Second Horseman Out of Eden

1

Santa Claus was long overdue, and if I didn't hear sleigh bells in another hour I was going to start calling the hospitals.

Santa couldn't be drunk, because my brother no longer drank-not since he'd emerged from the drug-induced madness that had transmogrified him into a de facto, reluctant religious guru to millions, and the subsequent events that had caused the deaths of thousands of people and almost killed the two of us. Garth kept a well-stocked bar in his apartment for drinking friends and his imbibing sibling, but at the moment he was out of Scotch-the imbibing sibling's drink of choice. Consequently, I went up a flight to my own spacious apartment on the fourth floor of the renovated brownstone on West Fifty-sixth Street that we'd recently purchased, and which now served as our respective homes as well as the richly appointed offices of the recently founded investigative firm of Frederickson and Frederickson, Incorporated. As founder and senior partner I had, of course, insisted that my name be listed first.

I didn't really want a drink and could think of no reason why Garth would call my apartment when he was supposed to meet me in his own. But I poured myself a drink anyway and checked my answering machine; there were messages from three former colleagues at the university who had called to wish me a Merry Christmas and tell me how much I was missed in the halls of academe. Nice. I put on a heavy cardigan, slid open the glass door at one end of my living room, and went out onto my frozen rooftop patio and garden to look down into the street for some sign of jolly old Garth, whom I desperately wanted to see stay jolly. The possibility that something could happen to conjure up my brother's sleeping demons was a constant haunt.

It was four days before Christmas, not quite two years since my brother had emerged from his long illness and subsequently burned all his professional, and most of his personal, bridges behind him. Not that there had been that many bridges left standing for either of us to raze, but I'd at least had my somewhat problematic career as a private investigator to which I could return.

Almost ten years before we had become involved with one of your mad scientist types, definitely not of any garden variety. Dr. Siegmund Loge had had two abiding obsessions: the music of Richard Wagner, specifically the Ring, and saving humankind from what he was convinced was its impending self-imposed extinction. All he'd needed to indulge his passion for Wagner was a good sound system, but it had turned out that his second obsession required the cooperation, however obtained, of Garth and me, of all people. Lucky us. Siegmund Loge had come within a Frederickson brother or two of loosing upon the world a plague that could have conceivably altered the makeup of every living thing on the planet, and forever changed, perhaps canceled, human history. Finding a way to stop him had nearly cost us first our sanity, and then our lives. And, as far as I was concerned, Garth's sanity was still a tenuous thing, to be jealously guarded and tenderly nurtured.

It was a situation for which, perhaps, I had myself to blame, and I would probably never know if certain key decisions I had made concerning my brother's health had been the correct ones.

When Garth had gone into a coma induced by a mysterious substance called nitrophenylpentadienal, I had intentionally, by using Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle, endeavored to reach into his deep mind to stir nightmare memories of Siegmund Loge and his Valhalla Project that had nearly swallowed up the two of us. The musical ploy had gotten Garth out of bed, all right, but it had also gotten me, not to mention the governments of the United States and Russia, and a few million people around the world, considerably more than I'd bargained for.

As a result of my well-meaning ministrations, Garth had emerged from his coma with what might modestly be described as an altered consciousness. He was a gaping emotional wound, an almost total empath who literally suffered with all the wronged, helpless, and injured of the world, while at the same time appearing as a kind of stony automaton to people-including me-who were more or less able to keep on trucking through the big and little travails of everyday life.

Garth had been. . well, scary.

He'd come out of that more or less on his own, when the effects of the nitrophenylpentadienal poisoning had finally worn off. Or I'd thought-hoped-he'd come out of it. In fact, I now accepted the fact that, in some subtle and other not-so-subtle ways, he had been changed forever. Which didn't mean that he couldn't act like his old self, sometimes for prolonged periods of time, and that was how he had been for nearly two years. It was this sense of well-being that I felt, for no discernible reason aside from the fact that Garth was late, was somehow hanging in the balance this night, and I couldn't shake a suffocating sense of foreboding. As far as I was concerned, there could be no more sojourns into harm's way for the Frederickson brothers. It was not myself that I was worried about, but Garth. I did not want to lose my brother again, for if I did I feared I would lose him forever into some terrible sinkhole of the soul.

