At all costs

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The Orion News Database was available to everyone who could afford the subscription fee, which was easily high enough to keep the riffraff from jamming the server. Such concerns were not a problem, of course, for the FBI, and once inside the database, Irene could locate every article written on any subject within the last fifty years, as compiled from over a thousand daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals.

Somewhere, buried among all those words, she figured there had to be an item or two about the Grant Plant’s past. Never much of a computer whiz, she was walking blind here, having always depended on staffers to take care of this kind of research. She learned right off the bat that success and failure lay in the selection of well-defined search parameters. Underestimating the scope and power of the database, she tried Newark+Arkansas in her first attempt and was greeted with an invitation to scroll through 627,838 items.

Yikes!

Her second attempt cut the number of hits in half by setting date parameters between 1980 and the present.

“Getting closer,” she told herself. She leaned back in the impossibly hard desk chair. There had to be a way to get a handle on this. Problem was, the 1983 explosion and its aftermath had dominated every news outlet for so long that those were the only references she could find. She needed to filter out that information somehow.

She concentrated her next search on a year-by-year examination of articles up to, but excluding, the date of the explosion, and even then, she was pulling up more than a hundred articles at a time, mostly from hunting and recreation magazines.

Finally, she surrendered to the inevitable. “Okay, Irene,” she’d grumbled, about forty-five minutes into the exercise. “Why don’t you ask it what you’re really looking for?”

She entered, “Newark+Arkansas+Frankel/1-1-80 thru 8-21-83.”

In her heart, she’d hoped the screen would flash an error message. Instead, she got seventeen hits, sixteen of which dealt with the same story: the apparent murder/suicide of an Army general named Dallas Albemarle and his wife, up in suburban Virginia. She decided to go back to those later and concentrated instead on the seventeenth hit, from a periodical called The Freedom Report: A Journal Dedicated to Preserving Democracy. The article quoted highly placed, unnamed sources in reporting that Special Agent Peter Frankel was actively investigating a plot to sell chemical weapons out of a “secret location” in Newark, Arkansas. The article went on to say that the investigation had been fruitful but that no arrests had been made, and from there, launched into a blathering tirade about the looming threat posed by Third World powers.

“Well, there’s his hard evidence,” Irene told herself. Frankly, she’d been hoping for something more concrete.

After a giant yawn, and yet another battle with the chair over control of her spine, she turned her attention to the list of suicide stories. As she read through them, they rang a distant bell. Seems that the kindly General Albemarle was the man responsible for overseeing the shutdown of the Ulysses S. Grant Army Ammunition Plant, back in 1964.

That’s why the name rings a bell. He’s the guy the EPA wanted to crucify, back when the hazardous waste site was first discovered.

Inexplicably, the general had shot his wife to death in the bedroom of their home in Clifton, Virginia, and had then driven all the way out to Manassas Battlefield Park, to blow his own brains out at the base of a statue paying tribute to Stonewall Jackson. Each of the articles quoted the same source-Special Agent Peter Frankel of the FBI-in reporting that General Albemarle had been distraught over the recent death of his daughter and by his likely implication in the then-developing chemical weapons scandal in Newark. According to Frankel, the general had made his intentions clear in a suicide note found in the couple’s bedroom.

“First in line with a quote even then, eh, Peter?” Irene mumbled, clicking on through the stories. The coincidence of the note was not lost on her.

Odd, she thought. Some guy nobody knows blows his brains out, and the story is picked up all over the country. Yet an investigation into illegal weapons sales pops up only once. What a telling tribute to the credibility given The Freedom Report by its journalistic brethren. Probably devoted the rest of the issue to flying saucers and Elvis sightings.

On a whim, she compared the dates on the weapons article to the one on the dead general. The story from The Freedom Report ran just three weeks before the general did the big nasty.

How about that?

Truth be told, Irene believed in mere coincidence. They happened all the time-sometimes so wild they defied logic. As a matter of fact, in a very real sense, most violent crime against innocent people boiled down to just that: a tragic coincidence for the victims involved.

She understood better than most, then, that the presence of two people in the same place at the same time didn’t necessarily reflect intent on anyone’s part. There comes a point, though, when coincidences stack up so high that it takes more effort to justify their randomness than to accept them as something more complicated. This business with Frankel was rapidly approaching that point.

It was time to stop being an investigator for a little while and become a casual observer. If she were to accept only Donovan’s side, she could place Frankel with at least one other dead party, and she could place him at the Little Rock field office with the opportunity to pull a fast one with his investigatory prerogative; all within the time frame when weapons could have been sold out of his backyard. Wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened, after all. Sadly, it wasn’t uncommon at all for a cop to get involved with the very crime he’s investigating.

