Scorpio Rising by Alan Annand
Crowe turned to survey the crowd of mourners whose number had doubled since his arrival. The elderly Blaikies, accompanied by their son, slowly made their way, like a glacier to the sea, toward the casket. Mrs. Blaikie was visibly shaky; her husband and son helped keep her upright and ambulatory. Crowe respectfully stood aside to allow the elderly Blaikies room to come to grips with every parent’s nightmare, the viewing of a dead child.
He moved among clusters of mourners who spoke in hushed tones, their conversation alternating between the tragedy of a premature demise and the catching-up on news between people who hadn’t seen each other in a while.
Crowe saw a young woman enter the chapel, her flowing platinum hair standing out from heads whose luster paled in comparison. She was tall and wore a dark blue pinstripe jacket and skirt, the business-like appearance of which only exaggerated her significant beauty. She paused at the door and signed the guest book. After scanning the crowd, she headed toward Jeb Stockwell.
The blonde gave Stockwell a brief embrace and murmured some condolence. Seemingly aware of the many eyes upon her, she broke off and moved toward the casket. There she spoke to Blaikie and his parents, and spent a few moments before the casket, her head bowed.
Crowe went to have a look at the guest book. Katrina Korba. The exaggerated loops of her signature suggested a woman whose ego was still a work-in-progress. The name sounded familiar. Maybe a model whose face had been on a magazine cover?
Crowe watched Stockwell. As the widower dealt with a steady flow of sympathizers, accepting condolences and exchanging words to fill the void of a situation for which language was inadequate, he looked tense, like someone who desperately needed to take a leak. No matter with whom he spoke, his eyes darted back and forth to Korba. Crowe noticed that, whenever he wasn’t shaking hands, his right thumb was tightly gripped inside his fingers, like a child hiding a cherished possession from schoolyard bullies.
After a few minutes at the casket, Korba drifted back through the crowd, which parted almost choreographically as she returned to Stockwell. It was uncanny, Crowe observed, how even sophisticated New Yorkers sometimes acted like a school of fish or a flight of birds, recognizing a different creature in their midst. Korba and Stockwell exchanged a few words and a brief embrace, and then she departed. Stockwell visibly relaxed, as if he’d been holding his breath for several minutes.
Crowe left the funeral home and saw platinum hair flouncing in the afternoon sunlight as Korba walked up First Avenue. Crowe caught up with her on the other side of 70th Street.
“Miss Korba, could we talk? I’m a friend of Jeb’s brother-in-law.”
She gave him a startled look. “How do you know my name?”
“I recognize you from some fashion magazine,” he said, playing to her vanity.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Your relationship with Jeb.”
Her eyes flickered alarm. “Jeb? We’re just friends.”
“More than just friends, Miss Korba. The police don’t know that. But I do.”
Chapter 45
Washington
The directors of the FBI, CIA and DHS met in downtown Washington for a late lunch. Unfortunately, the nature of their business didn’t allow dining either publicly or in one of the private rooms of the many fine and discreet restaurants catering to men of power. Instead, the FBI’s concierge service arranged for lunch to be brought in to the J. Edgar Hoover Building, where the three ate in the oak-paneled and bug-free conference room adjacent the director’s office.
Although his ulcer allowed him scant latitude, FBI Director Bobby Bueller ate a little of the sole that his secretary had ordered for him, its soft bland flesh acceptable to his tortured stomach, along with a modest helping of mashed potatoes.
CIA Director George Gann had a robust appetite and wolfed down three veal cutlets with a huge salad and a glass of wine. He ate veal, Bueller reflected, like a man who was going to face the firing squad. Or order one. Did he know something Bueller didn’t?
Tom Ridgeway, fresh from his trip to Miami on behalf of Homeland Security, was sunburned on his face and arms. According to the overnight surveillance report, he also had a bad case of carpet burn after a night on a yacht with some enthusiastic Republican supporters. War was hell.
Bueller finished his mashed potatoes and sipped some warm water. He laid his hand on the slim report adjacent his plate. They each had a copy but since it was color coded at level three, it meant the world as they knew it wasn’t ending, so neither Gann nor Ridgeway had hurried to read it when Bueller handed copies out.
“Given our joint intelligence,” Bueller said, “it appears the Cassidy bombing wasn’t part of a terrorist plot. It’s day three and we have no new incidents, no new evidence and no real suspects. I propose we downgrade the domestic security alert from orange to yellow. Any objections?”
Gann looked at Ridgeway to see how he’d react to being told when and how to do his business. Ridgeway shrugged and wiped a smear of garlic butter from his chin. That man did love his scampi tails.
Ridgeway cleared his throat, climbed into the saddle, and lassoed control back over to his side of the table. “Much as I hate this system, I prefer to maintain orange for another four days. If things remain quiet, we’ll go back to yellow. People hate it when we jiggle the security alert up and down. Makes us look like a bunch of yo-yos.”
Gann shook his head. “This is different because it’s not terrorism and it’s not a threat to the general public. The public doesn’t even know what’s going on.”
“None of us know what’s going on.” Ridgeway turned to Bueller. “What’s up with that, Bobby?”
