“Welcome to the club.”
A roadside diner stood on the right, and Elliot pulled into the parking lot. A single mercury-vapor pole lamp at the entrance shed fuzzy purple light over the first third of the parking lot. Elliot drove behind the restaurant and tucked the Mercedes into a slot in the deepest shadows, between a Toyota Celica and a small motor home, where it could not be seen from the street.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“Starving. But before we go in, let’s check out that list of questions they were going to make you answer.”
“Let’s look at it in the café,” Elliot said. “The light will be better. It doesn’t seem to be busy in there. We should be able to talk without being overheard. Bring the magazine too. I want to see that story.”
As he got out of the car, his attention was drawn to a window on the side of the motor home next to which he had parked. He squinted through the glass into the perfectly black interior, and he had the disconcerting feeling that someone was hiding in there, staring out at him.
Don’t succumb to paranoia,
he warned himself.
When he turned from the motor home, his gaze fell on a dense pool of shadows around the trash bin at the back of the restaurant, and again he had the feeling that someone was watching him from concealment.
He had told Tina that Kennebeck’s bosses were not omniscient. He must remember that. He and Tina apparently were confronted with a powerful, lawless, dangerous organization hell-bent on keeping the secret of the Sierra tragedy. But any organization was composed of ordinary men and women, none of whom had the all-seeing gaze of God.
Nevertheless . . .
As he and Tina walked across the parking lot toward the diner, Elliot couldn’t shake the feeling that someone or something was watching them. Not necessarily a person. Just . . . something . . . weird, strange. Something both more and less than human. That was a bizarre thought, not at all the sort of notion he’d ordinarily get in his head, and he didn’t like it.
Tina stopped when they reached the purple light under the mercury-vapor lamp. She glanced back toward the car, a curious expression on her face.
“What is it?” Elliot asked.
“I don’t know. . . .”
“See something?”
“No.”
They stared at the shadows.
At length she said, “Do you feel it?”
“Feel what?”
“I’ve got this . . . prickly feeling.”
He didn’t say anything.
“You
do
feel it, don’t you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“As if we aren’t alone.”
“It’s crazy,” he said, “but I feel eyes on me.”
She shivered. “But no one’s really there.”
“No. I don’t think anyone is.”
They continued to squint at the inky blackness, searching for movement.
She said, “Are we both cracking under the strain?”
“Just jumpy,” he said, but he wasn’t really convinced that their imagination was to blame.
A soft cool wind sprang up. It carried with it the odor of dry desert weeds and alkaline sand. It hissed through the branches of a nearby date palm.
“It’s such a
strong
feeling,” she said. “And you know what it reminds me of? It’s the same damn feeling I had in Angela’s office when that computer terminal started operating on its own. I feel . . . not just as if I’m being watched but . . . something more . . . like a
presence
. . . as if something I can’t see is standing right beside me. I can feel the weight of it, a pressure in the air . . . sort of
looming.
”
He knew exactly what she meant, but he didn’t want to think about it, because there was no way he could make sense of it. He preferred to deal with hard facts, realities; that was why he was such a good attorney, so adept at taking threads of evidence and weaving a good case out of them.
“We’re both overwrought,” he suggested.
“That doesn’t change what I feel.”
“Let’s get something to eat.”
She stayed a moment longer, staring back into the gloom, where the purple mercury-vapor light did not reach.
“Tina . . . ?”
A breath of wind stirred a dry tumbleweed and blew it across the blacktop.
A bird swooped through the darkness overhead. Elliot couldn’t see it, but he could hear the beating of its wings.
Tina cleared her throat. “It’s as if . . . the night itself is watching us . . . the night, the shadows, the eyes of darkness.”
The wind ruffled Elliot’s hair. It rattled a loose metal fixture on the trash bin, and the restaurant’s big sign creaked between its two standards.
At last he and Tina went into the diner, trying not to look over their shoulders.