Jingle bells, indeed. Where was he?

The poison had worn off, Garth had resigned from the NYPD, from which he'd been on an extended leave of absence. Eventually he had become my partner, and we had formed a corporation.

Well.

Much to our collective amazement, virtually overnight we became the "hot" investigative firm, not only in New York City but in Washington-to which we now commuted by shuttle three or four times a month to oversee a small satellite office and team of staff investigators we maintained there. There is often, it seems, a fine line between notoriety and celebrity, and apparently we-or I, at least-had crossed it, and found riches on the other side. We'd hardly had time to advertise our new corporate headquarters and list our telephone number before a score of Fortune 500 companies were lining up to offer us the most ridiculously easy assignments, for the most outlandish fees. Our more adventurous days now seemed part of a distant past, as we spent virtually all of our time doing things like background checks on prospective CEOs, coordinating industrial espionage investigations, working for congressional committees, or performing mostly cut-and-dried investigations for high-priced law firms. We were on permanent retainer to fifteen major corporations, and were rarely called upon to do anything to earn the fat fees these companies seemed all too happy to pay to Frederickson and Frederickson.

Good-bye, murderous minions of the C.I.A. and K.G.B; good-bye, mad scientists, witch covens, assorted thugs and assassins; and good-bye to all the other garden variety loonies I felt as if I'd spent most of my life dealing with. Hello, fat city.

Whether or not Kevin Shannon, president of the United States, was subtly steering business our way was difficult to tell. Shannon certainly knew that our attitude toward him was decidedly ambiguous, but that didn't seem to matter. The fact that the president had publicly acknowledged the "nation's debt" to us for our role in unmasking a very dangerous K.G.B. operative and had then awarded us the nation's highest medal for civilians-at a ceremony which Garth and I hadn't bothered to attend, for decidedly personal reasons-had apparently been enough to convince corporate America that Garth and I were "connected," and we saw no reason to disabuse our clients of such a notion. It seemed we were in imminent danger of becoming fat, lazy, and wealthy, and we loved it. Both my brother and I had struggled hard, each in our own way and for our own reasons, most of our lives, and we had been very close to death not a few times. We owed each other our lives many times over. Only when we had finally escaped from the bizarre ripples and vicious undertow of the Valhalla Project, which had haunted, threatened, and consumed us for the better part of a decade, had we come to realize that physically, emotionally, and spiritually we had both spent the better parts of our lives clenched like fists. You could say that we were trying to learn to relax; money might not be everything, but we were discovering that it can certainly be a powerful tranquilizer.

A lot of the work for which we were being so well paid could be done by our staff investigators, or with a few telephone calls; a lot of the work for which we were being so well paid was also crushingly boring-but that was fine with us. Garth and I had zestfully agreed that we would be happy to be crushingly bored with our work at least into the next century, at which point we might take the time to reevaluate our attitude.

Good-bye, bullets, knives, mind-altering drugs, broken bones, and squashed souls.

And, at least on my more optimistic days, it had seemed to me that Garth was healing. There had been lots of sports, including membership on a championship softball team with Garth as the star slugger and me as a second baseman who set a league record for most walks in a season, lots of concerts, lots of time with friends, especially loving women friends, lots of good food, and-perhaps best and most important of all-lots of good talk. Once again Garth had learned to laugh without shedding tears for those in the world who would never know joy or find anything in their lives funny, love without suffering pangs of sorrow for those who were alone, dine without feeling the hunger pangs of the starving, tell a joke without rage at the legions of manipulators who made other people's lives a joke. Sometimes it was all enough to make me believe that my brother was completely recovered.

