by Robert Pobi
“Where was the housekeeper during your visit?”
“Keeping house.”
Whitaker stopped taking notes and looked up at him. She raised an eyebrow and he came back with “Somewhere else. I don’t know where. I didn’t hear a vacuum or dishes being put away. The apartment was quiet. The apartment was always quiet—Mr. Makepeace was a calm, quiet man.”
“What was he wearing?”
“Horsebit loafers—brown crocodile. A pair of chinos. A white button-down, the cuffs rolled up.” He shifted on his feet and added, “I didn’t see the color of his socks or underwear.”
William Hockney held up a hand. “The agents are just doing their job. Someone killed Jon, and we all want to find out who. No one is accusing you of anything.” He looked over at Whitaker, and turned on the paternal tone. “Are you, Special Agent Whitaker?” The forced calm was still there, and it was pretty convincing.
Whitaker stared at Frosst for a few moments before folding up her notebook and turning to William. “We understand that you and Mr. Makepeace had a close working relationship at one point. In light of what happened at the Guggenheim the other night, do you think his death is in any way linked to your business together?”
William waved a hand at the sofa and his sleeve crept up, exposing a watch that chimed in at a quarter of a million dollars. “Would you please have a seat? I can’t stand for long.”
Everyone migrated to the sofa and club chairs by a fireplace large enough to roast an entire steer. William and Seth took up position in the club chairs, and Lucas and Whitaker got a sofa. Mr. Frosst stayed near the door. Still looking like he has a stick up his ass, Lucas thought.
Whitaker picked up where she had left off. “I know you’ve been interviewed by other agents regarding the bombing at the Guggenheim, and I apologize for any redundancy in our questioning, but it’s obvious that your interests are somehow part of these attacks.”
William stared at her for a few cold seconds before turning to Lucas. “You are Dr. Lucas Page, the astrophysicist?”
“Apparently, yes.”
William Hockney smiled as if there was some hidden joke in the question. “I see.”
Whitaker killed the silence with “When was the last time either of you saw Mr. Makepeace?”
William shrugged. “Three, maybe four months ago. It was in Zurich. I can check the dates should you wish.”
“Thank you, that would be good.” She held out a card. “Do you know of anyone who would wish ill on Mr. Makepeace?”
Seth answered that one with “All of Wall Street.”
“Anyone in specific?”
William waved the question away. “Please excuse my brother, he tends to the melodramatic.”
With that, public dominance was now established.
William continued with “But he is not wrong in that Mr. Makepeace was a very aggressive investor. He was also successful. It has been my experience that this particular combination of elements tends to foster jealousy in others.”
Whitaker’s phone buzzed. She checked the number, then excused herself from the conversation.
While she went over to the window, William reacquired Lucas. “And what, may I ask, is a man of your reputation and upbringing doing with the FBI, Dr. Page?” William looked honestly perplexed.
“My facility with numbers is an advantage.”
“Pearls before swine. Should you ever want to challenge yourself, I would be more than happy to discuss a position for you.” He held up a hand, palm out. “Not that I am trying to hire you away from your esteemed company here, but a man of your abilities could do so much better with his time.”
“Well, that’s very condescending of you, but thank you. If I ever feel like being underappreciated, I’ll know where to come.”
William dead-eyed him.
Whitaker hung up and snapped her fingers at Lucas, who stood up.
As they headed for the door, Whitaker said, “We will be in touch,” to no one in particular.
Lucas raced down the hallway, trying to keep pace with Whitaker, and the door closed behind him. “What is it?” he asked.
“There’s been another bombing.”
35
Pelham Gardens
Lucas stood on the sidewalk, staring up into a tree. A bonsai was jammed into the crotch of a branch fifteen feet up. It was mangled, half of its pot gone, diminutive roots dangling free, small fingers of dirt stuck to them.
“How very meta,” he said.
Whitaker followed his line of attention. “Leave it to you.”
He turned to her and arched his eyebrow.
“Look around.”
So he did.
There were too many emergency vehicles, a platoon of NYPD officers in uniform, and a duplex that had most of the first floor blown out. But she was talking about the bonsai. They were everywhere. All over the sidewalk; all over the street; all over the cars; all over the park across the street.
The water from the fire hoses had settled into puddles, but there was still runoff heading for a storm drain somewhere down the street. The FDNY guys were stacking hoses on the back of one of the trucks and two ambulances sat silent, lights flashing with no apparent purpose. A bonsai dragged along in the current, hiccupping toward parts unknown.
No one had bothered with all the little dead charred trees strewn around other than to drive over them, kick them out of the way, or stomp on them. Some were still smoking, and it looked like Gulliver and the Lilliputians had really gotten their drink on before duking it out in a tiny forest.
But the damage to the trees was minor when compared to what had happened to the house. It had been a typical three-story duplex with main entrances at either end, both up identical eight-step stoops. But the first floor on both units had blown out—that the entire building hadn’t collapsed was testament to American postwar craftsmanship and building materials. And luck. What was left had been eaten black by flames.
A crowd had assembled at the end of the block. Like the others, this one was populated by people in costumes—mostly superheroes and Star Wars characters. They were chanting False flag! False flag! False flag! on loop.
