The Devil's Cauldron Read online

  Down at the lake, Becca killed the motor, tied off the boat, and took the stone staircase from the dock two steps at a time. She was sweating and flushed by the time she got up. Wes came down from the deck and met her on the lawn.

  “She’s there.” Becca stopped, gasping for air, hand on her back. “And she’s awake!”

  “What? Are you sure?”

  “She was tapping her finger. And she can move her eyes! It’s not even full LIS. She can communicate.”

  The news was electrifying. After weeks of searching for Meggie Kerr, could they have really found her with a simple trick? Was the woman’s seven-year nightmare almost over?

  They’d been pretty sure Meggie was at Colina Nublosa for several weeks now. The facility kept its resident list under tight control, but they knew she was at a high-end facility in Costa Rica, and the staff at the other two such places were more cooperative. They allowed Wes and Becca to tour the grounds and meet the low-functioning residents. It hadn’t taken long to drop the two from suspicion.

  “What happened?” Wes asked. “Tell me everything.”

  Becca nodded, still panting. “Just a second. I think I’m going to die.”

  “You’re okay? You don’t need a doctor, do you?”

  “I’m good.”

  “It’s not labor, is it?” Given what had happened to his brother at birth, Wes couldn’t shake his worries about Becca’s looming delivery.

  “Hah!”

  “Just being sure. It’s forty-five minutes to the nearest clinic.”

  “And thousands of women in Costa Rica give birth without complication every year.”

  He laughed. “That’s encouraging. Should I get the towels and hot water? Go across the lake to dig up some old abuela to serve as midwife?”

  Becca gave him a look, but it was teasing, not serious.“But I’d love to get off my feet. And to have my nice, considerate husband bring me a glass of iced tea.”

  A few minutes later, on the patio with her feet propped up, iced tea in hand, she relayed her adventure infiltrating Colina Nublosa. The reconnaissance hike to the Devil’s Cauldron from the backside of the mountain had paid off. She had driven the road up to the facility, hidden the car, then walked right onto the grounds. She’d wandered for at least twenty minutes before being challenged, and by the time someone did, she had discovered their missing patient. Who seemed to be awake and alert.

  “And you’re sure it was her?” Wes asked. “You know how LIS changes people’s bodies.”

  “She looks exactly like the pictures. I don’t know what kind of therapy they have up here—”

  “The best, according to their web site.”

  “—but they must have stimulated her muscles to limit atrophy. Only her eyes and one index finger moved, but otherwise, she looks great. Young, pretty. Whole life ahead of her.”

  “Except that she’s doubly a prisoner. Stuck in her body and stuck in that facility.”

  “And someone wants to keep it that way,” Becca said. “They practically carried me out and tossed me down the hill.”

  “You were trespassing. Rich people don’t like that. Makes them cranky.”

  “The director guy was more than just unfriendly. He was hiding something.”

  Wes finished his own glass of iced tea and swirled the half-melted cubes around the bottom, thinking. Through the open sliding glass door came the moan of zombies from Eric’s video game.

  Sherlock Holmes cried, “Head shot, Watson!”

  Last week, when they’d ruled out the other two facilities, Wes and Becca met with a contact in the Costa Rican Ministry of Health in San Jose, to talk about forcing a visit to Colina Nublosa. The man agreed to investigate, but later that day sent a curt email, telling them he’d verified that the facility had no Meggie Kerr and urging them to drop the case and return to the United States. What had changed? Had he made discrete inquires at Colina Nublosa and either been threatened or bribed into dropping the matter?

  And the case had started so promisingly, too. Two months earlier, an anonymous tip came in via the form on the foundation’s web site:

  Subject: Meggie Kerr

  Message: She is in Costa Rica. They say she is in a coma, but she might be awake. Please investigate.

  The tipster left no email or name in the contact information field.

  Costa Rica? There were tens of thousands of hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, and care centers in the United States—they couldn’t run down to Central America on a lark.

