by Glenn Cooper
Quinn’s body had been spotted by a motorist who had pulled off the highway to change a flat. He was already the subject of a missing person report after he failed to show up for his shift in Boston as a nurse anesthetist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital. Local police had gone to his Hampton Falls house in southern New Hampshire where they had forced entry and found nothing amiss. His postmortem showed cause of death to be a massive subdural hematoma caused by a depressed skull fracture, and had it not been for Dr. Leonard Adler’s obsessive technique, the drill wound on the opposite side of his head might have gone unnoticed. This grotesque detail was kept from the press to preserve the integrity of the investigation.
The police had done a workmanlike job fleshing out the high points of Quinn’s life. He was single and homosexual. He was not in a steady relationship. He was solvent and up to date on his mortgage and financial obligations. He had no police record and to their knowledge was uninvolved in drug use or trafficking. None of his friends or family could point to soured relationships or lurking dangers. He wasn’t shy about his sexuality and was a fixture at a few gay nightclubs in Boston. The working hypothesis was that he had strayed into a random sexual encounter with a homicidal psycho.
The police had focused on his mobile phone records, particularly the last calls he had made on his putative day of death, a Thursday. He had worked a full day shift in the OR doing orthopedic procedures. His phone was inactive throughout the day but at three o’clock it came to life with a flurry of calls between two numbers, a mobile phone belonging to a graduate student at Boston University named Davis Fox and a landline at Harvard Medical School assigned to a researcher named Alex Weller.
Both men had been interviewed by the police. Fox described a brief affair with Quinn a year earlier. The relationship had cooled but they had remained friends. Weller apparently had no romantic connections with the victim. Instead, they had some common intellectual interests that Fox also shared. Police reports were vague about the details; egghead stuff. Neither Fox nor Weller had seen Quinn that Thursday afternoon or evening and neither had any theories as to his fate. The police had canvassed Quinn’s usual haunts in Boston but he hadn’t been seen at any of them since the previous Saturday night.
Cyrus arranged to meet Davis Fox at the BU Student Union during the heart of the lunch hour. The place was packed with kids coming and going and he wondered how he’d be able to pick one young man out of the crowd. Beneath the hanging food court sign, he shifted his weight from foot to foot, absorbing the din generated by students living a life he dimly remembered, unencumbered by those things that were making his own existence as oppressive as the air in a malarial jungle.
As it happened, it was easier for Fox to find him since Cyrus was the lone short-haired clean-shaven adult in a suit and overcoat. A pale-skinned African-American youth in skinny jeans tucked into boots and a bright woolly scarf flamboyantly draped around his sweater approached and asked, “You the FBI guy?” He had the flowing manner of an effete trendy, the body of a dissipated male model. He was not quite handsome, his eyes too narrow, mouth too large.
They found a table for two and no sooner sat down when Fox’s mobile rang. “Yeah, I’m with him now. I’ll call you later.”
Cyrus immediately wanted to know who was calling but shelved his curiosity. He began with small, procedural questions. Fox told him he’d been interviewed a month earlier, that he’d told the police everything he knew, et cetera, et cetera. Cyrus let him go unprompted until he talked himself out. He liked to see where people would wander, unguided. Over the years, if he had a hundred dollars for every time this approach was useful he’d be living in a better zip code.
Cyrus began to probe deeper and studied the young man’s face as he responded. It was contemporary hirsute with carefully shaped hair, long sideburns, uniform stubble and a neat tuft between his chin and lower lip. He had multiple small gold loops piercing each earlobe, which Cyrus found off-putting. He tried not to look at them.
When Fox talked about Thomas Quinn, Cyrus sensed a lack of guile; he’d been at the game long enough to trust his intuition. As to the details of the crime, Fox knew, as widely reported, that Quinn’s head had been caved in. If he had any knowledge of the more macabre aspects of the case, he certainly didn’t volunteer it.