Samir Chawla was beside one of the bureau wagons, speaking to Calvin-Wade Curtis, who had his smile dialed up to solar level. Lucas wished he would do something about the habit, like punch himself in the face when he felt it coming on. Chawla saw them and came over.
They exchanged curt but civil greetings.
“What have we got?” Whitaker asked.
Chawla went to work on the tablet that Lucas had come to realize was indispensable to him. “The house is rented by a doctor of some sort—academic, not medical. His name’s Timo Saarinen and he’s the project manager for Horizon Dynamics. We’ve had a pair of agents on him just in case the people who bombed the Guggenheim decided to go after stragglers and no-shows. They were parked out front and said it was a normal day. No comings or goings. Saarinen stepped out his front door to walk the dog when the place went up. The dog hadn’t cleared the sill and his wife and housekeeper were inside. Wife and housekeeper are dead. Dog too. But Saarinen survived. He’s a little beat-up, but nothing a few stitches and some painkillers won’t fix. He’s down the street in an ambulance—he’s refusing to leave the scene until someone tells him what happened. He’s not being what I would call cooperative.”
“Did Curtis have anything to add?”
Chawla scrolled through his notes and Lucas wondered if the guy had any memory to speak of.
“C-4 again. Curtis is on his way back to the lab to see if he can match it to the other sites, but I think we all know what he’s going to find. We don’t know what kind of trigger. Yet.”
Whitaker pointed at the ambulance up the street. “Did you interview the victim?”
“I ran him through the basics but didn’t get anything useful and figured you could take a shot when you got here. See if you can fill out any of the blanks—he didn’t give me much and I didn’t want to push him
. He’s pretty upset.”
Lucas looked up at the house. “No shit,” was all he could think to offer.
Whitaker put a hand on Chawla’s arm. “Thanks, Samir.” She pulled out her phone and gently waved it at him. “I’ll record our interview.”
Chawla nodded a thanks and walked away.
Lucas and Whitaker headed over to the ambulance, passing a gaggle of firemen putting gear away. One of them smiled over at Whitaker. “Hey, sexy lady, would you like to—”
“How about you go fuck yourself, short bus!”
The fireman’s expression went from lascivious to heartbroken, and he turned away.
“And I’m the one who needs to chill?” Lucas said.
“Any asshole who screams at me on the street gets an immediate rejection—it’s a principle I have.”
“I can’t say I disagree.” After half a dozen steps, Lucas asked, “What did your ex-husband do?”
“As little as he could to make me happy.”
“I meant for a living.”
“He’s a baker.”
“As in ‘rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub’?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
Lucas decided that small talk was too much trouble, so he shut up. But his questions had triggered Whitaker, and she said, “It’s not like I’m not interested in dating. But I haven’t been out with a man in so long my neighbors are thinking about sacrificing me to a volcano. I just don’t meet the right kind of men out there.”
“Well, maybe telling prospective dates to stick their own genitals into their own anuses is limiting your prospects.”
She smiled up at him. “Look at you, being all caring and shit. It’s like your dreams of being a real boy came true.”
“I quit. This friendship thing is too esoteric.”
“You don’t have any friends; everyone around you suffers from Stockholm syndrome.”
Whitaker flashed her badge at the NYPD man keeping watch over the ambulance. He stepped aside and she knocked.
Someone inside said, “Come in,” and when Whitaker opened the back door, the paramedic nodded a hello. Saarinen was staring at the floor and didn’t look up. He was shirtless but still in suit pants and a pair of monk straps with bright red socks. There was a dog leash wrapped around his hand and a foot of leather dangled from his fingers, the end charred and tattered. He clocked out somewhere in his late fifties and had one of those frames that can happen only with a lifetime of healthy eating, exercise, and good DNA. He looked more like a tennis pro than an academic. He sat on the stretcher while a tech pulled debris and shrapnel from his back that he dropped into a little plastic bowl dripping red.
“Dr. Saarinen, I’m Special Agent Whitaker and this is Dr. Page. May we speak with you?”
Saarinen nodded in a gesture that could have meant come on in or go fuck yourself that he punctuated with a grunt.
They stepped up into the ambulance and Lucas pulled the door closed; anyone whose wife had just been blown up deserved a little privacy.
They sat on the gurney across from him. Saarinen didn’t look up when he asked, “Dr. Lucas Page, the astrophysicist?”
Lucas said, “Yes.”
Saarinen gave another nod as if that made no sense at all. Or all the sense in the world. “I can’t help you.”
Whitaker was using her friendliest voice. “Could we ask you a few questions? You might know something without being aware of it.” She knelt down and looked up into his face. “Please. It’s important.”
Nothing about his expression said that he had heard her. But he waved his hand—the one with the frayed leash in it—and said, “Suit yourself.”
