Troubled Waters (32 page)

“Listen,” Ted said when I finished, “there's a guy I consider the best political editor in the Midwest. He's got contacts in Washington. Let's lay this whole thing on him and see if he has any suggestions.”

“I don't know,” I replied. Now that I had Ted's attention, I wasn't sure this was the best way to handle things. I was beginning to feel like one of those people in science fiction movies trying to warn everyone about the pods.

“Where are you?”

“At the hospital.”

“I'll be there in ten minutes.”

He made it in seven. Ron and I were in the hall outside Jan's room. Father Jerry was on another floor, visiting a parishioner who'd suffered a stroke.

Ted strode up to us. “I called my friend on the car phone. He's at the Bayview Yacht Club. I thought we could meet there. It's as good a place as any to talk.”

I picked my bag up and prepared to leave. Ron said, “I'll go with you.”

I wanted to object. I wanted to protect my brother from whatever was going on. But I saw the stubborn set of his jaw, the glint in his eye. He wasn't going to listen. “Okay,” I said. “Let's get Zack and—”

Ron shook his head. “We don't need Zack. I gave him the afternoon off, since I expected to be here with Jan. But since she's sleeping, she doesn't need me.”

“But how will we get you in the van?”
And what if there's something else you need, something I don't know how to do?

“Cass, the van has electric controls. You push a button and I'm inside. No big deal. I'll walk you through it.”

The van Ron called the Quadmobile was parked in the nearest handicap spot. I noted that Zack had affixed the Star Trek bumper sticker next to the one from the Disabled American Vets.

“The keys are in my pouch,” Ron said. I reached into the fanny pack strapped around his waist, took them out and opened the door. I slid into the driver's seat and pulled the lever that opened the rear doors. Then I hit the red button that lowered the platform.

It whirred as it stretched from the back of the van, then slid down to the pavement. I wheeled the chair onto the platform and locked Ron in place with the oversized seat belt, following Ron's instructions. Then I went back and raised the platform.

I gave the keys to Ted. “Since you know where we're going, you might as well drive.” I walked around to the passenger's side and hoisted myself up onto the seat.

The yacht club was located on Maumee Bay, which connected the Maumee River with Lake Erie. As we approached, a breeze blew off the water, carrying the musky smell I associated with Lake Erie. Ron and I had grown up on the other side of the lake, but it was the same smell.

Across the bay stood the gasworks, their flames flickering like St. Elmo's fire in the overcast gray day. It was an odd contrast: the golf green, the yacht harbor, the accoutrements of wealth and privilege, and in the distance a reminder of the industrial base that made it all possible.

We passed green and white signs marked Bayview. “Hey, shouldn't we turn here?” The park was green and inviting; I glimpsed masts and a big white building on the shoreline.

“Rap lives near here,” Ted replied. “I thought we might go to his place and check out a few things.”

“Are you crazy?” I inclined my head toward Ron, strapped into the back of the van. “You want to take Ron and me out to a killer's house just so you can get a story?”

“He's not there,” Ted replied. “Dana said he went to Michigan last night.”

“Ted, turn this damn van around and take us to the yacht club. This is too dangerous.” I pounded on the dashboard like a kid demanding an ice cream cone.

“We'll just drive past his house,” Ted said. “If his car's there, I'll come back. I promise.”

I glanced back at Ron. His face wore a worried look that matched my mood exactly.

“Ted,” Ron said, “turn around.”

“We're almost there,” Ted replied. We turned onto a street lined with white clapboard houses and headed north. “He lives on the Lost Peninsula.”

Ted's conversational tone relaxed me a little, although I was angry at him for not obeying Ron. “That's an odd name,” I said.

“It's called that because the state line between Ohio and Michigan runs through it. So whenever a tornado hits,” Ted said, “each state claims it belongs to the other, so it takes forever for anything to get fixed.”

I was beginning to picture Rap's house as a smuggler's cave, but the houses stayed normal-looking, except that the backyards ended at water's edge and boats were as common as cars. And it was the last house on its street, a good quarter mile from its next door neighbor. But then, I reasoned, Rap was Coyote, and he could blend in when it suited him. Even to the point of having a white picket fence around his lair.

