Bev sits on the narrow, sour-smelling bed. It has no covers, just a dingy, rumpled white form-fitted sheet and a stained pillow that has lost its shape and is almost flat. Bev's eyes follow Jay as he lowers the woman to the floor, holding her around the waist while she struggles for balance.
"I can't seem to stand up," she says, avoiding Bev, pretending Bev isn't there. "My feet are numb."
"She tied you too tight, didn't she?" Jay says as his eyes burn brighter. "What'd you do to her?" he asks Bev.
Bev stares at him.
"Get off the bed," he says to her. "We need to let her lie down. She's hurt. Get a wet towel." To the lamb he says as he helps her on the bed, "I don't have any ice. I'm sorry. Ice would be good for your head."
"There's ice in the fish box. And groceries," Bev says in a flat tone.
"You didn't bring me any pups," Jay comments.
"I was busy, and nothing was open."
"Plenty of strays out there, if you aren't too lazy to look for them."
She opens the refrigerator and pours cold water on a dish towel.
"That's all right," the lamb meekly replies, relaxing a little.
Jay is handsome and sweet. He is a friend. Not horrid, like that ugly beast of a woman.
"I'll be fine. I don't need any ice."
"It's not all right." Jay gently arranges the pillow under her head, and she cries out in pain. "No, it's not all right."
He slips a hand under her neck, moving her head so he can feel the back of it. The pressure of his fingers is too much, and the woman cries out again.
"What'd you do to her?" he asks Bev.
"She fell in the boat."
The woman says nothing and refuses to look at Bev.
"Fell with a little help, maybe?" Jay asks in a tone of perfect self-control.
He gathers the lamb's blouse together and buttons it without touching her.
58
BENTON TAKES OFF his jacket and drops it in a trash can. A block south, he tosses his baseball cap into another trash can and ducks into the shadows of scaffolding to unfasten his canvas knapsack. Inside is a black do-rag, and he ties it tightly around his head. He slips on a denim vest that has an American flag embroidered on the back. During a brief lull in pedestrian traffic, he substitutes his sunglasses for amber-tinted ones in different frames. Rolling up the knapsack, he tucks it under his arm and cuts left on 73rd Street, then left again on Third and back on 75th, where he stands at the corner of Lucy's building. Jim the doorman ignores him and wanders inside the lobby for a welcome rush of air-conditioning.
New technology is Bentons ally and enemy. Cell phone calls can be traced by more than caller ID. Signals bounce off satellites and boomerang to where the caller is located geographically when the call is made, and to date, it is impossible to foil this technology. Benton has no choice but somehow to work around it. While caller ID will erroneously indicate that the call is being made from a Texas prison, the satellite transmission will reveal that the call was made in Manhattan, pinpointed to an area that is smaller than a city block.
He uses this to his advantage, however. All obstacles can be steps to a higher benefit.
Benton makes the call from Lucy's address at Lexington and 75th Street. Jean-Baptiste is on death row, and that is easy enough to check. Logic would dictate that Jean-Baptiste could not have called collect from Manhattan. Then who did? Lucy will puzzle over the call made in the immediate area of her office building, and knowing her as well as Benton does, he is certain she will make a call from her own address and see that the same coordinates are pinpointed by the satellite.
This will lead her to the conclusion that there must have been a technical glitch, that somehow the transmission traced back to where the call was received instead of where it was initiated. She will not understand how this could have happened when it has never happened before. Lucy will be paranoid. Without a doubt, she will be angry, because she does not forgive sloppy work or technical screwups. She will blame the snafu on the telephone company or her staff Probably the latter.
As for Jim the doorman, when asked, he will say that at the precise moment the call was made, he saw no one on a cell phone in front of the building or close to it. This will be a lie. Almost everybody in New York walks around with a cell phone to his or her ear. The truth is, even if Jim remembers the precise time he left his post for the air-conditioned lobby, he won't want to admit it.
The last obstacle is voice analysis, which Lucy will conduct immediately to verify that the caller was Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. That is no threat. Benton has spent several years meticulously studying, transcribing and editing recordings of Jean-Baptiste's voice, then rerecording them into digital files with a single directional microphone that, when used in a high-sensitivity mode, picks up multidirectional sound, or background noise-in this case, the inside of a prison. He edited and spliced it on a computer, and the results are seamless, each file a blitz of sound bites intended for voicemail or a live recipient who has no chance for a response that would force a mental engagement that is impossible. Switching from Menu to a folder he named Redstick for Baton Rouge, he verifies the time stamp on the LCD and double-checks that all details of the setup are in order.
He plugs the microphone into a speaker port and tucks in the earpiece.
The phone at Infosearch Solutions-The Last Precinct-is picked up.
"Manhattan. Collect call to Infosearch Solutions on Seventy-fifth," he says into the microphone.
"Your name?"
"Polunksy Unit."
"Please hold."
The operator connects the call.
"Collect call from Polunksy Unit. Will you accept charges?"
"Yes," without pause or change of inflection.
"Good afternoon. May I ask who's calling?" a male voice continues, the caller ID showing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Benton sets noise cancel on high to eradicate the live feedback of New York traffic and other sounds that would be ruinous for a call supposedly made from the interior of a penitentiary. He presses Play. The indicator light glows green, and File One begins.
"When Mademoiselle Farinelli returns, tell her Baton Rouge. " Jean-Baptiste s recorded voice is as natural as if he himself is speaking in real time.
"She's out of the office. Who's calling? Who is this?" The man in Lucy's office tries to talk to what is nothing more than a memory chip on the line. "May I give her a message?"
The call ended seven seconds ago. Benton erases File One from Red-stick, to ensure that Jean-Baptiste s faked message cannot be played again, ever, by anyone.
He walks swiftly along the congested sidewalk again, head bent, missing nothing.
59
"PLEASE DON'T HURT ME," the lamb says. Jay helps the woman sit up. She cries and moans as he gently cleans her bloody hair, worrying about the split in her scaJp, caused by the blunt-force trauma of her head cracking against the outboard motor. He reassures her that the injury isn't serious and didn't fracture her skuJJ. She's not seeing double, is she?
"No," she says, her breath catching as he touches her hair again with the wet, bloody towel. "I can see fine."
Jays sweetness, his protectiveness, has the usual effect, and the woman's attention is fixed only on him. She identifies with him to the extent that she feels she can tell him that Bev-whose name the woman doesn't know-pushed her into the outboard motor.