Michael Palmer - The fifth vial

8 p.m. 16 R.D. FELIX #13

There was no doubt in her mind that she had interpreted the written message correctly. It was now ten after. The nugget was growing with each second. Dora's plea on the street that Natalie not look back, and her reaction in the SIC-U to the arrival of the Military Police officer, underscored the woman's fear, but sharing the name Dom Angelo and the scribbled note suggested that she wanted to help.

"Come on…come on…"

Natalie knocked again, then returned to the front hallway and tried the bell one last time. Her mind was racing through possible responses to this latest turn. One thing was certain — she wasn't leaving until she had done everything possible to ensure that Dora Cabral was all right.

Eight fifteen.

Natalie debated knocking on a neighbor's door to see if any of them might have a key to apartment 13. Instead, she went outside and, suddenly wary, walked to the end of the block and turned the corner before swinging around abruptly and heading back. Nothing looked suspicious, so she went to the edge of the alley and ducked in. Assuming the apartments were approximately the same size, the fifth and sixth windows on her left would be Dora's, but because the first floor was up four stairs, they were two feet or so above Natalie's head. There was dim light behind each of them.

Eight twenty.

The lights were not what Natalie wanted to see. A dark apartment could have meant that Dora had been delayed somewhere. Lights made the possibility less likely. Grimly, Natalie raced as best she could down the alley to a single, half-filled galvanized metal trash can. She carried it back, turned it over, and clambered up so that the lower sill was now at the level of her chest.

She was looking into a neatly kept bedroom with two twin beds. The light was coming from beyond — from the kitchen, it seemed. She blinked twice to assist her eyes in adjusting to the gloom. Now she could make out the sink in the kitchen and the back of a chair and part of the kitchen table. It took several seconds for her to realize that hanging off the side of the table was an arm.

"Oh, God, no!" she cried out softly.

Without hesitation, she slammed her elbow viciously into the pane, exploding nearly all the glass into the bedroom. There were several large shards still protruding from the frame. Rather than try to remove them, she reached up and unlatched the window, pushed it up, and found the strength to hoist herself up and inside. Mindless of the blood flowing from a gash just below her elbow, she raced to the kitchen.

Dora Cabral was slumped on the table, dead. Her head rested peacefully on one cheek. Her mouth was agape, her lips pulled back in a disturbing rictus, exposing her teeth. Natalie checked the carotid pulse in her neck and the radial pulse at her wrist, but knew there would be none. Then she noticed the syringe on the table, next to an empty multidose vial of what she felt certain was a powerful, injectable narcotic.

Nothing she sensed about the woman encouraged the belief that she was a narcotics addict, but if she knew nothing else, she knew that was al-ways a hard call to make. In her heart, she felt that Dora's death was murder, and worse, that it had something to do with the two connections between them — the rain forest village of Dom Angelo and the Military Police officer Rodrigo Vargas.

Still numb and not thinking with much clarity, Natalie glanced down and noticed the blood dripping off her hand and forming a small pool on the linoleum floor. The gash by her elbow was two inches long and fairly deep, but she knew pressure would take care of the bleeding and in time, provided there was no major infection, all she would be left with was another Rio scar. She took a dishcloth from the sink and managed to tie it tightly around the wound. At that moment, she heard sirens approaching.

Was this a setup?

Fueled by a massive adrenaline rush, she was thinking quite clearly again. She had to get away. Using her shirt to turn the knob, she hurried to the hallway and immediately opted against the front stairs. Instead, she took a narrow flight down to a pitch-black basement. Virtually blind, she felt along the wall for a light switch. At the moment she was about to give up and head back upstairs, she found one and flicked it on. Just ten feet away was a small set of concrete stairs, leading up to a door. Opening it cautiously, Natalie stepped out into an alleyway between the backs of buildings, scarcely six feet wide, and permeated by the pungent odor of urine.

The sirens were close now, and she felt certain she heard heavy, running footsteps from someplace to her right. She had been set up. There was no doubt about it. It had to be Vargas. Sometime soon, very soon, she would be killed trying to escape arrest, and the loose ends surrounding Dom Angelo would be tied up.

Mindless of her breathing, she dashed to the end of the alley farthest from the footsteps and then flattened against a wall as a uniformed policeman raced by. Finally, she slipped across the street and cut through another alley. Several more blocks, and she could go no farther. She was in an upper-middle-class neighborhood now, with single-family homes and lush gardens. Breathing heavily, and not all that successfully, she sank onto the ground behind a dense grove of palms, ferns, and huge yuccas, and allowed herself to cry — not so much out of fear for herself or even horror over the death of Dora Cabral, but rather out of sheer bewilderment.

Somehow, she was either going to find some answers, or die trying.

Her search had to begin, and would hopefully end, in Dom Angelo.

Natalie spent the night in the back of the Jeep, parked in a public garage north of the city, using a duffel bag for a pillow and a tarp for a blanket. For six hours her tension and confusion battled with her physical and emotional exhaustion for possession of her ability to sleep. In the end, the struggle was more or less of a draw, and she estimated two hours of decent rest, maybe even three.

At five thirty, stiff and bleary, she climbed out of the Jeep and paced around level two of the garage. As far as she could tell, she was fifteen or twenty miles north of Rio, just a dozen or so miles from Route 44, a cutoff that would continue leading north and west, away from the coast. That two-lane would eventually become a winding, probably unpaved secondary road that snaked into the rain forest mountains for at least twenty miles before connecting, in some way, with a road to the village of Dom Angelo. It was going to be a hell of a trip, but that might be said for every inch her life had traveled since she stepped on board her initial flight to Rio.

She had a dreadful ache in her soul for Dora Cabral, and what the woman might have gone through before her death. There didn't seem to be any signs of torture on her body, but Natalie had little doubt that Rodrigo Vargas was skilled at the art of getting answers without leaving marks.

Natalie felt totally alone — more so perhaps than at any time in her life. She thought fleetingly about calling Terry or even Veronica to ask if they might fly down and join her in the search for answers, but one person who had reached out to help her had already died. No, this was going to be her game to win or lose. Actually, she acknowledged bitterly, no matter what, she had already lost. The scimitar scar on her right side attested to that. So now, the rules had changed. The game was no longer about winning or losing — rather, it was all about answers and, if possible, vengeance.