There was no car in the driveway, which reassured me slightly. Maybe Rap really was in Michigan.

Something Harve had said on the phone was trying to break through to me. Something that changed everything.

We passed the last house.

“Ted, there aren't any more houses,” I said, my voice quavering.

“He lives just up the road,” Ted replied.

Wiretaps. Walt Koeppler had wiretapped the church. He'd bugged the sanctuary movement.

Which meant he hadn't needed an inside informer to find out what was going on.

And if he'd had an inside informer already, why would he have made a deal with Dana?

More than that, if he'd had someone inside the movement, he'd have known that Dana was setting him up when she told him when they'd be moving the man they'd known as Joaquín Baltasar.

There was no informer in 1982.

I'd narrowed my suspects to those members of our 1969 group who'd been in northwest Ohio in 1982 on the theory that the same informer who'd betrayed us and killed Kenny was active in the sanctuary movement, but that no longer had to be the case.

Which left the one member of the group I'd never really considered.

And, I realized, stealing a sidelong glance at Ted, that person was also the last American journalist to interview Joaquín Baltasar.

His article in
Newsweek
established Caña Dulce as Joaquín. From there, the sanctuary movement simply did what it would have done for the real Joaquín.

I leaned my head back on the car seat, trying to remain still, trying not to alert Ted to the fact that tumblers were falling into place in my brain.

Kenny's notebook had named Ron as the 1969 informer, a charge I'd rejected out of hand. But looking back, I realized Ted had orchestrated the entire search for the notebook and the translation of Kenny's code.

There was one more house. A neat little white clapboard Cape Cod with bushes and flowers and lawn. Ted pointed and said, “There it is.”

Kenny had trusted his killer. I'd considered Wes in that role, since Kenny had idolized the Golden Boy, but the hemostat had gone a long way toward convincing me that someone other than Wes had left it on the scene. But who else would he have trusted so naively?

Not Rap. If Mercury had appeared under the weeping beech, offering him the magic twanger, Kenny would have run the other way. Tarky, too, would have put the kid on alert.

But Ted, the man who'd given him the steno pad in the first place, was eminently trustable.

After all, hadn't I trusted him? Weren't Ron and I in this situation because Ted was the guy next door?

Cold sweat prickled my skin. I'd been worried about Ted taking Ron and me to Rap's, afraid that he was taking us into Coyote's lair. But the reality was even worse. We were in the hands of a killer, and he'd driven us to Rap's empty house because it was a nice, lonely place far away from help.

Maybe I could keep up a pretense of ignorance. After all, I'd been doing a great imitation of a person who had no idea what was going on. Of course, it was easier to do that when you
were
completely in the dark.

“Well, it looks like Rap isn't here,” I said, trying to sound as if I still believed Ted's cover story. “I guess we can go see your friend at the yacht club now.”

“Get out of the van, Cassie,” Ted said. A hard metal thing prodded me. If it wasn't a gun, it felt enough like one that I opened the door and slid out.

I glanced at Ron. The white plastic medallion was around his neck. I hoped he'd been able to push it. But his hand was moving toward it with agonizing slowness. Could he reach it before Ted saw what he was—

Ted reached in through the rear doors of the van, which he'd opened from the driver's seat. “You won't be needing this,” he said. He pulled a Swiss army knife out of his pants pocket. I caught a glimpse of metal in his waistband. He did have a gun.

He opened the knife and used the largest blade to cut the cord on the medallion. Then he slipped the medallion into the pocket along with the knife.

Our best hope of rescue had been cut off.

Ron's limp hand hung from the edge of his chair like an empty glove. He seemed deliberately to drop it. I didn't know what was going on, but I felt it was vital not to draw Ted's attention to it. I fixed my eyes on Ted's bland face and said, “Why?”

“The oldest and stupidest reason in the world,” he replied. “I got caught in a drug bust in Texas when I was down visiting my cousins. Do you know what the penalties were for selling marijuana down there in those days?”

