The Last Blue Plate Special (13 page)

“You’re working on the case, too,” I said. “Maybe you got the same message.”

I retrieved the day’s news as Rox went to check her e-mail.

“Nothing,” she said when I returned with the paper in its plastic bag. “I don’t get it. Why are you the target? And how did
Sword get your e-mail address?”

“It’s not that difficult. All the servers maintain directories, listings of subscribers under their real names. There are
ways of protecting identity—all kinds of Web services through which you can send e-mail anonymously or even have your own
Web page without anybody being able to find out who you are. I didn’t do that, although from the e-mail address I’d guess
Sword did.”

“Anybody could find my e-mail address in five minutes,” I continued. “What I don’t understand is how Sword knows I’m working
on this thing.”

“Maybe he works for the paper. Look.” She’d unfolded the paper to the front page.

“Police Investigate Revivalist Threat,” an article header told us. CBS had lost no time in disseminating news of the Bugs
Bunny tape, but there was no mention of the previous letter threatening Grossinger and Ross or the green note pushed under
the door of Kate Van Der Elst’s campaign headquarters. I assumed that was because the police, while not hesitating to reference
in an interview “forensic consultants Dr. Roxanne Bouchie and Dr. Emily ‘Blue’ McCarron, retained to profile the offender,”
had wisely chosen not to provide Sword any more publicity.

“He got your name from the paper,” Roxie said. “And mine, although I don’t seem to bother him.”

“Roxanne is a woman’s name,” I pointed out. “No gender ambiguity to rile him up.”

“Or else he’s white.”

“White?”

Roxie shook her head. “As in Caucasian, honey. You know, folks who sunburn? They have hobbies like owning plantations and
naming their children for plants that grow in the Scottish highlands. Our boy isn’t interested in me because I’m black. I
could walk right up to him in a tux and introduce myself as Steven Spielberg and he wouldn’t notice. Only the behavior of
his own, of people with whom he identifies, is of interest to him.”

“Three things,” I said. “First, there’s no way he could know you’re black. Second, the e-mail was sent an hour and a half
ago. It was still the middle of the night. The paper wasn’t available yet.”

“And third?”

“I sold the plantation in a leveraged buyout
weeks
ago, right after I legally changed my name from
Calluna vulgaris,
commonly known as heather, to the more serviceable ‘Blue.’ Rox, sometimes your racial jibes make me feel … I don’t know,
like you think I’d run out and buy a slave if I could find one on sale.”

“Girl,” she said in that way she knows is a guarantee of my total attention, “he could have read the paper on-line before
it hit the streets and looked me up under the American Psychiatric Association membership roster for San Diego, found out
I work at a state prison, and gotten the info off any of several different sites. Remember, I’m a government employee. Government
agencies have to prove they don’t discriminate on the basis of race, so everybody’s race is documented in personnel data,
which is all on the Internet. And I was just joking about the plantation. Sometimes I forget you aren’t black.”

It was hard to reply through the braids falling across my face as she hugged me, but I felt compelled to make a point.

“Nobody ever mentions that black plantation owners in the South
also
bought and sold black slaves,” I lectured into braids. “Greed and cruelty are options for everybody.”

“Good point,” she said as she glanced at the kitchen clock.

“Gotta handle an ethnic crisis this morning,” she yelled after dashing to the shower. “Need to be there early. The Latino
prisoners want to have a memorial service for some bullfighter who finally got gored to death in Tijuana last week. The guy
was a kind of cultural icon to them. You know,
muy macho.
An artist, too. He painted pictures in the blood of the bulls he tortured and killed. Blue … ?”

I sensed a warning in the interrogatory use of my name.

“I won’t,” I said.

“Don’t go anywhere near the Rainer Clinic today. Let the police do it and funnel information to us for analysis. That’s our
job. You hear me?”

“Huh?” I yelled back.

