Perfect killer

CHAPTER 55

Jasmine stood with her back to me, shoulders slumped, staring down at the pink sheet of paper. The fading sound of Quincy's car left us holding on to a brittle silence filled with ancient hurt and modern pain. I wanted to reach out, but Quincy's insults made me second-guess my own motives.

Then, from outside, a mockingbird broke the silence nd the tainted mood. Jasmine leaned down and picked up the slip of paper.

"It's from Jay Shanker," Jasmine said as she stood up, her back still to me. "Talmadge's lawyer."

"I remember."

She squared her shoulders and turned to me. "He wants to meet at his office this morning."

Her voice was all business and her gaze had a distance I had not seen before. Quincy had played the enforcer better than he knew.

"He left a number. Said we had to call at precisely eleven A.M." She paused, and when she spoke again, warmth filtered into her words. "This is weird. The note says under no circumstances should I call his office.

"Strange man." Jasmine shook her head and went into the front room. And why didn't he call my cell?"

I took the occasion to pull an unadorned, navy blue polo shirt from my bag, along with a fresh pair of cargo shorts.

"Damnation," she mumbled. With my back to the door, I tucked the shirt in and zipped up the shorts. "My cell battery's dead."

I turned as she walked back in. She had pulled on a pair of jeans under the Valley State T-shirt.

"Let me check mine." I went over and excavated the plastic hospital bag from beneath a pile of green surgical scrubs on the floor. I rummaged my phone from the bag and pressed the power button.

"Nada." I held it up and looked at her. Anxiety welled up then as I thought of Camilla and wondered if Flowers had called back. "My charger's in my bag."

Jasmine shook her head. "No good. Mom's authenticity, remember? No electricity, no phone."

"Oh, terrific."

We listened to the mockingbird for a moment before Jasmine spoke. "I don't know about you, but I can't take much more of this morning without some coffee. You?"

"Yeah. Me."

"Okay, but like everything else here, you're gonna have to work for it." She tossed me a Mona Lisa smile, then headed into the front room. I followed her, jamming my wallet and the rest of my stuff in my cargo shorts pockets. I found her fiddling around with a black cast-iron stove in the corner.

"There should be some dry wood on the front porch."

I went out front and pulled several split pieces of pine from the pile. I grabbed the smallest pieces I could find and made sure a couple of them had nice globs of hardened resin. Pine made for a dirty flame that fouled flues, but it would give us a quick, hot fire for coffee. I pried off a chunk of dried resin the size of a marble and crushed it under my heel. I scraped up the coarse granules, grabbed a fistful of pine twigs for tinder, and carried them in along with the wood.

When I came back in, Jasmine had filled a battered, old steel coffeepot with bottled water. A Starbucks bag sat on the adjacent counter next to a hand-cranked coffee grinder.

"Sure beats muddy creek water and ground-up chicory," I said as I made my way over to the stove and looked it over. I had never lit a fire in one of these.

"In there." Jasmine pointed. "Lift the cover and put the wood in.

"Mama was a coffee snob. It's one of the things I picked up from her." Jasmine placed a conical paper filter in a funnel holder and put it in a thermos. Then I pulled off a heavy cast-iron disk from the top of the stove and bent over the opening to build a fire. I arranged the resin granules over a small bed of pine twigs, then carefully placed the larger pieces.

"Black men really resent successful black women," Jasmine said evenly as I bent over my task. I resisted looking at her. "They come up with every hang-up imaginable. I think Uncle Quincy knows he's off base, but he's too old to shake it off."

I straightened up to grab a large wooden match from a box next to the stove. I carefully avoided looking at her. I did not want her to stop talking.

"My grandmother really liked you," she said as I scratched the match head on the inside of the stove and held my breath against the fumes. "But she was just a woman, and my grandfather and Uncle Quincy hustled Mama away."

"I'll never forget," I said as I touched the match flame to the resin powder. It caught immediately. I stood up and blew out the match.

"Mama told me she always wanted to see you marching through the door to get her."

"Damn." I swallowed hard against the old painful feelings and took a deep breath."I thought maybe she felt the same way as Quincy and your dad." I shook my head slowly, "I had no idea what to do. Not a clue."

Jasmine smiled and turned her attention to the coffee.

The pine resin, knots, and wood blazed high and hot. I covered the hole in the stove with the black cast-iron disk and Jasmine put the coffeepot on top of it.

"Something to eat?" Jasmine said as she bent over and opened a crude, unpainted cupboard door. She stood up with a box filled with an assortment of foil-wrapped bars: Balance, Power, breakfast, granola. She set the box on a table made of wide pine planks ornamented by decades of use.

"Most everything's past its expiration." She pulled out a Balance bar and pushed the box over toward me. "But I don't think this stuff ever goes bad."

Jasmine unwrapped her bar and took a bite. "Probably not lethal."

I pawed through the box, listening to the coffee water start to tick. I pulled out a bar, unwrapped it.

