Michael Palmer - The fifth vial

There was no other explanation for what had happened — no other explanation, of course, except the obvious. Was it possible that a woman with a zodiac tattooed on her forehead, living in a tiny house on an undistinguished street in Florida, had somehow tapped into his thoughts? If there were people running about with that ability, why didn't everyone know? How many times had he walked right past a tent at a county fair offering readings for five dollars?

He remembered talking with Gilbert Forest, a physician friend whose foundation of medical beliefs had been badly shaken by a traditional Chinese doc, who had cured an inoperable cancer in one of Gilbert's patients using only acupuncture and what he called "vitamins." Since Ben believed in very little at this point in his life, the biggest danger posed by Alice Gustafson and Madame Sonja was to those many things he didn't believe in.

Start with what you know.

As the sun rose higher and the wet heat grew more intense, Ben set his case file on the ground beside him, and started going through it a page at a time, searching for some angle he had missed. Perhaps the renderings of Glenn would stir some memory in one of the hematologists, he mused. Not likely, he quickly decided.

Okay, okay, Callahan. Aside from the fact that you're not much of a detective, what else, exactly, do you know?

Ben's gaze drifted out over the glistening water. When it returned to the papers in his lap, he was looking down at the article about the woman, Juanita Ramirez. The three photographs accompanying the text, typical of the tabloids, were grainy. There was one of the woman, one of the puncture wounds above her buttocks, and one of a likeness of the mobile home in which she had been kidnapped, held prisoner, and operated on. The mobile home…

Ben pulled out the transcript of the interview Gustafson had with the woman. The parts he considered important were highlighted in yellow. The part he needed at that moment was not.

AG: Can you describe the mobile home where you were held prisoner?

JR: I only saw the outside once, when they stopped to ask me directions, and then pulled me inside. It was big. Real big. Most of it was gray or silver, and there was like a maroon or purple design on the side, sort of like a swirl pattern, or a wave.

The woman's description wasn't much, Ben acknowledged, but it was something. He had done the police stations and the hospitals and the hematology offices and the surgicenters, all the while searching for the man he called Glenn. His plan, now that he had Madame Sonja's renderings, was to make the loop once again, hoping against hope that someone might connect with the face. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Who had told him that?

"All right, Callahan," he muttered, "you've been calling yourself a detective. So detect."

Two hours and four mobile-home dealerships later, he was losing faith. Beaver, Alpine, Great West, Dynamax, Road Trek, Winnebago, Safari Simba. The list of RV makers seemed endless. Damon, Forest River, Kodiak, Newmar Cypress, Thor Colorado. Almost every one of them had a model or more with a design on the side that could have been the one described by Juanita Ramirez.

By mid-afternoon, his feet and back were aching, and the super-stuffed burrito he had eaten at Taco Bell, usually a staple in his diet, was making more encore appearances than the Rolling Stones. A hundred and fifty dollars a day — maybe ten dollars an hour for the time he had put in. He had done quite enough. Alice Gustafson should have found some other way to spend Organ Guard's money. Even though he didn't care much about her miniscule organization and its arcane mission, he really had tried his best. Now it was time to give up and go home.

Three hours later, through lengthening late-afternoon shadows, he swung the Saturn up the short driveway to the Schyler Gaines Mart and Gas, the fifteenth gas station he had visited since deciding to quit the case and return to Chicago. He had managed to add a pounding headache to the persisting miseries in his feet and back. Callahan's Syndrome, he decided to call it — CS for the purposes of fund-raising.

The brainstorm that kept him on the road long enough to develop the syndrome was a circle he had drawn on his map, ten miles around the spot where Glenn had been killed. Armed with catalogues from the RV dealers and the pictures of Glenn, he had decided to go down fighting, visiting every gas station he could locate within the circle. Given the single-digit miles per gallon of the largest RVs, the one he was searching for had to spend as much time at the pump as in the trailer parks. Perhaps, he decided, pigheadedness should be added to the symptoms of CS.

The station, three miles off the highway in Curtisville, might as easily have been on the other side of a time portal. It was a rickety-looking red clapboard structure with a peaked, shingled roof, and a small porch, complete with two rocking chairs. The hand-painted sign over the door was faded and peeling. Out front was a single gas pump that, while modernized at some point from the glass-topped Esso pump standing off to one side of the tarmac, still looked outdated.

It was to the good that the active pump was a fair distance from the porch, because the man Ben assumed was Schyler Gaines was seated in one of the rockers smoking a pipe. With his bib overalls, plaid shirt, dirt-stained Caterpillar cap, and gray beard, he might have been teleported to the mart from Li'l Abner's Dogpatch. Ben pulled the Saturn to a stop not far from the corner of the porch and approached the man, who eyed him with some interest, but said nothing. The smoke from Gaines's pipe was cherry-scented and not at all unpleasant.

"Good afternoon," Ben greeted him with a half-wave, mounting the first step to the porch and leaning on a rail that he guessed was a fifty-fifty bet not to hold him.

Gaines pulled out a gold watch on a chain and checked the time.

"S'pose you could still say that," he replied, sounding exactly as Ben might have predicted.

"My name is Callahan, Ben Callahan. I'm a private detective from Chicago, and I'm looking for a man who was run down and killed on Route Seventy, south of here."

"He 'uz killed an' yer still lookin' for 'im?"

"Let's try that again. Actually, I'm trying to learn about him. No one even knows his name, let alone what he was doing out on Route Seventy at three in the morning."

"Big Peterbilt three-eight-seven hit 'em head on — back cab sleeper, contoured roof cap."

"You know the truck?"

"Stops by here for gas from time t'time. I got a diesel pump out back. Charge a dime less than the stations on the turnpike, but it adds up when yer pumpina hunnert gallons. Guy named Eddie's the driver."

"Eddie Coombs. I spoke to him. He's still pretty messed up over what happened."

"I'll bet. It's a crackerjack rig he got. Six-hunnert horsepower Cummings engine. Fella who got hit couldn't a had much time to knowed it happened."

"I think that's the case," Ben said. "Well, here are some computer drawings of what the guy might have looked like."

He passed the renderings over, suddenly feeling strangely foolish and impotent. What was he doing here? What could he possibly expect to learn from this laconic old man? Why had he ever said yes to Alice Gustafson in the first place? Rocking and puffing, Gaines studied the pictures for a time, then handed them back, shaking his head.

"Don't mean nothin' t' me."

"I didn't think they would," Ben said. "You got some cold Coke in there?"

"I do. Just short a havinice in the can if you know what I mean."

"Oh, I know exactly."

Ben used the back of his hand to wipe a sheen of sweat from his forehead.

"Cans are in the cooler. Jes leave a dollar on the counter. I'm enjoyin this bowlful too much t'git up."