After Roxie had left, Brontë and I headed straight for my truck and drove to the coastal San Diego community called La Jolla,
which is pronounced “La Hoya” and means “the jewel” in Spanish. Once an idyllic resort community favored during winter months
by such East Coast luminaries as Ulysses S. Grant and the author Helen Hunt Jackson, La Jolla later became a magnet for movie
stars who wanted someplace quiet in which to purchase weekend homes. Now it’s the densely packed pinnacle of an area called
the “golden triangle,” and not for no reason. The village’s rambling old streets are crammed with upscale shops, and a triangle
of new office buildings, hotels, and shopping centers expands east toward its base at an inland freeway. Among those office
buildings are numerous medical clinics, some of them featuring cosmetic surgery.

I had no intention of going
in
to the Rainer Clinic. In fact, my original plan had been merely to run Brontë along La Jolla’s famous Coast Walk, a path
through wind-bent juniper and sea spray along the spectacular edge of the continent. And I did. Then I found the clinic’s
address in a shell shop phone book and drove by. It was a new black-glass-and-steel monolith housing hundreds of discrete
endeavors, none of which was obvious from the outside. I couldn’t stand it. And I thought my long black dress and sandals
were the sort of thing one would wear while popping into the offices of the place where Kate Van Der Elst had allowed her
face to be, as she described it, cut loose from her skull.

The Rainer Clinic was on the ground floor of the building. The reason for this selection became apparent to me as I stood
in the parking lot. From ambulance-bay doors emerged a young man with a thick bandage over his nose secured by gauze strips
about his head. With him was an older woman who led him toward a tan Mercedes. The young man, really a teenager, seemed groggy.
Then he doubled over to vomit beside the car.

“It’s all right, Ian,” the older woman said. “It’s from the anesthesia. Let’s just get you home, and you can use one of those
suppositories Dr. Rainer gave you to control the nausea. You’re fine, honey.”

“Mo-om!” came the woozy response. “Don’t talk about
suppositories
!”

Mother and son, I deduced. Rhinoplasty. The young man was being groomed for college and the marriage market. A Roman nose
can be such a help.

Skirting the ambulance-bay doors, I entered the building’s lobby from the front and looked around. Typical lobby. Black marble
floor, textured walls, enormous flower arrangement on circular white marble table dead-center. The left rear door of four
bore a brushed brass plate which read
RAINER CLINIC
. Pushing it open, I entered what seemed to be a small art museum.

Modern art. Minimalist in the reception area, but slightly more daring in two anterooms flanking a black marble counter. The
carpet was gunmetal-gray and so thickly voluptuous it was like walking on a cat. An aquarium beneath a painting of black sticks
on a background of white contained no fish, but a school of flat metal ovals that moved through the water in patterns determined
by an almost invisible magnet on a clear plastic wire. The furniture was all black leather brightened by very thin pillows
in shades of red chenille.

“May I help you?” asked an attractive woman behind the counter.

She appeared to be in her late twenties and was flawless. Porcelain skin, gleaming dark hair fashionably cut, pouty lips that
whispered the word “collagen.” Her suit, I noticed, was similar to the one I’d bought for Kate’s fundraiser. Except hers was
all black, the better to emphasize those deep red lips.

“Um, my husband has an appointment with an attorney on the seventh floor, going to be there for hours, I’m afraid, and the
other car’s in the shop, so I dropped him off and was going to go shopping but …” I said, mucking through my purse for the
parking stub, “I forgot to have them validate my parking ticket and I was hoping you’d …”

“No problem,” she said, smiling redly as she leaned to reach for the parking stamp beneath the counter.

Behind her I could see several glassed-in cubicles, each with what looked like a white Naugahyde dentist’s chair. Also visible
were stainless steel sinks and waste receptacles. Trays of surgical instruments. Oxygen tanks against a wall.

A woman in green surgical scrubs exited one of the cubicles, pulling a sterile mask from her face. About five-four, I guessed,
ruddy and wholesome-looking. Cub Scout den-mother type. Wisps of straight, dust-colored hair drifted from the edges of her
sterile green head covering. There was blood on the front of her scrub shirt. Megan Rainer, I thought. The daughter.

“I’ll be meeting Chris for an early lunch at Samson’s,” she told the receptionist. “Think you can hold down the fort for an
hour?”

