Elixir. Part 29

At about sixty meters, Roger pushed his throttle to the limit. Straining with everything he had, he moved past 44 without a glance and pumped down the road to the fat yellow finish, crossing a dozen paces ahead.

The crowd went wild not because they knew Roger, but for his breakaway. From over a hundred meters they had watched the two run in perfect stride until Roger made his stupendous sprint to the finish.

Laura ran out to Roger as he panted and stumbled around to catch his breath. She embraced him and gave him some water.

He knew it was irrational, what he had just done-yielding to testosterone. But, Jesus, it felt good to take that guy.

Standing on a bench in the Park across from the finish, Agent Eric Brown shot off two dozen frames from the Nikon with the black zoom and motor drive as Roger flew across the yellow line and into the cheering crowd.

He takes a cup of water from someone. He bends over to catch his breath. He raises a pained face to the sky. He takes a hug from his wife, who looks older than he in the zoom. He dumps a cup of water over his head. He towels off. He downs more water. He high-fives his son. He gives a wave to Bill Pike when he crosses the line.

And Brown caught it all.

"Olafsson's right," Pike said when he finally made his way to Brown. "The wrong guy." He was still panting and mopping his brow with a towel.

"Yeah, but for thirty-eight, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d can run."

"Tell me about it." Pike's face was drained and his lungs still burned. "I don't know what his secret is, but he must have rocket fuel for blood, is all."

"Roger, I'm sorry to call you at the shop, but it's extremely important."

Jenny tried to disguise the desperation in her voice, but he heard it.

And, yet, he still turned on her harshly. "If it's about the orchids, m'am, I can't help you. They're not available."

That was their code word. Whenever they discussed Elixir on the phone, her sister and Roger had referred to it as the "orchids."

It was so unfair, Jenny thought. So unfair. And Laura was to blame. She had poisoned his mind. Her own sister! "But you must," Jenny pleaded. You have to. If you don't-"

"I'm sorry, m'am, I can't help you," he said, and hung up.

For a startled moment Jenny stood there with the dead phone to her ear. He had cut her off because he was afraid their lines were tapped, which was why he never even addressed her by name.

But that was ridiculous after all these years. Roger and Laura had new lives, and Jenny had moved out of Kalamazoo years ago. Even Ted didn't know where she and her daughter were living.

Jenny put down the phone, thinking how selfish and inconsiderate of him. Her own brother-in-law. And after all she had done for them.

The music still wafted down from Abigail's room. Thank goodness she hadn't heard the conversation.

Jenny felt the panic grip her again. The last injection of serum could not hold her much longer. Any day now she could begin to change. Laura had said it was awful what happened to the monkeys.

What will happen to me? Jenny's brain screamed. They said you turned old and died in a matter of hours. It was too horrible to contemplate.

I can't leave her like this.

"Mother!" Abigail called from upstairs.

"Yes, darling?"

"How do you say kangaroo in French?"

"I don't know," she yelled, "but I'll look it up."

As she made her way for the dictionary, Jenny looked at her face in the mirror. "G.o.d, help me," she whispered.

"It's the second time this week she's called. She sounded a little crazy," Roger said from the bathroom.

As usual, Wendy was in bed propped up with a book. It was what she did every night before going to sleep.

Jenny had turned fifty a few months ago, and Wendy knew it had hit her hard. She had called them several times about Elixir, to the point of begging. Having been a registered nurse, she a.s.sured them that she could administer needle injections to herself, that she would be no problem to them at all, that they could even Federal Express a few vials to her. But they had flatly refused.

Roger snapped off the bathroom light and headed for the bed. He had touched up his beard and grayed his sideburns.

"She wasn't just irrational," he continued. "The way she talked. Her tempo was all off. She took long pauses before responding. I wasn't even sure she got what I was saying. At one point she called me Mr. Bigshot and threatened not to be my friend anymore. It was like talking to a child."

Laura didn't want to get into more Jenny-bashing. "She's been through a lot," she said.

"But I don't think she'll let it go. She sounded almost threatening."

He got into bed beside her.

Tonight Laura was reading a mystery novel. For years she had avoided the genre because they reminded her of her own lost career. Ironically, her fugitive status had made If I Should Die a best-seller years ago. She had thought about getting back into writing under a pseudonym, but there were too many risks in going public. They still lived in fear of seeing recognition flicker in a stranger's eyes. Also, some hawk-eyed reader might picked up on quirks of style and connect her to Wendy Bacon. So, sadly, she had abandoned her pa.s.sion and became just another reader.

Roger reached over and pulled the book out of her hand and gave her a kiss. He had that goatish look in his eye. He rubbed his hand down her thighs.

"Not tonight." She could see the disappointment in his face. Brett was already asleep in his room, so that was no excuse. She just didn't feel like it. She gave his hand a conciliatory squeeze. "I'm sorry."

"Not as much as I am."

There was a time he would have protested-when they were both younger. When they were biological equals. But he had become resigned to rejection. These days they made love just a couple times a month. He took her face in his hands. "I love you, you know."

"I know," she said. She still liked hearing that, but she no longer took refuge in the words. "And I love you. Tomorrow night, I promise."

Roger nodded. "Sure," he said and kissed her lightly on the mouth.

She dimmed the light and lay quietly against him for several minutes. The silence was charged with bad feelings. Several times when they were out she'd catch him looking at younger women. And how could she blame him? Even though she kept up aerobics, ate right, colored her hair, used vitamin supplements and all the hot anti-wrinkle creams on the market, a quarter century of biology separated them. Technically, she could be his mother.

