The Devil's Cauldron Page 4

  “In ten minutes, this place is going to be empty,” Becca said. “We’ll have it to ourselves.”

  “Not entirely,” Wes said, with a nod to his brother, who was already peeling off his Sherlock hat, t-shirt, shoes, and knee-length socks. He looked up questioningly when he was down to his blue spandex suit.

  “These aren’t the boil and die pools. Go for it.”

  Eric found the biggest pool and waded in. He gasped at the heat, but shortly was splashing and goofing off like a kid. Wes envied his energy and enthusiasm.

  Becca undressed as Wes sought out a quieter pool. She wore a maternity bathing suit underneath. Pregnant belly or no, she was still damn sexy.

  “How about this one?” he said, bending to test the water with a hand. Hot, but not scalding.

  “I like this one better,” she said, stopping in front of a steaming pool not much bigger than a bathtub. She sat on a boulder at the edge and dangled her feet in.

  “I can’t see my brother from there.”

  “He’ll be fine,” she said. “And he’s singing that damn Sherlock Holmes song from his game.”

  “Head shot, Watson!” Eric cried.

  Wes laughed as he undressed. When he was done, he slipped into the water. It was warm, but not particularly hot. Becca came down and was soon straddling his lap, removing any doubt as to her intentions. She kissed him. Her belly pressed into him, but so did her breasts, swollen from the pregnancy.

  “Do you remember that time on the Golfo Dulce, when we swam out to the island?” she asked. “We got in the pool and stripped out of our dive suits. That was the first time I saw you naked.”

  “We were supposed to look away, right?”

  “I mostly did.”

  “You were such a tease,” he said.

  “I didn’t want to be your vacation fling. I wanted more.” She glanced over his shoulder as Eric stopped singing. A moment later, he started up again. “But if you’re looking for a fling,” she said, stroking her fingernails along his chest, “I could go for one right now.”

  “Just like that? What if someone comes?”

  “Bad light, and we’re mostly underwater. The last few hikers are down the hill. Nobody will see.”

  She was sliding back and forth on his lap as she said this and within about three seconds he wouldn’t have been able to resist Becca if the whole Dutch contingent had shown up with their camera phones. She reached her hand down and tugged at his shorts, then she was pulling her own swimming suit to the side. He gasped as she eased herself down on top of him. She arched her back and moaned.

  A few minutes later, when they were done, he opened his eyes to see Eric above them on the hillside. Wes startled, but his brother was squatting with his back turned, stacking stones at the edge of one of the pools. And wearing his Sherlock hat.

  “Hmm,” Becca said, following Wes’s gaze. “We’re lucky he didn’t leap into our pool, oblivious.”

  “You’re still a tease,” Wes said, giving Becca’s bottom a pinch as she slid off and moved to one side.

  “I am? You seduced me, sir. Saw that my body was wracked with hormones, and took advantage of me. And in public.”

  “I have no shame, it is true.”

  “That’s the sort of unprotected sex that can get a girl pregnant, you know. The nuns warned me about that. It only takes one time.”

  “Really? I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.

  They sat for a minute listening to the burbling water overflowing the cascading hot water pots to run down the hillside. Wes put a hand on Becca’s belly, but the baby lay still and he didn’t feel anything. Gradually, the disquiet of the unresolved case replaced the mellow post-lovemaking feeling.

  “I don’t want to go back tomorrow,” he said at last.

  “I never thought we would.” Becca’s tone was matter-of-fact.

  He gave her a sharp look. “We’re packed up. We told the housekeeper we’d clear out in the morning.”

  “Only so we can find another place. Harder for your uncle to track us down that way.”

  “So we’re going to blow him off?”

  “Wasn’t that the plan all along?” she asked. “I mean, you never seriously thought we would give up now, did you?”

  “Well, no. But I thought we’d go back to Vermont and work on something else until we figured out what Davis was thinking.”