  But Wes and his brother had practically grown up in the country, not to mention the experiences of Uncle Davis, the head of the foundation. Also, Becca and Wes had fallen in love down here, while diving on the Pacific coast and trying to track down who had tried to kill Uncle Davis.

  At the time of the Meggie Kerr tip, the team was busy working with a veterans organization helping three Iraq War vets with high brain stem injuries. Plenty of money available for therapy, they just needed the latest technology for bridging that gap between a trapped mind and the outside world. It was exciting work, and with dozens of other leads to follow, Wes had only nibbled around the edges of the Meggie Kerr case. New info trickled in. Turned out, she was a fellow Vermonter. Now he was intrigued. And once he was intrigued, he got Becca interested, and then the case warmed up in a hurry.

  Even now, with the woman at the top of the list, there were still a million questions to answer. The case had progressed from intriguing to an obsession. But Wes faced the uncomfortable worry they had stumbled into dangerous territory: rich people with secrets.

  Becca’s eyes shone with an intense gleam. “Have you been keeping track? This is number sixty.”

  Wes hadn’t counted recently, but he had no doubt she was right. Sixty people found and identified over the past five years. Prisoners within their own minds, fully alert, but with injuries so high on their brain stems that they couldn’t communicate with the outside world. So many, yet so few. Statistically, there were thousands of unidentified sufferers of locked-in syndrome in the United States alone. They needed more resources, more employees, more media attention.

  “It’s not sixty yet,” he said. “Not until we get Meggie out of there.”

  Becca set down her glass and rose to her feet.

  “I’m going to grab the laptops,” she said. “We need to talk to Uncle Davis.”

  #

  Uncle Davis appeared on the screen. Outwardly immobile, his body bent and rigid like Stephen Hawking’s in a specially made wheelchair, his mind was a twisting, turning clockwork of moving gears, always probing, thinking.

  Wes remembered a smart man from before Davis’s spear gun injury to the base of his skull, but the years of hell with undiagnosed LIS had honed his uncle’s mind to another level. Davis could remember conversations verbatim, spent his spare time listening to poetry audiobooks, which he committed to memory, and had taught himself Spanish, French, and German after his paralysis.

  Once, a newspaper reporter openly wondered if the whole thing were a fraud, like those autistic children who supposedly pressed their mother’s fingers to play the piano. The reporter left his first interview with Uncle Davis a believer.

  “The house okay?” Davis asked. “Comfortable enough, I mean?”

  A tiny camera on his computer read his eye movements as they flashed across a sophisticated pattern of words, letters, and shorthand symbols. A computer voice translated those flickering glances into a smooth baritone. The software had grown increasingly sophisticated over the past couple of years until he no longer sounded like a robot.

  Wes and Becca sat with their laptops in the front room where the light wasn’t as strong. Wes looked out the sliding glass doors at the clean, clear waters of Lago Cristal and laughed. “Yeah, I’d say it’s comfortable.”

  They enjoyed a million-dollar, 360-degree view, with the dormant volcano rising from the mist to their rear, and thousands of acres of cloud forest beyond the immaculate grounds. In front of them, the lake its
elf. Tropical birds woke them in the morning, and last night Wes’s brother Eric had burst into the front room shouting that he’d seen a tiger. Probably an ocelot, rather than the rare jaguar but still, pretty cool.

  Becca took her laptop to the window to let the webcam pan slowly over the view, before returning to the table.

  “Fantastic,” Davis said. “Wish I were there. Don’t know how the wheelchair would do on those hills, but I’m sure you guys could carry me around, right?” There was a smile in his voice. “And all my gear, too?”

  “How much does that chair weigh?” Wes asked. “Four hundred pounds?”

  “Point taken.”

  “Really, though, it’s too much. Next time a guest house or lodge would be fine. We don’t need the private house. We’re only three people—we could have rented rooms across the lake for a fraction of the cost.”

