Flashback (35 page)

There were thousands of square miles of Caribbean and Gulf waters. To choose the fifty thousand or so acres of that vastness guaranteed to be crawling with tourists, flown over by seaplanes and patrolled by federal law-enforcement officers in the persons of park rangers, made no sense. A vampire in the Vatican would have a greater chance of going unnoticed.

Anna took the videotape and went home. There were three things on her To Do list today that couldn't in good conscience be put off. She needed to call Lanny Wilcox and let him know he was not insane. She needed to revisit the Theresa Alvarez abdication/vanishing. And it behooved her to dive the green Scarab one more time. With Bob laid up and Mack on the mainland, she'd be diving alone. Teddy Shaw was an accomplished diver and had come to her aid after the fuel tanks blew up, but Anna couldn't help seeing her in B-movie guise: the angel of death in starched white uniform, cap and squeaky shoes, slipping into a hospital room, dripping syringe in hand.

As she'd taught herself to do over the years, thus earning an undeserved reputation for never procrastinating, Anna chose to do the most revolting chore first. It was the adult equivalent of holding the nose and gulping the brussel sprouts without having to taste them.

She docked at Garden Key, got her gear from her quarters then, quickly-surreptitiously, if that was possible in the light of day amid a cloud of tourists and pelicans-took tank, vest and regulator from the storage room behind the ladies' toilets. She had no fears of diving alone in this warm shallow place of coral reefs and sand, particularly since she had no intention of getting within forty yards of anything that looked as if it could roll, fall, shift, explode, scrape or bite. The concern that prompted the desire for stealth was that, were her intentions to become known, she might not be diving alone.

The water remained choppy but in no way dangerous to anything but digestion. Over a sandy spot near the wrecks she dropped anchor. Having tucked a garbage bag in her vest, she pulled on latex gloves and went over the side. The garbage bag seemed a bit callous, but she figured she would not find any parts of the Scarab's captain too big to fit. In a perfect world-that is to say a world without people-she would have left the pur‚ed remains to feed the fishes. However, when and if the man was identified, it would behoove the National Park Service to have retrieved the body-or what there was left of it-and stored it with proper respect.

Whatever forces of nature conspired to make the surface waters rough had also stirred up the bottom. Visibility was not great. Anna could only see a hundred feet or so. Because she valued her own skin more than that of the fragmented boatman, she first inspected the engine that had nearly marked her final resting place. There were shiny scrapes and scars that could have indicated the thing was levered up by someone intending to squash her. They could also have been made by the metal prongs of the anchor when it moved the engine so Mack could pull her to safety.

No epiphanies in the iron, she moved on to her gruesome harvest. The accidental chumming of the man Anna'd known only as a finger and a half had attracted scavenger fish. The only ones Anna was concerned with were two largish sharks. One swam close as if to assure it's tiny prehistoric brain that she was not shark food but a largish fish in her own right. Other than that they showed no interest in her. She was careful to do nothing that might offend them.

Thirty minutes searching and she had gathered all she could of what had once been a man. That it was a man was left in no doubt. Trapped beneath a metal sink, blown intact from the galley, was half a penis. With a nod to John Wayne Bobbit, Anna put it in her garbage bag. A line from an old Uncle Bonsai song robbed the moment of its gruesomeness. If I had a penis, I'd still be a girl. Anna bagged the evidence and wondered if the song's prophecy would come true. If she'd make much more money and conquer the world. Had ill-timed merriment not so recently gotten her in trouble, Anna would have laughed.

Scavengers had carried away or eaten what the explosion had not obliterated. She did not find the head-a failure for which she was grateful-or much in the way of edible meat. The right hand was recovered. It had been immersed in salt water for a while, and smaller fishes had been snacking on it, but there was a good chance prints could still be lifted. Oddly enough she found both feet together and relatively intact. One was still wearing a bright blue flip-flop. Because of their humanity it was these and not the coarser discoveries of a shoulder and clavicle or a part of a ribcage that got to Anna. Before she'd had time to do more than rip out her mouthpiece, she vomited. Immediately schools of tiny fish rushed over to partake of the unexpected bounty.

