Read Lab Notes: a novel Online
Authors: Gerrie Nelson
With that Gabriel walked away. But then he turned and slowly, pensively retraced his steps to her side.
He reached toward her. She froze.
With a feathery touch, he brushed the bruise still visible on her jaw, then smoothed some stray hairs behind her ear. In a choked voice he said: “‘Thou art too dear for my possessing.’”
He turned away and stepped quickly to the door.
Maxine sounded glad to hear Diane’s voice on the phone. “Huck sure will be happy to see you. Where’re you calling from?”
“The plane—Gabriel’s plane. We should be landing soon.”
“Cool! It’s nice to know jet-setters. But Gabriel will be disappointed when he gets here; Raymond’s not back from Australia yet.”
“Gabriel Carerra’s not with me; he had his pilot bring me back.”
“You have the whole plane to yourself? Way cool.”
Diane glanced around at the upholstery adorned with gold brocade figures of Colombia’s ancient Chibchan tribesmen. The seats were empty, but she did not feel she had the cabin to herself.
For the entire flight, she had been struggling to blot out Gabriel’s indelible presence, to erase his touch from her cheek, to eradicate her appreciation of his kindness at letting her go.
But why did he release her? And why did he provide her with the means of escape? That’s assuming the plane’s actual touchdown will be in Houston, rather than some secret lair in the Bahamas.
The only answer that made sense was: Gabriel knew the video was no longer a threat. In which case, he knew it had been stolen. That’s it! He was the one who ordered the theft of the camcorder. Without that video, there was no proof of Gabriel’s involvement in Vincent’s death. That’s what the break-in was all about—to steal the video; the rest was just a ruse.
“Diane?”
“Yeah…um… When do you expect Bellfort to return?”
“I talked to him two days ago. He said the fishing’s good, so he won’t be back for at least another week.”
Diane felt a rush of relief. Not knowing whether Bellfort was involved with Gabriel in Vincent’s death, she was concerned for her safety while she was in Texas.
Whether or not she took the job in Maine, she was moving back up North. She had planned to ask Sara Solomon for protection while she packed up her house and office. But that wouldn’t be necessary now. She’d hire professional packers who would store her things until she established a new address. She’d be gone before Bellfort returned.
Maxine was still talking on the other end of the line: “I haven’t been able to find any of the stuff you asked about on Raymond’s computer. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places.”
“Thanks for the effort anyway.”
“I wish you’d call David. He keeps bugging me about whether I’ve heard from you. I told him you couldn’t very well call from the jungle. He’ll be glad you’re back.”
“I’ll phone him later… I’ll stop by and pick up Huck on my way from the airport. Thank you so much for babysitting.”
“No problem. See you later…Wait! Are you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“I almost forgot to tell you. Harry Lee’s uncle Hu Lee phoned here looking for you three times in the past two weeks. He said he’s coming to a banking conference in Dallas. He wants to fly down to Houston and meet with you. He said he’ll call when he gets to the States.”
Diane sat staring at the monitor while her computer booted up. It was 10 p.m. and she hadn’t located Olimpia yet. But she’d send an email and keep trying to phone her until she knew she was safe. Was it just fourteen hours since the two of them stumbled out of the jungle into that small Colombian village?
Now, here she sat, freshly showered, with Huck happily piling his favorite toys at her feet. But she couldn’t share his homecoming joy. This was no longer home to her.
Suddenly, the background picture of Vincent aboard
Woodwind
filled her computer screen, jarring her out of her reverie.
She leaned forward and studied his image, then spoke to him: “It haunts me that my selfish career focus might have contributed to your death. I have to leave here for my safety and my sanity. It’s time I moved on. But I promise you I’ll avenge your murder, and I’ll find
Peruvase
.” She kissed her fingertips, touched the screen, then forced herself to click onto her emails.
While the computer searched for her mail, she reached down and scratched Huck’s ear. Then, glancing up at the screen, she blinked and jerked her head back in shock.
The most recent email was titled: “Important. Please Open Immediately.” It had been sent that day—by Gabriel Carrera.
Driven by an impulse to delete the message, Diane reached for the mouse.
Gabriel stood in front of his father’s massive desk feeling like a child about to be scolded. He ran his finger along the rosewood grip of an antique dueling pistol lying on the desktop while waiting for Carlos to finish his phone call. It occurred to him that Carlos Carrera was the only man he had ever known who could throw down the gauntlet, then casually answer the telephone.
As Gabriel traced the inlaid
cruz latina
on the pistol handle and the golden gazelles representing the Carrera name on the trigger guard, he remembered the exact moment in his youth when he realized the dueling pistols meant his family had the social position to take the life of another with impunity. Now he wondered if the weapons also gave the Carreras the right to take each others’ lives.
Gabriel sank into a chair. The burdens of the past twenty hours were taking their toll. Yesterday afternoon the woman he revered had called him a murderer. And in doing so, she had led him to painful insights regarding the real murderer’s identity and motives.
