by Lori Avocato
Pug took off his ear muffs.
Maele placed a finger to his lips. “You all listen now,” he said softly. “Listen very carefully.”
He pushed the button. Again, no bang or chamber rotation. But this time everyone heard a distinct click.
“Misfire?” Salazar asked?
Maele shook his head. “No. That is sound of electricity hitting closed relay switch in black box.” He punched the button twice more. Two more clicks.
Skip nodded. “The signal’s not getting relayed to the winch motor. So the trigger’s not getting pulled.” He winked at Pam. “Not even once.”
“But you watch again,” Maele insisted. He deftly removed the black box from the firing loop and replaced it with a simple antenna attached to the winch. “Ear muffs on, please.” He punched the button twice in rapid succession.
Bang! Bang!
Salazar started to say something, but Maele stared him into silence while he re-inserted the black box back into the firing loop. Again, he punched the button.
Bang!
“What the hell!” Double arched detective eyebrows.
Pam inhaled sharply.
“Whoa!” Skip whispered.
“That very weird, huh?” Maele rubbed a bushy eyebrow with the back of his wrist.
Salazar placed his hands, palm down, onto the black box, trying to discern—through vibration, warmth or telepathy—what was going on inside. “What is this damned thing?” he swore. “Some sort of electrical Russian roulette?”
Maele grinned. “Rusky roulette alright. With six bullets in gun!”
4
Twenty-four hours later, Pug’s boringly white government sedan boiled up dust along the gravel road leading to the crime-scene house in Alpine, a hillside community on the eastern edge of San Diego. The sky was leaden, the day sullen gray again.
Pug paid more attention to the area this time, and to the house itself. It was set back from the road along a path overgrown with bushy laurel sumac, white-tipped sage, and salmon-colored poison oak. Scotch pines, scrub oaks and California sycamores framed the house, almost hiding it from view. He understood now why the sound of a gunshot might have been the only clue a chance passerby would have had that any other soul was in the neighborhood.
He was greeted at the front door by a pale-faced, middle-aged woman with red-rimmed eyes. Mousey brown hair pulled tightly back, face wrinkled, mouth turned down in a permanent frown, she eyed him through the screen door.
He’d first met this woman at the morgue when she came to ID her father’s body, merely nodding when the ME pulled back the sheet.
“You have to say it,” Dr. Youngblood told her gently.
“Yes. That is my father. As I remember him.”
~ * ~
She pushed open the screen door. “Come in, detective. I’ve been expecting you.”
“Thank you.” Salazar did a quick survey of the main room. It looked a lot different this time, cluttered with packing boxes, file folders and old clothes.
“Sharon,” she said, the thinnest of smiles creasing her lips. “Please call me Sharon. I’m just here to gather some of my father’s possessions before I decide what to do with the place.”
“You’re his sole heir?”
“My father was an only child—as was I, as far as I know. Since he died in testate, the State will automatically do a search for others, but I don’t think they’ll find any.”
“Tell me about your father,” Salazar coaxed. “What sort of man was he?”
“He was addicted to his work. That was all he really cared about. I never saw much of him when I was growing up. And after the divorce, only a couple more times.”
“Letters? Emails?”
She shook her head. “He was a stranger to me most of my life.”
Salazar rubbed his chin. “Was he a man of faith?”
She looked up, startled. “Why, no, he was an atheist. I once asked him why we never went to church like other families. He said that when you become a scientist, you have to give up the idea of a personal God.”
“Did he by any chance believe in—” how to phrase this?— “in the paranormal?”
Her eyes widened. “You mean like ghosts...ESP... channeling...life after death? That sort of stuff?”
Salazar pulled out his notes to refresh his memory. “His department secretary said he was interested in...” he read the words verbatim...“the ‘nature of consciousness.’” He snapped the notebook shut. “Do you know anything about that?”
She shook her head.
“One last question. “Do you know if your father was in good health? I mean, he was seventy-two. Did he have any medical conditions you know about?”
“No.” She pointed to a row of backpacks, rucksacks and canteens hanging on hooks by the front door. “He loved to be alone. He fancied himself a modern day Thoreau, hiking and backpacking in the wilderness with just his thoughts for company. Even when I was a little girl, he’d go off by himself for days.” She pointed a finger to the ceiling. “But wait…!” She went to a small table and returned with a single sheet of paper. “Here’s a doctor’s bill. They sent it to me when he didn’t pay. I was the only beneficiary on his medical insurance policy.” She handed it over. “It’s for an office visit a year ago.”
Salazar jotted down the physician’s name and address. “Mind if I follow up on this?”
“Not at all.”
“Thank you,” he said. “And I’m sorry for your loss.”
She shook his hand. “Can I make burial arrangements now?”
“Oh! I’m sorry. Didn’t they tell you at the morgue?”
“Tell me what?”
“The ME won’t release the body while there’s still an on-going investigation.”
Her face showed the first emotion he’d seen: eyes widened, nostrils flared.
He anticipated her next question. “We’re still not sure whether your father’s death was a suicide, an accident, or...” He hesitated.
“Murder? You think he could have been murdered?”