  “Wes, imagine if it were you. You’ve been suffering LIS for seven years. Someone wants to hide you so badly they brought you to Costa Rica and stashed you in a secretive place like Colina Nublosa. You’re dying inside. Do you want to wait another six months? A year?”

  “No.”

  “I sent Meggie Kerr a message. I looked right at her and as clearly as I could communicate it, let her know that I’d heard her tapping. She has to know I’m looking for her. She must be going crazy.”

  “I know,” Wes said.

  He thought about people like Meggie all the time. It was worse than being a prisoner in solitary confinement, worse than being straightjacketed in a padded cell. Worse than almost anything he could imagine. Sometimes he suffered nightmares where he had become the patient in a vast asylum, like something out of some Victorian hell. In the dreams, he lay in a vast hall filled with beds. In each bed lay a patient, and none of them were moving. Not so much as a blink of the eyes. Wes tried to scream, but his mouth wouldn’t move. He woke from these nightmares sweating, his heart pounding.

  Becca said, “We find them, we rescue them. That’s our job. That’s the only thing that matters.”

  “Why did Davis call us home?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There has to be a reason,” he said.

  “What do you think?”

  “He’s afraid. First priority is to keep us alive, remember? Why would he say that? He must have learned something, and it freaked him out.”

  “He wasn’t freaked out when we opened the call,” she said. “He was asking about the house, chatting about that kid in the Bronx.”

  “I want to ask him,” Wes said. “Whatever it is, we deserve to know.”

  Becca pushed wet hair out of her eyes. “And when he insists we fly home?”

  “Then we’ll insist on staying. What’s he going to do, come down here and wrestle us onto the plane?”

  “He could cancel our accounts, hire someone to shadow us, phone Colina Nublosa and tell them we’re snooping around.” Becca shrugged. “If he’s serious, he can mess with us a dozen ways.”

  “So we stay?”

  “We stay,” she said firmly. “And we finish the job.”

  “He’s going to find out soon enough. When we don’t show up for work, he’ll call the airline and figure out we weren’t on the flight. He can mess with us plenty, then.”

  “Right. So we have three days, tops.”

  “You’ve thought this out,” Wes said.

  “I have. And I have a plan.”

  He was getting hot in the water, so he hoisted himself out and waited for Becca to explain. She wore a look of grim determination.

  “We need someone on the inside,” she said. “That’s how we got to Walter Fitzroy. I took a job as an aide.”

  “They already know you from that stunt you pulled. And you’re pregnant, so it’s not like you can go in disguise. Besides,” he added. “You don’t speak Spanish. I do, though.”

  “We have three days, Wes, before Davis is on to us. They’re not going to hire you in three days, even if they have a job opening, which they probably don’t. And can they even hire a foreigner without papers in this country? There are probably laws about that.”

  “So if neither of us can get a job, then how do we infiltrate?” he asked.

  “We’re not sending an employee. We’re sending a patient.”

  Becca turned her gaze as she said this. It fell on Eric, still goofing around in his hat and electric blue trunks at the edge of the water. He’d ripped the seat of his shorts on the rocks, revealing more than either o
f them cared to see. Good thing he had two identical pairs back at the house.

  “No,” Wes said.

  “This is his chance to play Sherlock Holmes.”

  “I mean it, no.”

  “I sent Jerry Usher an email last night via their web form, and he answered this morning. Said they would be happy to accept a high-functioning resident. I filled out the application as you, and sent in a deposit, together with some forged medical records we happened to have on hand for just this sort of contingency.”

  “Becca!” Wes said, sharply.

  “I only hope the bank doesn’t flag the withdrawal, or Davis will see what we’re doing. It was twenty thousand, and I have to cough up the first six months by the thirtieth.”

  “Twenty thousand a month? What kind of a ripoff is that? Eric’s group home is only fourteen hundred.”

  “It’s a high-class joint.”

  “Never mind,” he said. “I won’t let him do it.”

  “Maybe you should ask Eric,” she said, her tone gentle. “Instead of treating him like a child.”

