No Immunity

doesn’t help ninety million Japanese with tanks to fill.”
    “Are there any data to indicate Grady was negotiating with the Japanese?”
    “Nope. But there was nothing on Estes till the bullet.” Tchernak fingered his beard, pondering Hummacher’s trips back and forth to Panama. As far as he could see, frequent travel indicated nothing perfidious. “If it had been Tokyo Grady’d been heading to, that’d be one thing, but coming home to Adcock headquarters isn’t the first thing a turncoat would do. And he definitely wouldn’t go to all the trouble of getting ‘seismic aide’ visas for two deaf teenaged boys from Panama so they could have a better life in this country, not if he was going to be moving right away.”
    Persis was laughing, not the sexy little blond-curl giggle he’d come to expect from her, but a series of sharp hoots. “Tchernak, who do you think those boys are?”
    “A couple of deaf kids who weren’t getting adequate medical care down there.”
    “You must think Grady’s quite the decent gay, huh?”
    “When I saw him, he was real concerned about his responsibility for them.”
    “Well, it does make a good story, and I guess there’s no reason not to believe it if you don’t know’ better.”
    “Better is?”
    “I did some research on oil-exploration methods down there. South of Yaviza it’s rain forest. What they call impenetrable rain forest, which means you can’t drive through it and you’re not going to walk any too fast if you’re not a tribesman born under the banana trees. The oil companies are trying to get the Pan-American Highway cut through. This is the last link they’d need and you’d be able to drive from Canada to Chile. They’re not going to all this trouble to add a couple of gas stations and fill up a few more VW vans. The reason they want the road through is so they get the infrastructure to get into that rain forest and explore for oil.”
    “But they don’t have it yet, right, Persis?”
    “Right. But they’re still after the oil, so who do you think they count on to lead them into that rain forest?”
    “Ah, the indigenous tribesmen. So, okay, Grady’s boys are not street urchins but tribesmen or tribe boys. Still, why bring them to Las Vegas where they are useless, and helpless?”
    “No research is going to answer that one. Maybe tribesmen were murdered down there, but that wouldn’t be likely to make an English-language newspaper.”
    Tchernak sighed. He liked his banter with Persis, and I no one touched her when it came to research. But she had her limits. And now when he wanted to speculate back and forth, it was clear that Persis had hit those limits and stopped dead. If Kiernan were here... But she wasn’t.
    “You need anything else, Tchernak, you know where to call.”
    “You got it, Persis. You’re going to hear from me lots.”
    He hung up, but stayed in Grady Hummacher’s chair. The Grady Hummacher he remembered was a college kid, a good-time guy, fun to have around if you wanted to blow off steam. Was he really the kind of guy who would make the commitment to care for two teenaged boys? Tchernak could picture Grady fuming that no one was bothering to test the kids’ hearing, much less teach them to communicate. He could see Grady in one burst of energy getting them visas and shepherding them onto the company plane.
    And he could imagine only too well how those boys had ended up alone in a rented apartment among people with whom they could no more communicate than if they had lived next to Cassie Marengo. Grady was like the kid who got bunnies for Easter, and lost interest when he discovered they didn’t retrieve or roll over.
    But Grady hadn’t forgotten the boys. When he got off the plane from Yaviza, he hadn’t even slid between the sheets in his own apartment before going to the boys’ place and spiriting them out of the city. Maybe Grady had done the sensible thing and taken them back to Yaviza.
    Tchernak hit Redial. “Persis, can you check airline rosters this last week? Grady flew in from Panama a week ago Friday. Then he made another quick trip and got back Wednesday morning—”
    “Wednesday morning, you sure?”
    “He checked out of his hotel down there at four A.M. Where would he go besides the airport?”
    “I can’t answer that, Tchernak, but I’ve done enough eyeballing of airline schedules from that part of the world to know there are no flights from Panama to Las Vegas at five A.M. No