21
THE LONG L-SHAPED DINER WAS FILLED WITH glimmering surfaces: chrome, glass, plastic, yellow Formica, and red vinyl. The jukebox played a country tune by Garth Brooks, and the music shared the air with the delicious aromas of fried eggs, bacon, and sausages. True to the rhythm of Vegas life, someone was just beginning his day with a hearty breakfast. Tina’s mouth began to water as soon as she stepped through the door.
Eleven customers were clustered at the end of the long arm of the L, near the entrance, five on stools at the counter, six in the red booths. Elliot and Tina sat as far from everyone as possible, in the last booth in the short wing of the restaurant.
Their waitress was a redhead named Elvira. She had a round face, dimples, eyes that twinkled as if they had been waxed, and a Texas drawl. She took their orders for cheeseburgers, French fries, coleslaw, and Coors.
When Elvira left the table and they were alone, Tina said, “Let’s see the papers you took off that guy.”
Elliot fished the pages out of his hip pocket, unfolded them, and put them on the table. There were three sheets of paper, each containing ten or twelve typewritten questions.
They leaned in from opposite sides of the booth and read the material silently:
1. How long have you known Christina Evans?
2. Why did Christina Evans ask you, rather than another attorney, to handle the exhumation of her son’s body?
3. What reason does she have to doubt the official story of her son’s death?
4. Does she have any proof that the official story of her son’s death is false?
5. If she has such proof, what is it?
6. Where did she obtain this evidence?
7. Have you ever heard of “Project Pandora”?
8. Have you been given, or has Mrs. Evans been given, any material relating to military research installations in the Sierra Nevada Mountains?
Elliot looked up from the page. “Have you ever heard of Project Pandora?”
“No.”
“Secret labs in the High Sierras?”
“Oh, sure. Mrs. Neddler told me all about them.”
“Mrs. Neddler?”
“My cleaning woman.”
“Jokes again.”
“At a time like this.”
“Balm for the afflicted, medicine for melancholy.”
“Groucho Marx,” she said.
“Evidently they think someone from Project Pandora has decided to rat on them.”
“Is that who’s been in Danny’s room? Did someone from Project Pandora write on the chalkboard . . . and then fiddle with the computer at work?”
“Maybe,” Elliot said.
“But you don’t think so.”
“Well, if someone had a guilty conscience, why wouldn’t he approach you directly?”
“He could be afraid. Probably has good reason to be.”
“Maybe,” Elliot said again. “But I think it’s more complicated than that. Just a hunch.”
They read quickly through the remaining material, but none of it was enlightening. Most of the questions were concerned with how much Tina knew about the true nature of the Sierra accident, how much she had told Elliot, how much she had told Michael, and with how many people she had discussed it. There were no more intriguing tidbits like Project Pandora, no more clues or leads.
Elvira brought two frosted glasses and icy bottles of Coors.
The jukebox began to play a mournful Alan Jackson song.
Elliot sipped his beer and paged through the horror-comics magazine that had belonged to Danny. “Amazing,” he said when he finished skimming
The Boy Who Was Not Dead.
“You’d think it was even more amazing if you’d suffered those nightmares,” she said. “So now what do we do?”
“Danny’s was a closed-coffin funeral. Was it the same with the other thirteen scouts?”
“About half the others were buried without viewings,” Tina said.
“Their parents never saw the bodies?”
“Oh, yes. All the other parents were asked to identify their kids, even though some of the corpses were in such a horrible state they couldn’t be cosmetically restored for viewing at a funeral. Michael and I were the only ones who were strongly advised not to look at the remains. Danny was the only one who was too badly . . . mangled.”
Even after all this time, when she thought about Danny’s last moments on earth—the terror he must have known, the excruciating pain he must have endured, even if it was of brief duration—she began to choke with sorrow and pity. She blinked back tears and took a swallow of beer.
“Damn,” Elliot said.
“What?”