  “But he is a child. That’s the point. My brother suffered serious brain damage at birth, in case you forgot. Or maybe that doesn’t matter to you.”

  “Be fair, Wes.” She sounded hurt at his tone.

  “I’m sorry, but think about it. His memory is poor, his powers of observation suck. He has a hard time reading people, and he’s distracted by moving objects. I love Eric, but he can’t hold down a job and he lives in a group home so someone will remind him to brush his teeth.”

  Becca was silent and he continued.

  “I’ve asked myself a million times why my twin brother and not me. The umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, but it could have easily been mine. So I have to take care of him. I can’t put him in danger, no matter how good the reason.”

  She heaved herself out of the water and took Wes’s hand. “There’s one thing your brother has that he didn’t lose. You both have the same moral compass.”

  “Becca, I couldn’t stand it when you hiked up there alone. I kept worrying what would happen to you and the baby if something went wrong.”

  “I know. You would have stopped me if I’d let you. Too bad you didn’t marry that kind of girl.” She squeezed his hand. “Eric knows right from wrong. Ask him. Tell him what we need and ask.”

  “And what am I asking? Go undercover in the facility and what?”

  “Take your cell phone. It can record video. Eric will get Meggie Kerr alone, turn on the camera, and then ask her a few carefully memorized questions. She will tap and blink her answers, then we’ll get Eric out of there and get home. Once we’re back in the United States, we’ll raise a stink until the Costa Rican authorities have no choice but to act.”

  Wes chewed on his lip. It sounded so simple. Why couldn’t Wes try it himself? He’d been in a few plays before; maybe he could act the part of someone mentally handicapped.

  No, not convincingly. And who would introduce him at the facility anyway? Not Becca or Eric. He couldn’t just show up at the front gates.

  “Hypothetically,” Wes said, “say we drop him off on Monday, then Davis starts wondering why we didn’t show up later that day. He blows the whole thing. Canceling our accounts and all the rest of it.”

  “Once your brother is on the inside, Davis will have to go along. He’ll be pissed,” she added. “But he’ll have no choice unless he wants to put Eric’s life at risk.”

  “You mean more at risk. Eric will be at risk the moment we send him in.”

  But Becca was right about so many things. It was an elegant solution. Nobody would expect a mentally handicapped patient to be investigating.

  “Can we trust him?” Wes asked. “He’s got the attention span of a cocker spaniel.”

  “He only needs to do a couple of things. Get Meggie alone, get her on camera, then keep his mouth shut.”

  “Even that will take some serious drilling to get into his head.”

  “We have thirty-six hours. Three things—that’s all he has to learn.”

  Wes looked at his brother. The rip had grown. Any more and it would split right in two along the butt crack. It would be dusk soon, which only lasted a few minutes here at the tropics. Time to get out of here.

  “Hey, Ruk,” he called. “Come here for a sec.”

  Eric flipped his head up too fast and the hat slid off his head. He made a desperate lunge and caught it just before it fell in the water. He pulled it low over his eyes and slapped a hand on top as if afraid it would fly away of its own volition.

  “Where are all the froggies?” Eric asked. “I hear them, but I can’t see them.”

  “The water is too hot, Ruk. They don’t want to boil into frog-leg stew, so they stay in the trees.”

  His brother snickered at this.

  “Hey, Becca and I were talking just now. You know why we came down here, right?”

  “’Cuz you wanted to be kissy in the water?”

  “No, silly,” Becca said, though she couldn’t keep the grin from her face even as Wes felt himself flush. “He means why we came to Costa Rica.”

  “Oh, yeah. To help the nice lady in the wheelchair.”

  “That’s right,” Wes said, nodding. “We’re looking for a woman who can’t move her body. It doesn’t work right, and so she’s a prisoner. Like Uncle Davis, or Walter Fitzroy. They need a computer to talk because they can’t move.”

  For a moment he was tempted to frame the thing in the most frightening way possible. Something about dark, confined spaces. That would freak Eric out. Let him know the danger, imply that being locked-in might be a risk for him, too. Heavy emphasis on Davis’s warning that they might be in danger.

