The Brea File (32 page)

Carole Baumgartner ordered a second drink. Pouring a little of it into Linda’s glass, she laughed lightly and said, “Don’t worry about me—I didn’t let myself get trapped in Mother’s cage, with or without a bottle.”

* * * *

Carole Baumgartner drove her BMW effortlessly, using the five-speed gearbox with casual skill. The road wound downward out of the hills until it came to a long straight grade that leveled out on the lowlands where, in the distance, a river glinted here and there in its winding course.

A little more careless than usual perhaps, her senses dulled just a little by sun and gin and hard exercise, Carole did not notice the battered blue pickup on the road behind them until they were coming down the long grade. By then the truck was close behind the white car.

“Look at that son of a bitch!” Carole cried in exasperation.

The pickup swung out. Carole slowed a little to give it plenty of room to pass. Quickly the truck drew level with the smaller vehicle. Carole glanced up at it, an expression of hostility on her face, a caustic comment on her lips. But the side of the truck was splashed with mud that completely covered the side window. She couldn’t see the driver.

For several seconds she waited for the pickup to draw ahead. With a prickly feeling of surprise she finally realized that it was staying even with her, matching her speed. She felt a tug of anxiety. Glancing down the long two-lane grade, she muttered, “Games!”

As if accepting a challenge, Carole’s foot tromped down on the accelerator. The BMW jumped a few feet ahead of the truck. The gain was short-lived. Within seconds the bigger vehicle surged alongside of the car once more.

In the passenger seat beside Carole, Linda Macimer felt the first strong beat of fear. She glanced sidelong at the speedometer. They were racing downhill at over seventy miles an hour. The rasp of the BMW’s engine grew louder as their speed increased even further. Linda looked ahead anxiously. The road remained clear.

“Oh my God!” Carole cried. In the same instant Linda felt a jarring impact. There was a crunching of metal as the truck lurched into the side of the small white car.

Carole Baumgartner fought to hold the car on the road. The pickup swung away from them for an instant. It was a scene Linda had seen a hundred times on television, a staple of the low-budget thriller. It couldn’t really be happening.

The truck swerved back suddenly, smashing into the side of the car.

Linda had a last glimpse of the rear of the pickup as it sailed down the road. The white BMW was airborne for an instant as it shot off the side of the road. Then it bounced over slippery gravel. The front wheels nudged a shallow ditch and the car rolled. With an odd clarity Linda remembered Carole’s insistence that she buckle up her seat belt when she got into the car. She felt grateful.

Her head struck something hard and she knew nothing else.

Paul Macimer paced the hospital corridor slowly. He had left Linda’s room a few minutes before. The silent vigil with Jan in the narrow hospital room, while his mind churned with questions raised by Linda’s “accident,” had become too much for him. He felt as if he were going to explode.

Jan could always sense his moods. When he had slipped from the room, saying he would be just outside the door if Linda woke, Jan had glanced at him searchingly.

He stared at the paintings lining the corridor. They were an attempt to relieve the stark white walls and blank sheets of glass with splashes of bright color. They were a desperate distraction. They kept him from thinking about what might have happened to Linda and Carole this afternoon. And why it had happened.

A check with the FBI’s SMV file had so far failed to turn up a stolen pickup matching the description of the one which had forced Carole’s car off the road. Scrapings of blue paint from the left front fender of the BMW had been sent to the Bureau’s Instrumental Analysis Unit, which specialized in hit-and-run investigations. If it was the original paint, it would identify the make, model and year of the vehicle.

Macimer expected little from these investigations. The truck would be found abandoned somewhere in Washington, probably close to a subway terminal. It would be identified as stolen. There would be a routine examination of mud from the accelerator and brake pedals, clothing fibers or human hairs found on the seats of the truck, fingerprints from the steering wheel, shift knob and door handles. If the driver of the truck at the time of the accident were found, such evidence would be damning enough. First he would have to be found. Macimer suspected that might prove a lot more difficult than tracking down the blue pickup.

The case had begun with another car theft, Macimer thought. And another accident. He tried to find some parallel between the two incidents but it eluded him.