Pug couldn’t reveal the mysterious details of the case, which might be known only to the killer, if it was indeed a homicide: the fully loaded gun, the broken clock, the unexplained dehydration. And the black box. Especially the black box.
He could only say, “Check with the M.E.’s office tomorrow. I’m sure they’ll be releasing the body soon.”
On his way back down the dirt road, his cell phone chirped. It was Maele from ballistics.
~ * ~
“Crime Lab guys couldn’t figure out that black box of yours either. And they don’t want to take it apart; maybe mess it up somehow. This important evidence, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay. I tell them to send to Physics Lab at University. Let those guys play with it.”
“Thanks, Maele.” He hung up and thumbed Pam Mundy’s number. “Do me a favor, will ya?”
“If I can.”
“I got a name and address for our victim’s private doctor. Pay him a visit. See what you can find out.”
“Sure.”
“Shouldn’t be any medical privacy issues since the guy’s dead. And I have verbal permission from his only living relative.”
“I’ll call you if I turn up anything. Where you headed?”
“The University.”
She chuckled. “About time you got some education. Hope you get an A.”
5
The name and title on the door read: Peter Eckman, Ph.D., Chairman, Department of Philosophy. Pug entered, walked across the room, and reached for a hand outstretched across a cluttered desk—a firm grip from a lean, rangy guy who couldn’t have been fifty years old, or at least didn’t look like it.
“We spoke on the phone,” Salazar said, sizing up the man: fair skin, sandy hair and blue-green eyes denoted Scandanavian genes for sure. In fact, he was wearing jeans: blue jeans and a T-shirt.
“Sorry about the clothes, detective.” Ekman motioned him
to a chair. “I’ve just been for a run, and you told me this was urgent—something about the death of Professor Jackson?”
Salazar ‘scoped out the office some more. Not the academic digs he’d imagined. It looked and felt more like a den or home study. Shelves full of books and journals, to be sure. But also an extensive collection of sports memorabilia, a TV monitor, a stereo playing soft classic music. And a cat! A cat curled up in an upholstered chair.
“Schroedinger.”
The detective cocked an ear. “Pardon me?”
“The cat. That’s its name. Schroedinger.” Clasping his hands behind his neck, Eckman leaned back in his chair, an impish smile smeared across his handsome face.
Salazar didn’t get the joke, so he got right to business. “I’m sorry about your colleague’s death. Did you know him well?”
“Not really. I’ve been here only a few years. Professor Jackson was near retirement by then.”
“What was your overall impression of him?”
“A thinker. A very profound thinker.”
“So I gather. But what about the man?”
“He kept to himself—kept inside himself. He published of course—have to in this business. And he shouldered his share of teaching and committee assignments. But he was much more comfortable with ideas than with people.” He leaned forward and tapped the eraser end of a pencil on a lined yellow pad.
Salazar pressed. “I’m told he was particularly interested in the ‘nature of consciousness.’”
“That’s a hot topic in philosophy right now. Part of the broader discipline of the Philosophy of Physics.”
“Philosophy of Physics?” Pug grunted. “Sounds like an oxymoron to me.”
Eckman laughed easily. “It goes to the relationship between mind and body.” He tapped the eraser on the pad again, then looked at Salazar. “Did you take history and philosophy courses in college, detective?”
“Sure. I read Plato, Aristotle...and those other guys.”
“Ahh! The ancient Greeks. Theirs was a very concrete world. Only four substances—fire, water, earth and air—were needed to explain all of nature. This left them free to think about other, grander things, like ethics, politics, government, and the individual’s relationship to the state.”
“Democracy. They gave us democracy.”
“More. They gave us the idea of democracy.” He leaned forward on his desk. “And with Euclid, Aristotle and Ptolemy, they also gave us scientific inquiry, the seed from which grew the classical physics of Newton, Leibnitz, Galileo and others in the 17th and 18th centuries—and even Einstein’s thought experiments two hundred years later.”
“‘Classical’ physics? What is that?”
“Where everything in nature must obey the laws of physics: Gravity, electromagnetism, and the laws of motion, to name but a few. Even the mind was thought to obey these laws. But then the curtain was lifted—just a little—by Rene Descartes, when he opined, Cogito ergo sum.”
“‘I think, therefore I am.’” Salazar clicked his pen twice. “My Catholic schooling. The nuns practically beat Latin into me.”
“I’m a Lutheran.”
They shared a chuckle.
“With these three words,” Eckman continued, “Descartes forever separated the mind and all its processes from the merely organic organ which gives it birth: the brain.”
Salazar scratched his ear. “Do you believe that?”
He nodded. “Neuroscientists who’ve studied this phenomena cannot explain how a lump of gray matter, with nothing but bioelectrical processes, can produce a Picasso painting, a Shubert symphony—or even our present discussion. There must be something more to the mind, they contend, something beyond the merely physical brain.”
Salazar scribbled a note. “Go on.”
“The tenets of Classical physics were challenged by the discovery of the quantum nature of matter in the 1920s and 30s.”
“The quantum nature of matter?” Salazar felt his own very average brain beginning to ache.