She walked over to her pile of bags and came back with a legal-size manila folder I recognized as part of Lashonna's files we had retrieved the night before. A CD in a thin plastic jewel case fell out of the bottom of the folder. It landed on a corner and split apart, sending the top of the jewel box and the bottom in different directions and the CD rolling off in a third.

"Damnation!" She dropped the folder and stretched out to pluck the CD off the floor while it was still rolling. "Sometimes I am such a klutz." I helped her gather the jewel box remains, then went to get my laptop.*****

The mixed woodlot of oak and pine shed the previous night's rain with every breeze, showering Jael St. Clair as she made a broad circle through the brush. She wanted a clear shot to the path between the shack's front door and the red Mercedes.

Jael quickly found the correct angle, then walked a line back from the shack. She found the spot, but when she looked back, banks of fog drifted in and out, totally obscuring the shack as often as not. She moved closer and found a small cove surrounded by pine saplings. She pulled out her laser range finder and speced the distance at thirty-six yards. Not even a proper sniper shot. No matter. Business was business. She adjusted the Leupold for the distance. Then she jammed the aluminum walking staff into the rain-soft dirt. It sank in deep and steady.

Picking up the rifle, she knelt beside the walking pole, grabbed it with her left hand. Then she rested the M21 on that hand, holding it tight against the pole with her thumb. Then she placed her cheek against the M21 and looked through the Leupold, down at the path Stone and the lawyer would eventually walk when they went to the Mercedes. Then Jael St. Clair sat back on her haunches and waited. She craved a cigarette but knew the smoke could give her away.

Jasmine and I sat at the table and drank coffee, silently scanning record after record off Shanker's CD as I scrolled them down my laptop screen.

"I can't believe this," I said.

"You've said that a hundred times. Maybe more."

The CD contained thousands of images of medical records, administrative documents, experimental protocols, maps, diagrams, photos. The first document on the CD was a memo on Jay Shanker's letterhead that explained that all of the documents had been transferred from microfilm to the CD. The microfilm had been salvaged decades before from the vandalized ruins of a once-secret Army medical facility that had operated on the site of a POW camp built near Belzoni. The memo explained that the records had been salvaged by his client Darryl Talmadge, a hunting guide who had scheduled a duck hunt in a nearby slough. The client had been a no-show and Talmadge had passed a morning digging around in the ruins. Beneath a pile of termite-infested beams and flooring, Talmadge had found a safe that had sunk under its own weight through the decaying floor.

Talmadge concealed his find and returned with an oxyacetylene torch, opened the old, rusty safe, and found that leaking water had destroyed most of the contents. He did recover a number of watertight microfilm canisters, which he tossed in his garage, vowing to read them one day.

The microfilm sat untouched in Talmadge's garage for seventeen years.

In his only private conversation with Talmadge before the military took over, Shanker learned of the microfilm and his client's hunch it might be useful.

Jasmine leaned on my shoulder to better read the laptop's screen as we scanned the documents to get an overview of what we had.

"This Frank Harper starts out like a saint and turns into a monster," Jasmine said.

I shook my head. "I think he's the same person. But he got sucked in by his own insatiable curiosity about what makes us human, good, bad… who we are. He was grappling with the big question with some big consequences. I think its clear, early on, he wanted to explore this Phineas Gage thing firsthand." I paused. "I want to go back when I have time and read that essay he wrote about ethics, free will, crime, and punishment. It's pretty deep."

"So he starts out with a charge of pure scientific curiosity, then someone in Washington gets wind of things and dumps a ton of money on him," Jasmine said. "You think that's what made him cross the line? Moved him from fixing up people with head wounds and studying them into creating head wounds to make better warriors? Then the chemicals?"

"Clearly," I agreed.

"It doesn't hurt the rationalization process when your own government says it needs your research."

"Big factor. Really big."

The last document on the CD was a memo on Jay Shanker's letterhead summarizing a second CD dealing exclusively with Clark Braxton. That CD and the location of the original supporting documentation for all the information on both CDs would be made available once two conditions were met: if Vanessa Thompson joined in Talmadge's defense and brought me on board.

"Shanker and Mom agreed you're the only expert who could credibly unravel the data in the files."

"I don't understand why Shanker didn't go to the authorities with it," I said.

"He did."

"He did what?"

"He took it to the judge," Jasmine said. "And within hours, the suits showed up at his door and the threats began. That's when he came to Mama. She found it hard to swallow until the next day when Shanker's office and his house and a mini-storage unit, his RV, and even his duck blind had been ransacked."

"How come they didn't find the microfilm?"

"My understanding is, he'd been freaked out by what he had read and had hidden everything before he went to the judge."

"And we don't know where."

As Jasmine opened her mouth to reply, we heard distant sounds of tires on gravel.

"Quincy coming back?" I asked.

Jasmine frowned. "Not likely."

"Who?"

She shook her head. I rushed to the bedroom then and grabbed my Ruger. Jasmine pulled hers from her purse and clipped the holster to her waistband.

"Come on!" She said, heading for the back door. She unbolted it and lunged into a dense wall of green vines, weeds, and saplings. I followed her in my bare feet.