An urgent whisper caught his attention. “Paul!” Jan was at the door to Linda’s room, beckoning him. The girl was awake.

* * * *

Linda stared up at her father, whose face was like stone. On the other side of the bed her mother appeared drawn, and her eye makeup was smudged. Linda tried to smile encouragingly, as if it were her parents who needed moral support. She felt bruised from head to foot. “How do I look?” she asked.

“Beautiful,” said her father. “Remember that TV show a few years back?
The Munsters?
You’d fit right in.”

“Oh, thanks a lot!”

“You’re going to be fine,” Jan Macimer said.

Jan had not asked what Linda was doing in the speeding car with Carole. No lectures, no recriminations. Linda felt tears threaten.

“How… how is Carole?”

“You were luckier than she was. She has a broken leg, but she’s going to be all right. You were both lucky, really.”

“Linda…” Her father seemed different to her. After a moment she realized it was his eyes. She had never realized how soft was his normal expression when he looked at her. Now his gaze was hard, probing intently. “I don’t want to press you, but… I’d like to ask you about that pickup truck. Just a couple of questions.”

“He ran us off the road!” she wailed, a cry that mingled pain with remembered fear and anger. “He did it on purpose!”

“Did you get a look at him?”

She shook her head.

“What about the license plate? Could you make out anything at all? Even one or two numbers?”

“I saw the truck when it went by after it hit us, but you couldn’t see the license plate. There was mud all over it.”

She thought something shifted in her father’s eyes, but he nodded without comment. “Okay. Carole told us it was dark blue, maybe a ‘75 or ‘76 Chevrolet. That sound about right?”

“I think so… I don’t know. It was just an old pickup.”

He didn’t ask any more questions. Soon afterward Linda began to feel sleepy again—they must have given her something to make her sleep—and her parents drifted toward the door of her room. She heard her mother ask, “Who’d do such a thing? What kind of man would do such a thing?”

“We have a good description of the truck. If we find it, we’ll know more.”

As Linda floated toward unconsciousness she remembered Carole Baumgartner’s muttered word: “Games!” But it hadn’t been a game, Linda thought. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a game.

* * * *

Carole Baumgartner was in a great deal of pain. She hoped it would go away soon. She didn’t like pain at all; she wasn’t very good at enduring.

The door to her room opened after a gentle knock. She stared past the monstrous encumbrance of her right leg, which was raised in traction, at Jan Macimer.

“We’re leaving,” Jan said. “I’ll look in on you tomorrow.”

“I won’t be going anywhere.”

“Stop being brave.”

“You know me better than that. Jan—”

“You don’t have to say it.”

“Yes, I do. I wasn’t trying to undermine you or anything. You know how I am. I get fired up, and I thought maybe I could help.”

“You care.”

“Yeah.” Carole studied her friend anxiously. There wasn’t much else she could say. She had gone behind Jan’s back in a sense, arranging to have her “little talk” with Linda while she knew Jan was elsewhere. “You’re sure Linda’s going to be okay? If anything serious had happened to her because of me…”

“You couldn’t help what happened.” Jan didn’t sound completely convincing. But what did Carole expect? Hosannas for nearly killing Jan’s daughter?

“You know what I can’t figure out?” asked Carole after a moment. “Why did he do it? Do you suppose he was getting even for women’s lib? Do you think some lady truck driver took his job? Or maybe his wife told him to get lost last night?”

“He doesn’t like women drivers,” Jan murmured.

“Or German cars.”

“People who belong to country clubs.” When you thought about it, the actions of the man in the pickup were too bizarre for any easy explanation. How else explain him except with macabre jokes?

Paul Macimer entered the room briefly. He asked Carole for the second time about the mud-spattered license plate and side window of the truck, looked thoughtful when she answered and urged her to take it easy. She wanted to know how she could do anything else in her position.

The Macimers left and she was again alone in the room. There was another bed but it was unoccupied. Carole was glad of that. Her own pain was bad enough without having to listen to someone else’s.

