Perfect killer

CHAPTER 35

Greenwood loomed quickly ahead, and according to the map I had printed off the Internet, Jasmine's office was on Main Street, straight ahead at the looming cloverleaf. But Rex's warning about the dangerous neighborhood made me worry about parking there because stealing my laptop-which had my life on it-would be child's play.

So I took the ramp for west 82 instead and followed it over the steep viaduct spanning the mainline railroad tracks. I dialed Jasmine's cell phone as I came down to a red light where the highway made its way through a congested strip area lined with motels, fast-food restaurants, muffler shops, and other outskirts establishments.

Again she didn't answer, so I left another voice mail. The light turned green and I pressed on. The local newspaper, the Greenwood Commonwealth, passed by on the left and, next to it, the EZ-Sleep Suites.

I turned toward the EZ-Sleep and drove past a small brick building whose sign identified it as a cancer treatment outpatient clinic. The building was surrounded by people scattered in ones and twos smoking cigarettes.

The motel lobby was alive with the faint spicy fragrances of ginger, turmeric, cumin, and lime, which made my mouth water and reminded me it was after noon and I had eaten nothing in the past eighteen hours of travel other than Lilliputian bags of peanuts and pretzels. A middle-aged Indian man checked me in and directed me around the corner to my room.

As I parked near the stairs and got out, I noted a line of white panel vans with ladders on the roof and signs on the side marking them with the name of a large national contractor that laid and installed fiber-optic cables. Down at the far end of the building, people in orange shirts gathered in conversation, obviously the contractor's people here on extended assignment.

I lugged my laptop bag and duffel up to my room on the second floor and dumped them on the nearest bed, cleared off a table for my computer, connected it to the phone's data port, and turned it on. I entered the BIOS-level password, then plugged in a USB flash drive that governed the automatic encryption and decryption of everything on the hard drive. Without the flash drive plugged in, the hard drive was impenetrable to anyone save those with access to a supercomputer and advanced code-breaking software.

With this done, I connected to the internet and began downloading all my spam and e-mail. Next, I knelt beneath the desk, unscrewed the plastic faceplate from the electrical outlet, and replaced it with an invention of my own: a sturdy metal faceplate with an attachment point for a hefty security cable, which I secured to my laptop and set the combination. To steal my laptop, a thief would have to rip the entire electrical outlet junction box from the wall. Then I plugged in the laptop's AC power supply.

E-mail was still downloading by the time I finished settling in, so I stood in the door of my room for a moment looking out at the field behind the hotel. The heat of the day blushed my cheeks like staring into an open oven. Over to my left, next to the stairs, big red wasps with plump bellies filled with sting and pain hovered near a cranny under the eaves. Experience told me if I risked a closer look, I'd find a big paper nest filled with fat white larvae waiting to be more red wasps. I remembered long ago as a child using the garden hose nozzle at full blast to knock the nests off from under the eaves of our house and running like hell after about a dozen blasts until the nest finally fell and I could toss some gasoline on it to finish the job.

The vivid, painful memories of being stung replayed themselves now with an amazingly clear image of how a sting grew into perfectly round red welt with a little hole surrounded by white skin at the very center. With this memory vivid in mind, I closed the door and stood there uncertainly. I wanted something to eat, I wanted to talk to Jasmine. I didn't want to look at my e-mail, but I did, all 307 new messages.

My head spun bright and dizzy with travel fatigue and sleep deprivation. I didn't want to deal with the spam, so I went into the cramped little bathroom, stripped, and took a shower instead. Afterward, I put on the least-wrinkled blue, oxford-cloth, button-down shirt, tucked it into a clean pair of khakis, and sat down to deal with the e-mail vomit fouling my in-box.

Not needing to add a full cup size to my breasts and being comfortable with the size of my penis, I deleted large stretches of spam, including those from Tiffany, Brianna, and others who promised me a good time and had attached explicit photos. I quickly winnowed things dawn to about a dozen that really mattered, then focused on two from Jeff Flowers.

Flowers's first e-mail told me Camilla had not changed significantly. He had enclosed the links and account access information for me to access EEG scans on one of Pacific Hills' Web servers. In the second e-mail, sent about four hours later, he said her EEGs had taken a turn toward the bizarre, which had prompted them to conduct a PET scan. He enclosed another set of links for those files.

I leaned back in the chair and let out my breath in a loud, heavy rush. Again guilt wrestled with feelings of relief. I did not want to look at the EEGs and scans. I really wanted to let Camilla's condition take its course without any further intervention. But my heart told me that if she simply slipped away without me doing all I could, I'd never get rid of the guilt. Regrets were always for the living.

So I launched Firefox, double-clicked on the links Flowers had sent, and logged in to the server using the user name and password he had sent. The EEG scans would download okay on this connection in half an hour or so, but the PET scan files were huge, multigigabyte monsters. I realized I needed to make contact with someone at the Greenwood Hospital who would allow me to use their connection.

I stood up, looked at my watch, and found the time creeping up on 1:00 P.M. Jasmine's failure to return my calls nagged at me, but I decided I had left enough voice mails. I pulled out the small notebook I always carried with me and scribbled in it the necessary information from Flowers's e-mails and shut down my laptop.

Next, I pulled two small Targus motion detectors from my laptop bag and locked one to the laptop and the other to the security cable where it attached to the wall. Then I pulled out a laminated Day-Glo orange placard in English and Spanish warning people not to touch or the alarms would go off. I armed the laptop's motion alarms, made sure their blinking red LEDs were immediately visible to anyone who might enter, and left a light on so the warning note was clearly visible.