Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  So what had?

  The ER doctor was not happy to see Cavanaugh a second time. She stood in bloodstained scrubs, scowling at him. But she answered his questions without his having to pull out FBI credentials. This was good because Cavanaugh hadn’t the faintest claim to jurisdiction, nor any plausible grounds for claiming a crime had been committed, nor any real idea what he was doing.

  “I already told you, Mr. Cavanaugh, that the evidence for an allergic reaction in your wife’s cousin was as close to certain as we come, but that we didn’t identify the specific causal agent. You’d need an autopsy to do that, and of course we had no reason to perform an autopsy. Did Ms. Baker have multiple severe allergies?”

  “No,” Cavanaugh said. He’d already questioned Judy’s aunt. Subtly, he hoped.

  “Then that’s your cause of death. Why do you doubt it?”

  “Because there were no peanuts around.”

  The doctor moved away. Over her shoulder she said, “If Ms. Baker’s allergy was the most severe kind, a whiff of peanuts from someone in the crowd might have set off a reaction. Sometimes that’s all it takes—the odor.”

  “To kill her?”

  “Well, no, probably not. Not unless it were very concentrated. She would have had time to get to her EpiPen under normal circumstances. I’m sorry, I must go.”

  Under normal circumstances. So, as a working assumption, these were not. What about them had been abnormal? Carefully, Cavanaugh reviewed every detail he could remember about Marilyn’s book signing.

  Someone had happened to have a camera all ready to take a media-grabbing shot of Marilyn collapsing . . . a shot that just happened to include clear focus on the sign advertising her book: COOKING WITH GENTICALLY ENHANCED FOODS!

  None of the protesters against genetically modified foods had come anywhere near the mall stage. Not usual demonstration behavior. Usually protesters against anything tried to intimidate, getting as close to the target as possible, waving their signs aggressively.

  Marilyn’s onstage stove had smoked. A lot, although Cavanaugh had not seen any cherries flambé slopping onto the burner.

  “Can I help you, sir?” a nurse said pointedly. It took Cavanaugh a moment to focus on her, and on where he was. “Are you looking for someone?”

  “No,” Cavanaugh said. “Yes. I don’t know yet.” She watched him all the way through the ER glass doors and halfway across the parking lot to his car.

  At home, Judy said, “Did you know that two percent of the population has some form of peanut allergy? And that it’s on the increase?”

  Cavanaugh bit back his answer. Instead—he had been married awhile now—he carefully took her in his arms and, just as carefully, withheld all explanations, solutions, and logic. He just held her.

  It didn’t seem to help.

  From his office, Cavanaugh called The Washington Post.

  A chatty secretary who sounded about fifteen was glad to give him the credit on the photograph of Marilyn collapsing. It was offered gratis, the girl said helpfully, by a Mr. Colin Wilson of Bethesda.

  Cavanaugh ran the name through NCIC: nothing. But a search on the Internet led him to a home page jammed with anti-genetic-engineering messages. He spent an hour following the links from the home page. This netted him a list of seventeen names, all members of an organization called FOFFGEN: Free Our Food From Genetic Engineering Now. Members dressed in green overalls and T-shirts and spent their weekends protesting at supermarkets around Washington.

  FOFFGEN. It sounded like an alien race invented by George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. Sometimes Cavanaugh

  suspected that protesters formed their groups solely for the weird names.

  In the next half hour, he revised this opinion.

  One of the seventeen FOFFGEN members, “Harold Keller,” turned up only once on the welter of linked sites. Every other name was featured over and over, with many pictures, on the slightest of pretexts: people screaming for attention. There was no picture of Harold Keller.

  On impulse, he entered Marilyn’s name into the search engine. The Internet gave him her home page. Biography, book promotion, career in food preparation, lifelong fascination with cooking, childhood memories . . . why did people assume others were interested in all this personal trivia? But, yes, there it was, a whole section of the home page: My Deadly Battle with Mr. Peanut. Illustrated with tiny hopping peanuts dressed like pirates and wielding scimitars.

  Cavanaugh went downstairs to the information analysts.

  “Jim, I need a name check. Whatever you can find for me.”