Hmm…

She clicked back to the beginning and initiated another search, this one running permutations of dates, places, and names, but all with the common denominator of “chemical+weapons.” After half a dozen tries, the list became manageable, and within an hour, she’d found what she was looking for.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said. The coincidences just went over the top.

When the phone rang a minute later, she didn’t even jump. It was nearly six o’clock, and she’d been waiting for the switchboard to get around to their promised five forty-five wake-up call.

“I’m up, thank you,” she said as she lifted the receiver from the desk.

“Irene?” Hearing her name stopped her from hanging up.

“Yeah?”

“Hi. This is George Sparks,” the voice said. “I just got a call from the county lockup. Carolyn Donovan hanged herself in her cell.”

The matron peeked in through the observation window and went right to work. As she worked her master key with one hand, she pushed the transmit button on her portable radio with the other. “Unit Four to Central, we got a swinger in Isolation Two.” Her voice sounded hurried but not panicked.

“Fresh or stale?” a voice came back.

“Still swingin’! Get Medical down here quick!”

The prisoner’s face was purple from the increased pressure in her head, and her hands and feet were still twitching. The matron knew from her rookie training five years ago that as long as the victim’s neck wasn’t broken, and she hadn’t burst something in her brain, this one was salvageable. Kind of a waste, though. Hardly seemed worth the effort to save somebody, just so the government could later issue her a termination slip.

Working alone-although she could hear the pounding of running feet in the hallway-the matron locked her arms around Carolyn’s waist and lifted, hoping to take some of the strain off her neck. No matter how high she lifted the body, though, its torso flopped over to take up the slack. Burying her face in the victim’s clothes like this made the matron’s skin crawl. If the approaching footsteps hadn’t been so close, she might have let her sway for a while longer.

The duty paramedic arrived first, a college student named Dan. Rather than burst in, he strolled. “Hi, Gladys. Whoa!” he exclaimed with a wince, recoiling just a bit. “Ain’t she pretty?”

Gladys was too busy to laugh. “Shut your mouth, Mr. Stand-Up,” she snapped. “Give me a hand here.”

“Always the boss,” Dan sang out cheerily. Precious few people were permitted to carry knives in the cellblock, and he was one of them, in anticipation of this very event. Then again, he never went down there unless someone was either dead or dying, and even then he’d often wait until all the inmates were locked down. He preferred to work in a controlled situation.

He removed his Leatherman from its holster on his belt, fished for the knife blade, then reached high to saw through the nylon. When he was done, both prisoner and matron fell in a heap on the floor. “You okay, Gladys?” he asked, suppressing a grin.

“No, I’m not okay. Get this bitch off of me!”

Two more staff members arrived at the door, one of them wheeling a crash cart, loaded with all the equipment necessary to perform CPR.

Dan knelt next to his patient and paused a moment to don latex gloves. With the tension of the rope removed, her color looked nearly normal, other than some bruising around the area of the rope burn. He pressed two fingers deeply into the flesh of her neck, just slightly off midline, and arched his eyebrows high.

“Hey, we got a live one,” he announced. “Pulse is a little thready, but it’s there. Time to go to work, people. Anybody called Fire and Rescue yet?”

“On their way,” someone said.

Over the course of the next thirty seconds, Dan found nothing but good news. His stethoscope found good lung sounds on both sides, as well as a patent airway. One of the most critical complications of what the incident report would euphemistically call a near-hanging was the fracture of the larynx, the voice box. Vascular as hell, a fractured larynx would bleed like a son of a bitch and swell up to the size of a grapefruit, cutting off the flow of air through the patient’s windpipe. That would have required him to do an emergency tracheostomy, a procedure he hadn’t tried in over a year. As it was, the rope seemed to have avoided the critical structures of the throat entirely.

Dan plucked a penlight from his breast pocket and flashed the beam first into one eye and then into the other. The pupils performed as they were supposed to, contracting uniformly to the beam of light.

“I’ve got normal breath and lung sounds and perfect pupils,” he announced to the still-gathering crowd. None of them knew the exact significance of his words, but the banter helped him concentrate. “Quite an audience,” he observed lightly.

There wasn’t much to do, actually. The patient was stable; breathing on her own and clearly perfusing oxygen. In the world of the road doctor, that was called a save. To kill some time, he started an IV of dextrose and water, flowing at just a high enough rate to keep the patient’s veins open, in case something catastrophic happened and she decided to crash. With the line in place, they could administer virtually any drug they wanted to.

