by Theo Cage
“Did you know any of the other professors who worked on that project with your husband? Like this Abraham Bugloski?” I asked.
“From Columbia? Yes. I met him once. He was very old and frail, but his mind was sharper than anyone I know. A real match for Henry. You know how he died?”
“Something about radiation?”
“They have a radiating chamber at Columbia. It’s a small room where they can take something like a case full of golf balls and bombard them with high energy x-rays or other particle emissions.”
“Golf balls?”
“Yes. When you radiate a golf ball, it changes the chemical structure of the plastic, and the ball will fly further. About twenty yards they say.”
“He was a professor who worked on golf balls?”
“He had a Ph.D. in Engineering – a brilliant man. He radiated all kinds of objects and structures to see if he could increase their strength. One day he got locked in the chamber when the beam was on and got a huge dose of radiation. He died two days later.”
“The report I saw said they thought he was senile and forgot where he was.”
Mrs. Gridley shook her head. “Ridiculous. Like I said. He was sharper than most on a good day. Physically slight, but could still solve a Rubik’s cube in under sixty seconds at the age of eight-six. He used to do that at staff parties routinely.”
“So you think he was murdered too?” I asked.
She gave me a look of tired exasperation. “Detective. Someone is murdering brilliant researchers. There were four other professors working on that project with Henry. I was hoping you could get to them before they’re all killed and find out why someone thinks they’re so dangerous.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I tracked down the officer who attended the scene at Columbia U where Professor Bugloski died. He worked out of the 26th Precinct. Officer Brian Redpath. He joked that Columbia was currently celebrating Brain Month, which was hilarious to him considering one of their most senior profs just died because he forgot where he was.
I started with “I just spoke to someone who knew Bugloski, and they said he was no more senile than you or I.”
“Well, I can’t speak for you, Detective Hyde. You’re famous for being with the force for a hundred years, so anything is possible. That was a joke by the way.” Funny guy.
“Who exactly told you they thought he was senile?” I asked.
“Let me check my notes. Yeah, the director of the Engineering Lab. Irene Quitzol. I’m not making that up. She took me aside after I looked around – after the ME had left – and filled me in.”
“And she said he was clinically senile?”
“She said he was a problem because he would wander the halls and forget his name and take things that belonged to people. But no one wanted to make a fuss because he was so respected. Seemed very likely considering his age and the circumstances.”
“So what happened?”
“This room is lined with lead and concrete. It’s like a freakin’ bank vault. The door is so heavy motors operate it. So an alarm sounds when they want to close the door. She ran it for me. Instant headache. Then the door rolls closed. Takes about two minutes and sounds like a freight train. There are no windows because of the high radiation, but one of the crew has to monitor the door to make sure no one gets left inside. Then they blast the living hell out of whatever is in this room. Twilight Zone time. Not a good place to be if you have Alzheimer’s.”
“Did you talk to the crew member who watched the door? Why didn’t they see him?”
“The ME said it looked like Bugloski had a mini stroke or something or fainted behind the packing crate. You couldn’t see him from the door. Poor guy. Musta felt like being left in the microwave. Lousy way to go.”
“And what did he die from specifically?”
“Oh. I’ve got that right here. Massive cell and organ failure about twenty hours later at the hospital at Columbia.”
There wasn’t much more I could do. I had him send me a copy of the report.
I now have a young whiz kid millionaire, an uncertain suicide, no note left behind, no apparent motive. Another Prof he knew, Dean of Engineering, who apparently dozed off in a radiation chamber.
The next name on the list was Esther Nates, a math Prof. I called her number at Berkeley. The phone was picked up by a woman in the Math department who wanted to know if I was a student or colleague. When I explained the situation, she immediately began to cry.
“Esther was killed,” she sobbed. “She was very generous. She was working with a local drug program and hired a former addict to help her work on a project. He strangled her yesterday.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The two and a half hour drive from downtown Toronto along the relentless 401 to Muskoka Lake had turned Kam's stomach sour and driven a wedge of pain into his furrowed brow. It hurt so much it reminded him of a head wound he once received playing College football. Funny how he hadn't thought of that for years, he mused, poking around up there for the tender spot; a place that still hadn't healed and was waiting for his guard to drop so it could kick into a tumor or aneurysm. Now there was a joyful thought; spinning out of control into eight lanes of on-coming traffic, his brain working towards the big surprise ending.
He had made an appointment with his doctor originally to examine his leg. Instead, they had discussed the possibility that he had suffered a minor stroke in the lobby of the Royal York. What they called a TIA, a transient ischemic attack. Kam had left out the gory details because he had no idea if what he saw was real. In fact, he knew it couldn’t be. The video was obviously a clever scam to scare him off.
It occurred to Kam again, like it had a countless number of times, that every injury you sustained throughout the years, every bruise, every bang of your head against the kitchen cupboard, even though they all healed, were only waiting for old age to ring its full bell at you again. Play the final chorus. We're back! The broken femur he earned falling off a horse at the age of eight was just now sending him little reminders, little nostalgic blossoms of pain. It throbbed dully when he pulled on the wheel to take the long turn past the southern tip of the lake, then up the steep climb to the road that took him home to Tamara.
