Miller walked in two and a half hours later. Before I’d finished my lunch. He looked distinctly happy. I didn’t remember him looking like that since before he made lieutenant.
“You look like a chocolate Cheshire cat,” I said. “You just catch a chocolate Cheshire mouse?”
“I’ve got a lady outside wants to kill you,” he said.
“No wonder you look so happy. Anyone I know?”
“A lady called Dorothea Thomas. John Pighee’s sister.”
“Ahh,” I said.
He handed me a leather-bound book. “I can give you about twenty minutes with this before I take the lady to her new home.” I nodded. “Thanks,” I said.
“I’ll be outside.” He walked to the door. “By the way, those letters from the F.B.I. were forgeries and Henry Rush tried to kill himself. They brought him here; he’s five doors down the hall.” He left.
The book was the journal of John Austin Pighee. He had begun it the day Henry Rush recruited him to work on Project Bagtag. “I guess the F.B.I. has to do its work somewhere,” he wrote. “I feel the luckiest darn man in the world that it happens to be the place I’m working. And when this is over, when the culmination of all the work ahead pays off, I feel sure that the world will want to know what it owes to people like Henry. That’s why I’m writing this diary. I’ll write in it every day. I’ll keep it in my sister’s trailer and stop in each day either before or after I go to work.”
And he had. The enthusiasm for his work showed. He believed throughout that he was working for the F.B.I. He felt obliged to sell the importance of the project, its mission as he saw it, at every opportunity. The man had been a salesman, after all. And in this journal he was silently preparing the product that would be the big sale of his life.
It was clear that he intended to turn the journal into a true-life undercover book. He figured to make his fortune.
From the beginning it was full of personal details about the people involved with him. I suspect that he made approaches to Marcia Merom in the first place only so that he would have juicy details to write about. And write about them he did.
He found her solicitous and flexible. And he claimed to feel alive with her and excited by her. “Which I don’t with Linn, my wife, and haven’t since our tragedy.” The only reference I found to his wife.
The tragedy being the loss of their kids to a car.
But the week before he died, he wrote, “The pressure for secrecy is so steady, so complete, that I haven’t even fold Marcia about this diary. Should I, I wonder? I don’t know. There are depths to her that even I haven’t plumbed. Until then . . .
“But I’ve been worrying,” he continued. “When this journal goes to a publisher, will they believe me? I’m wondering if I shouldn’t start accumulating supplementary evidence, to prove—against official denials, should they take place—that this is a real operation and not just the product of my fevered imagination. Occasional notes, a few samples of materials we use. That kind of thing.”
I called Miller in. “You like?” he asked.
“It would have saved me a lot of trouble if I’d known it existed,” I said. “What else did you get out of the cupboard?”
“Some samples of an illegal white powder. And an empty container of some radioactive stuff. Some scraps with notes on them. Some invoice copies. I don’t know quite what.”
“What about the stuff in the house? Anything radioactive?”
“We didn’t go out there with your Geiger counter, if that’s what you mean, but we brought a lot of stuff back and we’re looking into it. What do you think happened? What’s it all about?”
“When I sent you out there, I thought you’d find stuff to show that John Pighee fed his wife radioactive calcium that led to her bone cancer.”
“My God. Killed by the dead.”
“But I’m not so sure now,” I said. “Let Mrs. Thomas in here, will you?”
“Let her in? You sure?”
“Yeah. Come in with her, but stay out of the way.”
He shrugged and went out to bring her in. My stock had risen.
Mrs. Thomas came in red and raging; her face looked as if it had just been shorn of fur and was smarting at the abuse.
“You!” she said, and nearly hit me. “You betrayed my trust. It should be against the law to betray a client’s trust.”
“It is,” I said, “except when it involves information relating to a crime.”
“What crime?” she asked, suddenly coy.
I held up her brother’s journal. “You read this day by day, didn’t you?”
She thought about whether she should deny it. Then said, “Yes.”
“So when you hired me, you knew this group he was working with was why John was not allowed to have visitors.”
“Well,” she said.
“But you put me on the scene to pressure them so they would give you money, maybe the money you had been getting from John.”
“He would have wanted them to,” she said emphatically. “There I was getting nothing, and they were making her a wealthy woman for as long as he was sick. It wasn’t her he cared about.”
“No. It was you, and Marcia Merom, but definitely not Linn.”
“Definitely not. She was bad enough at the beginning, trapping him with . . . the way she did. But after the children died she was nothing, nothing to him.”
“She was holding him back. With her out of the way, there were no limits on him.”
“She was an anchor,” she said.
“Only he wouldn’t do anything about getting rid of her.”
“No,” she said heatedly, “so—” She caught herself.
“So you helped him, as you always helped him, since he was a baby.”
She didn’t say anything.
“And besides,” I said, “if John died—”
“He won’t die.”
“But if he did. Linn would inherit everything. Unless she died first.”
She sat and glared. As clear as a silent confession can be.