Fox was a second-year grad student in experimental psychology. He’d known Quinn for a little under two years. They’d met through a mutual friend, Alex Weller. Cyrus grunted at the name—his next appointment. Fox told him that Quinn had seemed his normal self during their last phone conversation, maybe a little tired and stressed from a busy day. If he had plans for that evening, he never shared them.
“When was the last time you saw him?” The hall was noisy; Cyrus almost felt he was shouting.
“At Alex’s house, the previous Saturday night.”
“Tell me about Alex.”
“He’s a great guy, an amazing guy, a really brilliant research doctor. When I was an undergrad I read one of his papers and e-mailed him. We got to know each other.”
“He’s at Harvard Med, isn’t he?” Cyrus asked, aware of the answer.
“Yeah. And at Children’s Hospital. I wouldn’t be shocked if he gets the Nobel Prize one day for his work on brain injury.”
“Brain injury,” Cyrus repeated. “Lot of that going around. What were you doing at his house?”
For the first time the young man stiffened. “A bunch of people meet at his place in Cambridge a couple of times a month to talk about science and philosophy. Alex is sort of the focal point.”
He wanted to know more but Fox was hesitant. “You’re going to be talking to Alex. He’ll tell you about it.”
“How come you know I’m talking to him?”
“He told me.”
“Was that him on the phone?”
Nodding, Fox tried to avoid sounding unhelpful. “Look, it’s not a big mystery or anything. It’s just that Alex likes to keep the group’s discussions private for a lot of reasons. If you’ve got any questions after you’ve seen him—any whatsoever—call me and I’ll be happy to help you out but really, Alex is in the best position to give you the lowdown.” Whenever Fox talked about Weller, Cyrus noticed he lowered his eyes and spoke a little more softly. What was it? Was he in awe of the guy? Something else?
If Fox’s intent was to put him at ease, the conversation had the opposite effect. Cyrus was satisfied Fox was telling the truth about his relationship with Thomas Quinn. In his gut he believed the kid probably didn’t have information on the murder. But this Weller character made his antennae vibrate like crazy and he hadn’t even met him. The police report on Weller’s interview was two-dimensional, minimalist and uninteresting. The real story was bound to be richer.
When he was ready to leave he flipped a business card on the table and worried the kid by sternly saying, “Since your friend Alex is so interested in my whereabouts, let him know I’m on my way over to his lab.”
As he drove down Longwood Avenue past Children’s Hospital, Cyrus stared unswervingly at the bumper of the car in front of him, refusing to look at the buildings. If there was a place on earth he loathed more, he hadn’t yet found it. Tara was still there. He’d visit her later. For now he tried to block it out.
Down the street, he pulled into a handicapped spot in front of Vanderbilt Hall, the med school dorm, and put his FBI OFFICIAL BUSINESS placard on the dash.
Across Longwood Avenue, the entrance to the Harvard Medical campus, long ago dubbed the Great White Quadrangle, was festooned with a pair of oversized stoneware urns. He sighed heavily at the imposing sight of five large marble buildings surrounding a central green crisscrossed with students walking purposefully, to this day self-conscious about his own academic credentials.
His start had been auspicious: a scholarship at Boston College, which took care of a good piece of the financial burden. A couple of campus jobs and a modest contribution from his parents had covered the rest. Sad to say, he conside
red his two years at BC his life’s high-water mark. The ivy-crept campus, the library books that smelled of past generations, the lofty ideas; the hours spent reading beautiful sentences. Thinking about those years made him ache.
Then, in the summer before his junior year, his father got into the kind of trouble that blights a family for generations: accusations of sexual impropriety involving a woman at a traffic stop at midnight—on the surface way out of character for an old family man like Sergeant O’Malley. But then a first transgression was compounded by a bigger one: he threatened her. The woman got it on tape, and with the speed of the self-inflicted bullet that would soon end his life his career as a Boston cop was over.
