Tobie considered herself a typical all-American chicken-shit. She was not hero material. She’d survived the terror of being in Iraq largely by playing mind games with herself. In Iraq, when she thought about where she was and what could happen to her there, she froze up. So she learned not to think about it.
Colonel McClintock had all kinds of terms for it, like “sublimation” and “suppression,” words she vaguely remembered from Psych 101. He said sublimation of fear was the reason at least half of all vets suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome. People can only repress so much for so long, he said; then it starts bubbling up.
She didn’t think she deserved her psycho discharge from the Navy, but she figured she probably did have PTSS. Most sane vets did. Hell, half the people in New Orleans were suffering from PTSS, although their demons had been unleashed by Katrina rather than Iraq.
She figured maybe, in some way, what she’d been through in Iraq had prepared her for what she was going through now. People had been trying to kill her there, and people were trying to kill her now. There were differences, of course. In Iraq, none of it had been personal. She’d been a target not because she was October Guinness, but because she was a member of an occupying military. Now the people trying to kill her were after her and her alone. She wasn’t sure if that was better or worse. At least it removed that element of randomness.
But there was another difference, one that she knew did make her present situation worse. In Iraq she’d had over a hundred thousand guys on her side. She always knew there was someone watching her back—lots of guys watching her back. Here, she was on her own. Every time she contacted one of her friends, she put them in danger.
After leaving Gunner, she went to sit in the Fair Grinds Coffee Shop, just off Esplanade Avenue. Like almost everything else in that part of New Orleans, the coffee shop had flooded after the storm. But it had been one of the first places to reopen, and continued to serve as a rallying point for a neighborhood determined to rebuild itself.
Fishing the envelope from her bag, she drew out a thick sheaf of Internet printouts. She found herself staring at an article concerning a study advocating the military destruction of Iran, published by a Washington think tank called the Freedom Institute for Democracy. At first she thought Gunner had included the site by accident; then she noticed Keefe Corporation listed as one of the study’s sponsors.
She glanced through it in a hurry. It was pretty alarming stuff, reminding her of the policy document produced by the Project for the New American Century—PNAC—back in September of 2000. In a Mein Kampfesque call for world domination, PNAC had advocated rallying the people of the United States to attack Iraq in the wake of a Pearl Harbor–like disaster. Gunner was always using it as evidence to support one of his crazier conspiracy theories, that the U.S. government was covering up something about 9/11. She shifted the article to the bottom of the pile.
The rest of the printouts dealt mainly with Keefe Corporation’s various projects. There were articles about Keefe’s involvement in building American bases and military installations everywhere from Iraq to Uzbekistan to Pakistan; about their contract to supply the U.S. military; about legal suits against various chemical factories built by Keefe. There were several articles on the proposed pipeline through Afghanistan, oil exploration in Arctic wildlife refuges, and, buried amidst reports on the buildup of mercury around Keefe’s offshore drilling platforms, a brief mention of the corporation’s funding of a study on the use of psychics in the exploration for mineral deposits.
Tobie pulled out the page and stared at it.
Here, it seemed, was the source of Keefe’s interest in remote viewing. Had Henry Youngblood put in a funding proposal to Keefe Corporation? A proposal that included a trial remote viewing session? A session in which she had seen something no one was supposed to see?
She dug her prepaid phone out of her purse. About the only person she knew at the university who’d been associated with Youngblood’s research was a statistician from the math department, Dr. Elizabeth Vu.
Tobie was about to punch in the woman’s number when she hesitated, remembering Gunner’s warning. What if the bad guys were monitoring Vu’s phone? She knew she was probably being paranoid, but she turned off the phone again, and then, for good measure, pulled out the battery. Pushing back her chair, she went to use the coffee shop’s pay phone.
Dr. Vu answered on the second ring. “Hello?”
“Dr. Vu? This is October Guinness. I was wondering if I could come by your office this afternoon?”
“Oh, hi, October. I’m about to leave my office for the day. I need to do some work on my boat this afternoon—I’m taking my brother and his family out this weekend. Why don’t you come to the marina? I’d like to talk to you myself. The boat’s at the Orleans Marina, slip 23, Pier 4. Say in about an hour?”
“I’ll be right there,” said Tobie, and hung up.
Jax was on his laptop, flipping through Matt’s information on October Guinness, when the call came through from Dr. Elizabeth Vu.
“I just heard from October. She’s coming to see me.”
Jax looked at his watch. “Now?”
“In an hour. At the Orleans Marina.” There was a pause. “I hope I’m not making a mistake telling you this.”
“You’re not.”
He hung up the phone, then sat staring at the photograph on his computer screen, a photograph of an unexpectedly fresh-faced young woman with brown eyes and shoulder length, honey-colored hair. She didn’t look crazy. But he had read her medical reports.
He slipped his Beretta into the waistband of his slacks and reached for the city map.
Detective William P. Ahearn fingered the bullet-scarred wood of October Guinness’s kitchen door frame. This investigation just kept going from bad to worse.
He glanced over at the lowlife with long scraggly hair and ragged jeans who stood in the middle of the kitchen floor. Ambrose King, he said he was; played the sax at some tourist trap down in the Quarter. The guy might have called the cops, but he wasn’t exactly being cooperative.
“You say she contacted you? Where is she?”
The lowlife stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans and looked blank. “She didn’t say. She just said she had to leave town for a few days.”
“In the middle of a murder investigation?”
Ambrose King rolled his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “She didn’t say nothing about that.”
Ahearn met his partner’s gaze. She raised her eyebrows and turned away to hide a half smile.
He walked back toward the living room, his gaze sweeping the ransacked house. “I see DVDs, but no DVD player or computer. What else do you think is missing?”
King ambled behind him. “Tobie has a laptop, but I think she took it in to get fixed last week. Her DVD player died a month or so ago. I don’t think she’s replaced it.”
Ahearn turned to give the guy a hard look.
King stared back at him. “What? What you thinking? That I lifted her stuff? Man, you’d have to be nuts to want any of Tobie’s electrical shit. It’s like she generates this electromagnetic field or something. If she walks up next to you when you’re on your computer, it freezes. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Ahearn pushed out his breath through pursed lips and swung back to the kitchen. “Let’s get that bullet to ballistics,” he said to Trish. “See what they can tell us about it. And I think maybe we ought to find this Guinness woman. She has some serious explaining to do.”