Silent Night. Oh Come All Ye Faithful. Come home, Garth.

We did a lot of pro bono work, which we enjoyed-mostly investigations for attorneys who were themselves doing pro bono work for poor clients-and we made regular contributions to our favorite charities.

And, as always, we looked forward to Christmas.

From the time we arrived in New York, we had, along with thousands of other New Yorkers, taken great delight in observing one particular tradition. Each year, during the Christmas season, tens of thousands of letters addressed to Santa Claus are mailed in the greater New York metropolitan area, and they all end up at the General Post Office on West 33rd Street in Manhattan. Here, the children's letters are placed in cardboard boxes, which in turn are placed on the block-long marble counter inside the main lobby. Anyone is free to come in, browse through the letters, and select up to five to which he or she may wish to respond with gifts or services, or whatever.

Yes, Virginia. .

Garth and I always spent a good deal of time each year doing our Santa Claus number. On our appointed day or days we would go to the GPO, start at opposite ends of the counter and work our way toward the center, poring over the letters in each box, searching for the ones which it would please us the most to "answer." Each year, as a result of this search, ten children-usually from poor and obviously needy families, but not necessarily-received brightly wrapped packages on Christmas Eve, delivered by special messenger and directly dispatched by Santa Claus at the North Pole.

We normally began our selection process early in December, as soon as the first boxfuls of letters would begin to appear, but this year Christmas had caught up with us. Late November and early December had been uncharacteristically hectic, with a heavy workload that had demanded our personal attention, and we'd just returned from an exhausting two-week stint in the Middle East, where we'd been attending to the needs of one of our corporate clients, an oil company. It had been necessary to prepare a report hurriedly, which then had to be presented orally before the corporation's board of directors. With Santa-time quickly running out on us, Garth and I had flipped a coin; I'd gotten to deliver the report, and he'd gotten to spend the day at the post office doing a letter search for both of us. Delivering the report, and then answering a host of detailed questions, had taken me all of the morning and most of the afternoon, and then I'd eagerly rushed back to the brownstone to see what, if any, treasures Garth had been able to excavate from what had to be, by now, a severely depleted trove of interesting or worthy Christmas wishes. Garth hadn't been in our offices, and I hadn't found him in either his apartment or mine. There had been no note, no phone message. I was still waiting for him, or for some word from him. It was 10 P.M.

Huddled inside my bulky cardigan and sipping at my Scotch, I stood at the three-foot-high brick balustrade at the edge of the roof and peered up at the sky as light snow began to fall, dusting my eyelashes, the brick patio, and the dormant, burlap-swaddled plants in my garden. Within minutes the snow began to fall more heavily, filtering and diffusing the bright city lights, creating a kind of milky glow around the illuminated tops of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings. It was growing colder-or perhaps it was only the chill that had been steadily growing inside me, and which had nothing to do with the weather.

Where the hell was Garth?

Enough, I thought as I drained off the rest of my Scotch, flung the ice into my garden, and headed back inside. I'd already waited too long.

I had a list of the telephone numbers for all the hospital emergency rooms in the five boroughs taped inside the front cover of my Manhattan directory, and that's what I turned to as I picked up the telephone in my oak-paneled, leathery library-study. I was just starting to dial the first number when I heard my front door open and close. I slammed down the receiver, hurried out of the study, across the living room, and around a large Chinese silk screen into the foyer, where I stopped suddenly and sucked in my breath, shocked by what I saw.