As the oldest son, Cyrus was the responsible male. He’d take a year off, get a job, help with the bills, help his younger brothers and sisters and a shell-shocked mother who’d cloistered herself at their church. A year turned to two, then three. He wasn’t ever going to return to the shaded campus. His books would stay in cardboard boxes. He’d need a better job with higher pay to keep supporting his brothers and sisters. His father’s pals greased the skids. He aced the qualifying exams with perfect scores, and he became a Boston cop. He didn’t really want it, he never wanted it, but that’s what he did.
With grim determination he decided if he was going into police work he might as well do it well, better than his old man.
Smart cops became detectives. Smart detectives sometimes went to the FBI.
Yet he always felt he’d left a part of himself on the BC campus and was forever reminded of his academic cleft. His ex-wife had gone to Wellesley, his former neighbors on both sides were Harvard men, Stanley Minot actually wore his Phi Beta Kappa pin from Columbia, special agents with Ivy League degrees were all over the Boston bureau; even Avakian was a bigtime U Mass alum. He tried to be philosophical about his truncated collegiate life but such moments as these brought back unpleasant memories, bitter ones that puckered his mouth like a shot of unsweetened espresso.
The grandiosity of the quadrangle dazzled and depressed at once. He imagined how it might feel to be one of these students, treading on a lawn covered in gold maple leaves the color of success, hurrying to afternoon lectures in deep-welled lecture halls steeped in a century of tradition.
In another life, he thought, not this one.
Alex looked out his office window down onto the quadrangle and spotted the man who surely had be the FBI agent. He took a sip from a water bottle to wet his throat that was acidic with fear. He had a minute or two to compose himself: with everything to lose and nothing to gain, what choice did he have but go through the motions, try to be helpful, act clueless, and then in a worst-case scenario, feign indignation?
Why wouldn’t they leave him alone? If they only understood what the stakes were, they’d let him finish his work in peace. Throughout history great minds were always persecuted. He was close but he needed time.
Just a little more time.
Down a long echo-chamber hall, Cyrus passed a dozen closed doors until he found Weller’s nameplate. He rapped his knuckles against frosted glass and entered. Three lab workers bathed in harsh fluorescents looked up from their benches and one of them, a man only in his twenties with a long white lab coat and bad skin, asked harshly, “In the right place?” He had an incongruous townie accent and a coiled toughness that didn’t fit the profile of a plummy academic laboratory.
“I’m looking for Alex Weller.”
The man had his name stitched onto his lab coat in red thread: Frank Sacco. “You expected?”
Cyrus sent him scurrying to a closed office at the rear by tersely telling him he was from the FBI. The others, young Chinese women, put their heads down and minded their own business.
The lab was an old-world space on one of the floors that had so far escaped renovation, a turn-of-the-century room with period floorboards and dated soapstone countertops; but it was packed with twenty-first-century electronics and analytical instruments. Cyrus involuntarily sniffed at the acetone vapors hanging in the air. Every few seconds he was startled by a harsh vibratory whir when one of the women pressed a test tube against a mechanical agitator.
Sacco returned and pointed mutely toward the rear. Alex Weller stood at his corner office door, arms folded, forcing a smile. He was tall and lanky, late thirties, hair pulled into a hippie ponytail, casual in jeans, pullover and running shoes. To Cyrus’s ear he had an unvarnished British accent, like Ringo’s. He launched into a voluble barrage. “Davis Fox passed along your message. Welcome. Should I call you Mister O’Malley, Agent O’Malley, or Cyrus?”
Cyrus bristled at the way Weller was trying to take charge. “It’s Special Agent O’Malley.”
The tall man shrugged in a suit-yourself way. “Well, I’m more informal. I’m just Alex.”
Alex closed the door, offered a chair and squeezed back behind his desk. The airless office was impossibly small, so jammed with journals and papers as to be almost comical.
“Sorry for the mess,” he said, resting his feet on the one bare patch of desktop. The sneaker soles were worn from serious roadwork. “I don’t know how I can help. As I said, I already spoke with the police.”
Cyrus awkwardly stripped off his overcoat without standing up and let it drape back over the chair. “You were the last person to speak with Thomas Quinn on his mobile. I’m hoping you can be of further assistance to the investigation.”