Then this morning his father had challenged him to “a duel to the death.” In Gabriel’s state of desolation, his response had been: “Why a duel? Just shoot me.”
Carlos replaced the phone in the receiver and turned to face his son once more.
Gesturing toward the pistols, Gabriel said in exasperation, “Surely you jest about all this.”
Carlos leaned forward. His words were measured. “You have been given special consideration for my sake. But for two years you have shown only disdain for the warnings.”
“Not so. I have detailed my ten-year plan to your lieutenants.”
Carlos slammed his fist on the desk. His eyes narrowed. His nostrils flared. “It is a mockery of all that is right and good.”
Gabriel answered slowly through clenched teeth. “It is just common sense to convert assets from our most powerful resource into legitimate businesses. Then, in ten years, our country will no longer need to produce cocaine.”
Carlos stood up from his desk chair and jabbed his finger in the air to emphasize his words. “What the rest of the world calls money laundering, you refer to as asset conversion? It grieves me that I have sent you to the finest schools in the U.S., and what have you learned? You have become expert at putting spin on your words as well as your actions.”
Gabriel picked up one of the dueling pistols and waved it in the air. “I did not have to leave your house to learn about Machiavellianism. When I was quite young, you exposed me to your ‘Knights’ and their trials
in absentia
and their imagined mandate to murder.”
He aimed the pistol at Carlos. “You call the use of this barbaric anachronism honorable? Does its expensive ornamentation and ritualized violence exalt it above the level of the street gun?
Carlos collapsed back into his chair. His voice was barely above a whisper now. “In some situations, the courts are impractical tools.”
Gabriel smirked, still brandishing the pistol. “
Judicium Dei
—the last man standing assumes his victory represents divine favor. Is that it? You want vindication before God? If it were otherwise, you would have hired an assassin.”
Carlos closed his eyes. “I gave you life. Only I have the right to take it away.”
Gabriel smirked. “How noble.”
Carlos placed his elbows on the desktop and pressed his forehead against his folded hands. The two men sat in silence for several seconds. Then Gabriel spoke.
“Father.”
Carlos flinched. He had not heard that word from Gabriel’s lips in decades. Gabriel saw the effect it had. He continued.
“Your
Carabina
days were over years ago. I have inherited your accuracy and your speed with the pistol, you know that.”
Carlos raised tormented eyes to his son. “It is too late. It has been done. If I do not honor the pledge I have made, they will kill us both. Another, then another will take up the sword until it is accomplished. If you are the victor, your only recourse will be to leave the country, find a place where you can hide from them—if such a place exists.”
Gabriel shook his head slowly. “There will be no winner here.” He stood up to leave. “I need two days to put some matters in order.”
It rained off and on the next morning; the darkened sky shrouded the earth in a perpetual dusk. Between downpours, Diane donned her wind-breaker and walked Huck. She greeted the neighbors and inhaled the mingled scents of wet gumbo soil, brackish lake water and pine, triggering an unexpected feeling of impending loss.
To Huck’s delight, she walked the entire lake road, avoiding the house and her “To Do” list for as long as possible. But no matter how far she roamed, she couldn’t dodge the awareness of Gabriel’s message locked in her computer’s memory. The unopened email pulsed unrelentingly in the back of her brain.
Returning to the house, she picked up a phone message from Olimpia who was ecstatic that she was okay. She said all was well with her, and she’d call back later that day.
Even with her profound relief that Olimpia was safe, Diane’s mood matched the gloom outside. It was hard to concentrate on the matters at hand—like arranging for the packers and the sale of the house and her car.
But once the phone calls were made, she felt the weight of her possessions falling away, allowing her to focus forward. Tomorrow, she’d clean out her office at BRI. Then there would be only Huck and the Suburban, and the trip back to the Northeast.
David showed up in late morning with a bag of warm kolaches, one of Diane’s addictions since moving south. She made coffee.
They sat at the kitchen counter with the rain drumming on the back deck. Diane told David about an email she had opened from Tung Chen the night before. In doing a new search for
Peruvase
using the name TekTranz in the parameters, Tung’s people had found Vincent’s drug. It was bought by a Taiwanese pharmaceutical company with a large U.S. affiliate. The drug had been shelved. Tung was going to do a closer investigation.
Diane moved on, telling him about her trip to the Caribbean.
David listened with furrowed brow. Then she told him she was leaving Texas. He began to object. But then he thought better of it. “I’d just be whistlin’ past the graveyard if I said things would turn out alright here,” he said. Somberly, he offered to help expedite her departure.
On his way out, David suggested that she call Sara Solomon. “There have been some developments,” he said.
Diane saw David off, agreeing to meet him at BRI the next day, Sunday.
She returned to the kitchen, unplugged her cell phone from its charger and tapped in Sara Solomon’s number.
Sara answered on the first ring. “Hey, Diane. Good to have you back. How was your trip?
Diane gave her the condensed version she had given David, again leaving out any mention of the Knights of New Granada, the Kogi and her dalliance in the storm with Gabriel.