She stared up at the paraphernalia assembled to keep her going. There was a needle in her arm with a long thin tube attached that led upward to an IV bottle. She was receiving antibiotics with the IV, Nurse Jane had told her.

Nurse Jane was Filipino. All the nurses seemed to be either black or from the Philippines. Carole couldn’t understand most of what the latter said. They giggled a lot when they talked among themselves in their own language, which had a ridiculous name. What was it? Tagalong? Not quite it. Taga-something.

Why were all the hospitals being forced to recruit nurses from the Philippines, even from Canada? American women were deserting the profession in droves. Even RN’s were finding better things to do. It wasn’t that the job was beneath them, Carole thought defensively. The medical world was simply a microcosm of the whole system, a chronically male-dominated world in which men were Daddy and women cleaned up the bedpans. The doctors (male) drove Cadillacs, played golf on Wednesday and wintered in Bermuda. The nurses (female) barely received a subsistence wage, fought their way home on the night shift through the rapists in the parking lot and became the butt of jokes about their morals.

No wonder they had to go out of the country or far into the boondocks to find women still willing to put up with that, or innocent of it.

Satisfied with her analysis, Carole drifted off to sleep.

* * * *

When she woke she was sweating and trembling and her leg hurt like hell. The fragments of a frightening dream eluded her as she tried to remember them.

The room was very quiet. The hospital was quiet. Drapes were drawn over the window of Carole’s room, but she could see enough through them to know that it was dark outside.

Her room was dimly lit. Someone must have come in to push the buttons that turned off all the lights with the exception of one recessed into the ceiling above the doorway. It spotlighted that area but left the rest of the room in twilight.

Carole watched the slow drip of the clear liquid from the IV bottle into the tube. The tube was like an umbilical cord, carrying food and medication into her bloodstream. The room was so quiet that she found herself listening for the soft “plop” of each drop of liquid from the bottle. But there was no audible sound at all, of course. Except…

She could hear someone breathing.

Carole turned her head quickly on the pillow. Seeing the white jacket, she relaxed a little, though her heart was beating rapidly. “Hey, don’t you ever knock, Doc, when you come into a lady’s room?” To her own ears her humor sounded forced.

“You were asleep. You didn’t hear me.” Great voice, she thought, for a bedside manner. Like having Orson Welles doing the honors.

He had been standing behind the rack of survival gear near the head of her bed, lost in shadows. He stepped closer when she spoke to him, but she still could not see his face clearly.

“How’m I doing?” she murmured.

“Very well, it appears. There is a possibility of internal injuries, but nothing serious.”

“Who cares if a woman bleeds a little inside? We’re supposed to, aren’t we? It’s true, you know, the way God worked things out. He had to be a male.”

“Don’t you believe in God?”

“You don’t have to get mad about it. What are you, a doctor or the hospital chaplain?” She peered up at him, puzzled. He had leaned closer when he spoke to her sharply, and she had a quick glimpse of his features. He looked familiar. She couldn’t see him very clearly, but there was something about him…

Her eyelids were heavy. Not sexy, Doc, just tired. Don’t get any ideas.

She was aware of feeling weak and helpless, lying there with her leg caught in its complicated trap, unable to move, while a white-jacketed man, a stranger, stood beside her bed and gazed down at her with hostile eyes.

She stared at the IV bottle and its assembly of control valves as if she might find a message there. The fluid continued to drip slowly into the long tube that led to her arm. The doctor fiddled with one of the small appendages protruding from the tube near the top assembly.

“What are you doing?”

“We’re going to add something to your diet,” he said with a smile. “To make you rest comfortably.”

Maybe I don’t want to rest comfortably, she thought. Aloud she said, “What do you call those things sticking out there? Side-somethings, right?”

“Those?” He appeared to examine one of them thoughtfully, even though he was apparently in the act of inserting the needle of a big syringe into the end of it. “Side valves, that’s all.”

Carole frowned. That didn’t sound right. She stared at him in alarm. He regarded her impassively. Strong silent type. He looked very… strong. Carole shivered. “Who… who are you?” she whispered. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”