Life goes on.

Topside, the bits and pieces in the garbage bag disturbed her more than the actual handling of them underwater. Flopped on deck they became somehow more real. Feeling a little silly but doing it just the same, she covered the black plastic sack with a yellow tarp so she wouldn't have to see it on the trip back.

Not stopping to put tank and vest away, she gathered up the four corners of the yellow tarp, the black plastic shroud tucked inside, and walked toward the fort as quickly as she could without drawing attention to herself.

It was three o'clock. Tourists crowded beach and dock, gathering to get back onto the catamaran for the two-hour trip back to Key West. Three giggling girls, the littlest not more than eight or ten years old, caught up in a windstorm of their own making, tumbled into her as she stepped from the sand onto the planks of the drawbridge. One collided with the yellow tarp. Involuntarily Anna cried, "Oh, God!" as if she carried fine china or nitroglycerin.

The child was unharmed, her spirits undimmed by this collision with death in the least attractive of its myriad forms. Breathing out her relief, Anna became aware she was too tightly strung. Consciously getting a grip on herself she hurried toward the researchers' dorm and the chest freezer.

"Hey, what did you bring me?" Daniel called as she passed the shop.

"Takeout," was her first thought and "seafood" her second, but to hold the thoughts more than a nanosecond would have brought on a second attack of nausea.

"Don't ask," she hollered back.

Alone in the researchers' dorm, she tied an apron she found in one of the drawers over her swimsuit and donned a fresh pair of latex gloves. Feeling more like Dr. Frankenstein than Quincy, she sorted through the bits of bone and flesh, bagging each separately. Forensic pathology was an alien science to her. It grew and changed on a monthly basis as brains and technology raced each other into an unknowable future. Bagging the hand, she wondered if freezing it would further destroy the whorls and ridges making identification harder-or impossible. Till she could ask someone, she decided to put it in the refrigerator. The rest went into the freezer like so much venison to await its ride to Key West on the Activa.

After a shower, longer and hotter than necessary for rudimentary hygiene, Anna chose to cleanse her mind of the contents of the black garbage bag by being the bearer of glad tidings. Sequestered in her tomb-like office against the east rampart, the undersized door closed for privacy, she called the number where Lanny Wilcox was staying in Miami.

A woman with a lilting Spanish accent answered the phone, then went to see if "Mr. Wilcox is taking calls." Not an auspicious beginning. Anna wondered if Lanny was under the care of a nurse. There had been those unfortunates during her college years who had slid over the line while on LSD and were marooned in that place where monsters manifest.

"He's coming," the woman's voice promised after a while. Anna waited so long she thought she'd been forgotten or disconnected. She was debating whether or not to hang up and dial again when Wilcox finally came on the line.

"This is Lanny Wilcox."

At least that's what Anna assumed "iss iss anny Wilks" translated to. The man sounded drugged to the gills. Anna pictured him in a cheap tatty robe in a room full of droolers of whom he was one.

"Lanny, this is Anna Pigeon. I took over as Supervisory Ranger when you got sick." A long silence followed. Faint as a drunken memory, Anna heard clicking over the line or the microwaves or whatever. She imagined it to be the clogged gears of Lanny's brain beginning to move. Finally he managed a word.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I called to tell you you are not crazy. While you were out here somebody spiked your water with a hallucinogen. What kind I don't know yet but I will. They did the same thing to me. I was seeing all kinds of strange shit for a while."

Another silence, longer this time, then: "Not crazy?"

He didn't sound exactly thrilled by the prospect of incipient sanity. In fact, he didn't sound sane. "What meds have they got you on, Lanny?"

"Uh," a pause perhaps to drool or think or both, "Lithium I think and other stuff. Since I got it I haven't had... you know... visions."

"Quit taking it," Anna said. Then, thinking better of this over-the-phone prescribing and ever-mindful of the litigiousness of the American spirit, she amended it. "Talk to your shrink. Tell him what I told you-"

"Her. It's a her."