Garth was still tough-minded, to be sure, and in some ways even more tough-minded-some would say callous-than he had been during the years when he had been a county sheriff in Nebraska, and then a much-decorated NYPD detective. In fact he wasn't callous at all, but he no longer had any time for cant, hypocrisy, or any of the sundry nonsense that flows through and around most of us during the ordinary course of our everyday lives; Garth just ignored all that. To some, this attitude made him seem emotionally flat, but this was far from the mark. The one characteristic he had retained from his poison-induced change of consciousness was a profound sense of caring, or near-pure empathy, for people truly in need. His experience had rounded off some rough edges, making him even more sensitive to other people's pain, and caused certain other rough edges to become even more pronounced-if you happened to be the cause of other people's pain, it was best seriously to consider avoiding my brother. Even his appearance had changed, inasmuch as he now wore a full beard-much more liberally streaked with gray than his long, thinning, wheat-colored hair-in order to shield himself from the curious who might otherwise recognize him as the disgraced and discredited former leader of "Garth's People." I was told by women friends that the beard made him look very sexy; I thought it made him look most imposing, what with his six-foot-three-inch solidly built body and piercing, light brown eyes.

Right now Garth didn't look very imposing at all; he appeared almost shrunken, with red-rimmed eyes and the kind of pallor that comes not from poor diet or lack of sunshine, but from the kind of intense, unrelieved stress that can suck at a man's guts until he's turned inside out. He looked truly haunted, as if something horrible had followed him home and was lurking, waiting for both of us, just outside the door.

"Garth!" I managed to say when I had recovered from my initial shock at his appearance. "Jesus Christ. I was just outside, and I didn't see you coming down the street."

"I came down Fifty-seventh and up the back way," Garth said in a tight voice that was oddly distant, as though he could not get his mind off whatever it was that was bothering him. "I figured you'd be up here waiting for me."

"I was just about to start calling the hospitals, for Christ's sake! Are you all right?"

"I'm all right," my brother replied in the same distant tone.

"Nothing happened to you?"

"No. Nothing happened to me."

There were times, I thought, when Garth could make the Sphinx seem like a loquacious party animal. I laughed with equal parts nervousness, relief, and annoyance. "Then where the hell have you been? One of your reindeer throw a shoe? Where the hell are my five letters?"

Garth's response was to reach into the pocket of his gray, snow-speckled overcoat and remove an envelope, which he held out to me. "I think this one letter is about all you and I are going to be able to handle this Christmas. Read it and see what you think."

The first thing I did was examine the business-size envelope, front and back; the paper was cream-colored, textured, heavy bond-the expensive kind of stationery that usually has a personal or corporate name and address tastefully embossed in the upper left-hand corner, or on the back. This envelope was unadorned, the stamp standard post office issue. The postmark was New York City, and the envelope was addressed to Santa Claus at the North Pole. The handwriting was a child's light, uncertain scrawl.

The folded letter inside was of a matching heavy bond, with no return address. There were a number of dark smudges on the paper, and in the creases of the envelope were tiny specks of what appeared to be dirt. The letter was written in the same child's handwriting. It read:

Dear Santa,

Please bring me a puppy to keep me company because it is very lonely in here and Mommy and Daddy won't let me go out and other kids can't come in because it is a secret place but I know you will be able to find me because you know where every boy and girl in the world lives. I would like a girl puppy but a boy puppy will be all right if that is all you have.

Also please bring me something real nice I can give to Reverend Billy so he will stop hurting me between my legs and sticking his big thing in my mouth and behind. Reverend Billy says God will not let me into heaven with Mommy and Daddy if I tell them and sometimes he hurts me very much and I bleed.

I have been a good girl Santa.

I love you.

Vicky Brown

P.S. If you do bring me a puppy I promise to take very good care of her and before I go to heaven with Mommy and Daddy I promise I will find her a good home where she can stay until the demons come and Dear Jesus and Satan fight and the world ends. I think Jesus will win.

With something approaching disbelief I reread the letter a second and then a third time, and felt within me a great upwelling of sadness, rage, and frustration. With tears filling my eyes, I slowly refolded the letter and replaced it in the envelope. I looked up to find Garth gazing steadily at me. His brown eyes gleamed with resolve, and the hard set of his features belied the softness of his voice.