“Only if Mrs. Austin doesn’t show up,” the receptionist answered, bringing a laugh from the woman in scrubs. “Dr. Rainer,
I don’t know how you keep from killing that woman, she’s such a pain in the—”

At that point the receptionist remembered I was present and briskly stamped my parking ticket. Her look made it clear that
I had no further business there, but I pretended to be searching for my keys as two men in scrubs identical to Megan Rainer’s
opened a cubicle door. On the reclining white chair inside I saw a woman in knit slacks and a blouse that buttoned up the
front. She didn’t move, and her entire head was wrapped in thick gauze bandages except for openings at the nose and mouth.
Even her eyes were covered.

“Bettina will be ready to go in about twenty minutes, Mr. Ashe,” I heard Megan Rainer say in another waiting room around a
corner behind the counter. A door to this area stood slightly ajar to my right.

“She’ll be woozy and will want to sleep as soon as she gets home. She’ll probably sleep straight through until tomorrow morning
once the nausea’s controlled. We’ll send some suppositories for that home with her, as well as antibiotics. Just help her
through those double doors and out into the parking lot. It’s not visible from the street. Nobody will see.”

The name, Bettina Ashe, was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“I’ll just duck out this way,” I told the receptionist, who nodded absently. I had ceased to exist in her mind, which was
convenient. The closed waiting room, meant for those who would transport patients home after surgery, was also artfully decorated.
In blue.

A lush quilt in shades of blue velvet, maroon satin, and gold lamé covered one wall, illuminated by gallery lights. On the
opposite wall was an unusual collection. Plates. An antique blue willow design, a terra-cotta under an exquisite glaze the
color of midnight. A Grecian key design in a mosaic of teal and sapphire bits of glass. A plate made of inlaid wood like a
Chinese puzzle, every other piece a shade of blue.

I exited through the double ambulance doors to the parking lot without attracting further attention, blue circles haunting
my field of vision.

I
was dying to get out of that black dress, but I knew once I got home I wouldn’t drive back over the mountains into San Diego.
And there was much to be done before I could afford the luxury of a swim in my pool. After stopping again to call Rathbone
from a pay phone I began to see the value in having a cell phone.

“Did you get the employee roster and bios for the Rainer Clinic?” I asked.

“On my desk,” he said. “Haven’t had a chance to look at them. Where are you? I can fax them to you right now.”

“I’m in a 7-Eleven parking lot in La Jolla where three Pacific Bell workers in a truck are blasting their radio so loud I
can’t hear you. Kenny Rogers’s ‘Ruby.’ I’m going to buy a cell phone even though I think they’re pretentious.”

“Annie got one and loves it,” he noted. “So where should I fax this file?”

“I’ll just drive downtown and get it, Wes. Have there been any more threats?”

“Not that we know of. I’m on my way to the Rainer Clinic right now. This thing isn’t a high priority with the department as
of last night, Blue. After this morning I’m not going to be able to spend much time on it. Threats are a dime a dozen, but
with the newspaper coverage on the Emerald tape today we’re under some pressure to investigate. Truth is, until we have some
evidence that this guy’s really killing people, he just goes in the kook file. I know you think the deaths of Grossinger and
Ross weren’t natural, but there’s no medical evidence to support that. All we have is one letter and a tape that sounds like
Bugs Bunny. I can’t justify—”

“What do you mean, ‘one letter’?” I interrupted. “What about the one on green paper shoved under Kate Van Der Elst’s office
door? Are you counting that one?”

“It’s in a separate file,” he explained. “Lab test showed the glue used wasn’t the same as the glue in the first Sword letter.
That was Super Glue and the green letter was Elmer’s.”

“So?”

“So they’re not from the same guy. Van Der Elst’s letter was probably just some local, like her husband said.”

“You deduced this from
glue
?” I asked. It seemed silly. Most people keep more than one kind of glue around.

“Blue, there was a shoot-out just this side of Tijuana early this morning and a border agent was seriously injured. Looks
like he’s gonna make it, but he may never walk again. The perp fled into San Diego. We’ve got every available officer working
on it. This letter-threat thing, it’s just a minor felony—Section 422 of the California Penal Code, ‘Threats to Commit Crime
Resulting in Death or Great Bodily Injury.’ A first offender would walk away with a few weeks of community service. We just
don’t have the manpower for a thorough investigation. But you and Roxie are still on the payroll. I agree with you that there’s
more going on here than meets the eye. Do what you can.”