“Hey, Doc!” someone called.

Dan looked up. He loved it when they called him Doc. “Yeah?”

“I got somebody from the FBI on the phone. Wants to know if this one’s gonna get a bed or a coffin.”

Dan laughed. “Tell ’em that Dan Schearer’s on duty. I only do beds.”

Barely 6:00 A.M., and the streets of Little Rock were still deserted. That didn’t stop Irene from using the bubble light and siren, though. Paul sat planted in the front seat next to her, looking like he still hadn’t come to grips with morning. Irene had given him only five minutes to pull himself together and meet her in the lobby.

They’d got to within three blocks of the jail when George Sparks called on Irene’s cell to inform her that Carolyn was still alive and en route to St. Luke’s Hospital. The turn Irene executed in the middle of the street would leave marks on the pavement for years to come.

For his part, Paul pulled his seat belt tight. Between being ejected out of a good night’s sleep, Irene’s driving, and the absurd tale she relayed from the night before, he’d have sold his soul for a stiff drink.

“Say that again slowly,” Paul said, his tone dripping disbelief.

Irene smiled and nodded her head. “Yeah, you heard it right. I think this whole mess was started by Frankel and that he’s still running it.”

Paul gave a low whistle. “Jeeze, Irene, if I ever piss you off, will you at least give me a fair warning?”

She laughed. “This isn’t a grudge,” she insisted. “I’m telling you, it’s a solid case.”

“Referred to you by none other than Jake Donovan,” Paul finished. “At least there’s no conflict of interest.”

She changed lanes. “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think we have an indictment here, but I’m telling you the pieces fit.” She ran through the coincidences of the notes and the locations. “And let’s not forget the munitions George Sparks was tracking down in the desert. But here’s the real kicker. You ready?”

“Holding my breath. You do see that parked car up there, don’t you?”

Actually, she hadn’t. She swerved violently to the left, then back into her own lane, siren and horn screaming the whole time.

“Sorry about that,” she said sheepishly. “Woke you up, though, didn’t it?”

He answered with a look.

“Okay,” she went on. “Here’s the kicker. Let’s assume that the arms were stolen and sold in the early eighties.”

“By our boss.”

She waved him off. His defeatist attitude really grated on her sometimes. “Doesn’t matter. Not for now, anyway. Just assume they’re being stolen and sold.”

“Got it. Stolen. Sold.”

“Bite me, Boersky,” she growled. “Well, what do you know? Up until then, nary an article was published on chemical warfare incidents anywhere in the world. Then, starting in early ‘84, we got incidents popping up all over the world. Iran, Iraq, Libya, even Tokyo, for crying out loud!”

Paul looked at her disapprovingly. “And because people are getting gassed, you think Frankel did it? I’m afraid I don’t see the nexus.”

She tried again. She pointed out that no one incident was enough to draw a conclusion, yet taken together, as a tapestry of events, it all started to make sense. Frankel was the common denominator. He was in the article about General Albemarle, he was involved in the right-wing rag’s prophetic allegations about Newark, and he friggin’ ran the investigation after the explosion. Then, there was the business of the notes and the inherent flimsiness of the case itself.

“Tell me this,” Irene challenged. “Why didn’t Frankel keep digging? Why doesn’t the file have interviews with friends and coworkers and teachers?”

“It does,” Paul scoffed. “The file is full of them. I’ve read them.”

She shook her head emphatically. “Uh-uh. No, you haven’t. Look again. What are those interviews really about? The investigators back then were trying to catch the Donovans; they weren’t trying to build a case against them.”

“What’s the difference?”

“There’s a huge difference! You look through those files again, and you’ll see it. Frankel and company only asked questions about where the Donovans might have run to. Nothing about whether they might have done it. No one ever noticed the sloppy work, because everyone thought they already knew the answer. Frankel was going to rest his whole case on the note and their escape.”

Paul let the words settle into his brain while she negotiated a treacherous series of turns through the center city. “And that other guy? Tony Bernard? He was just a bonus kill?”

“No. At least not at first. I think he was the original patsy. But when the Donovans survived, the bad guys had to regroup in a hurry. That meant killing Bernard.”

“And leaving a note.”

She nodded. “Yes. And leaving a note. Chances are, there was a whole other note already drafted, to frame Bernard. How big a deal could it be to rewrite it?”

“You’re crazy, Irene.”