“You mean experts?”
“No. We’ll worry about that later. I mean fact witnesses. As I see it, our case has two basic premises, both of which we have to prove. First, that Blaylock poisoned the water. Second, that the poisoned water caused the leukemia outbreak. Of course, I’ll conduct the traditional legal discovery, but I think we can fairly assume that everyone at Blaylock will deny all responsibility. I need you to ferret out someone who will tell the truth.”
Loving tucked in his chin. “That’s a pretty tall order, Skipper.”
“I know. That’s why I gave it to you.” He smiled. “Blackwood has almost five thousand citizens. There must be someone somewhere who knows what happened and is willing to talk.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. And I’m not exaggerating the importance of this. We’ll use experts to prove the contamination caused the cancers. But if we don’t have evidence that Blaylock caused the contamination, we’ll never get to trial. They’ll take us out on a motion for summary judgment.”
Finally, Ben adjusted his gaze to Jones.
“I suppose you’ll want me to do some kind of high-risk heavy-duty investigating,” Jones opined. “Perhaps some undercover work.”
“Nooo,” Ben replied. “I want you to figure out how we’re going to pay for this.”
“But Ben—”
“You’re the CFO of this firm, Jones. It’s your job.”
“I know it’s my job!” he shot back. “I spoke to The Brain this morning, just as you asked.”
“And?”
“He’s willing to advance fifty thousand bucks at twelve percent.”
“Fifty thousand? That won’t get us through the first month, even if we all agree to waive our salaries.”
All three staffers shot out of their chairs. “What?”
“I was just speaking hypothetically,” Ben said, although in truth, he doubted if he was. “We’re going to need more money.”
“What you don’t seem to understand, Boss, is that The Brain works for a bank, not a charitable institution.”
“Find the money, Jones.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how. But I’m confident you’ll think of something.”
“Oh, thank you very much.”
“Look.” Ben pressed his hands against the desk. “I know this is going to be hard. This case—it isn’t like just any case. It’s—” He paused. “Frankly, most of what lawyers do these days doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s paper pushing and moneygrubbing and no one’s the better for it. But this case is different. This case matters.” He paused again, making sure his words had a chance to sink in. “So I want to make sure we do the best job we possibly can.”
Jones stared down at the floor. His voice was soft—but perfectly audible. “I still think we’ll go down in flames.”
Ben picked right up on it. “You know what, Jones? You may be right. Frankly, I don’t know if this case can be won or not. But we’re going to give it every possible chance, and when it’s all over with—at least we can say we tried. Win or lose, we tried to do the right thing. We tried to find some justice for those parents who lost their children for no reason. And that’s what matters in the end. That we tried.”
Ben pushed away from his desk and sighed. “End of sappy speech. Now get to work.”
Fred Henderson wadded the newspaper in his hands and tossed it across the room. Damn!
Well, he had wondered what everyone was whispering about at the Culligan cooler when he came to work this morning. Now he knew. After all, he wasn’t the only person in the building who knew Harvey. Hell, half the people here probably did. And now everyone did; Harvey was famous. Not for anything he did during his life, but for the nightmarishly gruesome manner in which he died.
Fred could tell from the article that the police were doing their best to suppress the details, but how could you suppress a thing like that? In this tabloid world, sixty strokes with a blunt instrument was going to make the headlines. And that wasn’t even mentioning what happened to Harvey’s wife, his son. The whole family had been wiped out in a single hyperviolent stroke. The police were baffled.
Fred wasn’t.
He pushed out his chair, suddenly moved by the desperate need to stretch his legs. He felt as if the walls of his cubicle were closing in on him, threatening to crush him like some elaborate comic book deathtrap. He walked to the edge of his space, catching a glimpse of himself in the glass in the dividers. He was fifty-eight, gray, liver-bespotted, slightly arthritic, and too damn old for this sort of thing. Way back then, when the whole mess began, it had been different. He was a different person, with a different body. Now he just wanted to be left alone. To forget. To fill out his final days in peace reading H. Rider Haggard novels and watching the History Channel. Hell, given the circumstances, there was no end to his retirement possibilities. If he lived long enough to enjoy them.
He knew what had happened to Harvey. He knew who did it and why he did it. And he knew that Harvey’s killer had not found that for which he was looking. Fred knew that for certain. Because Fred had it.
Fred would be the last one the killer came after. He knew that as surely as he knew the sun would rise in the morning. No one had ever taken Fred seriously. He had never really been one of the gang—more like a mascot. Fred the Feeb, that’s what they called him when he wasn’t around. They thought he didn’t know. But he did, of course. He always knew. He always knew everything. He was always one step ahead of them. Which is why he now had the merchandise. And the others didn’t.
And Harvey was dead.
For some reason, Fred’s mind began drifting backward, snatching back the calendar pages, remembering his boyhood back in Carter, a small town in western Oklahoma. He thought of his father, dead these past twenty years. His dad had been a poor hardscrabble farmer, barely eking out a living for his family of seven. He had rarely had time for play and too often had time to drink. And fight. And hit. They were too unalike, Fred and his father, and Fred’s disdain for farming was too transparent. Instead of encouraging Fred’s business ambitions, he actually seemed to resent them. They had never been very close.
And now that he was gone, Fred thought of him every day. And missed him, so badly that at times his chest ached.
What was it his father used to say? “You can’t hang pumpkins on a morning glory.”
What the hell had that meant? Fred asked himself time and again. If that was his father’s idea of homespun wisdom, it was just as lame as everything else the man did. Or so it had always seemed. Now, today, his father’s words came back to him, and they made perfect sense. He knew exactly what his father had been saying. He’d spent his whole life hanging those damn pumpkins. And the morning glory was the merchandise.
Fred had it, all right. But what good had it ever done him? He couldn’t use it; he couldn’t even tell anyone he had it. Not if he wanted to live. It was his little secret. He’d had to content himself with the knowledge that he’d fooled them all. That he’d succeeded where the others had failed.
Fred had never married. Who would want to marry Fred the Feeb? His family was all dead. His principal source of pride in his life had come from one dirty little secret. But how much longer would it remain a secret? He knew Harvey’s killer wouldn’t stop after one strike. He would keep on swinging that bat, or whatever the hell it was, until he found what he wanted.
Until he found Fred.
Fred pressed his hand against the glass pane, staring at the lines in his face, the deeply etched creases that reminded him how old he was, how long it had been. He was too old to track down his old friend. And too old to kill. Too old to do anything, really. But a countdown had begun. A countdown that could finish only one of two ways.