Snakes and Ladders Read online

  Mitchell sighed and looked down at his plate. “A sledgehammer on one end of the spectrum, and a toy mallet on the other.”

  “Don’t denigrate your ability, Mitchell,” she said. “Ballard has shown no evidence, as far as we know, of the ability to read minds, and I believe there are ways to increase your ability to affect others’ brains physically.”

  “How?”

  She sat forward. “I can give you something that will magnify the effect and, I believe, enhance your ability to apply it effectively. A performance-enhancing drug, one might say.”

  “Sounds like an athlete on steroids,” said Mitchell.

  “Yes. Exactly like that.”

  He hesitated. “I’ve read about what steroids do to the people who take them.”

  Louise waved her hand. “That’s when a person takes them over an extended period of time—you would only need to take the drug for the specific times when you wanted to apply your ability. And I’m still refining the drug—we won’t test it out until I know it’s safe.”

  Mitchell nodded. “Of course.”

  Louise took a sip of wine. “The immediate concern is Brashear’s investigation.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  She put her glass down. “If this drug works as I anticipate it will, you can take care of the attorney general, Mitchell. The basis of his investigation will sound so ludicrous to his colleagues and to the public that I’m surprised he’s taken it on. If we eliminate him, I believe the investigation will be dropped.”

  Mitchell shifted uncomfortably. “What about Elizabeth Ballard?” he asked. “And Owen McNally?”

  “George is taking care of that,” she said.

  “Do we even know where they are?”

  “George will find out.” Louise dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin and pushed back her chair. “I’m going to be in my study, looking through the records. Please stay, though, and finish your dinner. I’m sure Juana has a wonderful dessert prepared.”

  Only if she’s figured out how to keep the meringue from collapsing, thought Mitchell sourly as Louise left the room.

  4

  Lizzy and her godfather, Owen McNally, were headed up 89A on a day trip to explore Flagstaff when Owen noticed the restaurant on their left.

  “That looks nice,” he said.

  “Uncle Owen, we just left home!” protested Lizzy.

  “I’m too hungry to wait until Flagstaff,” he replied sheepishly.

  She rolled her eyes.

  The place turned out to be a combination restaurant and market. They placed their orders at the counter—sandwiches for both of them, plus soup for Owen—then retired to the outdoor dining area behind the building with gourmet sodas and chips to wait for their food to be delivered. Owen eyed the metal chairs with distrust—he was a huge man, with a height that was almost, but not quite, commensurate with his girth. He lowered himself onto one of the chairs with his customary caution, but it exhibited no signs of distress and he relaxed a bit.

  Over the back of each chair hung a colorful woven blanket, and Lizzy wrapped hers around her shoulders against the slight chill of the January air and of the shadow cast by the towering red rock cliffs that rose immediately behind the restaurant.

  Owen’s phone pinged, and he glanced at it. “Andy,” he said. He read the message, then rolled his eyes. “He’s just taunting me about the Coyotes. Evidently while we’re in Arizona, the Coyotes are my adoptive hockey team, and he’s laying claim to the Flyers, who won in overtime last night.”

  He held the phone out so Lizzy could read the message.

  Yo bro even your width couldn’t have blocked that last shot into the net

  Lizzy laughed. “He never cuts you a break, does he?”

  Owen tapped out a response, still smiling, and a moment later the phone pinged with another message. His smile faded as he read it. He tapped out a brief response and slipped the phone into his pocket.

  “Is everything okay?” Lizzy asked.

  “Oh, yes—you know …” He glanced around, then said jovially, “Ah, here’s our food.”

  The dreadlocked staffer delivered their lunches, and Owen busied himself extracting the utensils from the rolled napkin and popping open his bag of chips.

  Lizzy opened her own bag of chips. “So, is everything okay with Andy?” she asked again.

  “Oh, yes. He says he’s keeping an eye out, and he hasn’t seen anyone who looks like your description of George Millard, or anyone else doing anything that seems suspicious.”