“Take light itself. It has a wave-particle duality that produces some very spooky results. It can be either a wave or a particle—is, in fact, both a wave and a particle. For example, when you shine a flashlight, or take an x-ray, you’re observing the wave effect.” He paused, glancing closely at Salazar. “You up for more?”
“Why not?”
“In a famous experiment, light beams shined through a slit in a solid wall are detected as waves further on. But single photons fired one at a time through a double slit in the same wall, are also detected as waves.”
“So how can you tell which it is?”
“We can only guess, based on probability. Certainty, if that’s what you’re after, is just a crapshoot until the damned thing is actually measured.”
“What about larger objects?”
“They probably generate quantum waves as well. They’re just much harder to measure.”
“You mean like objects like—” Salazar looked at the sleeping Schroedinger—“cats?”
Eckman smiled. “And probably bowling balls, mice and men too!”
“What’s that mean?”
“In 1935, Erwin Schroedinger, a theoretical physicist, designed what is probably the most famous thought experiment in the history of science, now dubbed ‘Schroedinger’s Cat.’ It was a test of the principal of Superposition, a mixing of wave forms or particle states, a mixture which only ends when you actually measure them.”
“Seems pretty far-fetched.”
“Schroedinger thought so too. That’s why he dreamed up the experiment: to slam the proponents of superposition.”
Salazar smiled. “This is all fascinating stuff. But what’s all this got to do with Professor Jackson?”
“It goes to that quantum ‘nature of consciousness’ stuff you mentioned. Professor Jackson thought, along with many others, that consciousness exists in some energy form separate from the brain. Maybe electrons in the brain generate their own quantum waves, creating their own quantum world.”
“You’re beginning to sound like Shirley MacLaine, doc.”
Eckman didn’t laugh. “Near death experiences cannot be verified experimentally. But they are so numerous and so extensive they deserve to be taken seriously.”
Salazar had heard enough. His head was about to explode. “Quantum physics, quantum mind, quantum consciousness. Next you’ll be telling me there’s even a quantum form of suicide!”
Eckman didn’t answer. He just looked into his hands.
Oh, my God! An idea as fantastic as a quantum wave itself crashed into Salazar’s consciousness. He shook hands with the Eckman and hurried out. He had to see a man about a box.
A black box!
6
Skip Mulcahey was waiting for him at the University Physics Lab.
“Mind if I join you, Pug? I figured this would be your next stop.”
Salazar pointed to the door. “After you.”
They were met by Dr. Dan Merriman, a black man whose muscular build bulged the chest of his lab coat. He wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the locker room of a professional football team.
After introductions, the scientist led them to a bench with the black box—cover off—from the Alpine house.
“This is quite a gadget you’ve got here,” Merriman said. “Where’d you get it?”
Pug shook his head. “Sorry, that’s confidential.”
“It’s not just a simple junction box, is it?” Skip asked.
The physicist chuckled. “Heavens, no! I’ve never seen anything quite like it. What’s it for?”
Another shake of the detective’s head. “Can you just tell us how it works, please?”
Merriman slipped one hand into the lab coat. “First, it uses commercially available products. I’ve just never seen them connected this way before.”
“Please, go on,” Salazar urged.
“The short answer is that this box generates, then detects, the spin of a single electron.”
“The spin?”
“Yup. Either up or down. Opposites, but related—like the two poles of a magnet.”
“Got it,” Skip said. “Spin-up or spin-down.”
“This transistor here—” Merriman pointed to a small component—“generates the electrons one at a time...”
Pug clicked his pen. “It can do that? Generate just a single electron.”
“Sure. And detecting it isn’t hard either.”
“But...?”
“Detecting the spin, that’s tough. But it can be done. This other gadget—” he pointed again—“measures the difference between the two spin states of the electron: if spin-down, a small current is generated in the transistor; if spin-up, no current.”
“What happens to the current?” Skip asked.
The scientist shrugged. “Whatever you want it for. In this set-up, it’s boosted by a small transformer and sent out through the power cord.”
Salazar glanced at Skip. Both knew what its purpose was: to activate a winch, which pulled a rod connected to the trigger of a .38 revolver.
Skip raised a finger. “Wait a minute. How can a single electron be in two states—spin up and spin down—at the same time?”
Pug knew the answer to that one. He’d just barely learned it. “Superposition,” he answered. “The mixing of waves or particle spins.”
“Quite right, detective!” the physicist said. “Good for you. In the quantum world, the spin-up and spin-down states do both exist at the same time in a single electron.”
“Until it’s actually measured, neither spin state is favored.” Like in the Schroedinger’s Cat thought experiment.”
“Correct again, detective.”
Pug remembered the Ballistics Lab demonstration. That was it! Spin up, click—no bang. Spin down, current—bang!
It was starting to make sense. Sort of. But why such an elaborate gadget just to kill yourself? What was he missing? He thanked the physicist, nodded at Skip, then headed back to his office.
Maybe Pam had turned up something to fill in the blanks.
~ * ~
He was busy at his computer when a voice startled him. He pried his eyeballs off the screen and swiveled around. Pam was standing at his elbow.