Lucas tried to ignore the singed hair and blood and the stink of creosote and disinfectant because the sensory memory would start fucking with his head. So he concentrated on watching Whitaker try to connect with a man who was somewhere else.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I was taking Bongo out for a walk. I stepped out of the house and I guess my wife opened the back door at the same time, because the wind slammed the front door. Bongo was still inside. I turned to open the door and that’s…” He hit the consonants a little too hard in an unmistakable Finnish accent. “Then I woke up on the sidewalk. My trees were everywhere. My house was on fire. My wife was inside. Our housekeeper—” And he just stopped, as if he ran out of tape.
“Our people found traces of a chemical compound used in commercial explosives—C-4. We haven’t been able to isolate its signature, but we’ll know more in a few hours.” Whitaker took up a seat beside Lucas, facing Saarinen. “Anything you want to know?”
“No.”
“Have you had any visitors in the past few days? Any service people? Any packages arrive with the mail? Anything that might lead us to how this device made its way into your house?”
Saarinen winced as the tech pulled a shard of glass from his shoulder and said, “I was out of the country until the night before last. I came home the night of the bombing at the Guggenheim. I lost all of my friends. My employees. And now…”—tears welled up in his eyes—“this.”
The paramedic asked, “You sure you don’t want something for the pain? Not even topical?”
Saarinen stuck with the less-is-more school of language—another typically Finnish trait. “Just finish.” When he shifted focus back to Whitaker, he appeared to see the dog leash for the first time. He unwrapped it from his hand and dropped it to the floor. “All I remember was opening the door to take Bongo for a walk.” Saarinen stared down at the leash. “And boom.” He looked up and Lucas knew exactly what was going on behind his eyes. “How much bad luck can visit a person? The last time was enough.”
Whitaker’s voice wobbled a little when she said, “What last time?”
Saarinen fastened his stare on her. “When they blew up my son.”
36
Pelham Gardens
The servos moving Saarinen’s facial muscles locked in place for a moment and he looked like he had ceased movement down to the cellular level. Then something inside him relaxed, or simply broke down, and he eyed Lucas for a few long seconds. “One of those things that happen. I was on a project in Nicaragua. Cutting-edge work. Magic, really. But as always, there were political problems. The uneducated didn’t want us there. And to make their point—” He stopped and pinched the bridge of his nose. “A company bus was attacked. Thirty-seven people were on board. They used an antitank rocket.” He looked up. “One of the victims was my son, Jukka.” He shook his head. “People too ignorant to realize that we were trying to help them. To better their lives.”
“When was that?”
“February 21, 2005.” His European education was highlighted when he said twenty-one instead of twenty-first.
The tech was trying to get a piece of metal out of the nape of Saarinen’s neck and Lucas focused on the procedure because it was better than looking at the sorrow on the man’s face. “I’ve seen the guest list and you weren’t at the Guggenheim for the gala. Why was that?”
Saarinen waved it away. “I should have been there.” He paused for a few seconds. “I lost everyone I knew.” He looked up at Lucas. “I was on a plane on my way back from Paraguay. The plan was to make an appearance at the end of the evening, but there was no end of the evening.” The paramedic tugged the piece of metal free. It was curved like a fishhook and Saarinen didn’t flinch when it pulled his skin, then popped free. “Some madman took it away.” He looked down at the leash coiled up between his feet.
Lucas knew all the things that were going on in Saarinen’s head. The anger. The sadness. The survivor’s guilt. And he knew that they would morph into other feelings—mostly rage. “Do you know a Jonathan Makepeace?”
At that, Saarinen looked up. “Of course.”
“How do you know him?”
“He does a lot of work for William Hockney.”
Lucas thought back to what Knechtel had said. And about the last time Hockney said he had
seen Makepeace in Zurich—several months ago. “We just spoke to William and Seth Hockney, and apparently neither has seen him for months.”
Saarinen shook his head. “Not William Senior, William Junior.”
Lucas saw the lights go on in Whitaker’s head, but he stuck with questioning Saarinen—any minute now he was going to close up. “Dr. Saarinen, do you know of anyone who would profit by disrupting things for either Horizon Dynamics or the Hockneys?”
“Social progress is always hindered by the ignorant who feel they are being left behind. Some village farmer killed my son for no reason other than he was terrified that the world was evolving without him and he wanted to stop it from happening. This is America.” Saarinen’s eyes narrowed and he looked over at Lucas, then to Whitaker, then back at Lucas. “There are plenty of people who feel they are being left behind.”
37
Lucas was trying to focus on something other than the emotions their conversation with Saarinen had stirred up. “Do you have spare handcuffs?”
Whitaker jabbed an index at the glove compartment. “In there.”
Lucas found them tucked in between typical Whitaker glove compartment emergency gear—which meant a few packets of ketchup, a chocolate bar, one bent straw, three spare magazines of 9mm, and a hunting knife.
He held the cuffs up and shook his head. “I can’t believe that we’re still using shit like this in the twenty-first century.”
“You were expecting space handcuffs or something?” Whitaker pointed back at the glove box. “You can always put them back.”
Lucas forced the strands though their turns a few times, each rotation accentuated by the cicada click of the ratchet. He slid the cuffs into the hip pocket on his suit jacket. “Not until we catch this guy.” As a scientist, he had spent his life trying to be an unbiased observer, but this one was testing his abilities.