  “Maybe Mr. Millard disguised himself.”

  “It’s possible. I keep reminding Andy to be careful.”

  Lizzy gazed speculatively into her bag of chips. “He doesn’t really seem like the careful type.”

  “He can take care of himself,” said Owen, but his voice held a hint of brotherly concern.

  “How about Ruby?” asked Lizzy.

  “Andy’s checking in with her periodically. He says she hasn’t seen anything suspicious either, and unlike Andy, she would recognize Millard if she saw him. I think that if anyone could see through a disguise, it would be Ruby DiMano.”

  Lizzy smiled. “Yeah, I agree.”

  They ate in companionable silence for a few minutes, then Lizzy said, “We should go back to Pennsylvania to check on them.”

  “I don’t think there’s much checking we could do there that we couldn’t do equally well from here,” replied Owen, although he didn’t sound entirely convinced.

  “They could come here.”

  “I have asked them about that. Andy … has some things he needs to take care of in Philly, and Ruby says she needs to be there to help her sister care for her brother-in-law.”

  Lizzy put down her sandwich and heaved a sigh.

  Owen put down his own sandwich. “It’s all going to work out okay.”

  “I wish I could do something.”

  “We’ll come up with a plan.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  Lizzy returned her attention half-heartedly to her sandwich.

  After lunch, they wandered to the building next door, which housed a jewelry store.

  “Can we go in?” Lizzy asked.

  “Sure.”

  Lizzy wandered along the glass-topped display cases while Owen checked out a selection of Indian pottery in an alcove off the main room. She stopped at one of the displays and gazed down at the offerings.

  “May I show you something?” asked a woman who had appeared behind the counter.

  “Can I see that?” Lizzy asked, pointing.

  It was a bear-shaped pendant, the body of the bear divided vertically into three parts—the back section lapis, the middle section onyx, the front section turquoise. The woman put the pendant on a square of black velvet.

  “It’s really pretty,” said Lizzy.

  “It’s a Zuni bear.”

  Lizzy picked up the pendant. The bear was such a pleasing shape, the inlay so smooth that she could run her hand over it and not feel where the lapis changed to onyx changed to turquoise.

  “They say that the Zuni bear changes passion into wisdom,” said the woman.

  “That’s neat.”

  “And helps you forgive yourself for past mistakes.”

  Lizzy’s fingers froze. After a moment, she asked in a small voice, “Really?”

  “That’s what they say,” said the woman cheerfully. “Would you like to try it on?”

  Lizzy turned the pendant over and glanced at the small hand-printed price tag. “Uh—no, thanks. I don’t have enough money with me.”

  “What have you got there?” she heard Owen ask at her shoulder.

  She turned the pendant back over and held it out to him. He bent to peer at it.

  “That’s lovely work,” he said.

  “Yes,” said the woman behind the counter. “One of our local artists.”

  “And did I hear you say it has a special meaning? A special power?”


  “Yes, they say it helps the person who wears it forgive themselves for past mistakes.”

  Owen took the pendant in his hand and turned it under the light.

  “Yes, I think this is just the thing for my friend to have,” he said. “We’ll take this.”

  5

  Considering the off-the-grid existence the Ballard girl had lived in Pennsylvania, George Millard wasn’t surprised that she was pretty much a nonentity in the sources he had access to. However, he figured it would be harder for someone like McNally, with a more sizable presence, both physically and professionally, to disappear completely. If possible, he wanted to find them without resorting to online searches in order to reduce the chance that anything that might happen to them could be traced back to him and then to Louise Mortensen. The old-fashioned way would be cleaner, and he always prided himself on being clean.

  On a rainy early February afternoon, Millard stepped into the administrative office of the Neurobiology Department at Philadelphia’s William Penn University, carrying an envelope with Owen McNally’s name on it. Inside was a copy of Psychology Today that he had picked up at a bookstore.