“Sometimes things just aren’t what they seem,” Bueller shrugged. “We worked the terrorist angle, it just doesn’t add up. What looks a whole lot better is Cassidy’s wife.”
“More ways than one, I hear,” Ridgeway leered. “I’ve seen a couple of pics, but I’d like to see more.”
Bueller bit his tongue. If Ridgeway wanted pictures, the FBI’s surveillance library could show him a few, like the one with his bare ass humped over a brace of thousand-dollar call girls. Instead he said, “Our local team is keeping an eye on her but it may take a while. She obviously didn’t do her husband on her own, being away in New York, and not being too likely a bomb handler.”
“So you’re waiting for an accomplice to crawl out of the woodwork?” Gann said.
Bueller shrugged. “One way or another, we may hand it off to the locals anyway.”
Ridgeway slapped his hand on the insubstantial report. “We’re still responsible for a large population of federal employees. Until we’re sure that terrorism isn’t a factor in this recent attack, I insist we stay on orange alert until next Tuesday. I hope you’ll agree that any kind of knee-jerk reaction reflects badly on the administration.”
Bueller looked at Gann. They exchanged nods.
“Done,” said Bueller. He smiled at Ridgeway. “Got any room for dessert?”
“Dress it up purty,” Ridgeway chuckled. “I’ll eat anything.”
Chapter 46
New York
Axel Crowe led Katrina Korba to a café on First Avenue where they took a booth in the rear. Katrina ordered a latte, Crowe a Perrier. They said nothing for a few moments, holding silence until the waitress had come and gone. She took out a pen and doodled on the paper placemat. She drew a capital ‘K’, then added two diagonals to the left side of the vertical so that it looked like two ‘K’s laid back-to-back. The waitress returned with their drinks and went away.
Crowe indicated her doodle. “Does that symbol mean something to you?”
“It’s my brand, a Double-K for Katrina Korba.” She made the lines bolder with additional pen strokes. “Two Ks joined at the hip but looking in opposite directions.” She looked at Crowe. “Why? Does it mean something to you?”
Crowe recalled the same image etched in the cracked asphalt where Janis Stockwell’s dead hand had been o
“It’s similar to an astrological symbol. A sextile. An asterisk with six points.”
“What does that mean?”
“Astrologically, it can represent a secret friendship. Geometrically, it connects six points on a circle, sixty degrees of separation.”
Katrina sipped her latte. “Didn’t they make a movie about that?”
“That was six degrees of separation.”
“Is there something significant about the number six?”
“Could be… six places, six people, six events. Three pairs...” Crowe caught himself thinking aloud.
“What kind of business are you in, anyway?”
“Mostly, I find things for people.”
“Really? Perhaps I should hire you. Can you find my sanity?” She gestured vaguely. “I seem to have lost it somewhere in this city.”
“May I see your hands?”
Katrina held out her hands. They were long and slim and so pliable as to appear almost boneless. Crowe tested the flexibility of her thumb. It angled away from the index finger at about a hundred and twenty degrees. Its top phalange bent even further backwards from the lower, giving her thumb the look of a boomerang. Her index finger was short and all her fingertips came to a point. Her skin was soft and most lines on her hand were delicate except for a distinct fate line.
“A classic water type, you’re very sensitive, emotional, artistic, intuitive. You’ll bend over backwards to please other people who take advantage of you because you can’t say no. You grew up in someone else’s shadow. You struggle with self-doubts but you’ll make lots of money, first in the fashion business, later in show business.”
“I’m studying acting.”
“Good. You need a profession where you get immediate feedback.”
“What about my love life?”
“Things are a little more difficult there.”
“Story of my life.” Katrina shrugged. “What’s happening this year?”
“I assume you’re a Pisces. Twenty-one years old?”
“Yes. How’d you guess?”
“What day of the week did your birthday fall on this year?”
“It was a Tuesday. March 17th.”
Crowe didn’t need his astrology app for this one. The only planet of interest here was Mars, which ruled Tuesday. “This year, you’ll buy property and have a surgery.”
Her eyebrows arched in surprise. “I just bought a condo last month.”
“And you’re thinking about having an abortion.”
She dropped her eyes. Her hands wrestled with each other.
“Because you know it’s not Jeb’s.”
Her eyes jerked up to meet Crowe’s. “How can you know all that?”
“Tell me about you and Jeb.”
Katrina sighed. “It’s a story as old as the hills. Small-town mid-West girl wins state beauty competition, comes to New York to make her name. She signs with a modeling agency, shares an apartment with another model and starts looking for Mr. Right. After she’s been around the block a few times and met all the worms in the Big Apple, her principles get a little frayed around the edges. So when she meets Jeb Stockwell, who treats her like a class act but eventually admits he’s married, she just hopes it will sort itself out in the end.”