Chapertah's face seemed to be hanging in the air just below the glare from the headlights flashing past the dense pine forest. He had a sickening haunted look, like a man who had just discovered he had some unknown thing eating away at him from the inside and there was nothing he could do to stop it. But what possesses a man to throw himself through a plate glass window and off an eighth-floor balcony? And if he was planning to kill himself, why do it in front of a witness – especially someone you hardly know, someone who was going to end up adopting a fair chunk of the final agony for themselves to replay during periods of broken sleep through the rest of their days.
And the scientist didn't leave a note. The police told Kam that was customary in suicides. The well thought out ones, anyway. There was always a note.
Kam's daughter, Sheila, had left him a note when she had ended her life twenty years before, in a shabby room in a cluttered boarding house two streets over from the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco. The home of the love generation. The decade that filled so many boomers with warm nostalgia had not been kind to her in any way. Kam didn't know why, but he never dwelt on Sheila's death. It always seemed so distant and wasteful, like it was someone else's daughter he was grieving for.
Chapertah on the other hand – he had chosen him to be there. There had to be a reason for it. Like he wanted someone to know.
Kam rubbed cold sweat from his neck. He couldn't make sense of Chapertah involving him in his bizarre date with destiny, and this irritated him. Kam was a stranger to the man – had no expertise in either the sciences or religion, and didn't remember even hitting it off with him that well when they first met. He only remembered thinking how he was crazier than a drunken bat. And at the same time completely brilliant.
&nbs
p; At the age of sixteen, Chapertah had solved a physics problem that Einstein spent forty years trying to puzzle out. He was truly a novel thinker, and it was quite possible that he hit on something that made sense of the infernal knot that was the text of Revelations. But who really cared? The religious community would reject any re-telling of the story out-of-hand, and the scientific community couldn't care less. Yet here was Indra Chapertah giving the whole issue major brain space. Was there a link between his genius and his insanity? Kam knew that was a wives’ tale written to make fools feel comfortable. No. Chapertah was obviously stressed by something to the breaking point. It had nothing to do with his IQ. This had been building for a long time.
Reaching the top of the rise, Kam finally began to feel himself grow tired. He needed sleep. Five more minutes and he would be home. Two minutes after that he would have a glass of wine in his hand and Tamara in his arms and everything would be right with the world again.
As he rolled over the crest, his headlights raking the tips of the cedars above him, he relaxed for the first time since lunch at the Royal York that afternoon. Below him, the road coiled into darkness and flattened out.
Beyond the base of the hill was his final turn off to Muskoka Road, the moon just above the tree line.
Near the side of the road, just before the turn-off ahead, he caught a dull flash of something. A small cloud of dust in the moonlight. He squinted. A dark shape sat at the side of the road, a car, perhaps a truck or a four-wheel drive. No lights. The vehicel was sitting in an odd place; as dark and narrow as the road was there, with no cabins in easy walking distance, a blind turn from the other side. Kam let his van pick up speed down the hill, the speedometer reading over 90 kilometers an hour, anxious for that final turn. What was that puff of smoke he thought he saw? Then he knew. It was exhaust. Whatever kind of vehicle was parked at the side of the road with the lights off, was still running. Teenagers? Couldn't they find a safer place to neck? When Kam was only a hundred yards away from the bottom of the hill, the dark vehicle spit up gravel suddenly, lurched and crossed his path broadside. Then it stopped suddenly, seeming to hang there in the two-dimensional glow of Kam's headlights – the driver’s face turned towards him. His expression looked blank, almost calm, prepared for what was about to come.
At high speed on a mountain road, your eyes watery and craving sleep, your right foot numb and cranky, response to sudden death situations, any response, seems almost a futile effort. Better to just hold your breath and wait. Pray that the goddamn seat belt, the one that's been putting a crease in your digestive tract for ten years now, does its job.
For reasons Kam could never guess at; a long forgotten instinct wrenched the wheel from his hands and cranked hard. Defensive driving 1998. A weekend course his first wife insisted he take. Who knows why? She must have read a glowing review in Cosmopolitan magazine. But whatever lingered there, some physical memory perhaps that had atrophied from lack of use, caused Kam to twist the steering wheel madly and then hang on. He was now traveling roughly at the same speed he had been at only seconds before, only now he was doing it backwards. The driver of the other car must have been just as surprised – a barreling pair of headlights replaced suddenly by two glaring red eyes, the tail lights of Kam's Toyota Van, plowing into his driver’s door.
The rear end of the Toyota sliced cleanly into the side of the shiny Jeep Grand Cherokee, driving the steel side-guard rails deep into the interior, turning the drivers head into an unfeeling, unthinking pulp that slicked up the cool leather seats and splattered the shiny face of the GPS display.
Both vehicles spun around, welded together by the force of their collision, and skidded noisily across the gravel shoulder and over the edge of the ravine that dropped into Lake Muskoka.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Esther Nates was now the fourth dead professor on my growing list.