  Wes had already found one in Santa María del Lago if they needed to stay past the end of the month. Twenty bucks a night per person, with coffee and fresh fruit at breakfast in some gorgeous Garden of Eden-like setting almost enough to make up for the shared bathroom down the hall. This rental house, in comparison, cost fifteen hundred per week.

  And he was jealous of the money. He wanted every penny to track down the locked-in sufferers. But Uncle Davis had made the reservations from back in the U.S., and he insisted they needed more privacy.

  “Did you get my email?” Davis asked. “I sent it about thirty minutes ago.”

  “No, we haven’t checked,” Wes said. “Becca was out and just got back. What’s up?”

  “That kid in the Bronx checked out. Easiest case all year. Jaleel was there all along, but nobody cared enough to check him out. High brain stem injury, but little brain damage otherwise.”

  “What happened to him?” Becca asked.

  “He took a bullet to the back of the skull several years ago. Gang violence. He’s still young, and shows a lot of promise if we can get him the right treatment. The New York Times is running a big feature on him next week.”

  Becca frowned. “Please tell me he was a kid in the wrong place at the wrong time, and not some gangbanger.”

  “A kid, but definitely banging.” Somehow, Davis’s voice software managed to sound equivocating. “He was one of the shooters in the incident.”

  “Great,” she said. “Just who we want as the poster boy of the foundation.”

  “But he was only fourteen, he didn’t personally injure anyone, and his older brother was killed in the shootout. Jaleel has had a lot of time to think about things inside that head of his. I read a preview of the piece—it will be favorable coverage.”

  “I’m all for giving the kid a second chance,” Becca said, “but I’m the media rep, and we need those donations to come in. So no child molesters or anything, right?”

  “We find them, we rescue them,” Davis said. “No value judgments.”

  She made grumbling sounds.

  “So what did you find at Colina Nublosa?” came the voice from Davis’s computer. “Tell me everything.”

  Wes gave him the rundown of the past few days’ events. After bombing out with the Ministry of Health, Becca had tried again with the facility itself, sending the director, a man named Jerry Usher, a couple of emails. No answer. One more email to the ministry.

  It was urgent that they visit Colina Nublosa. Barring that, even a meeting with Usher off site would be a first step. How about a simple confirmation that they had a patient named Meggie Kerr?

  A curt response returned: “Stop meddling in local affairs or we will send the police to question you.”

  Of course things worked differently down here. But the ministry’s stonewalling was suspicious.

  When Wes finished, Davis said nothing. His eye flickered across the screen, but the computer didn’t speak.

  “Are you there?” Wes asked.

  No answer.

  “I think we lost him,” Becca said. “The software crashed or something. Kill the chat and see if you can reconnect.”

  “No, I’m here,” Davis said. “Hold on.” Several seconds passed before he spoke again. “Okay, guys, time to bring you home.”

  “What?” Becca and Wes exclaimed together.

  They were loud enough that it startled Eric from his video game. He looked at them, blinking, with that glazed expression of gamers everywhere, whether they were mentally handicapped or not. Then he turned back to the zombie battle.

  “I’ve been doing my own digging,” Davis said. “I don’t like what I turned up. I want to drop it for now.”

  Becca and Wes exchanged bewildered looks before looking back to the chat.

  “Did something happen?” Wes asked.

  “I turned up a few things. I’d rather not discuss it here, because I don’t want you to ignore me.”

  “Give us some credit,” Becca said. “We’re not going to blow you off. What is it?”

  “Come back to Vermont—I’ll explain here. The upshot is we’re dropping the Meggie Kerr case.”

  “Why would we do that?” Wes asked.

  “Bigger priorities. Other cases with fewer difficulties. Maybe we’ll get back to this one later. But for now—”

  “Whatever happened to ‘we find them, we rescue them’?” Wes cut in. “And ‘no value judgments’? ”

  “First priority is to keep you alive.”

  “Alive?”

  “Whatever it is, we can handle it,” Becca said. She sounded equally baffled. “Remember Walter Fitzroy’s case? His psycho girlfriend tried to kill me. It can’t be worse than that.”

