Part 29 (1/2)

Thirtytwo children were entered in the contest, I read in my packet. The meet was divided into different heats for children of different ages and abilities.

Swimming was scheduled to start at one, but the Carnifice and Global sponsors had plenty of entertainment lined up for both before and after. Lacey Dowell was supposed to make an appearance, and the first three Virgin films were being shown in a tent behind the garage.

The event had grossed sixtyseven thousand dollars to be shared by three charities dedicated to children with disabilities, innercity children, and children's athletic programs. Carnifice Security and Global Entertainment had each contributed ten thousand dollars. It was a nice mediagenic event, and plenty of media was swarming about.

”Jennifer! They want us inside in five minutes to do a press conference.”

It was Eleanor Baladine, speaking so close to me I jumped. She was on the other side from me of a large shrub with spiky leaves. I sipped my Malvern water thoughtfully and kept an eye on the flash of turquoise linen, which was all I could see of her.

”I'm annoyed with Abigail,” Eleanor continued. ”She says Rhiannon got tired of swimming when we were in Limoux and doesn't want to compete. I wish she had said something before we had the programs printed: I tried telling her how bad it looks for one of the organizers to withdraw her own daughter from compet.i.tion. I thought it was ridiculous the way she kept running off with her daughter to Toulouse for little shopping trips, as if they were girlfriends together. My girls were in the pool six hours a day and loved every minute of it.”

”But you're so intense, Eleanor,” Jennifer Poilevy said. ”Not everyone has your drive. Of course your girls inherited your compet.i.tive spirit. It's a shame about poor Robbie, but I do wish you and BB had brought him to France with you.

He might have kept the twins from terrifying me with their climbing and jumping.

Half the time we were there, I was scared they were going to be brought in on stretchers.”

”We certainly never have to worry about that with Robbie,” Eleanor said dryly.

”Eleanor-there you are.” Baladine had come up to the women from the other side of the house. The sound of his voice woke in me such a frenzy of hatred and of helpless rage that I had to move away before I blew my cover by leaping through the shrubbery and strangling him.

Before I got out of earshot I heard Baladine say, ”Did your sister say anything about visiting Robbie at Camp Muggerton on Friday? Major Enderby called to say the boy's Aunt Claudia took him out for dinner and got him back after lightsout.”

My stomach jumped. I hadn't expected the camp commandant to check up on a family visitor. That meant I had to move as fast as possible.

I scurried past the media tent into the kitchen, since the bathroom we media folk were allowed to use was there. Rosario the nanny was was.h.i.+ng gla.s.sware while caterers a.s.sembled monstrous platters of shrimp, mushroom tartlets, and other delicacies. The contrast to the kitchen at Coolis, where roaches crawled over congealing piles of grease, and women swore at each other as they lugged dented pots around, made my anger start to boil again. When a waiter offered me a tray of salmon tartare with a perfect circle of caviar in the middle, I turned him away with more fury than manners.

The bathroom stood next to a swinging door leading into the body of the house. I pushed on it-anyone could make a mistake-and a Carnifice guard sprang to life in the hall beyond. He saw my green media badge and said, ”House is offlimits to guests, ma'am. If you're looking for the bathroom it's next to this door. And don't you want to be at the press conference? It's starting in two minutes.”

I murmured an apology and slipped into the bathroom. The first swim heat would start immediately after the press conference. It was the one for the littlest children, in which the Baladines' younger daughter was competing. Both Eleanor and BB would be at the pool for that, or at least Robbie had seemed to think so.

”They'll both want to see the girls beat everyone else, or if they lose, BB and Eleanor will want to show them everything they did wrong. They love that kind of stuff.”

He told me that at dinner Friday evening. When he came into the visitors' room at Camp Muggerton on lagging steps, his head down, I felt an uncomfortable parallel to the visitors' room at Coolis, but when he saw me his face lit up.

I had been afraid he'd blow my cover out of surprise, but after a moment's confusion he said, ”Oh, I thought-oh, it's you, Aunt Claudia.”

Over chicken and mashed potatoes at a diner in Columbia, he begged me to take him away. I wished I could but told him that would put real teeth into his father's kidnapping charge and I might not manage an acquittal.

He started crying, apologizing between sobs, but Camp Muggerton was a miserable place, the hazing was horrible, he couldn't get anything right, he was always last at everything. And they were on strict orders about his diet, did I know that?

I knew that-Major Enderby had stressed it when I was sent to his office for a visitor's pa.s.s. The major was pleased to see a family member paying a visit: most of the boys were home for the holiday weekend, and young Robert felt left out, having to stay in camp, but Commander and Mrs. Baladine thought it better he not be put in the way of the temptation of a big party. I gave my most dazzling smile and nodded gravely when the major told me Robbie was not allowed fat or sweets of any kind-so no Big Macs and shakes, ma'am.

I said that Robbie's weight was a trial to the whole family and everyone wondered where it came from. Certainly not my sister's and my side, although Commander Baladine's mother had been a plump little woman.

I told Robbie about the conversation while helping him decide whether he wanted caramel or chocolate sauce on his sundae. He had lost weight, his soft chubbiness replaced by something worse, a kind of gaunt hunger.

”You've lost weight too, Ms. Warshawski. Was that because of being in jail? Was jail as horrible as this camp? You don't want ice cream?”

I'm not much of a sweets eater, but I got a cone to keep him company. As we ate our ice cream, Robbie sketched a plan of the Baladine house for me-where Baladine's study was, where the controls for the house security system were, and where the surveillance cameras were trained. I had explained I wanted to know because it had to do with Nicola's death.