"We don't have many more years left for this," she said.

"Left for what?"

She wished he wouldn't play dumb. "For charades."

"Do we have to get into that now?"

It scared him when she brought it up because the inevitable was happening-to her, not him. Between fake ident.i.ties and the makeup, he had almost fallen for the artifice. Once a few years ago she had let the roots of her hair grow out, and he was shocked at all the gray. He had nearly forgotten she was growing old.

"Well, when exactly do you want to talk about it?" she asked.

"How about tomorrow night after jumping on each other's bones?"

"Roger, when are you going to face the obvious? I'm fifty-five years old. In four years I'll qualify for senior citizen discounts."

"You're in great shape."

"No, I'm not. I'm older and heavier. I don't have your energy level, nor your s.e.xual hunger. I've changed. I've slowed down."

"That's bull. You're fine, and you look terrific."

"Roger, will you please stop it?"

"Stop what?"

"Stop patronizing me. Stop this pity s.e.x."

"It's not pity s.e.x. I want to make love to you."

"No, you want to make love to Wendy Bacon."

He started to protest, but fell flat. He looked away, but she could see the tears in his eyes.

She felt the tears well in her own eyes. She took his hand. "I'm sorry, but it's not like it was."

After a long moment's silence, he said, "You have an option."

"That's not an option, and you know it."

"Don't you like being alive? Don't you want to be with me?" For a second, he looked like a little boy begging his mom for understanding.

Laura sighed. Yes, she felt the temptation. More than her sister or any other woman alive, she heard the siren call every day. But she had made herself a promise long ago.

"How about when he's older?" He was still holding out hope that when Brett matured she would give in. "In seven years he'll be twenty-one."

"And I'll be sixty-three."

Already their s.e.x was bordering on the bizarre. In seven years it would be sick. She'd feel like a cradle-robbing old hussy, and he'd have to fake it.

"But you'd retrogress to fifty or younger."

"You mean Laura would be as young as Wendy."

"If that's the way you want to look at it."

"Maybe I won't want to be."

"But maybe you will."

They were silent for a long spell, and Laura felt the old anger burn itself through the sadness. Roger had brought this upon them himself. In a monumentally stupid act he had injected the stuff into his veins thirteen years ago and forever infected the very fabric of their lives. While she understood all the forces that had driven him to that act, she could never forgive him. More than anyone else alive he was able to foresee the consequences but had chosen to disregard them instead. And while she felt pity and compa.s.sion for him, there were moments she hated him for what he had done.

"Laura, I need you. I don't want to go this alone."

Laura closed her eyes and remained silent. She knew the panic he was beginning to feel. Aside from Wally, who still remained on the sidelines of things, she was the only person in the world who knew who and what Roger was. She was his sole intimate. His life had come to a standstill, and the future appeared some vast and empty stretch. It might take another thirty years for her to die. Toward the end he might even care for her like an aged parent. But after she was gone, could he go on without her? Could he live alone with his secret? Would he take another lover?

With Brett in her life, these considerations were no longer priorities. She didn't say this, of course. Nor did she mention a third option that had crossed her mind: divorce.

Brett was still too young. He was crazy about his father and splitting up would scar him permanently. Nor could he comprehend the rationale: not for the lack of love, but time.

When he was older, she told herself. After they had explained all the other awful stuff.

"Laura, promise me just one thing," he pleaded. "That you'll keep open the option-okay? Maybe after Brett's off and on his own?"

She sighed. "I'm out of promises," she said and turned off the light.

And as she lay in the dark, she wondered at the extraordinary muddle of their lives.

G.o.d Almighty, how was it going to end?

FBI HEADQUARTERS, CLARKSBURG,.

WEST VIRGINIA.

Eileen Rice was only half-conscious at how the coffee had turned cold in her cup. She was too lost in what she had discovered on her computer monitor.

The image was of partial loops with a count of eleven ridges on a bias from the triradius to the core of the inner terminus. Her best guess was the right index, although that made no difference since the morphologies were identical across the digits.

What set off the alarm in her head was the nearly full loop found on the latent print coded "Mark (4)-137-left II."

On the split screen, she enlarged the image and clicked on the base print. With the pivot ball, she rotated the axes until they were in alignment. Then she tapped a few keys and brought the two images into superimposition.

A perfect match.

The image on the left was the print lifted from the Carleton, Ma.s.sachusetts premises in 1988. It was the same print found on household objects including a coffee mug at the same premises. The image on the right had been lifted seven weeks ago from a flower pot in a shop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

It had taken that long because it was an old case and no prints were on file in the database. That meant Eileen had to conduct a hand search of all the latent prints from door handles, clothing, and household items included in the evidence files. And because of their recent move to new headquarters, boxes of old cases had been misplaced. Eventually she found dozens of different prints, scanned and entered them into the database, then cla.s.sified and compared them to the nine different latents found on the Eau Claire fern pot, wrapping paper, receipt, and business card which also had to be scanned and cla.s.sified.

That meant running over three hundred comparisons, carefully tabulating each elimination. Also, of the 43 million individuals in the National Fingerprint File/Interstate Identification Index, none matched any prints in the case.

But identifying the prints was not Eileen Rice's problem. With the mouse, she clicked the terminal to print out the matching prints-one for her own files, and one to the terminal of the field office in Madison, Wisconsin. She then picked up the phone and dialed the number of Agent Eric Brown.