Tennessee welcomes you, the sign read. Tom was in the mountains now, past Asheville, and the land descended and rapidly flattened. Once it had supported tobacco farms or dirt roads funneling slave-grown cotton east to the ocean, west to the Mississippi.
I-40 traffic slowed as he reached the outskirts of Memphis. He exited the highway by the Mississippi waterfront. He passed the big University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law. The revived neighborhood offered upscale souvenir shops and cobblestone plazas, and he saw crowds of tourists wandering about on a lazy weekend. No malaria fear here! Cars bore license plates from many states, so Tom’s Colorado one blended in. The city had the vibrant feel of a place where the population was exploding. Working from his hand-drawn map, he got turned around for a few minutes, made a wrong turn, entered a commercial zone… Hooters, Pancake House… and passed into something more calmly residential, with fine old antebellum houses and blooming trees where moss hung from two-hundred-year-old branches that once shaded Confederate troops. He turned the car around and headed back toward the waterfront.
No more men for me, Mom had told him. I swear it this time.
She’d been honest about it.
Until Hobart Haines came along.
Tom reached the waterfront, and the wide, muddy Mississippi River. Crowds flowed toward the landings and park abutting the waterway, or back to the restaurants and greenways. Tom saw the tall white twin stacks of the riverboat Queen of the Mississippi, docking by the busy Beale Street Landing. He passed a brewpub and an old tobacco exchange converted to souvenir shops. A summer arts festival was in progress. When Tom had scouted this place it was practically empty, but now streets were packed and there were stages set up for bluegrass bands.
Tom strolled the paths along the riverfront, growing frustrated. There were too many eyes here. He could not risk a release. The last thing he needed was for some stranger to see him freeing mosquitoes. He had a lie prepared if that happened—I’m with the University, studying them—but only a fool would risk using it.
Also, unlike New York, where people avoided eye contact, here passersby nodded hi. A crowd had gathered to hear a popular North Carolina folk singer, Philip Gerard, perform his new hit song, “Robert Johnson and the Devil.”
Tom Fargo almost fell as a drunk bumped into him, apologized, and lurched away. Giving up, he remembered the name of a city park, his fallback point, a small lake off Wolf River, a wetland Mississippi tributary just a few miles north on State Route 51.
Tom made it back to the parking area and strolled toward the dead end where he’d left the Subaru. Cars were packed into diagonal spaces like horses tethered to poles two hundred years back.
As Tom approached the Subaru he slowed and his heartbeat rose. He spotted a couple of blue-and-white city police cars there, blocking his way out.
It can’t be for me.
There was a small crowd. One police car was parked so close to the Subaru that it almost touched it. Another vehicle — a Chevy Tahoe — had apparently backed into his door. The Subaru’s driver-side door was bent in; worse, he saw with horror, there was a rip in the door where the impact had taken place.
Inside that door were the mosquitoes.
Tom started to turn away but spotted a fat woman standing with one of the policemen, pointing Tom’s way. He had a feeling that the busybody was telling the cop that the Subaru was his car. Maybe she’d seen him park. The larger cop was coming toward Tom. It was too late to turn away now. Too late to come back later when there would just be a note or ticket on his car.
“Is this your car, sir?”
The woman gripped the other cop’s arm, clearly insisting, yes, that’s the man. The officer before Tom had a jarhead haircut and attentive stare and seemed quite fit. There were too many people here to start a fight. Even if he were inside the Subaru, it was impossible to drive off with cars blocking his way. Could he ram his way out? He told himself that what he felt was not a fear problem but an adrenaline problem. Control the adrenaline, he thought.
“Yes, sir!” he said, acting indignant, glaring at the trio of teenagers by the offending Chevy. “What the hell happened here?”
“They hit your car, sir. They actually called us to report it. I know one of those kids. Relax. May I see your license and registration? You’re from Colorado, I see.”
To protest would only make the cop suspicious. Tom reached for his wallet and remembered it was in the car. He would have to open the glove compartment to get it. But the Sig Sauer was there, too. Then he saw something that froze his blood.
A small dot, a mosquito, was climbing out of the Subaru’s driver-side door through the rip in the metal.
The impact must have busted a carrying case.
A second insect appeared. There were more than three thousand insects in there. What would happen if hundreds of them began crawling and flying out?
“The registration is in the glove compartment,” Tom said, heading for the passenger-side door, hoping to distract them from the rip on the other side. They were all watching him.
Which will I come out with? he asked himself, opening the compartment. The registration? Or the gun?
TWENTY-THREE
“Get us into that apartment,” I ordered the police locksmith. I was in a black rage over the twenty-four-hour wait for a search warrant. I couldn’t believe that judges had denied our request, even after the dead bodies of Tom Fargo’s neighbors had been found, murdered, across the hall.
“Goddamn liberal judges. He never came home. Never came to the shop. No sign of the damn car.” Eddie mimicked the reason for the delay. “There’s no proof! No evidence! You can’t just break into any apartment near a crime scene.”
With us in the foyer was Detective Jamal and an NYPD canine handler named Kovics and his four-year-old German shepherd, Dorothy. Yellow crime-scene tape hung off the door across the hall. Forensics crews had left, and the bodies were long gone. The dog was trained to detect chemicals in which mosquitoes are shipped. Sucrose solutions vary in taste and flavoring. Manufacturers add lemon or caramel to enhance taste. Dorothy would also allegedly alert to the smell of Parafilm, which to humans has no odor at all.
Dorothy strained at her leash as the eyes of the British jockeys in the lithographs on the wall seemed to watch the locksmith pull out the Medeco. My anger was a steady drumbeat in my skull. In the Marines I’d never had to deal with search warrants.
“I’m going in anyway,” I’d told Jamal yesterday.
“No, you’re not.” With two uniformed officers, he blocked the way. “Not without probable cause.”
“Two bodies aren’t probable cause?” Eddie asked.
“That’s like saying anytime anyone is killed, police can enter any residence within a hundred yards.”
“Well, why can’t they?” Izabel asked.
“I’m frustrated, too,” Jamal said, “but I see the point. I grew up in Bed-Stuy. If open entry was the rule, I would have spent my whole childhood watching cops turn our apartment and neighbors’ places upside down. Sir, if you go in, I’ve been ordered to arrest you.” Jamal had folded his arms. He didn’t like it. But he meant it. At least he looked miserable over it. I gave him credit for that.