty-two.

On the table was one box of twelve syringes, its seal unbroken.

The open box had contained ten more, but one of them was now in her hand.

Apparently UniChem had supplied exactly enough syringes to inoculate the entire student body, and had insisted on an accounting.

Judith’s sense of unease over the whole inoculation program congealed into fear. Why would UniChem be so concerned about accounting for all the needles?

Still, because of what she’d seen that morning, she was prepared for this accounting system, and now flipped through the lists once more, until she found the one for her own first-period class.

The second name from the top was Jed Arnold’s, and the space next to his name was still blank. She breathed a sigh of relief as she realized that, expecting him later in the day, Laura Sanders had not yet marked Jed as absent.

Judith fished in her purse and found the permission slip she’d taken from Frank’s refrigerator that morning. Her eyes flitting guiltily toward the door, she added the slip to the stack attached to the top of the class list. Next she picked up a pen, tested it to make certain its ink matched that of the pen Laura had used to fill in the class lists, then carefully copied the number from the syringe she’d taken from the box into the space next to Jed’s name.

The handwriting match wasn’t perfect, but it was so close that she didn’t think anyone would notice.

Leaving everything as she had found it, Judith slipped the syringe into her purse, and moved quietly to the door.

She listened for a moment, but heard nothing from the corridor outside.

Finally she opened the door a crack and peered out into the hall.

It was empty.

Unconsciously drawing her breath in, Judith pulled the door open and slipped through. Leaving it a few inches ajar, just as she had found it five minutes before, she walked quickly away, her mind already fully occupied with figuring out the fastest way to get the syringe to Sally Rosen in Los Angeles. And then she remembered Peter Langston.

She’d dated Peter in Los Angeles for a few months, until he’d moved to Los Alamos to take a position with a think tank. The work was highly technical, he’d explained, and secret. It was, he’d added, the opportunity of a lifetime.

And here was her opportunity: Peter was a chemist—he’d be able to tell her exactly what was in the syringe.

If Judith had looked back at that moment, she would have seen Stuart Beckwith emerge from his office and frown as he saw her disappear around the corner toward the cafeteria, then turn his attention to the open door to Laura Sanders’s office.

He stood where he was for a moment, apparently lost in thought, then went to the nurse’s office himself.

He scanned the lists carefully, then took his own count of the syringes.

He repeated the process, assuring himself that the number of needles matched the number of students who’d been absent that day.

Perhaps, he finally decided, he’d been wrong.

Perhaps Judy Sheffield hadn’t been in Laura’s office at all.

Still, as he left the nurse’s office a moment later, he
made certain the door was firmly closed, and locked it as well.

He made a mental note to reprimand Laura Sanders. Greg Moreland, after all, had made it absolutely clear that the syringes were to be kept under lock and key at all times.

Well, nothing had gone awry, so there was really no point in even mentioning the incident to Greg.

Laura Sanders, on the other hand, was another matter.

He went into the teachers’ lounge, already silently relishing the tongue-lashing he was about to give her.

Frank drove quickly down the narrow dirt road that edged the canyon. Only a fraction of his attention was focused on driving, for the ruts in the road were so deep that the pickup essentially drove itself. His mind kept turning over what he’d seen at the dam.

He still wasn’t certain why he’d decided to start poking around after the meeting in Max Moreland’s office; he only knew that, despite Kendall’s assurances to the contrary, he had not been expected to attend. He’d seen it in Otto Kruger’s eyes.

He also knew, regardless of Kendall’s claims, that UniChem’s plans were not going to be nearly as beneficial to Borrego as Kendall maintained. Over the past two days, despite the hectic schedule of the plant shutdown, he’d still managed to do his homework, and now, on Thursday morning, he knew more about UniChem than Kendall—or anyone else, for that matter—suspected. This morning, with the shifts already juggled so he could attend Max’s funeral, he’d decided to drive up to the dam and have a look around.

He hadn’t liked what he’d seen.

Everywhere he’d looked, there had been signs of sloppy maintenance.

Greasy rags, which should have been stowed away in a fireproof bin until they were ready to be washed, were scattered haphazardly through the passages.

Valves had been allowed to rust and corrode, some of them so badly they should have been replaced weeks, if not months, earlier.

When he’d finally taken a look at the main flume, the shaft that carried water from the lake down through the dam to power the huge main turbine itself, he’d been downright scared. Cracks had developed in the flume’s lining—cracks too big to have developed overnight, or even over a period of days. In fact, they’d been damned lucky they hadn’t lost the entire turbine. If a sizable chunk of concrete had come loose, they would have had a major disaster on their hands.

When he’d asked Bill Watkins why the dam had been let go so badly, the operator had shrugged helplessly. “Otto just kept telling us to make do,” he explained. “He kept telling us Max didn’t have the money.”

Though he’d said nothing, Frank knew that whatever Watkins believed, Otto Kruger had been lying to him. Max Moreland would have closed the dam down before he’d have let it run in the condition he had just observed.

As Frank’s anger built, his foot pressed down on the accelerator and the truck shot forward. He knew Kruger would be at the plant, and no doubt Kendall was with him. Whatever they were up to, Frank was not going to let them get away with it.

As he suspected, the two were in Kruger’s office
when Frank stormed in. Paul Kendall looked up, a smug smile playing at the corners of his lips as Frank spoke.