“Has there been any progress?”
“I’d say yes,” he replied enigmatically, trying to ferret out some kind of response, verbal or nonverbal; but Alex was impassive. “I want you to walk me through your last phone calls with Thomas. That Thursday you spoke with him at three-fifteen for about a minute and again at five-twenty for three minutes.”
Cyrus detected a smirk of sorts. “Glad to; but first, I’m curious why the FBI would be involved. I grew up in Britain so perhaps I don’t understand these things as well as I should.”
He wasn’t about to humor him so he replied curtly, “The police asked for our help. The phone calls?”
Alex shrugged again and told him that both calls involved planning for their next Saturday meeting. Thomas helped organize biweekly salons at his house. They had discussed who was coming, the ever important matter of refreshments, and whether they would have a guest speaker. As memory served him, their first call was interrupted when Thomas had to take care of something in the recovery room, and the second call, a continuation of the first occurred during Thomas’s evening commute.
Had he seen Thomas in person at any time on Thursday or Friday? Alex said no, emphatically.
Cyrus looked at his notepad. He had written the word salon in capital letters and had underlined it twice. “Tell me about these salons. What are they?”
Alex gestured grandly as if he were about to impart a great teaching. “Well, a salon is a gathering of like-minded intellectuals who meet to—”
Cyrus cut him off irritably. “Your salons. What do you like-minded intellectuals discuss at your house?”
Alex innocently smiled back. “My friends and I are interested in all manner of topics relating to philosophy, religion, and biology. Specifically, we share a fascination in cultural concepts of the afterlife. It’s a subject I’ve been toying with ever since my university days. Several years ago I founded a small private society, the Uroboros Society—no more than an informal salon, really—to stimulate discussions.”
“What does that mean, Uroboros?”
“It’s an ancient mythological symbol, the serpent swallowing its own tail. It represents eternal return, life after death, self-renewal; immortality. It may sound pretentious, I know—and believe me, I’m not a pretentious bloke—but it encapsulates the scope of our interests.”
“Immortality and life after death. Is that what neuroscientists think about in their spare time?”
“This one does. The intersection between science, philosophy, and religion is blurred but fascinating. I’m immersed in that intersection.�
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“What kind of research do you do?”
Alex wet his lips with his tongue. “I study the stressed brain … the brain in trauma, in oxygen deprivation, at the boundary between life and death.”
“Is this theoretical? Practical?”
“Well, this is a medical school. I’m a pediatric neurologist. I split my time between patient care and research. My grant funding points toward the discovery of new drugs for brain injury; but it is fundamental thanatobiology—the biology of death—that really gets my motor running. Death isn’t instantaneous, you know. We’re complex machines, and when we shut down, a lot happens in specific sequences at a cellular and molecular level. By understanding death, maybe we’ll get a better understanding of life.”
Cyrus raised his eyebrows. “If you say so. What kind of people go to your salon?”
“All types: biologists, psychologists, philosophy students, dilettantes, a theologian or two.”
“Thomas was a nurse. What did he bring?”
“Thomas was an interesting man, very astute. He wasn’t all that book smart, yet his line of work made him a keen observer of life and death. He held his own in debates with PhDs.”
“What is it you debate about?”
“This is relevant to Thomas’s murder, how?” Cyrus was staring back at him icily, prompting Alex to add, “I’m just asking.”
“I’m not sure it is, I’m not sure it isn’t,” Cyrus said evenly. “A guy’s got a fascination with death, his last cell phone call is to another guy who’s got the same interest and he winds up dead. I don’t know … call me crazy for being curious.”
“Just as long as you don’t think I had anything to do with it,” Alex said with forced cheeriness. “We debate many things: What should we read into the differences in cross-cultural beliefs in life after death? Does God exist—that’s a biggie. Why are so-called near death experiences so similar by description across multiple cultures? Is there a biological basis for them or should we be looking toward spirituality? We ask large questions and after lively discussion, we come up with small answers, which guarantees we’ll be talking for a very long time.”