"Agreed, Mongo?"

"Oh Jesus, Garth. Agreed."

With Vicky Brown's words throbbing in my head and heart, I suddenly felt slightly dizzy and nauseous. With Garth following behind me, I turned and walked back into the living room. I sat down at a chess table set up next to a window and stared out into the snow, trying to calm down so that I could think. Garth went to my bar and, to my surprise, poured himself a drink-straight bourbon. He downed that, then poured himself another before coming over and sitting down across from me.

"You've been all this time trying to track down the letter, haven't you?" I asked the king on the chessboard in front of me.

"You want me to get you a drink?"

I looked up, shook my head. "I've had enough. Could you find out anything?"

Garth absently sipped his bourbon, then set the glass down at the side of the board. "You noticed that there's no return address." It was not a question.

"I noticed. New York City postmark, though."

Garth sighed; it was a soft, sibilant sound that was in total contrast to the tension clearly etched in his face and the stiffness with which he sat in his chair. "Christ, Mongo, that postmark covers upwards of eight million people in the five boroughs-and that may not be all; a lot of letters to Santa that are mailed in Yonkers, Rockland, and Westchester end up here."

"With a New York City postmark?"

"I'm told it can happen; sometimes Santa letters are grouped together and handled differently. I didn't even bother looking in the phone book, since there are probably hundreds of Browns in Manhattan alone."

"And not one of them would be likely to admit knowing-if they did know-that their daughter was being sexually abused."

"Right."

"Whatever you've been up to, Garth, you should have called me. I'd have given you a hand."

Garth shrugged his broad shoulders. "I didn't know how long you'd be tied up in meetings, and by the time the sun started to go down I was pretty much into what I was doing. It was a one-man job, anyway. But I should have checked in. I'm sorry I caused you to worry."

"Yeah. The sexual abuse is clear. I assume you notified the various social service agencies?"

"Sure, but that's a dead end too. There are lots of people named Brown on the welfare rolls, and lots of girls named Vicky. Welfare has no record of any Vicky Brown being reported as sexually abused-and there's no way of knowing if the family of this Vicky Brown is on welfare to begin with. Finally, even if some agency did have an address for a family that seemed like likely candidates, the child probably wouldn't be there."

"Because she's in a secret place," I said quietly.

"Yes."

"I assume you've been to the police. What did your former colleagues have to say?"

"Considering the lack of information and the fact that there's been no formal complaint, there's not much they can do, Mongo," Garth replied in a flat tone. "At least not officially. They said they'd take note of it."

"You'd have done more than that when you were a cop, Garth."

My brother slowly shook his head. "No, Mongo. I'd have been upset, just as I am now; I'd have worried, and I'd have taken note of the information-but there wouldn't have been a whole hell of a lot more I could have done, at least not on city time. The NYPD has a lot more to do than to investigate suspicious letters to Santa Claus."

"They could have checked out known sexual offenders."

"They did that for me. There are dozens with the first name Billy, or William, but no Reverends in the bunch."

Deciding that I wanted another drink after all, I rose from the chess table and went to the wet bar across the room. I put ice in a clean tumbler, splashed in some Scotch, swirled it around. "I can think of a certain Reverend, first name William, who's displayed some perverse sexual behavior in the past," I said, peering into the amber fluid as I held my tumbler up to the light over the bar. "I don't recall his being accused of child abuse, but I wouldn't put it past him. He's one crazy son-of-a bitch, and history teaches that a lot of people who believe they have divine inspiration also tend to believe they have divine permission to do just about anything they want."

I turned to find Garth staring at me intently; it seemed I'd sparked his interest. "Kenecky?" he asked quietly.

"Just a thought. They still haven't found the lousy, neo-Nazi prick. Nobody's suggested that he's dead, so he's still out there someplace. But your guess is as good as mine."

"Not always, brother; you can be a hell of a good guesser. I hadn't even thought of Wild Bill Kenecky, and I should have. It would tie in with that demon and end-of-the-world business in the girl's letter."

