"Detective Harland; Secret Service Agent Maxwell," Forsythe introduced us with his customary eloquence. "You're assigned as of right now to a burglary case; Maxwell will give you the details." And with that, he turned on his heel and strode back to his office.
For a second Maxwell and I eyed each other in somewhat awkward silence. "Burglary?" I prompted at last, expecting him to pick up on the part of the question I wasn't asking.
He did, and his tight lips compressed a fraction more. "A very special burglary. Something belonging to President Thompson. All I really need from you is access to the police files on—"
"Stolen from the White House?" I asked, feeling my eyebrows rise.
"No, the doll was—" He broke off, glancing around at the desks crowding around us. None of the officers there were paying the least bit of attention to us, but I guess Maxwell didn't know that. Or else mild paranoia just naturally came with his job. "Is there some place a little more private where we can go and talk?" he asked.
"Sure," I said, getting to my feet and snaring my coat from the chair back as I took a last bite from my sandwich. "My car. We can talk on the way to the scene of the crime."
I was very restrained. I got us downstairs, into the car, and out into Washington traffic before I finally broke down. "Did you refer to this burglared item as a 'doll'?" I asked.
Maxwell sighed. "Yes, I did," he admitted. "But it's not what you're thinking. The President's doll is—" He broke off, swearing under his breath. "You weren't supposed to know about this, Harland—none of you were. There's no reason for you to be in on this at all; it's a Secret Service matter, pure and simple. Left at the next light."
"Apparently Captain Forsythe thought differently. He gets like that sometimes—very insistent on having a hand in everything that happens in this town." I reached the intersection and made the turn.
"Yeah, well, this one is none of his business, and I'd have taken him right down on the mat if time wasn't so damn critical." Maxwell hissed through his teeth.
"So what files do you need?" I asked after a minute. "Professional burglars or safecrackers?"
He glanced over at me. "Nice guess," he conceded. "Probably both. We've checked over security at the—office—and it took a real expert to get in the way he did."
"Whose office?"
"Pak and Christophe. Doctors Sam and Pierre, respectively."
"Medical doctors?"
"They say yes. I say—" Maxwell shook his head. "Look, do me a favor; hold off on any more questions until we get there, okay? They're the only ones who can explain their setup. Or at least the only ones who can explain it so that you might actually believe it."
I blinked. "Uh..."
"Right at the next light."
Gritting my teeth, I sat on my curiosity and concentrated on my driving.
—
Dr. Sam Pak was a short, intense second generation Chinese-American. Dr. Pierre Christophe was a tall, equally intense first generation Haitian. Pak's specialty was obvious; the lettering on their office door proclaimed it to be the Pak-Christophe Acupuncture Clinic. It wasn't until the two doctors led us to the back room and opened the walk-in vault there that I found out just what it was Christophe supplied to the partnership.
Believing it was another matter entirely.
"I don't believe it," I said, staring at the dozen or so row planters lining the shelves of the vault. Stuck knee deep into the planters' dirt were rows of the ugliest wax figures I'd ever seen. Figurines with bits of hair and fingernail stuck on and into them... "I don't believe it," I repeated, "Voodoo acupuncture?"
"It is not that difficult to understand," Christophe said in the careful tones and faint accent of one who'd learned English as a second language. "I might even say it is a natural outgrowth of the science of acupuncture. If—"
"Pierre," Pak interrupted him. "I don't think Detective Harland came here to hear about medical philosophy."
"Forgive me," Christophe said, ducking his head. "I am very serious about my work here—"
"Pierre," Pak said. Christophe ducked his head again and shut up.
I sighed. "Okay, I'll bite. Just how is this supposed to work?"
"You're probably familiar with at least the basics of acupuncture," Pak said, reaching into the vault to pluck out one of the wax dolls from its dirt footbath. "Thin needles placed into various nerve centers can heal a vast number of diseases and alleviate the pain from others." His face cracked in a tight smile. "From your reaction, I'd guess you also know a little about voodoo."
"Just what I've seen in bad movies," I told him. "The dead chickens were always my favorite part." Christophe made some sort of disgusted noise in the back of his throat; I ignored him. "Let me guess: instead of sticking the acupuncture needles into the patient himself, you just poke them into his or her doll?"
"Exactly." Pak indicated the hair and fingernail clippings on the doll he was holding. "Despite the impression Hollywood probably gave you, there does seem to be a science behind voodoo. It's just that most of the practitioners never bother to learn it."
I looked over at Maxwell, who was looking simultaneously worried, tense, and embarrassed. "And you're telling me the President of the United States is involved in something this nutzoid?"
He pursed his lips. "He has some pains on occasion, especially when he's under abnormal stress. Normal acupuncture was effective in controlling that pain, but it was proving something of a hassle to keep sneaking Dr. Pak into the White House."
" 'Sneaking'?"
He reddened. "Come on, Harland—you watch the news. Half of Danzing's jibes are aimed at the state of the President's health."
And whether or not he was really up to a second term. Senator Danzing had played that tune almost constantly since the campaign started, and would almost certainly be playing it again at their first official debate tonight in Baltimore. And with the election itself only two months away... "So when the possibility opened up of getting his treatments by remote control, he jumped at it with both feet, huh?" I commented. "I can just see what Danzing would do with something like this."
"He couldn't do a thing," Maxwell growled. "What's he going to do, go on TV and accuse the President of dealing in voodoo? Face it—he'd be laughed right off the stage, probably lose every scrap of credibility he has right then and there. Even if he got the media interested enough to dig out the facts, he'd almost certainly still wind up hurting himself more than he would the President."
"He could still make Thompson look pretty gullible, though," I said bluntly. "Not to mention reckless."
"This wasn't exactly done on a whim," Maxwell said stiffly. "Drs. Pak and Christophe have been working on this technique for several years—these dolls right here represent their sixth testing phase over a period of at least eighteen months."
I looked at the dolls in their planters. "I can hardly wait to see the ads when they have their grand opening."
Maxwell ignored the comment. "The point is that they've been successful in ninety-five-plus percent of the cases where plain acupuncture was already working—those figures courtesy of the FBI and FDA people we had quietly check this out. Whatever else you might think of the whole thing, the President didn't go into it without our okay."
I glanced at the tight muscles in his cheek. "Your okay, but not your enthusiasm?" I ventured.
He gritted his teeth. "The President wanted to do it," he growled. "We obey his orders, not the other way around. Besides, the general consensus was that, crazy or not, if the treatment didn't help him it also probably wouldn't hurt him."