“But you hedged your bets nonetheless…”
“This winter, it was touch-and-go between us. He told me he loved me and it was just a matter of time before he left her, but I knew he wasn’t doing anything about it. Nobody needed to draw me a picture. He can’t turn his back on her family wealth. As much as I wanted him I could see it was tearing him apart. He was unhappy and anxious all the time and it was spoiling what we had. I was getting depressed. We were having terrible fights, an endless cycle of breakups and makeups. That’s when I started seeing this guy I’d met in acting class. Then about three months ago Jeb’s mood suddenly changed and he was confident everything would work out, we just had to be patient a little longer. Trouble is, by then I was getting serious about this actor and one night we got a little careless…”
She dabbed at her eyes with the napkin.
“And now you have a decision to make,” Crowe said.
“Am I going to have this baby?”
“Are you prepared to be a single mother?”
“You don’t think the actor…?”
Crowe shook his head.
“Or Jeb…?”
Crowe drank some Perrier, thinking of the most diplomatic way to say this. “Katrina, I know you’re looking for a substitute father figure, but Jeb’s not the one.”
“What do you know about my father?” Her eyes started to well with tears.
Crowe could visualize the astrological chart of the moment. The planets symbolizing the father were in a ruinous state, suggesting a trauma from the recent past. Having lost something so dear had left in Katrina a wound not yet healed…
“You were very close to him. Even though your mother favored your older sister, you were your dad’s favorite. He died shortly after you moved to New York. It’s what made your career here such a bittersweet experience. But you couldn’t have saved him by staying. It had been in his blood for a long time.”
“Leukemia.” She used the napkin again. “He was only fifty-three. It was so unfair.”
“It often seems that way but it sorts itself out in the end. I think he must have told you something just before he died. Do you remember?”
“He said I had to love myself first and then everything else would follow...” Katrina started to cry and her tears were full-blown now, giving vent to her emotions in a way that might have been embarrassing for anyone other than a Pisces, for whom it was a necessary catharsis.
Crowe held her hand.
Chapter 47
Santa Fe
In the north end of Santa Fe, a modern chapel on a rocky slope overlooked the freeway. It had a peaked tile roof and a large wooden cross studded with nails to keep the pigeons off. A reception hall was available for various community functions and behind it was a courtyard with dozens of stone benches, some with tables, huddled in the shade of stunted trees. A stucco wall with a row of anti-trespasser spikes surrounded the compound. The sign over the wrought iron gate read Our Lady of the Desert Fire.
Uphill and across the street, a van with the logo of Sierra Air Conditioning was parked in a driveway. On the roof of that house two men were attending to its swamp cooler, an indigenous air conditioning system of Navajo invention. Because of the blistering sun the A/C men had erected a tarp to shade them while they worked. Beneath its cover they’d mounted a tripod and a camera with a telephoto lens and directional mike sighted on the chapel courtyard.
In the chapel a priest addressed a small gathering of mourners: Carrie Cassidy, a few friends, some neighbors on her street, a handful of Walt’s National Laboratory co-workers, and his brother William.
“Today we honor the memory of Walter Cassidy,” the priest recited in a monotone, “a man who enjoyed life to the hilt, supported his community and died in the service of his country. We wish him safe passage.”
Carrie reflected that, aside from his slavish dedication to anti-terrorist technology, the only time she’d ever seen Walt up to the hilt in anything was her, and in the last few years there hadn’t been much of that either.
It went off with near-military precision. No body to view, no eloquent friends to fluff out the time with eulogies. From the chapel organ’s opening chords of Born in the USA to start the service, and Bridge Over Troubled Waters to end it, barely forty minutes passed.
Carrie and her brother-in-law stood at the chapel door to receive condolences as the funeral party moved from chapel to reception hall. Sorrow had a thirst and beverages were available to slake it. The Desert Fire seemed to have been designed by a Southwest libertarian, a pleasant anomaly in itself, explaining why Carrie had chosen it for the service. Any church whose reception hall had a discreet wet bar was her kind of place.
<
“You going to be all right, little lady?”
“Sure. Why shouldn’t I be?” She tugged her arm free.
“Well, he was your husband. You’re going to miss a man around the house.”
“The hours he worked, you probably saw more of him than I did.”
“Well, if you need anything at all – day or night – you just give me a call. You know I live just over there on Paseo del Ombra, not a few minutes’ drive away. I’d be happy...”
“Thanks, Hank, but I’m not looking for any kind of companionship these days. I just need to be left alone.”
“Sure, I understand, I only meant that maybe, after you were finished grieving...”
In the reception hall Carrie turned her back on him and went to the bar. She got a glass of white wine and went into the courtyard. In its furthest corner, two stone benches flanked a stone table beneath a tree. She opened her purse and took out her cigarillos. She hadn’t been there a minute before William showed up.
He was a heavy man in his fifties, wearing a suit that hadn’t been pressed in a year. He had a goatee and horn-rimmed glasses that had gone out of fashion many years ago. He looked like the academic he was, a business professor at some second-tier college in Colorado. He was drinking a Coke.
“Where’s your mother?” William sat on the opposite bench. “She didn’t have the decency to come and see her own son-in-law laid to rest?”
“Ever since 9/11, she’s afraid to take a plane. What can I do about it? Sedate her and ship her in a cage?”
Carrie lit a cigarillo and took a long sip of wine. They were silent for several minutes. She flicked ash onto the flagstones. “Something on your mind?”