  But Eric deserved the chance to make his own decision. And that meant playing fair with the facts.

  “Becca and I want you to help us talk to the woman. It isn’t going to be easy. You’re going to have to think really hard, and pay very, very close attention.”

  “That’s easy!”

  “Yeah? We’ll see. And it might be dangerous.”

  Eric smiled back, unperturbed by this warning. He rocked back and forth on his heels. “What do I do? What?”

  Wes looked at Becca. She met his gaze firmly, then spoke to Eric.

  “Ruk,” she said, “we need you to go undercover for us. We need you to be Sherlock Holmes for real.”

  “For real?” he looked at Wes, eyes widening.

  “For real, Ruk,” Wes said.

  “For real! Sherlock Holmes! Hound of the Baskervilles! Red-Headed League! The Scarlet Band!”

  Becca said, “Don’t forget Sherlock Holmes: Zombie Assassin.”

  Eric let out a snorting laugh. “Silly! That’s not real!”

  A nervous feeling twisted at Wes’s gut to watch Eric’s excitement bubbling over. There would be no talking him out of it now. Becca smiled at Wes, but there was a twinge of something unreadable in her expression. Sorrow, maybe? Guilt? Also, a flash of determination.

  We find them, we rescue them. That’s our job. That’s the only thing that matters.

  And Eric was now a part of the team. He would do his job.

  Chapter Five

  It was far too early when Meggie woke. A groggy, fuzzy feeling filled her head and she was sure she should still be asleep. Three straight nights they’d hammered her unconscious with whatever horse pill they’d ground into her applesauce, and she’d drooled her way through two full days with equally powerful sedatives forced down her throat at breakfast. Every time she felt herself swimming up to consciousness, they gave her a new dose. So why was she waking now?

  Something was drumming on the roof, like a single, noisy drip of water. Plop, plop, plop.

  Only gradually did she realize it wasn’t rain at all, and it wasn’t the roof. The sound came from inside the room. Someone stood at the head of her bed, tapping on her skull. Her eyes opened.

  The birds outside the window were going crazy with their early morning birdson
g and assorted bickering in the trees. It was light gray through the open shutters and her eyes turned around the room. Someone rapped her head with a knuckle or a stick, but she couldn’t quite focus yet. What was . . . why?

  The resident halls of Colina Nublosa were divided into buildings called habitats, which stood on stilts so they were up in the canopy like treehouses. The habitats radiated on spokes of covered walkways from the main building and blended into the environment like a large, sophisticated eco-lodge. Inside, the floors, walls, and furniture were tropical hardwoods, with beautiful details. The beds were firm and comfortable, and boasted 1,200-thread-count sheets. Shutters around the room opened onto a gorgeous tropical mountain view. The place must cost a fortune, and it had always bewildered Meggie that a working-class girl like herself had ended up in a place like this.

  “Good morning, sunshine,” a woman said. The words were cheerful, but delivered in a cold, venomous tone.

  The tapping continued, right on her skull. Whatever it was (it felt like a pencil) moved in and out of her peripheral vision.

  What are you doing? Who are you?

  “Are you awake in there? They say you are, but I’ve always wondered. What kind of miserable, pathetic life you must lead. Why don’t you die? Close your eyes and stop breathing. Do it. The world would be a better place.”

  Leave me alone.

  “It must kill you not to talk. Seven years without so much as a moan passing through your lips. And before the accident you never shut up. Always babbling away, talking about nothing. Verbal diarrhea, that’s what I told Benjamin. Whatever came into your head, you had to crap it out your mouth.”

  Meggie’s mind began to shake off the drugs. As it did, she recognized the voice. Seven years had passed, but it still possessed a gleaming, sharp edge, like a dagger tip sharpened to such a point that it could slide through the ribs and barely draw blood before puncturing the lungs and bursting the heart. Meggie’s stomach dropped.