  “Yo,” Jim Nedermeier said. Tall, weedy, he spent his days navigating seas of bits and bytes, a captain on invisible oceans. Like all explorers, he harbored a secret scorn for the landlocked. “Case number?”

  “Well, there isn’t one. It’s by way of a favor.”

  “I can’t—”

  “It’s really for my wife,” Cavanaugh said. “She’s in a bad way over her cousin’s death, this Marilyn Baker thing.”

  Nedermeier gazed at Cavanaugh. Steadily Cavanaugh gazed back. Nedermeier had married a year ago, a girl he’d met on-line, who had moved to Washington for him and had hated the place ever since. Awkward and shy, Sandra Nedermeier languished for Montana. Judy had gone out of her way to be kind to Sandra. Cavanaugh refused to feel ashamed of himself.

  Nedermeier finally said, “What’s the name?”

  “Harold Keller. H-A-R-O-L-D K-E-L-L-E-R. I have a hunch he may be European, possibly British.”

  “Yo,” Nedermeier said unhappily, and retreated to the bounding electronic deep.

  At the end of the day he dropped a report on Cavanaugh’s desk. Harold Keller was indeed British, having legally entered the United States on a U.K. passport two months ago, on June 6. He was thirty-six years old, until recently employed as an equipment engineer in a fishpacking plant in Hull, Yorkshire, England. On June 8, a warrant for his arrest had been issued by the constabulary of Hull. On June 5. Harold Keller had allegedly participated in a crop trashing, in which, during cover of night, twenty people had destroyed an experimental farm raising canola plants genetically engineered by a German biotech company. To his brief report Nedermeier had attached two documents. The first was an article from the London Daily Telegraph, discussing the large number of upcoming trials of crop-destroying food protesters in the U.K. The other was from Scotland Yard, summarizing a telephone transcript that linked Harold Keller, albeit inconclusively, to two counts of first-degree murder of Canadian fishermen caught harpooning whales. At the bottom of this Nedermeier had scrawled, in the awkward handwriting of someone who habitually typed: But maybe the whales were growing GM canola.

  Cavanaugh smiled, even though it really wasn’t all that funny. But you took what you could get.

  “Karen, it’s Robert Cavanaugh.”

  “Oh, hello, Robert,” Marilyn’s sister said, without enthusiasm. Robert didn’t take this personally. Nor did he take it as a sign of mourning. Karen Baker, a perpetual complainer, never had enthusiasm for anything, and she had disliked her deceased sister, along with almost everyone else she encountered. Cavanaugh didn’t have to worry about offending Karen’s sensibilities. Only about beating down his own.

  “Listen, I’m doing some follow-up for Judy on Marilyn’s death, and I wondered—”

  “For Judy? She feeling guilty? Well, maybe she should.”

  “And I—”

  “I mean, the whole world knew Marilyn had a peanut allergy. If Judy ever paid any attention to our branch of the family, she’d have known, too, and poor Marilyn might be alive.”

  Cavanaugh held on to his temper. “I wondered what happened to the equipment Marilyn was using onstage the night she died. The stove and pans and stuff.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Like I said, it’s follow-up for Judy.” This uninformative phrase had cost Cavanaugh some thought, as had his next. “For emotional clarity.”

  “Well, Judy certainly always nee
ded more of that. I suppose Marilyn’s equipment is still in her apartment. The police delivered it there, and Mama just hasn’t had the heart to go through the apartment yet. Marilyn was always her favorite, you know, even when we were kids.”

  Heroically, Cavanaugh refused the bait. “Could you let me in? Do you have a key?”

  “I don’t have time for Judy’s emotional crises, Robert. But there’s a key above the door frame in the hallway. Marilyn wasn’t very bright, you know.”

  “Thanks,” Cavanaugh said, hung up, and considered disinfecting the phone. Instead, he drove to Marilyn’s apartment before Karen decided to remove the key, from sheer cousinly spite.

  Too bad it was illegal to genetically enhance a family for greater sweetness. On the other hand, you might get increased shelf life. Not worth the risk.

  Marilyn Baker had lived in a nondescript apartment building in Silver Spring. As far as Cavanaugh could see, no one had disturbed anything since her death, except to leave a pile of cardboard boxes in the tiny foyer. These contained the ingredients for cherry flambé, her cooking equipment, and forty-two unsold copies of Cooking with Genetically Enhanced Foods! Cavanaugh was glad he wasn’t an author.