Sara was amazed by Diane’s assertion that Gabriel Carrera had been responsible for Vincent’s death. She said that she was at a loss to pinpoint a motive. She offered her condolences to Diane then moved on to the business at hand.
“A lot’s been happening here. The authorities are holding Leonard Everly for questioning in connection with the murder of Dr. Harry Lee. We’ve been unable to find Everly’s passport, but we’ve checked with the immigration authorities and they confirmed that he entered Hong Kong the day that Harry Lee was killed and left the next morning.”
Sara went on to report that the dog hairs found on Harry Lee’s jacket matched the ones from Diane’s lint brush.
In the phone call Diane had made to Sara from Olimpia’s house in Aruba, she recounted her conversation with Maxine about Everly’s presence in Asia at the time Dr. Lee was killed. Also, she had told her about the lint brush in a plastic bag hidden inside the piano. The brush contained the hairs from Everly’s dog, Hunter. Remembering the newspaper report of dog hairs on Harry Lee’s body, she had carefully brushed them from her slacks after returning from his ranch.
Now, she listened in numbed silence while the CIA agent went on.
Sara related that she had come to the treehouse and taken the brush as per Diane’s suggestion, but also she had snapped some photos of the writing on the cupola wallpaper. “The code-breakers wanted to know the exact placement of the numbers in relationship to each other,” she said.
It turned out that some of the numbers were GPS coordinates for offshore banks in Bermuda and Singapore. And two groupings were numbers for bank accounts belonging to Raymond Bellfort and Leonard Everly.
The rest of them were telescope settings, mostly for star gazing. But some were compass headings; one of them pointed from the treehouse to Raymond Bellfort’s lakeside home. Harry Lee was spying on Raymond Bellfort.
Sara said, “He had apparently hacked into BRI’s computers and/or Bellfort’s home computer to get the banking information.”
She added, “He was one smart fella, and clever too. He knew the next occupant in the treehouse would be a scientist—someone who wouldn’t rest until he or she solved the puzzle of the handwriting on the wall.”
Sara theorized that Harry Lee’s project at BRI was not quite finished when, through his spying, he discovered Bellfort was going to sell it out from under him. So he planned to move on and take his technology with him. But he wanted the next treehouse resident to find his evidence, build on it, then expose whatever Bellfort and Everly were up to.
Sara went on: “We did a retrograde search to find out who had been wire transferring large amounts of cash into those accounts. Bellfort and Everly frequently received identical deposits on the same dates.”
Diane knew she shouldn’t have been surprised when Sara informed her that the depositor was TekTranz out of Germany. But somehow that bit of information sent her into emotional overload. She sank onto a kitchen stool, leaned on the bar and propped her head in her hand.
She was now certain that Vincent’s death was linked to all of it, even though there was still a disconnect between Harry Lee’s death, Everly and Bellfort embezzling from BRI and Gabriel murdering Vincent. She wouldn’t rest until the motives were clear and everyone responsible had been exposed.
Diane forced her focus back to the telephone and Sara’s voice.
“Leonard Everly denied ever meeting Dr. Harry Lee when he was in Asia. But then we hit him with proof of the matching dog hairs—we neglected to tell him that the hairs were tangled in the Velcro in Dr. Lee’s jacket, along with some sweater fibers.
“In light of the evidence, of course Everly changed his story. He said that Harry Lee was peddling his technology in Hong Kong and had contacted him. He said that he and Dr. Harry Lee had never met before, but Harry had heard some good things about his marketing abilities at BRI. He told us that Dr. Lee was adamant that Raymond Bellfort was not to know of their meeting. Everly agreed to keep it confidential and flew over to Hong Kong to see him after completing his BRI business in Taipei.
“Everly said he met Dr. Lee at a wine bar in the SOHO district of Hong Kong. He insisted that shaking Dr. Lee’s hand and sliding onto a barstool beside him explains the dog hairs on Harry Lee’s jacket.
“He said that over a couple glasses of wine they discussed the possibility of finding a buyer for Harry’s technology and what his commission would be. But no deal had been struck yet.
“According to Leonard Everly, at 7 p.m. Harry Lee said he had to leave for a dinner engagement. He gave Everly his business card and they parted amicably outside the bar. That was the night Dr. Lee was killed.”
“By the way,” Sara added, “Leonard Everly’s arrest has been kept under wraps while the various authorities investigate further. They’re trying to connect the dots between Everly’s probable embezzlement from BRI and Harry Lee’s murder.
Sara added, “Considering the technology involved, we suspect this goes way beyond one man’s greed. So keep it to yourself. David Crowley’s group knows, of course. But the authorities want to question Bellfort before Everly’s arrest becomes common knowledge.
“Speaking of your illustrious boss, he’s been gone quite awhile. It makes me wonder whether he’s vacationing or hiding out.”
Outside the treehouse, the rain came down in torrents. A rental SUV cruised by, barely making a splash. The driver stopped near the boat ramp, backed into a parking space and cut the engine. Then he lit up a cigarette and watched.