“I thought we might make some quick allies out of those other parents. If they hadn’t seen their kids’ bodies, they might have just gone through a year of doubt like you did, might be easily persuaded to join us in a call for the reopening of
all
the graves. If that many voices were raised, then Vince’s bosses couldn’t risk silencing all of them, and we’d be safe. But if the other people had a chance to view the bodies, if none of them has had any reason to entertain doubts like yours, then they’re all just finally learning to cope with the tragedy. If we go to them now with a wild story about a mysterious conspiracy, they aren’t going to be anxious to listen.”
“So we’re still alone.”
“Yeah.”
“You said we could go to a reporter, try to get media interest brewing. Do you have anyone in mind?”
“I know a couple of local guys,” Elliot said. “But maybe it’s not wise to go to the local press. That might be just what Vince’s bosses are expecting us to do. If they’re waiting, watching—we’ll be dead before we can tell a reporter more than a sentence or two. I think we’ll have to take the story out of town, and before we do that, I’d like to have a few more facts.”
“I thought you said we had enough to interest a good newsman. The pistol you took off that man . . . my house being blown up . . .”
“That might be enough. Certainly, for the Las Vegas paper, it ought to be sufficient. This city still remembers the Jaborski group, the Sierra accident. It was a local tragedy. But if we go to the press in Los Angeles or New York or some other city, the reporters there aren’t going to have a whole lot of interest in it unless they see an aspect of the story that lifts it out of the local-interest category. Maybe we’ve already got enough to convince them it’s big news. I’m not sure. And I want to be
damn
sure before we try to go public with it. Ideally, I’d even like to be able to hand the reporter a neat theory about what really happened to those scouts, something sensational that he can hook his story onto.”
“Such as?”
He shook his head. “I don’t have anything worked out yet. But it seems to me the most obvious thing we have to consider is that the scouts and their leaders saw something they weren’t supposed to see.”
“Project Pandora?”
He sipped his beer and used one finger to wipe a trace of foam from his upper lip. “A military secret. I can’t see what else would have brought an organization like Vince’s so deeply into this. An intelligence outfit of that size and sophistication doesn’t waste its time on Mickey Mouse stuff.”
“But military secrets . . . that seems so far out.”
“In case you didn’t know it, since the Cold War ended and California took such a big hit in the defense downsizing, Nevada has more Pentagon-supported industries and installations than any state in the union. And I’m not just talking about the obvious ones like Nellis Air Force Base and the Nuclear Test Site. This state’s ideally suited for secret or quasi-secret, high-security weapons research centers. Nevada has thousands of square miles of remote unpopulated land. The deserts. The deeper reaches of the mountains. And most of those remote areas are owned by the federal government. If you put a secret installation in the middle of all that lonely land, you have a pretty easy job maintaining security.”
Arms on the table, both hands clasped around her glass of beer, Tina leaned toward Elliot. “You’re saying that Mr. Jaborski, Mr. Lincoln, and the boys stumbled across a place like that in the Sierras?”
“It’s possible.”
“And saw something they weren’t supposed to see.”
“Maybe.”
“And then what? You mean . . . because of what they saw, they were
killed
?”
“It’s a theory that ought to excite a good reporter.”
She shook her head. “I just can’t believe the government would murder a group of little children just because they accidentally got a glimpse of a new weapon or something.”
“Wouldn’t it? Think of Waco—all those dead children. Ruby Ridge—a fourteen-year-old boy shot in the back by the FBI. Vince Foster found dead in a Washington park and officially declared a suicide even though most of the forensic evidence points to murder. Even a primarily good government, when it’s big enough, has some pretty mean sharks swimming in the darker currents. We’re living in strange times, Tina.”
The rising night wind thrummed against the large pane of glass beside their booth. Beyond the window, out on Charleston Boulevard, traffic sailed murkily through a sudden churning river of dust and paper scraps.
Chilled, Tina said, “But how much could the kids have seen? You’re the one who said security was easy to maintain when one of these installations is located in the wilderness. The boys couldn’t have gotten very close to such a well-guarded place. Surely they couldn’t have managed to get more than a glimpse.”