  He lifted the portable stove from its box and sniffed the burners. With his fingernail he scraped cautiously. Both burners were indeed crusted with spilled food. Peanut oil?

  If Harold Keller, or someone else in the anti-genetically-engineered-food camp, had wanted a high-profile death to bring attention to their cause, they might easily have engineered this one. No one had monitored Marilyn’s equipment after it was set up for the cooking demonstration and before she showed up, late. Pour peanut oil on the burners, and when they smoke, the fumes deliver peanut essence to Marilyn in the concentrated form necessary for a possibly fatal attack. Even if it’s not fatal, the resulting photo would look like a horrible seizure from eating genetically engineered cherries flambé. By the time the newspapers printed a modification to the story, after the doctor’s report went public, the photo would already be burned into people’s brains. Meanwhile, keep your protesters well away from the stage during the actual demonstration, to make crystal clear that they never touched Marilyn.

  Cavanaugh carried the portable stove to his car. He’d have to go to the cops, of course. Out of his jurisdiction. But they’d listen to him, and probably appreciate the legwork. First, however, there was a stronger priority. He drove home to tell Judy that her cousin had indeed been killed, but not by her.

  It didn’t go exactly as he’d planned.

  Judy sat on the sofa, legs curled under her, hollowcheeked and big-eyed. She listened to Cavanaugh in silence. The only sign that his theory touched her was her left hand, which played with a strand of lank hair. When he’d finished explaining—the explanation that was supposed to release his wife from her guilty melancholy—Judy leaned forward and kissed him.

  “I’m glad I married you, Robert,” she said, and he heard the sadness in her voice.

  “Judy, don’t you understand? Somebody, most likely the GM protesters, set it up for Marilyn to have that attack. It was planned. Of course, I still have to have the burners analyzed, but they smell like some kind of oil was put on them, and Marilyn with her allergy would never have used peanut oil herself. If it is peanut oil, then that’s where the peanut fumes came from, not from the engineered foods that Marilyn was—”

  “Robert, you don’t understand,” Judy said, but without her old argumentative spirit. “Even if you’re right—and you’re not—it doesn’t matter where the peanut fumes came from, or if they were deliberate. I still could have saved Marilyn if I’d known about her allergy and gotten to the EpiPen in time.”

  This view of the crime hadn’t occurred to Cavanaugh. He’d been so intent on proving that it was a crime, an attempted murder, that he hadn’t seen how Judy would view it. She was looking not at the first cause, as he was, but at the immediate result, and her failure to stop it.

  “You went to a lot of trouble.” Judy said. “And you did it for me, I know. Thank you. But, honey, apart from me, there’s another problem with your theory. Even if it is peanut oil on the burners, that wouldn’t have killed Marilyn. I’ve been researching on the Net. The refining process to turn peanuts into oil removes the allergenic proteins. Peanut oil doesn’t trigger anaphylactic shock.”

  Cavanaugh got up and paced around the sofa. “So it has to be peanut solids?”

  “Pretty much. But, honey, listen . . . I’m glad to know it wasn’t in the genetically engineered foods. I’m really glad to know that. I believe in genetic engineering, you know.”

  Cavanaugh nodded, although at the moment Judy didn’t look as if she believed in much of anything. Cavanaugh pictured again the scene at the mall. Marilyn saying. No cherries for the un-American wimp! and then pouring the flaming fruit over hard vanilla ice cream set out in Styrofoam cups. Putting a heaping spoonful into her own mouth . . .

  The ice cream had melted. From the heat, of course. But the heat had also risen upward, traced by those plumes of smoke from the burners. Upward, to wreath that tacky reusable sign: MEET MARILYN BAKER! AUTHOR OF COOKING WITH GENETICALLY ENHANCED FOODS! That sign, with slots to hold different letters. Or anything else.

  “Wait right here,” Cavanaugh said.

  The manager of the Greentree Mall, Allen Sussman, required that Cavanaugh produce FBI identification. Cavanaugh did, hoping no one at the Bureau would ever find out. Immediately Sussman became cooperative.