I called the Berkeley County Sheriff’s office and was told that a William Pope was charged with her first-degree murder yesterday. Pope had been doing odd jobs around Nate’s house. A known drug addict, he told investigators he was suffering from drug withdrawals and blacked out. He said, later when he woke up, he found the professor laying on the living room floor with a plastic bag pulled over her head.
“He was apparently suffering the after effects of the drug and blacked out. He has no memory of the crime,” answered the officer in charge. Nates was found dead, suffocated, and her hands tied behind her back. By her daughter. The results of Nate’s autopsy were that she died from ligature strangulation and smothering.
I’ve been involved in dozens of homicides where the perpetrator denied any knowledge of the crime. They weren’t saying they didn’t kill anyone, they just didn’t remember the details. It’s an effective pre-trial strategy when all the cards are stacked against you. Was that what Pope was up to?
I Googled Nates. She was world-renowned. Recent winner of a prestigious mathematics prize. Born with three strikes against her she had once commented to a reporter for Science magazine. Grew up in the projects. Black. And a woman.
I could feel a hollowness in my stomach. This was too much of a coincidence. Four professors from a group of five – all dead within a week of each other. In different cities, connected by what?
I had worked with an FBI special agent a few years ago on a homicide case connected to a serial killer investigation. Her name was Jann Stone and she worked out of the Quantico Lab in Virginia, about two hours drive from DC. Her specialty was technology and since I’m one of the few human beings left in modern civilization who doesn’t own a PC, I thought I would get her advice.
Of course there was also a complication. We had gotten pretty close during that investigation. Seriously close. At one point I had actually considering retiring from Homicide and joining the FBI in Virginia, but then I woke up when I realized I shouldn’t be giving my hormones the vote on my career plans. Besides, I have a teenage daughter that lives with my ex in D.C. who I want to see more often rather than less. So I turned the offer down. Fireworks followed.
“Jann! It’s Hyde. How are things in Virginia?”
Jann whistled into the phone. “Gregory! Its been a while. I heard you solved that Buzzworm case last year.”
Usually I hate it when people call me Gregory. When Jann does, it’s like foreplay.
“That was pure luck” I said, feeling flushed.
“Pure luck? No way. You’re a human bulldozer.”
“Yeah. My ex used to tell me that. She didn’t think it was a good thing.”
“Too bad. Comes in handy sometimes. So what’s up?” Jann was acting very cool. Like an award-winning drama hadn’t gone down between us once. Shouting. Swearing. Historic make-up sex.
“I’ve got a suspicious suicide in D.C. that looks like it could be connected to a couple of out-of state murders. So I wondered if the Feds were on to this or would be interested in working with me on it.”
“What’s the victim’s name? I’m at my computer into HUMINT right now, so let me do a quick search and see if something pops up. But be patient. The system’s been very cranky lately. Everything takes forever.” HUMINT was the FBI’s searchable database of everything useful in crime – fingerprints, DNA, license plates, names, groups, sex offenders – you name it.
I read her the list of names. Gridley. Bugloski. Chapertah. Nates. I listened to her punching in the data. “And finally, the fifth member of their think tank, Professor Kaufmann out of Stanford.”
There was a long pause. She was right when she said the system was slow. When she spoke next her voice had changed. It was a subtle thing, but I had spent a lot of time with her on the phone during our relationship and I knew her moods. “Nothing’s showing up, Hyde.” Another pause. “This system is a real mess right now. Could be no data or just . . .” Still another long pause, like she was checking her text messages while talking to me, faint male voices in the background. “Sorry. Look. I’d love to chat with you more, Greg, but I’ve got a hard
stop in the next ten minutes. I can’t miss this one. I gotta run. I’ll talk to you later.”
I put the phone down, feeling much worse than I expected. Did I think she was going to jump up and down at the sound of my voice? But to get blown off like that was a real surprise. And she wasn’t even curious about the case, which was so unlike her. But what was with her voice? This reminded me of the feeling you get seeing a fresh murder scene for the first time; your concentration hijacked instantly.
I checked my notes again, trying to put thoughts of Jann aside, wondering if there was another contact I could squeeze information out of.
I called and left a message with Professor Kaufmann and spoke to his aide; no one knew where he was. He had missed classes today, which was very unlike him. I was able to connect with campus security and spoke to a supervisor who agreed to contact the local police. The day was not going well. I might shortly be five for five.
My cell phone rang and I looked at the screen. It was a Virginia area code.
“Hyde, it’s Jann again.” This time I could hear traffic noise in the background, a lot of it. A major highway. “I’m calling from a pay phone.” I squinted into the fluorescents above me. I was getting a slight buzz and could feel the hairs on my arm rising. Something was definitely up. She was breathing hard into the mouthpiece.
“You know how hard it is to find a pay phone these days? I had to jog three freakin’ miles”
“Just felt like you needed the exercise?” I asked.
“Sorry about the first call, Greg, but people were listening.”
“To what?”
