In Jax’s experience, if you wanted to know what was really going on someplace, you talked to the secretary.
The secretary of Tulane’s psych department was a fleshy woman named Chantal LeBlanc. She wore a lime green and aqua striped shirt, inch-long false fingernails, and enormous gold hoop earrings that bounced against the ebony skin of her neck when she moved her head. At the sight of Jax’s press card, her eyes widened and a big smile spread across her face.
“You want to know about Dr. Youngblood, you’ve come to the right place,” she said, leaning forward and dropping her voice.
Jax settled himself in the chair beside her desk. “You know about the project he was working on?”
She huffed a laugh. “’Course I know. Who you think typed up all them funding proposals?”
“He was having a hard time finding funding?”
“Wasn’t he just. He got a bit of money from the university, but that ran out months ago.” She dropped her voice even lower. “They didn’t believe none of it.”
“Really?”
“Nope. Called it voodoo and hoodoo and just plain hooey.”
Jax laughed. “In those words?”
She grinned. “Not exactly. But it’s what they think, believe me.”
“Yet he did get funding from someone.”
She shook her head, the big hoops swinging. “Lately, he was paying people outta his own pocket.”
“Where was he applying for funding?”
Chantal’s face fell and she glanced away. “I don’t know. He always did the cover letters himself.”
“Was there anyone in the department here working with him?”
“Are you kidding? He got a few undergraduates through work study and by offering them credit, but no one in the department here would touch that stuff—not even the grad students. I think the only reason he got Dr. Vu to agree to help him was because she was kinda sweet on him.”
“Dr. Vu?”
“Elizabeth Vu. She’s a statistician with the math department. Their offices are in Gibson Hall.”
Tobie sat in her car with the windows down and the sunroof open, letting out some of the heat. She wanted to call her next door neighbor and ask him to lock up her house and check on Beauregard, but when she glanced at her watch, it was barely eleven. Ambrose King never got up before noon. He could be really, really cranky if anyone woke him before that.
She called the Colonel instead.
His voice was reassuringly calm. “Tobie. You’re not using your cell phone, are you?”
She stared off across the heat-shimmered, black-topped parking lot to where a tour bus was disgorging a load of middle-aged women all wearing identical bright yellow fanny packs. “No.”
“Good. I’ve been worried about you. Remember anything yet?”
“A little. I need to talk to you.”
“I’m just getting ready to take Whiskey for a walk along St. Charles.” Whiskey was the McClintocks’ arthritic old yellow lab. “Why don’t you come join me?”
She turned the ignition and rolled up the windows. “I’ll be right there.”
By the time Tobie pulled in next to the curb on St. Charles and parked, the morning’s blue sky had faded to a white heat haze, and puffs of clouds were beginning to appear on the horizon.
After Katrina, the floodwaters from the collapsed levees had reached as far as St. Charles. She’d seen pictures of survivors paddling pirogues down the venerable avenue. But unlike some sections of the city where the water had reached depths of twelve feet and more, the ground here was higher; the gracious old mansions that stood on brick piers on either side of the street were little touched.
As she got out of her VW, a streetcar clanged past on its newly rebuilt tracks, the green metal of its side dull in the heat. She could see the Colonel coming up the neutral ground toward her, the old yellow dog padding happily at his heels. Tobie waited for a lull in the traffic, then crossed over to meet them.
“I’ve been thinking about your visitors,” he said as she fell into step beside him. “I still have a few friends in Washington. If you like, I could give them a call. Put out a few feelers and see what I touch.”
Whiskey came up to sniff Tobie’s hand, and she stooped to pet the old dog. “You think those men really are linked to the government in some way?”
“FBI badges are one thing; IDs are something else. I think we might be looking at some kind of a linkage, yes. But not necessarily. All you need is an organization with good graphics capability.”
“I’ve remembered the viewing session they were interested in.”
He glanced over at her. “And?”
“The target was an office in some large modern building. I’m not sure exactly where, but it didn’t look like anything in New Orleans. There was a file on the desk, labeled the Archangel Project. It contained photographs, including one of an old airplane. I recognized the logo on the file. It was the Keefe Corporation.”
He was silent for a moment, his lips pursed. “This isn’t good, Tobie. Keefe has a lot of ties to the Administration. To everything. Hell, they’re in something like two hundred countries. They’re everywhere.”
“My friend Gunner says the President’s brother sits on their board of directors.”
“Your friend Gunner is right.”
They watched Whiskey frisk on ahead, his tail wagging, his nose to the grass, sniffing. McClintock said, “There was a time when the lines between business and government were clearly drawn. That’s not true anymore. Now we have a vice president meeting with energy representatives to help draft the Administration’s energy program, and pharmaceutical companies helping draft legislation for prescription drug benefits. The military doesn’t even have its own mess halls and laundries and motor pools anymore; all that’s let out to private contractors for big bucks. Hell, we even hire private companies to come into our prisons and torture people.”
“You’re starting to sound like Gunner.”
McClintock didn’t smile. “The way I see it, either you know something these men want to know, or you know something they don’t want anyone else to find out about. They took the time to talk to you, which means they want something from you, some kind of information. But I suspect they’re willing not to get it in order to shut you up.” He glanced over at her. His gray eyes were hard. “You need to figure out what that something is.”
“I’ve tried. I can’t.”
“Until you do, Tobie, you can’t trust anyone. Anyone. If you let these people get you boxed in, you’re dead.”
Tobie felt a chill tingle around the juncture of her shoulder blades. “What do you mean, ‘boxed in’?”
“I mean you can’t let the police bring you in. Even just for questioning.”
A BMW convertible overflowing with college students cruised by, the top down, music blaring, a blond girl in a halter top hanging out the back and laughing. A shriveled black man with a plastic bag bulging with aluminum cans was working the trash receptacles in the neutral ground. As they drove past, the girl lobbed her beer can at him and shouted something.
“Could they do that?” Tobie asked. “Take me away from the police?”
“With FBI credentials? In a heartbeat.”
McClintock watched the old man stoop to pick up the girl’s beer can. “I think maybe you should consider getting out of town. Finding someplace to hide.”
“With my mother?”
“No. Not there. Not anyplace familiar.”
“For how long?”
He gazed off across the broad, leafy avenue.
“You mean forever, don’t you?” She swung to face him. “I’m not doing that.”
“October—”
“No. I’m just starting to get my life back together. I’m not going to let some jerks with guns and ties to a bunch of money-grubbing politicians come along and destroy it. These people think I know something that can hurt them. Well, you know what? I’m going to remember what that something is, and I am going to hurt them. I’m going to destroy them, before they can hurt me or anyone else again.”