“Yep."
“Um.” The sheriff's face didn't change.
“Mr. Kamen here is concerned something may have happened."
Kamen spoke up quickly. “I think we have to assume that possibility—that strong possibility exists, sheriff. She thought she might have seen a former Nazi doctor who committed a lot of atrocities and ... suddenly she goes up in smoke.” Even as he spoke he wondered if the sheriff realized the singular inappropriateness of that phrase. “Chief Randall said she might be under medication or under a doctor's care, and it dawned on me, I wonder if this man Emil Shtolz might still be working as a doctor?"
“First, Mrs. Purdy didn't strike me as particularly coherent, but let's say she was. Let's give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she saw this old guy. Aren't all these Nazis elderly men themselves now?” the sheriff asked.
“He was a young man at the end of World War II,” Kamen said. “He might be seventy now, but he might not appear that age. He could easily have had a face lift, and from what Alma Purdy told me it sounded as if he might have had some cosmetic surgery, assuming, as you say, assuming she did see Shtolz."
The two lawmen discussed who'd file the preliminary missing persons report with the state police in something called Bluff, which Aaron Kamen learned was Poplar Bluff, Missouri. But he knew he was hearing two conversations: one was shorthand cop talk, the other appeared to be for his benefit. It sunk in while he and Randall were heading back to the Bayou City police headquarters in the rain. He listened to their questions about the Purdy report, in tandem with a bantering about computers, how the sheriff was sick about the 2000 getting “shit-canned,” which he knew referred to an NCIC computer program. “I knew it'd be a hump,” Randall had said.
“I'll call Cape and let Immigration in St. Louis know.” More shorthand about the FBI and other authorities whom the sheriff would bring up to speed. It had been rather smoothly executed, Aaron thought, all in the cop-shop sidebar talk, punctuated with occasional questions to him about the contact with Purdy. He realized they'd known every speck of this all along, right down to the trip to the missing woman's home. This had been something Sheriff Pritchett and Chief Randall had set up to take his measure. He was being investigated, and not for the first time.
“Did I pass?” he asked suddenly, turning in the seat and smiling to show he recognized professionalism and approved of it.
“Excuse me?” The chief raised his eyebrows. Aaron was not offended. The fact they'd handled him rather adroitly, that they'd obviously been on top of the case for some time, was hardly discouraging. So far, at least, nobody was laughing at the serious situation.
So he saw it as good news and bad news. The good news was a circle of light was moving in the direction of the darkness. The bad news was that a woman named Alma Purdy, who'd apparently already been through hell once, had vanished.
Aaron left Randall's office after a few conversational loose ends were tied, among them being a mutual promise of cooperation. Meanwhile, where would Mr. Kamen be staying? He gave his room number at the little ma ‘n’ pa motel on the highway. How long was he planning to stay in town? Not long, he said. He assured the cop that he knew his place as a civilian, that he'd notify Randall and Pritchett if he learned of Mrs. Purdy's whereabouts, all the expected stuff. The chief would circulate the two blow-ups of Emil Shtolz that Kamen had extracted from his files, one a passport photo that showed the Boy Butcher without his infamous facial birthmark. Yes, he realized it might be impossible to I.D. a person from a forty-plus-year-old passport picture. And so on.
Instead of returning to the motel, Kamen went to a pay phone and dialed Raymond Meara's number for the second time. Kamen routinely attended gun shows, firearms club rallies, and the like, with a special eye for the lunatic fringe gun collectors, from whose ranks Neo-Nazis sometimes emerged. Aaron and Raymond Meara had met at a gun club rally the preceding year. They'd exchanged opinions on gun laws, the plight of the small businessman and small farmer, and found some areas of agreement. Kamen, being a people collector, retained the man's name in his files. When Alma Purdy had said Bayou City, he had recalled having a contact there.
“Mr. Meara,” he said, when a gruff voice answered after a dozen or so rings, “it's Aaron Kamen calling again. I'm the one called yesterday about Mrs. Purdy?"
“Yeah."
“I'd like to talk with you, as I said. I just finished speaking with the police and the sheriff and apparently the woman is in fact missing."
“Um. Well, like I said, I don't know zip about her. She's like a hermit, or whatever you call them, a recluse, you know?” Kamen moved under the protective overhang of the building as he was pelted by hard, cold raindrops.
“I understand, Mr. Meara, but if I could, I'd still like to come out and talk with you. I'm trying to find another individual. It's a bit lengthy to go into on the phone. Also, I want to show a couple of photographs to you and see if you might be able to help me."
“That's okay. Pretty good drive out here from town but you're welcome to come out.” It sounded as if Aaron Kamen were anything but welcome.
“If I'd be catching you at a bad time we could make it another day."
“Nah. I'm just waddlin’ around out here. Come on if you want to."
Kamen extracted directions, and in spite of the off-putting and complex-sounding series of twists, turns, and otherwise convoluted instructions, he had no trouble finding the Meara farm.
Within twenty-five minutes he was pulling up in the muddy yard of a near stranger, and he saw the scarred countenance of Raymond Meara.
“You bring this down from K.C., didja?” drawled Meara.
“No, sir. It was cold up home but at least it was dry."
“Come on in,” Meara said, and Aaron Kamen followed him into the farmhouse, and out of the pelting rain.
27
The rain had become an ever-present factor in Kamen's daily plans. It slowed his driving even more, and he'd been no speed demon to begin with. But he did not enjoy driving in the rain. His unfamiliar surroundings presented yet another worry. Working his way outward from the hub of Bayou City, he'd tried for an operational plan that was geographically logical, but the locations of some of the suspects on his primary search list were deceptively placed. Seeing something on a map and finding it in rainy, unfamiliar territory, weren't the same.
Three of the closest communities had been approached alphabetically: Anniston, Bertrand, and one of the list's more promising names, a Dr. Mishna Vyodnek, working at Consolidated Labs some twenty minutes from Bayou City, had not panned out. He found himself sitting in the front seat of the car, water puddling from his raincoat, trying to make heads or tails out of his map.
There were at least two other nearby leads, a veterinarian of Shtolz's approximate age, and a surgeon with the name Raoul Babajarh. He decided to check those two out next and, if time permitted, look up a party in a community called Kewanee. That would bring him into line with New Madrid, and from there he could swing back through Bayou City. If none of his semi-leads checked out, he'd call it a day and tackle the rest tomorrow. Then he saw another stop he reckoned would be on his way and inserted it into his itinerary. With that he pulled back into a stream of trucks and headed for the vet's.
Three hours later Aaron Kamen was winding up a conversation with a retired general practitioner in New Madrid, and for the first time he found someone opening up to him a bit.
“If you don't mind my asking, is this fellow you're looking for in some kind of trouble?” Kamen's day had convinced him that physicians were even more clubby and protective of their own brethren than lawyers or cops. His methodology had been to do a quick thumbnail profile of the type of man he was looking for, one who might have background or expertise in the medical or experimental disciplines, at least fifty years old—he ruled nothing out—and he might have a slight European accent, “a little like mine, perhaps."