With my breath trembling, I faced the dark recesses of the room I’d known I would find. A peculiar iodine odor permeated the room, the same smell I’d noticed on Gilda. I stepped inside and fumbled for a light switch.
Before I found it, I was caught in the beam of a blinding light. I gave a shocked yelp and covered my eyes. Of all the dumb ideas I’d ever had, this one was turning out to be a blue-ribbon prizewinner.
I put my hand up to shield my eyes. “Mr. Kurtz?”
No answer, just the ferocious light.
I decided the lack of shouting and yelling might be a good omen. Maybe Kurtz was so lonely there in the house by himself that he would overlook the fact that I’d broken in.
“Could you move the light? We could sit and talk awhile.”
The light held steady for a moment, then swung away to travel crazily over stark white walls and steel tables holding the kinds of things you expect to see in a research lab. Overhead fluorescents fluttered on to reveal a slight young man pointing a .44 Magnum at me. With a resigned sense of inevitability, I recognized him as the same man I’d seen watching Jessica at Ramón’s funeral.
I took a half step backward, watching his hand with the gun and thinking furiously. If I ran, he might shoot me in the back. If I didn’t run, he might trap me in the lab and kill me there.
In a soft trembling voice, he said, “You should not have come here. Now you have ruined everything.”
A cold serpent slithered up my spine.
She had cut her hair and dyed it dark, but the voice and accent were the same. Gilda had returned.
An insulated cooler like people take on picnics was open on one of the stainless tables, with an array of gauze-wrapped vials lying around it.
While I digested the fact that I had caught her in the midst of stealing vials from Kurtz’s lab, I could almost see her brain whirling to find the best way to dispose of me.
I said, “Since you don’t have any business here either, I don’t think it would be a real good idea for you to do anything that would wake Ken Kurtz.”
The only sign that she understood my meaning was a narrowing of her nostrils, as if she’d taken in a rush of unpleasant air.
I said, “Are you really a nurse?”
“I am very good nurse.”
I heard a hint of proud defensiveness and took heart. People who leap to defend themselves or their work aren’t thinking clearly. People who aren’t thinking clearly can sometimes be influenced. On the other hand, people who aren’t thinking clearly can also panic and blow a hole in your head.
I said, “Then you can clear up a mystery for me. Why does Kurtz have a PICC line in his arm?”
“Is for chelation, to take out metals that cause argyria.”
From the way she tossed out the medical word, she had to be a real nurse, maybe even a good one.
Seeing that I didn’t understand, she said, “Means blue skin.”
“I guess the chelation didn’t work, since he’s still blue.”
Her eyes flashed with a gleam of venom. “I tell him is chelation, is really silver nitrate. He is monster, he should have mark of monster.”
I felt a small twinge of sympathy for Kurtz, who hadn’t understood why his condition had worsened in the past few months. But things were looking up. Gilda obviously hated Kurtz, and if I could keep her hatred directed toward him, I might be able to convince her I was an ally.
I said, “I’ve been told that you hired somebody to kill Ken Kurtz. No woman would do that unless she was forced by extreme circumstances.”
“It was only way. If the man had done it—”
I pointed to the vials on the table. “But the vials you took from the refrigerator were fakes. If Kurtz had been killed as you planned, that’s all you would have had.”
She looked chagrined. “Is true. They were there as test. I do not know why he did not trust me.”
“Yeah, that’s a mystery.”
We were silent for a moment while Gilda puzzled why a man she’d been poisoning hadn’t trusted her, and I tried to figure out how to get that big gun away from her.
I said, “Why did you take the money to Ramón’s widow?”
Her grim expression softened. “There was big mistake and wrong man was killed. I did not want Ramón’s family to suffer.”
“That was big of you.”
I was surprised acid didn’t drip from my lips onto my high heels, but her head bobbed so vigorously that I knew she thought I’d given her a compliment.
“Since you’re a nurse and you were treating a very sick man, it would have been easy for you to kill Kurtz with an overdose of something. Why hire somebody?”
Her eyes widened. “I am not killer.”
“Uh-hunh. Good thing you’re rich enough to pay a hundred thousand dollars to hire one.”
She laughed shortly. “It was not my money.”
I heard a scuffling sound and whirled to look into the wine room’s dark red shadows. Ken Kurtz stood inside the blood-hued darkness, and I could see the glint of his teeth bared in a mean grin. He was definitely pissed, ticked off, disgruntled.
I wasn’t feeling so gruntled myself.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Kurtz wasn’t wearing his tatty old plaid robe. Instead, he was dressed like a man ready for traveling, in dark trousers and a blue-and-white striped shirt, with tasseled loafers on his bare feet. The blue in his shirt was eerily similar to the blue of his skin. Both blue hands bore angry red welts across their backs.
Ignoring Gilda’s gun, he walked to the stainless table holding the pile of vials. He picked up a vial and waved it at her.
“Stupid cow! Did you think I would let you take the work I’ve sacrificed my life for?”
Gilda’s face twisted, and she mimed spitting on the floor. “Pah! No sacrifice! Is all for money!”
“Speaking of money, which pharmaceutical firm is financing you?”
Again, Gilda made a spitting motion. “I work for my people, for the men and women and children on my island.”
Holding the vial out on his open palm, Kurtz stepped closer to her. “Then you’re even stupider than I thought.
What did you plan to do, take these vials home and pass them out on the street?”
She looked from his face to the vial.
I was hoping she would spit again, this time for real, but instead she looked distracted. She actually gestured with her gun as she talked, like a teacher holding a pointer.
“I take them to health department. My government will take them to laboratory … they will know what to do with them.”
Showing a lot more energy and strength than I’d seen before, Ken Kurtz moved another step closer to her, and I knew that in the next moment he planned to take her gun. I wasn’t so sure I liked what I thought he might do once he had it. Gilda might be a thief and she might have tried to hire a hit man to kill Kurtz, but I sort of liked her team better than his.
I said, “I hate to burst all your bubbles, but an FBI team has this house under surveillance and you’ll both be arrested.”
Ken Kurtz settled the vial in the cooler and looked up at me with a smug smile. “That’s like telling Jonas Salk that his parking meter has expired so his polio vaccine is lost to the world. You have no idea how important my work is.”
“Sure I do. You’ve developed a vaccine for bird flu.”
Both their jaws dropped in such identical gapes of shock that it was almost funny.
I pointed at a whirling centrifuge. “I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know how you make a vaccine, but I know virus-extracting machines can separate a virus from blood and concentrate it.”
His eyes narrowed in paranoid suspicion. “Only another scientist would guess at a vaccine for avian flu.”