  A young woman looked up from her computer. “Can I help you?”

  “Yes, I have a package for Dr. McNally, but his office is locked.”

  “Dr. McNally’s on leave at the moment, can it wait until he gets back?”

  “How long will that be?”

  “I’m not sure. He’s teaching a class in the fall semester, so he has to be back by then. If he needs to get it sooner than that, I could mail it to him.”

  “I don’t want to put you out. If you could give me his address, I can mail it.”

  “I’m sorry, we can’t give that information out, but it’s no problem—I forward mail to him all the time. He gets a ton of journals.”

  “That would be great.” He handed her the envelope. “Do you think you could send it out today?”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  “Great, I really appreciate your help.”

  After wishing the young woman a good day, Millard went down the hall to an alcove from which he could watch the hallway. He had to wait only about an hour before another woman—this one younger than the woman in the office and sporting a scattering of pimples across her chin—appeared from the elevator, pushing a cart containing a few small packages and envelopes. She stopped in front of the door to the Neurobiology office, sorted through the contents of the cart’s top rack, picked up a few items, and disappeared into the office. She appeared a moment later with Millard’s envelope, which she put on the cart’s lower rack. She trundled the cart down the hallway and repeated the process at the next office. When she got to the end of the hall, she turned the cart around and retraced her steps to the elevator.

  When Millard heard the bing of the arriving elevator, he stepped out of the alcove and jogged down the hall toward her.

  “Miss, can you hold up a minute?” he called as she pushed the cart into the elevator.

  Her head popped out of the elevator door. “Me?”

  Millard stepped into the elevator. “Sorry, I think I put the wrong address on the package for Dr. McNally.” He waved a piece of paper on which he had written McNally’s name and a made-up address. He pointed at the bottom rack. “I think it’s that envelope.”

  The door slid closed and the elevator waited for one of the occupants to press a button.

  “Uh, sure.” The girl pulled out the envelope. Millard took it from her before she could object, and glanced between the address the woman in the office had put on the package and the slip in his hand.

  “Oh, good, it is the right address.” He handed the envelope back to her. “Sorry to have bothered you. Going down one?”

  “All the way down. I’m done for the day.”

  He pressed the button for the first floor and smiled at her. “Me too.”

  6

  Millard drove from Penn to the Vivantem offices in Center City and took the elevator to the research facilities and Mortensen’s lab. During business hours, the floor where clients were seen—one floor above the labs—was as busy as ever, despite the absence of its ever-photogenic founder, Gerard Bonnay. In fact, in the weeks after Bonnay’s death of a massive stroke, the waiting room had been filled with bouquets of flowers sent by grateful couples who owed their offspring to Vivantem’s intervention. There was more than one Vivantem baby named after Gerard, although none, as far as Millard knew, named after Louise. Millard figured that there wouldn’t be any more flowers, and a lot fewer clients, if word of the attorney general’s investigation got out.

  He wasn’t interested in having the AG, or anyone else, upset the gravy train. Tracking down Elizabeth Ballard and her fat godfather, Owen McNally, was one step in ensuring that didn’t happen. He didn’t need Brashear, digging for dirt among the Vivantem children, to stumble upon Ballard and start poking into her past. And, he thought with a wry smile, Brashear didn’t need that either, because things could turn out badly for anyone who upset Lizzy Ballard.

  Lizzy Ballard took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. Not so much whacks, thought Millard, as a death of a thousand cuts. And she hadn’t given her father forty-one—Millard himself had taken care of that.

