Sandra Moore - The Orchid Hunter

“You see the boss?”

“I did indeed. He wished me well.”

“He wished you to hell, you mean.”

“Yeah, but only after I’ve got what I came for. He’s checking into a pharmaceutical company for me.”

“A pharma?”

“It’s personal.”

He nodded, taking that in and leaving it alone. “I thought you’d moved far, far away,” Marcus said, rounding the gleaming worktable and smiling a little as he did it.

He was still a hunk, but I wasn’t here to resurrect ghosts. “I did. Now I’m back.”

“For how long?” He crossed one muscular arm over the other, prompting a nice burn of remembrance in my sweet spot.

“Long enough for you to tell me what this is.” I handed him the plastic envelope.

He took it, glanced at the page. “It’s a new excuse for not having your homework.”

“I’m serious.”

When Marcus smiled, that dimple quirked in his cheek.

“I’m really serious,” I said firmly, trying to ignore the dimple. “This is evidence and I need to read what’s under the blood.”

He exhaled loudly for my benefit. “All right.” He pulled the page out of its protective plastic to examine it. “I don’t see how you can read this scribble even if I can clean it up.” He frowned. “But it’s not blood. It’s something else.”

“What?”

“I’ll have to get back to you.”

“I’m short on time,” I said. “Can you at least make the writing visible?”

“Wait here.” He went through a side door that had a red bulb over the doorway, like a photography dark room.

While I waited, I took out Harrison’s brass key. Under the harsh lab lighting, the key looked crisp around the edges, like it’d been superimposed on my vision. I evaluated what I knew at this point. Harrison had set up a research lab in San Antonio and worked on some kind of miracle cure for von Brutten. Whoever had kidnapped or killed Harrison had probably already been to his lab since von Brutten’s henchmen had come up with nothing more useful than the stained page Marcus was working on. If the bad guys had taken Harrison’s project notebook, that meant they had some idea of what they were looking for. But as far as I knew, there weren’t that many assassin botanists running around, so I stood a chance of finding something the bad guys wouldn’t think important. Otherwise, I’d have to widen my search to Harrison’s house.

The dark room door opened and Marcus came back with what looked like a Photostat on clear film. It was.

“Here’s the page sans blood as best I can get it for now. If you want to know what the blood actually is, that’ll take a little time.” He leaned his hip against the lab table and smiled charmingly at me. “Can I call you?”

“Better leave me a voice mail,” I said, handing him my card. “I’m in a hurry.”

I froze, my hands in Harrison’s drawers.

Down the town house’s single flight of stairs, low voices burbled. Men’s voices. Two of them. Steps creaked as the men climbed up. Fortunately, I’d pushed the upstairs bedroom door nearly shut before starting my little rampage through my old mentor’s underwear.

My luck never runs good for long. They must be cops. Had someone seen me breaking and entering an expensive condo in broad daylight?

The men passed up the bedroom and went directly into the home office across the hall, like they knew where they were going. Shuffling, papers flipping, footsteps. They weren’t cops. Harrison’s latest graduate students, maybe? Did they work in his lab? Something glass shattered on a hard surface and one of the men cursed.

“Shut up!” the other hissed.

“Why? Nobody’s home.” A pause. “It stinks in here.”

“So?”

“It’s gross.”

“Keep your voice down. Leave that alone and help me look through these binders. It’s got to be here somewhere.”

I straightened. Funny how fear evaporates when I know the other guy is just as much in the wrong as I am. It kind of levels the moral playing field. Gives a girl back her spunk.

The Dr. Terence Jasper Harrison I knew was a Grade-A neatnik. A place for everything and everything in its place. His office could have been the poster child for anal, scientific academia. He didn’t go out looking for plants; plants came to him to be studied to death.

One look at Harrison’s lab on San Antonio’s north side an hour ago had told me he’d either gone off his meds or the bad guys had beaten me there. After scrounging around the broken glass, strewn papers and emptied specimen cabinets, I’d gotten out before the cops could show up and pin the damage on me.

Next stop: his downtown two-story condo, where I now knelt, up to my elbows in socks carefully bundled into color-coded piles, except for a mateless stray exiled to the bottom right corner.

The second-floor home office now being ransacked by the jokers had yielded nothing for me but a bunch of old notebooks, an array of dried specimens, a few bottles of herbs in preservative alcohol, and one very nasty dead mouse behind the bookcase. Dr. Harrison had been out for some time. Nothing even remotely resembling a clue had been left behind.

That was my advantage in having been his graduate assistant. I knew he may have kept his technical notes in his office, but he always kept a memento of his current big find close to home. Kind of like a souvenir. Or a security blanket. Or a good-luck charm.

Hence the sock drawer. Alas, nothing but socks. I took another look around.

Harrison’s full-size bed sported a manly plaid bedspread undimpled by hands or head. The plain oak nightstand was held down by two neat stacks of books, biology texts in one and true crimes in the other. The oak dresser sat forlornly against the near wall, its surface empty except for a lone comb, a homemade ashtray and a fine layer of dust.

I flipped silently through the books on the nightstand. Nothing. The nightstand didn’t have a drawer. The stray sock’s mate lay limp under the bed. I felt between the mattresses but came up with nothing. I picked up the heavy wooden ashtray, hoping for a key underneath. Nada.

I was about to put the ashtray back when its design caught my eye. The pattern under the varnish gleamed pearlescent black on matte black, almost like raku. Had they smoked the wood somehow to make it look like that? I looked closer. The ashtray was homemade all right, but not by Harrison’s niece in art class. The inside bottom bore a miniature stylized jaguar pawprint.

Last time I saw something like that was in an ethnobotany presentation on how particular plants and herbs had been used for hundreds of years by shamans. Into the bowl goes crushed leaves and monkey spit, out comes a medicine to cure earache. The bowl itself was blessed by the shaman. A blessed bowl imbued the plant matter ground in it with magical powers.

Harrison wasn’t the type of guy to keep knickknacks around, not even precious mementos from past projects. Hell, there was barely anything in the condo that didn’t look like standard hotel fare. And Harrison didn’t smoke.

The bowl’s presence suggested two things: First, Harrison really had been in the field to collect the Death Orchid and brought this little talisman back recently, as a souvenir. Second, if I could find out where the bowl came from, I could figure out where Harrison had found the orchid.

The bowl fit in my shoulder bag. Now to wait until the jokers left.

“We could get Noah to go after the orchid, you know,” one said to the other. It sounded like he was standing in the office doorway.

“I don’t want to pay him if I don’t have to.”

“Well, no, but why should we have to contract malaria when we can hire someone else to do it?”

Indeed. I’d often asked myself the same question. My answer was always that I knew my job better than anyone else. These clowns might be after the Death Orchid, but they were probably armchair botanists. Sort of like Harrison without the single-minded pursuit of taxonomic perfection. This Noah guy might be another collector for hire, like me or Lawrence Daley. Heck, these guys might even be locals working for Constance Thurston-Fitzhugh, trying to track down the Death Orchid for her.