"Her then. Tell her what I told you."

Lanny said nothing. "What did I tell you?" Anna asked.

"Uh. Not crazy."

"That's right, Lanny. You are not crazy. What else?"

"Somebody was poisoning me."

Hearing her words repeated by a man on heavy antipsychotics, Anna realized the revelation sounded exactly like what Lanny would say if he was a paranoid schizophrenic or suffered any of a number of other mental illnesses.

"What's your psychiatrist's name?"

"Dr. Kelly. I'm not crazy?"

He was beginning to warm to the idea. "That's right, Lanny. Does she live in Miami? Have a practice there? What's the name of the practice? Do you have her number?"

The rapid-fire questioning was too much for him. "I got to give you to Anita," he said, and Anna heard the receiver crash against the table or maybe the floor.

"Anita speaking," was the next sign of life. Anna'd never much liked the name Anita, but the way this woman pronounced it made it pretty.

"Anita, could you give me Dr. Kelly's phone number please?"

"I have two. One for emergencies and one for regular. Which do you like?"

"Give them both to me." Anna copied down the numbers, then repeated them back. Anita seemed proud of her for getting them both right. Chore accomplished, Anna asked if she could speak with Lanny again. Anita didn't think this was such a good idea. Apparently the news he'd been first drugged into insanity by the criminal element and then drugged into another form of the same malady by the medical community had agitated him.

After Anna twice promised to keep it short and "nice" Lanny was again put on the phone.

"One question before I let you go, Lanny. I had cause to go into your quarters. There are no pictures of Theresa. Did you get rid of them?"

"Theresa left me."

"Right. And did you get mad and get rid of any pictures you had of her?"

"I want to keep the pictures. She left me but I love her."

Anna decided to be "nice" and take that as a "no" he did not get rid of the pictures. "I'll talk to you again when you're feeling better."

"Okay," he said obediently but didn't hang up.

Anna did. She could picture him standing at the phone table with the receiver to his ear till somebody thought to come and lead him away.

Much as she hated to talk to doctors who weren't related to her by blood, she felt she owed it to Wilcox not to put off the call to his psychiatrist. Using the emergency number, she got the doctor after less than twenty minutes of holding. Having briefly explained who she was and the annoying delay on the phone line, Anna told her about the drugging of the water.

Anna didn't know what she'd expected. Maybe a "Yippee" or "I'll get right on that" or a least a "Thank you." None of these transpired. The doctor's voice, warm and solicitous when she'd first come to the phone, had cooled significantly.

"Miss...?"

"Pigeon," Anna filled in for her.

"Yes. Miss Pigeon. As you are not a physician or a family member I can't discuss his case with you. Suffice to say I have spent time with Mr. Wilcox and his symptoms indicated the course of medications I prescribed."

Anna wasn't the only one scared to death of being sued. "He would have," Anna said in what she hoped were comforting tones. "The guy was being fed some kind of hallucinogen. He's been off of them for what, three weeks? He should have come down by now."

"I've been practicing a good while, Miss Pigeon. I think you had better let me judge the medical needs of my patients. Good day."

Boom. Silence. "The bitch hung up on me," Anna announced to the empty office. Dr. Kelly hadn't been afraid of getting sued; she'd been affronted at being told she was wrong. Who knew how long she'd keep Lanny on antipsychotics just to prove to herself she wasn't. Calling back would only make matters worse. Anna couldn't bring herself to leave a fellow ranger trapped in a bad production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Much as she hated to make public the news that there was a vicious prankster in the fort-or a perpetrator whose motives were as unknown as his identity-before she'd had a chance to work it out, she culled through Lanny's Rolodex and called half a dozen of the most pertinent names: a sister in Philadelphia, a son who worked for Goldman Sachs in Vero Beach, Lanny's general practitioner in Key West and the Chief Ranger of Everglades and Dry Tortugas National Parks in Homestead, Florida. Surely one of them would be better able to rescue Lanny than she was.