The gentleman we were so fondly discussing was one Reverend Doctor William Kenecky, the holder of a Doctor of Divinity degree issued by a mail-order "university" of his own devising and founder of a religious cable television broadcasting network that, before the plug was pulled, had come to dwarf the electronic resources of all the other boob-tube preachers combined. Like most televangelists, Kenecky was a Christian Fundamentalist, a so-called Charismatic of the sort who give the impression that they can't wait to go to bed at night because they hope to wake in the morning to find the world ending, and a warrior-Jesus returned to smite the forces of Satan-meaning, apparently, sundry demons popping up from hell, all non-Christians, all non-Fundamentalist Christians, and all non-Fundamentalist Christians who had not sent money to Kenecky. Garth and I had found the Reverend Doctor William Kenecky a howl even before it came out, after he disappeared, that he had, for years, been associated with a particularly perverse group of wacko neo-Nazis whose "religious" ideology, labeled Jesus White Christian, included the curious tenet that Mein Kampf was a missing book of the Bible.

Garth and I had never understood the appeal and success of any of the televangelists, with their obvious-to us, anyway-chicanery, overt appeal to ignorance and bigotry of all kinds, and blatant mismanagement of the dollars sent to them by people who surely needed the money more than these owners of Rolls-Royces and multimillion-dollar mansions. We'd agreed that it would take a team of anthropologists to try to make sense of this peculiarly American phenomenon of television preachers, but the appeal of William Kenecky had always been the biggest mystery of all. We had often watched his show for entertainment, much like kids watching the Saturday morning cartoons, whooping and hollering along with him as he "healed" people by smacking them on the forehead, and trying to anticipate his most outrageous-and oft-repeated-lines. But we certainly never sent him money, and were in full agreement that Wild Bill Kenecky was not a man any self-respecting God would choose as a mouthpiece; we considered him a spiritual thug, albeit a skinny one. He'd always worn black suits, and this gave his thin, slightly stooped figure the appearance of a half-finished scarecrow. We'd read somewhere that he was forty-one years old, and we'd been shocked. We'd thought that he was at least a decade older; hate, always shining clearly, in living color, in his jet black eyes, has a distinctly aging effect. We'd considered him the funniest thing on television, and had always made arrangements to tape his five-days-a-week show when we knew we were going to miss it.

But then, nobody had ever accused either Garth or me of paddling in the mainstream of American religious or cultural thought. For millions of Americans, Reverend William Kenecky's talk of Armageddon, the Rapture, and the ultimate destruction of everyone in the world who didn't believe exactly as he did, seemed just the ticket in a world filled with wars America was losing, women's rights, curse words in the movies, and satanic music played on the radio. To Garth and me, Kenecky's paranoid fantasies were incredible and highly amusing, his show a kind of window into the open psychiatric ward that was a part of the collective American psyche. But those same millions of Americans shared his beliefs, and they'd sent him money-lots and lots of money. And, Kenecky would explain, since Armageddon was just around the corner, there was no reason for him to stint on spending that money-and he hadn't. He'd owned a luxury car for every day of the week, mansions in the mountains and at the seashore. Palpable evidence of God's grace, he'd called it.

And then Wild Bill had pulled his own plug, even before his secret links with the neo-Nazis and Jesus White Christian were exposed. Charismatic, apocalypse-oriented, Fundamentalist Christians-at least the ones who supported Kenecky's extravagant life-style-take a dim view of sex in general, and an even dimmer view of sex outside marriage or sex in any of what are, in their view, its perverse forms. When an enterprising reporter uncovered the fact that Wild Bill had, for years, been trading promises of salvation for sexual favors from both men and women, it was the end of him-or at least the end of his television empire. The exposure of his many sexual escapades, the variety of his tastes, and the voraciousness of his appetite hadn't gone down well with his Tribulation, Rapture, and Armageddon crowd.

