“Marcia Kennedy and Olivia Nguyen,” Angel said. “Kennedy is in Vancouver and Nguyen lives in Seattle.”
Chapel nodded to himself. They would both be safe for the moment — it would take longer for the chimeras to get to either of those cities than it would take them to get to Denver. “What do they do for a living?” Chapel asked.
“Huh. Kennedy works at a flower shop. She’s filed some tax forms, but not regularly — only for about ten years in the last twenty. She’s a Canadian citizen, but she wasn’t born there. Looks like her parents moved to Canada in the nineties and she went with them. She was naturalized in 1998, the same year as her parents.”
“So it’s a close family — do they live together?”
“No… but,” Angel said, and clucked her tongue for a second as if she was thinking, “the parents have a house in the suburbs. She lives a little closer in to the downtown area in a studio apartment. Okay, here. The lease is cosigned by her father, Arthur Kennedy. Looks like she was the one who signed the lease in the first place, but the building owners sued her for failure to pay her rent in 2002. After that the father cosigned, and it looks like the rent’s been paid faithfully ever since.”
“She probably doesn’t make much money working in a flower shop,” Chapel pointed out.
“True… wow. Cool. I’ve got to remember how to do this.”
“You found something?”
“Her résumé is online, with one of those services that helps you get interviews. Interesting. She’s worked on and off at the flower shop, on for eight or ten months, off for four or six months. Just about every year she seems to quit, and then comes back and gets rehired a while later.”
“That sounds promising. Maybe the job at the flower shop is just a cover, and she takes off long stretches every year to do undercover work for the CIA.”
“Watching Canada to make sure those rascally northerners don’t try anything?” Angel asked, with a laugh.
“I’m looking for connections here,” Chapel said. “I admit that’s a stretch.”
“Let me take a look at something. Her medical records should be online and easy to get since Canada has nationalized health coverage. Oh.”
“What did you find?”
Angel clucked her tongue again. “Let me just check what this does… okay. Sure. She’s on carbamazepine. That explains a lot.”
“What is it?” Chapel asked.
“Carbamazepine is an anticonvulsant,” Angel said, “which would suggest epilepsy, but it’s also used in the treatment of severe bipolar disorder. Which fits her information pretty well. She can function for most of the year but every so often she probably gets a period of intense depression where she can’t get out of bed, so that’s why she works sporadically and why she had trouble paying her rent.”
Chapel leaned on the balcony railing and closed his eyes. “You’re saying she’s mentally ill. Just like Christina Smollett.”
“Her disease probably isn’t as profound, but, yeah,” Angel told him.
What could it mean? Why on earth would the chimeras be targeting mentally ill women? It was the one fact of the case that he couldn’t comprehend at all. Christina Smollett and Marcia Kennedy couldn’t possibly have done any meaningful work for the CIA, or the DoD, or any other governmental agency. They would never have passed the necessary background checks to get clearance. They didn’t have backgrounds in genetics research, either. They even lived on opposite sides of the continent… it just didn’t add up.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. You’ve already told me there are no red herrings on this list. No false leads. But this is looking just plain weird. I hate to ask, but — Olivia Nguyen. Is there anything there?”
Angel worked her magic for a while in silence. When she came back on the line, she sounded almost afraid to tell him what she’d found.
“Her address is listed as 2600 Southwest Holden Street, in Seattle.”
“It’s a hospital, isn’t it?”
“A psychiatric hospital, yes. She’s been a patient there since 1981.”
STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA: APRIL 13, T+34:48
Chapel and Julia waddled forward in line with the tourists and sightseers headed to the top of Stone Mountain. Chapel had traded his button-down shirt for a polo that let him fit in a little better. Even this early in the year, most of the people in line for the Skyride were wearing T-shirts and shorts, though most of the women carried windbreakers or sweaters. It was supposed to be cooler up top.
“You still giving me the silent treatment?” Chapel asked.
“Huh,” Julia said, not looking up. She read aloud from a brochure she’d picked up while Chapel bought their tickets for the cable car. “I didn’t know. This was the first project for Gutzon Borglum. He didn’t finish it, though.”
Apparently she was talking to him, now. She just wouldn’t look at him.
He didn’t suppose he blamed her. He’d made a fair share of mistakes with her. He should have told her about the virus. He should have found some way to protect her without bringing her here, without nearly getting her blown up. He should have killed Laughing Boy when he had the chance so she would be safe now.
That was a lot of should haves. It was going to take a while before things thawed out between them, he thought.
“Who’s Gutzon Borglum?” Chapel asked, shuffling forward. The line was taking forever. He’d wanted to be on top of the mountain at least an hour before his scheduled meeting with Funt, but it looked like they would have to wait for the next car.
“The man who carved Mount Rushmore,” Julia told him. “The monument at Stone Mountain was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy,” she read, “in 1916. It took nearly fifty years to complete.”
Chapel leaned to one side to take a look at the mountain. He’d had other things on his mind and hadn’t really bothered to check out the sculpture.
“It’s the largest bas-relief in the world,” Julia read.
Chapel could believe it.
Stone Mountain lived up to its name. It looked like a single piece of enormous rock towering over the nearby landscape, a dome of gray granite almost denuded of trees. From where Chapel stood it rose over him like a sheer wall. Carved into that massive rock face was a portrait of the South’s three greatest heroes: Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee. From a distance the carvings hadn’t looked like much, but from the base of the mountain they were colossal and incredibly detailed. It looked like the three giants on horseback were going to leap out of the stone at any moment and go racing across the country, capes flapping in the wind, the heads of the horses rearing, as the three men rode to glory.
Angel snorted in his ear. “What the brochure doesn’t tell you is that this is where the modern Ku Klux Klan was officially organized, and where they had their big rallies until the eighties.”
“During the Olympics,” Julia read, “Stone Mountain facilities were used for the archery, tennis, and track cycling events.” She folded the brochure and put it in her purse. “Are we going to have to wait for the next car?” she asked, and a moment later they watched the Skyride lift away from the ground, headed upward across the carving toward the very top.
“Looks like it,” Chapel said.
“Chapel,” Angel said in his ear, “I know what I said last time, about your being a jerk when you left Julia behind. But I also know you made the right choice, no matter how angry she is with you now. You should leave Julia down here. Just try to say it in a nicer way this time.”
“Not a chance,” he told her. Julia looked at him for a second as if she thought he was talking to her. Chapel tapped the hands-free unit in his ear and Julia rolled her eyes and turned away.