“Extremely high, I suppose. And that justified your selling out to the feds?”

I willed myself to keep my eyes away from Ron. But it was hard to look at the plain, honest face of the man who'd handed poison to a sixteen-year-old and bludgeoned Jan with a baseball bat. Forget about the sellouts; this man had killed.

And was going to kill us. There was a look of what might have been regret in his eyes, but it was not tempered by doubt. He might shed a tear or two over Ron and me, but he was going to eliminate us just as soon as possible.

And he was going to do it at Rap's house so that the blame would fall on him. With Rap's drug history and Dana's story about extra refugees and the investigation into bogus airplane parts, a couple of murders could go on Rap's account without much trouble. The cops would be only too happy to pin our deaths on him.

“They told me nobody would get hurt,” Ted said. “And they were right. But they were upset that the charges were dropped, even though that wasn't my fault, and they got really pissed when Kenny started snooping around. They said if my cover was blown, the deal was off and I'd go to jail.”

“But you'd convinced Kenny that Ron was the informer.”

The fact that my brother said nothing, even though this was the first time he was hearing this, told me he didn't want to call attention to himself. I kept my eyes locked with Ted's. It was vital to keep him talking.

“How long do you think that would have lasted?” he asked. “The best I could hope for was to lull Kenny into trusting me long enough to get close to him.”

“How could you?”

“I was twenty-one years old, Cass. My whole life was ahead of me. You'd have done the same thing.”

I didn't state the obvious, that Kenny Gebhardt had had his whole life ahead of him, too. As to whether or not I'd have done the same thing, I wanted to believe I wouldn't have sold out my friends. But I hadn't been facing thirty years behind bars for using a drug the rest of my generation considered less harmful than the two-martini lunch.

“See, my real value to them was that I was studying journalism. Infiltrating the migrant union was just a trial run. What they really wanted was a tame reporter.” He leaned against the van as if we were all going to step into the backyard and go for a sail, as if there was no gun in his waistband.

“So your whole career has been a lie. You were really a plant for the CIA.” I kept my eyes fixed on Ted's face, willing him to keep his attention on me.

“Cass, whole years went by and I wouldn't hear from them. Not a word. And then they sent me to Nicaragua, to interview Joaquín Baltasar.” He sighed and shook his head. “It was a piss-poor masquerade. I knew right away it wasn't Joaquín, but I did what they wanted. I wrote the article and praised Joaquín's bravery and took pictures. And then I forgot the whole thing. I didn't know what it was about, and I didn't want to know.”

Dana had said the same thing about Rap's activities. But there was a high price to be paid for some kinds of ignorance.

“Then all hell broke loose up here,” Ted said. “The papers were full of Joaquín's escape and how the sanctuary movement helped him. Only I knew the guy wasn't really Joaquín. I suspected the CIA had used me to get Caña Dulce into the States, but I didn't ask any questions. I was just grateful that Jan split. If she'd been caught and tried back in '82, all the shit would have come out.”

“So when she decided to come back and face the music, you slugged her with a baseball bat.”

“If the goddamn priest hadn't knocked at the door, I'd have finished the job.”

“Because by that time, you had Kenny and Dale Krepke on your conscience.”

“No, I don't blame myself for Krepke.” Ted shook his head. “The stupid fuck shouldn't have been there in the first place. And I didn't shoot him, Caña Dulce did. If the CIA wanted to protect him after that, so be it.”

He was good at rationalizing his own guilt. Better than I, in fact. I'd felt worse over Kenny's death all these years than Ted had, and his was the hand that held the poison.

A sound remarkably like a shot rang out. I turned toward it, jerking my head without thinking. A wetness sprayed my arms and chest. I jumped, then looked down. Red blotches. Red and yellow and—

I screamed.

Ted lay on the ground, crumpled like a playing card. His head was—

His head was gone. I screamed again, raising shaking hands to my face and then screaming even louder when I realized they, too, were bloodstained. I jumped back, stumbling over tufts of grass.