Contributions had dried up, and-despite his feverish pleas and assurances that God had forgiven him-his member stations had dropped off one by one.

Then, as surely as pestilence will follow drought and famine, the well-dressed, truly fearsome minions of that greatest Satan of all, the I.R.S., had come knocking at his already badly battered door, descending on him and his operations like some biblical plague.

Thoroughly disgraced, his financial holdings seized, under indictment for tax evasion, and facing the very real possibility of a long jail term, William Kenecky had somehow engineered his own personal Rapture; he'd promptly disappeared. For six months no one had heard a peep, apocalyptic or otherwise, from him.

Now it seemed possible that we had heard from him-in the form of a cry for help from a new and totally helpless victim; it seemed to me not at all unlikely that Kenecky was holed up somewhere and whiling away his time while waiting for the world to end by sexually abusing a little girl.

"It's a bitch, Garth." It seemed like such a trivial, inappropriate thing to say that I repeated it. "It's a real bitch."

"And we have to do something about it."

I nodded. "What we have to do is find the girl, and then I assume the proper authorities will investigate any possible sexual abuse. And if it does turn out that 'Reverend Billy' is none other than William Kenecky, we might even spend a couple of quarters to telephone the F.B.I, and I.R.S."

"Uh-huh," Garth said absently as he stared at the chessboard in front of him. "The authorities here in the city are already on notice; the police and Social Services are waiting to hear from us." He paused, looked up at me. "What's our business status right now? Are we finished with the Middle East assignment?"

"Yeah, but we're still busy beavers-or we will be if we try to handle all our other business while we search for the girl. I suggest we farm out everything our staff people can't handle; if any of our clients object, we'll explain the situation and ask to be released from our contract. I think most of them will understand. If they don't-tough. Money certainly isn't a problem for us at the moment."

"Okay," Garth said in the same distant tone as he sipped at his bourbon. "Good idea."

"Garth?"

"Huh?"

"So now we're going to look for Vicky Brown, and when we find her we'll turn over any information we've gathered to the police and welfare people. But all we've got to work on is a letter with no return address, a name that's as common as rain, references to some right-wing religious gobbledygook, and a child abuser who may or may not be a fugitive from justice. Even if the child and her abuser weren't in some 'secret place,' they'd still be lost souls in one of the largest cities in the world. Sorry if I sound pessimistic. I may be a hell of a guesser, but I have to tell you that I haven't a clue where to begin."

Garth turned in his chair and favored me with one of his faint, enigmatic smiles. "What are you trying to say to me, brother? Are you suggesting that this may be a difficult case?"

"Yeah, I think I was trying to say something like that."

Garth drained off his bourbon, then sat back in his chair and cupped the empty glass in both hands. His smile had vanished. "Did you notice the smudges on the letter and the dirt in the creases of the envelope?"

Suddenly my heart began to beat more rapidly. "Son-of-a-bitch! You had it analyzed!"

Again, the faint, fleeting smile. "I pulled a few strings, appealed to old ties that bind, called in some lOUs, and got the people in the police labs to do some quick work for us-which turned out not to be so quick. I just came from there, and they'd been working on those soil samples since three thirty this afternoon. By the way, Frederickson and Frederickson is going to be getting some hefty telephone bills for a few very expensive computer linkups."

"But they were able to analyze it?! The dirt can tell us something?!"

"It can tell us something, all right-but I'm not sure it's going to do us any good. For one thing, that soil is teeming with all sorts of microbes which, according to the technicians, are quite exotic."

"So what?!" I snapped, making no effort to hide my impatience. "Could they tell you where it came from?"

"Oh, yes," Garth replied dryly, rolling the empty tumbler between his palms. "Finally. According to the experts we talked to over those phone and computer linkups, there's only one place on the face of the earth where you'd find that particular variety of soil, and that place is the floor of the Amazon rain forest."