He took his time limping back to the Olds. A swarm of gnats found him and tagged along most of the way, but he barely noticed them. Something had taken hold in his mind.
After lowering himself into the Olds, he sat behind the steering wheel with the motor idling and the suddenly cooperative air conditioner blowing a hurricane, thinking about what he’d just witnessed at the dock. Putting it together with everything else he’d learned, and feeling his stomach plunge as he made some terrible sense of it.
It was cool in the Olds, but his mind and his gut kept churning and he was sweating. His body was coated with a nasty sheen of perspiration and the powdered dust that had risen from the dirt path to the sea.
Anger had joined revulsion by the time he swung the car onto Route 1 and drove for Key Montaigne.
He’d been back at the cottage only fifteen minutes when Millicent Bing called from Ohio. Carver told her what he’d figured out and promised to protect Dr. Sam’s memory as much as possible, in exchange for one favor from her. She had to make a phone call to someone she was sure would pass the word to Walter Rainer that she was returning to Key Montaigne to meet Carver at eleven that evening at the research center.
She agreed. She really had no choice.
After hanging up the phone, Carver explained to Beth what they were going to do. Then he called Katia Marsh, did some more explaining, and got her cooperation in gaining access to the research center that night.
Then he cleaned his gun.
38
At ten-thirty that night, Carver left the Olds parked out of sight and limped along Shoreline toward the research center. There was enough light to see fairly well, broken only by the passage of scudding black clouds across the face of the moon. He placed his cane carefully in the dark, making good time to the parking lot.
As he drew near the angular brick building, he slowed his pace, gathering his thoughts and resolve. Around him were only the night sounds of insects, the brief drone of a faraway plane, water lapping down by the dock where the dark form of the Fair Wind rode. He could sense on his right the vast mystery of the ocean. He was sweating, breathing raggedly, as he used the key Katia had given him and let himself into the research center.
After closing the door but not relocking it, he stood for a while waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dimmer light inside the building. Then he limped past the posters of sea horses and dolphins and opened the door to the lower level Tide Pool Room.
There were no windows in this room, so he felt for the light switch inside the door. Found its smooth protuberance and flipped it up. It made a sound like a sharp slap.
The overhead fluorescent tubes flickered like heat lightning then glowed steadily, and the shark tank’s wavering illumination was also activated. The hulking form of Victor swooped toward Carver, surprisingly near, startling him for a moment. Then the shark swept in a graceful arc behind the glass and with a flick of its tail glided in the opposite direction, its image becoming distorted and deceptively small on the far side of the tank. Victor’s world. Circling, circling.
“You’d think he’d get tired,” a voice said.
Still poised on the black steel landing, Carver looked down and saw Walter Rainer standing near one of the tide pool displays. Like Carver, he’d gotten the idea of arriving early, before Millicent Bing was due. Early birds hoping they weren’t worms.
Carver clomped down the metal stairs with his cane and saw Davy standing to Rainer’s left, where he wouldn’t be seen from the landing. Davy stared unsmilingly at Carver, his muscular arms hanging limply at his sides. Carver nodded toward the shark and said, “I’m told they have to keep swimming, keep feeding, or they sink and die.”
“I find myself in the same position,” Rainer said. He ran a hand over his hugely protruding stomach, as if to reassure himself he was prosperous and well-fed. He was wearing a cream-colored suit that made him look even more massive than he was. A beige shirt, no tie. The suit was wrinkled and baggy, and though the Tide Pool Room was cool, Rainer’s fat-padded face glistened with sweat and looked sickly in the fluorescent light. Davy had on tight jeans and a loud flowered shirt, untucked. Carver had left his own shirt untucked to conceal the Colt holstered beneath it. He figured Davy was also armed, probably with his weapon of choice, the sharpened cargo hook. There was pattern and predictability to sadism.
Behind Rainer the shark kept circling, the only movement in the room. Then Davy hooked his thumbs in his side pockets and swaggered out to stand in the center of the floor with his feet spread wide, closer to Carver but not too close. He was playing cool but he was tense; the nude dancer on his forearm twitched a hip.
Carver said, “Millicent isn’t coming.”
Ranier shrugged inside the tent-sized suit. “That doesn’t surprise me, nor does it matter. I was sure you’d be here. Time enough to deal with Millicent, if indeed I must.”
“You must,” Carver said. “Otherwise you won’t sleep well, worrying about when her conscience might bite her and then you.”
The small square room was silent, insulated from the outside world as the floor of the sea. “I assume she told you everything,” Rainer said.
“She filled me in on what I hadn’t already guessed after seeing Davy hand over a payoff to Frank Everman this morning.”
Rainer gave Davy an annoyed look. Davy’s flat little eyes fixed intensely on Carver, like dispassionate radar-gun sights.
“You weren’t smuggling drugs or anything else into the country,” Carver told Rainer. “You were smuggling something out, into Mexico. You run a way station, part of an operation that supplies certain people in Mexico with abducted children for sexual exploitation in brothels and for private amusement. Dr. Sam knew about it but wasn’t part of it, though occasionally he gave you use of the Fair Wind when you thought the Miss Behavin might attract suspicion. The doctor had a weakness for young boys, which you supplied in exchange for his silence. Millicent knew but wouldn’t talk about it and ruin her husband.”
Rainer was nodding slightly as Carver spoke, agreeing with him. “That kind of appetite burns in the blood,” he said. “Dr. Sam was weak, couldn’t help himself. Millicent’s also weak. That’s why she isn’t here.”
“And why she might eventually talk if you don’t find her and kill her.”
“I honestly don’t see that as necessary,” Rainer said. “There’s always a way to persuade people, and if they aren’t persuadable, there are other methods. For instance, just before you arrived I got a call from Hector telling me your friend Beth Jackson was arrested by Chief Wicke for spying on my private grounds. Apparently she was supposed to phone you here when I and mine left for this meeting. Instead she’s now in the custody of Chief Wicke.”
“You phoned Wicke to come get her?”
“Hector did, after Davy and I left unseen and were well on our way. We didn’t want her to become impatient and interrupt proceedings here. But do tell me what else you think you know, Mr. Carver.”
Carver glanced at Davy, who hadn’t moved or changed expression. The faint shadow of the circling shark played over his stolid features. “The Evermans are part of the operation that abducts the children and sends them south in Davy’s van for you to transfer to Mexico,” Carver said. “The boy who drowned was high on cocaine so he could be controlled, but somehow he got free, tried to swim to safety, and drowned. The Evermans were sent from Miami to Key Montaigne to pose as the boy’s parents and claim the body before further police investigation revealed his true identity and that of his real family.”
Rainer gently touched his protruding stomach again, making the gesture somehow sensual and obscene. He sighed. “You’ve done surprisingly well, despite our considerable efforts to discourage you.”