”But I want to use the information to-well, in part to get your father to stop trying to destroy me and my business, and in part to pay him back for the miseries I endured in the prison he runs. I want you to think carefully before you betray your parents to me.”

His tearstreaked face contorted in angry hurt. ”Don't start preaching the Ten Commandments to me like they do here. I know I'm supposed to honor my father and mother, but how come they never think of me? It's like there's something horrible wrong with me, I know they wish I'd disappear on them, I wish I could, I wish I was strong enough to kill myself.”

I gave him what awkward consolation I could-not that deep down his parents really loved him, but that deep down he was a fine and unusual person and that he needed to hold on to that idea. After we had talked for a time, I was relieved to see him start to look happier. I asked him if he wanted more time to think over what I wanted to do, but he said it was fine with him, as long as Utah didn't get hurt.

”She's kind of a brat, but I like her.”

”I don't think anyone's going to get hurt. Not physically, anyway, although I'm hoping your father may have to find a new job, perhaps in a different city. That may be hard on your mother.”

He ate another ice cream while he helped me draw up plans of the interior of the house. Afterward we sat and talked, about life and what could lie in store for him after he outgrew Eleanor and BB. I hadn't noticed the shadows drawing in on the town; we were going to be late for taps. I bustled Robbie into the rental car and drove like mad for the camp.

Before dropping him at the guardhouse I gave him a handful of twenties. ”This is enough for bus fare from Columbia back to Chicago, if you decide you can't stick it out here any longer. Sew it into the waistband of your shorts, but for pity's sake, don't use it until I know if your dad is going to drop the kidnapping charge. Or until after my trial, whichever comes first.”

The escape hatch seemed to breathe a little bit of optimism into him. I apologized to the guard for making my nephew late and begged him not to blame Robbie: I had gotten lost, and that wasn't the boy's fault. I had thought another dazzling smile would take care of matters, but now here was Major Enderby calling the Baladines to tell them Aunt Claudia had violated lightsout.

I waited in the kitchen bathroom until I heard the loudspeaker heralding the start of the swim meet. The bathroom had a second door, locked right now, that led into the maid's room. It took about fifteen seconds to pick that lock. I moved quickly, in case Rosario was getting a break while the swimming started, only stopping for a moment in front of a tin icon to the Virgin of Guadalupe, which was nailed over the prim single bed. I whispered a little plea for protection, although perhaps the Virgin would feel that not even Baladine's iniquities warranted protecting an intruder.

The back stairs led to Utah's and Madison's bedrooms and their playroom. On the other side of the playroom was a hall leading to Baladine's home office. I studied the location of the monitoring cameras in the bedrooms, playroom, and hall on my pencil map and ducked around the lenses, creeping into Baladine's office on my hands and knees.

Robbie said the system was voice and motionactivated. My hands and knees rustling on the carpet wouldn't turn it on, but a cough might.

Inside Baladine's office, I crawled along the edge of the room and came to the desk from behind. Lying flat, I stuck up an arm and found the switch for his inoffice video monitor and turned it off. I got to my feet and held my breath.

After a couple of minutes, when no security guards appeared, I relaxed enough to look around.

I found myself listening tensely for noise. The house was wellsoundproofed, and the cheers from the pool came through as only a faint echo. I might have half an hour; I needed to control my nerves and make the most of it.

The room held everything a manly man wanted in his home office, from the b.u.t.tery black leather couch in a window alcove to the electronics on the zebrawood desk, which included a shredder, a fax, a scanner, and a videophone.

I switched on the computer, covering my hand with a Kleenex-I thought it would be impossible to explain away rubber gloves if someone came in on me. The system came up and asked for a pa.s.sword. Baladine's s.h.i.+p number was what Robbie thought his father would use. When that didn't let me in I tried the name of the s.h.i.+p.

Bingo. To get into Carnifice files I needed another pa.s.sword. I tried the s.h.i.+p ID again, but the machine preferred his service dates.

I called up the homesecurity system and set the hall camera to appear in a split screen of the computer. That would give me a little advance warning if Baladine was coming. I checked the doors on the far side of the room. One led to a closet, another to a bathroom, and a third to the far hallway.

I logged on to the email server and called up the list of clients. Five of my own former clients had little stars by their names; Darraugh Graham had a question mark. I had memorized what I wanted to say and typed quickly, nervously proofreading and correcting my text. Did I want to send to the entire recipient list? I did.

Next I typed in my own media list and composed another message. When I'd emailed my media list I breathed more easily. I deleted all the messages, both from the outbox and from the trash file, so that Baladine wouldn't know from looking at his mailbox that someone had been using the server. Even if he found me now, I'd done enough to cause him some discomfort.

Just as a precaution I copied his homesecurity file onto a floppy, copied his client list onto another floppy, then, while I was still logged on to his network, started looking through his inbox for any messages that might be about me.

The searches had taken too much time. I was sweating, wondering if I'd better pack up and go, when I saw Baladine and Alex Fisher appear on the hall camera. I turned off the machine, grabbed my floppies, and dived into the closet at the back of the room. My heart was pounding so hard, I thought the closet door must surely vibrate in rhythm with it.

The two came into the room, talking in such low tones all I could make out was the murmur of their voices. Sweat began soaking my s.h.i.+rtsleeves as I imagined a telltale floppy or tissue alerting them to an intruder.