  “Glad to help, Agent Cavanaugh, although I have to say I’m sorry to hear this isn’t about the break-in we had at our own security office. Happened the day after Ms. Baker’s death. Embarrassing, when it’s the security office broken into, although nothing was really taken, they just trashed the place . . . The sign? The mall maintenance crew puts the letters into the sign and then hangs it up the afternoon of each event. Usually before they leave for the day at five-thirty. We let it hang there overnight—it doesn’t bother anybody—until the crew removes it in the morning. However, the night Ms. Baker died, we took it down right away. To keep down rubbernecking, disruption of mall traffic, that sort of thing.”

  “Who took the sign down? Where did it get put?”

  “Well, usually, as I say, it would be put back with regular equipment, but that night the maintenance crew had gone home, so . . . I don’t think I know where it got put!”

  “Who took it down? Were you here?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m always in on Friday nights. Let’s see—I remember I asked Brian, he’s our security chief, to get it taken down. Brian Selenski. Just a minute, I’ll page him.” While they waited for Brian Selenski, Cavanaugh said, “Who was on maintenance duty that afternoon? Who hung the sign up?”

  The manager pulled a duty roster from his drawer. “I don’t know who did the actual work. We’d have to ask. But we usually have a four-person crew on maintenance at any given time . . . Here we are. Sally Lieber, Bill Reese, Jeff Handerman, Harold Keller. Keller’s new, just been on the job a few months. English. They’re good workers, you know.”

  Cavanaugh sat quietly until the mall security chief showed up. Brian Selenski was a big man, balding, dressed in a uniform a little too tight across the chest. Cavanaugh knew the type: a square badge who enjoyed playing cop but would resent the real thing on his turf. Selenski listened sullenly while the manager explained what Cavanaugh wanted.

  “That sign? Took it down myself. Trivial detail. Until

  this very minute, I forgot about it; we have bigger things to deal with here, Mr. Cavanaugh. Security break-in at my office. Not that the cops were any help with that.”

  “Where is the sign now?”

  Selenski shrugged. “Still where I stowed it. In with the day rentals, the kid strollers, and wheelchairs. You want it, Mr. Sussman? I’ll get it.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Cavanaugh said. “And, Mr. Selenski, I think you need a better background-check system.”

  “Yeah? Why is that?”


  “I’ll show you. Let’s go get that sign.”

  So it was heat-activated,” Judy repeated, “and it was Harold Keller after all. He’s gone underground, of course, but you’ll get him eventually.” Judy put down her fork. Her eyes hadn’t left Cavanaugh’s face since he started explaining. Around them in the Georgetown restaurant waiters served drinks and diners clattered silverware.

  “Smoke-activated, actually. Like a smoke alarm. The smoke opened a spring door and a tiny fan drove the peanut fumes directly downward into Marilyn’s face. A simple piece of engineering.”

  “And the whole thing fit behind one of the movable letters on the sign?”

  Cavanaugh held up a thumb and forefinger to show the size of the device. “Plenty of room to plant it. The letters are just painted on thin blocks that slide into a tray. Cheesy.”

  “Ingenious.”

  “Deadly.”

  “Unfortunately.”

  Cavanaugh reached across the restaurant table to take his wife’s hand. “You seem better, honey.”

  “I am.” Judy pushed her clean hair back off her face.

  “I realized that I did what I could, even if it was the wrong thing. And if I hadn’t done it, there’s no evidence Marilyn would have got the EpiPen out in time, anyway. Her eyes were already rolling when I grabbed her. She might have gotten the injector out of her pocket, but she might not.”

  Silently Cavanaugh thanked Providence for his wife’s good sense. It disappeared under cover occasionally—actually, quite often—but eventually it reappeared.

  “You know what, Robert,” Judy said, “Everything’s dangerous. Genetically engineered food, genetically natural food, treated water, untreated water, food additives, nonpreserved food that’s been sitting around too long . . . Nobody should ever eat anything.”

  “Not very practical.”

  “No. So let’s order.”

  They opened their menus. Cavanaugh studied the entrees. Battered cod with skewered vegetables. Blackened trout with beaten biscuits. Spitted pork . . . He glanced ahead at the desserts. Blitz tort. Whipped cream pie. Death by Chocolate . . . even dessert was a violent risk.