  George Millard had worked for Louise Mortensen for almost fifteen years. His first job for her had been to discourage a colleague who was exhibiting an inconvenient interest in her research. Millard had discouraged—no muss, no fuss—and other jobs had followed. He had done work for Gerard Bonnay as well, and didn’t have any major complaints. Both Mortensen and Bonnay tended to let him decide how to handle a job without much meddling; treated him, if not as an equal, at least with respect; and paid him well for his services. But if one of them had had to fall victim to Ballard, he was glad it had been Bonnay. He didn’t miss the man’s tendency to say “we” when he really meant “you”—We’ll have to take care of this situation. And the guy’s manner was so smooth that it sometimes seemed more like slipperiness—you never knew where you stood with him. He’d take Mortensen’s bluntness any day.

  He had never worked for them exclusively—there were always people who wanted to pay under the table to have dicey situations taken care of—but as he banked his payments from Mortensen and Bonnay, he could be more choosy about the work he did, and more and more of it was for them. And the payments enabled him to indulge in his one interest outside his work and Philadelphia sports: fly fishing. He had traveled to the best fishing spots in North America: the San Juan, the Bighorn, the Alagnak, Five Rivers, the Colorado, the Blue. Always catch-and-release—there was no need to keep those gorgeous fish once you had fought it out with them.

  A couple of years ago he had bought a piece of land in Montana, near Dillon—paid cash—and in another year or two, he’d have enough in the bank to build his dream house on it. Then he’d retire, and he wasn’t even fifty. Until then, he had almost as much incentive to keep the AG’s office away from Vivantem as Mortensen did.

  He stepped out of the elevator and keyed in the passcode that provided access to the research facility. Unlike the area where the on-the-books work of the fertility clinic was done, the area that housed Mortensen’s private lab had always been quiet, but it was quieter than ever these days. Since Mortensen and Bonnay had found out about Lizzy Ballard and Mitchell Pieda’s Vivantem-bred skills, Mortensen had reassigned the few assistants who had helped her with her personal research back to the clinic staff. No doubt she didn’t want anyone else with access to her personal research files getting curious about what might be behind the attorney general’s investigation.

  The files themselves were also getting cleaned up. Since Louise had learned of the AG’s interest in Vivantem, Millard had been hauling boxes of papers from Vivantem to the house in Pocopson, where he was scanning and then destroying the paper copies. Most of the content was Greek to him, but he understood enough to know that she couldn’t have anyone else looking at those records—there was plenty to feed not
only an AG investigation, but also the ire of any medical ethics board that saw the contents.

  Quite a backlog had built up—she had been conducting her clandestine research since her late twenties, thirty years before, and she wasn’t willing to lose a single note or test result—and he wasn’t going to make progress on it until he got through these other jobs she was giving him.

  Reaching the door to Mortensen’s lab, he looked through the glass pane and saw her, as he often did, peering through the eyepiece of a microscope, taking notes on a pad of paper. He was struck by the fact that she didn’t hunch over the microscope, but rather tilted toward it, her back straight as a ruler. It had to take some muscles to do that hour after hour.

  He pressed another passcode into the keypad by the door, gave a courtesy knock, and entered.

  She leaned back from the microscope. “Anything?”

  “They’re in Sedona,” he said. “At least McNally is, and I’ve got to believe Ballard’s with him.”

  “Sedona?”

  “It’s in Arizona—”

  “I know where it is, I’m just wondering how on earth they ended up there. And why.”

  “It’s as good a place as any to hide out, and you couldn’t get much further from Philly without going all the way to the left coast.”

  “You have an address?”

  “I have a PO box, but the town is pretty small and it shouldn’t be hard to find him once I’m there. And he must have settled down, at least temporarily, if he got a box.”

  “What are they doing there?”

  “Trying to figure out their next move, is my guess.”

  Louise gazed at the notepad next to the microscope for a few moments, then tore off the top sheet and dropped it into a shredder next to the table. The machine whirred briefly, then fell silent.

  “What do you suppose their next move will be?”

  Millard shrugged. “I didn’t get a sense that McNally had told anyone at Penn he wouldn’t be back, and I found out he’s supposed to teach a class in the fall. Maybe they figure if they stay off the radar long enough, we’ll lose interest.”