  “Come back to Vermont.”

  “No,” she said. “Not until we’re finished.”

  “It’s not a discussion,” Davis said. “You’re coming home.”

  Wes’s surprise was turning quickly to irritation. “Since when have you ever pulled rank? We’re a team, not a dictatorship.”

  “At the end of the day, someone has to make the tough calls. And that’s me. I’m going to change your flights. I’ll email you the new itinerary when I’ve book your tickets. And I’m going to email and cancel the house.”

  “Seriously,” Wes persisted. “You can’t pull the plug without explaining first. Give us the info. We’ll talk it out.”

  “No. This isn’t up for discussion. You will come home and that’s the end of it.”

  And with that, the chat window went black. Wes and Becca exchanged bewildered, frustrated looks. Behind them, Eric’s computer game continued to chime and chirp merrily.

  Chapter Three

  An unpleasant surprise appeared in Meggie’s applesauce at pill time. The weather was clear, so the residents had eaten on the veranda. Dinner was the highest-quality organic vegetables and tropical fruits, together with an expertly prepared sea bass. Or so went the announcement. Meggie couldn’t eat on her own, so they pureed her food into something resembling pig slop, then spooned it deep into her throat until reflex made her swallow.

  As they finished, nightfall came over the forested hills with all the speed of closing shutters, and the bird calls gave way to the chirps, croaks, and thrumming of frogs. Insects buzzing and thrilling. Geckos perched near lights to gobble up the circling bugs. The shadowy forms of bats dive-bombed through the clouds of mosquitoes trying to thread their way through the gauntlet of citronella torches and sickly-sweet incense pots designed to drive them away.

  The higher-functioning residents shuffled inside, while a nurse wheeled out a cart to hand-deliver meds to the wheelchair-bound. She wore a nurse’s cap and a pinafore apron, starched white, looking like something out of the mid-twentieth century.

  The nurse presented the pills in cups, ground up and mixed with applesauce. As she coaxed residents into opening their mouths, she spoke in a soothing singsong, like she was house-training puppies.

  “Eat up now. Good boy. Here you go, there’s a good girl. Good girl!”

  When the nurse reached the end of the row, Jimena, tonight’s aide, pried open Meggie’s
mouth, while the nurse scooped out applesauce with a plastic spoon. The woman opened her own mouth. “Ah, there you go. Something new tonight for the big girl. Now swallow, be good.”

  The pills were always bitter going down, but whatever new pill was lurking in the applesauce had an especially sharp, corrosive taste in its ground-up form. Meggie almost gagged on pure reflex, but then her throat was moving and the applesauce went down.

  “That’s a good girl!” The nurse tossed the cup and spoon in the garbage attached to her cart, then patted Meggie on the head. “You were agitated this afternoon. That’s what they say. But this should help my good girl get some sleep.”

  Agitated? Who said that, Usher? Couldn’t he have at least pretended to consult the doctor before changing her meds? Wasn’t there a law somewhere, even in Costa Rica? Or did they simply not care about the law?

  Do I look agitated? Meggie thought angrily, as the nurse pushed the cart back inside. As if anyone could tell. As if anyone cared to ask her what she thought. How hard would it be to ask once in a while? To ask anything?

  Such as, “Blink once if you’re tired, twice if you want to stay up.”

  “Do you need to go to the bathroom? Blink once for yes, twice for no.”

  Or how about this? “Do you want to talk to anyone? Do you have any friends and relatives we could contact? Would you like a visit?”

  Meggie had no name for her condition, and nobody ever told her.

  Paralyzed seemed the wrong term. Even quadriplegic was inadequate. There had been a kid in one of her classes at college who couldn’t move his hands or legs and used his mouth to wheel his chair around, blowing in a straw or something. But he could talk, and smile, and laugh. He was alive to the world.

  So if Meggie wasn’t a quadriplegic, what was she? There had to be a medical term for this.

  The psychological term was prisoner.