by Lis Wiehl
“I wouldn’t know,” Villanegre said. “And he’s gone back to Germany or I’d ask him for you.”
“We’d heard Abbie had an interesting art collection,” Tommy said, “but nobody’s ever been in the house, so it was never more than a rumor.” He stood up. “Well, if I find George, I’ll let him know you’re looking for him.”
“And I will do the same for you,” the Englishman said.
Had Tommy waited another ten minutes in the lobby of the Peter Keeler Inn, he would have run into Quinn McKellen, who came down to wait for Dani. Quinn was in a hurry, running late as usual, but when he searched the lobby and then the parking lot, he discovered that this time Dani was the one who was late.
She’d been getting ready to go when she saw a long black Lincoln town car with tinted windows rolling down the driveway toward her house. She watched as a man in a black coat got out of the front passenger seat, while the man behind the wheel stayed put. The man in the black coat opened the rear door and stood aside as an older gentleman in a camel cashmere coat got out of the backseat and looked up at the house. Judging from the body language, it appeared that he told the man holding the door to stay with the car, and the man in the black suit was arguing with him. The older man glanced at a piece of paper in his hand and then approached the house.
Dani opened the door to meet him.
“Dr. Danielle Harris?” he said.
“Yes?”
He smiled warmly.
“I’m Ed Stanley. Your Grandpa Howard’s friend. You left a message on my answering machine. Do you mind if I come in?”
Inside, he declined her offer of coffee but accepted her invitation to take his coat off and join her in the living room. He was shorter than she’d imagined, slightly stooped over, with a soft voice and a gentle bearing. He was wearing dark khaki pants and a corduroy jacket over a plaid shirt, but Dani could tell these casual clothes were nevertheless well tailored and expensive. Stanley, who’d worked in Moscow for the State Department for over twenty years, had been enormously helpful when she’d had questions about the Moscow orphanage Amos Kasden had lived in before coming to the United States.
He went straight to a family portrait on the table by the window, a picture of Dani; her sister, Beth; their parents; Grandfather Howard, who was still alive and living in Montana; and Grandmother Ellen, who had passed.
“How’s my grandpa?” Dani said.
“He’s well,” Stanley said as he sat down on her couch. “He’s got a porcupine that’s been eating holes in his shed, but other than that, he’s good.”
“When I called you, I thought you were still in Montana,” she said. “I didn’t expect a visit.”
“Well, I was in Montana,” he said, “but I flew out this morning. Or actually last night, because I had to go regional to catch the redeye from Seattle.”
Dani drew a sharp breath. Why had he made such a long trip so suddenly?
“Are you staying?” she said, hoping the Keeler Inn wasn’t booked up.
“No, no,” he said. “But I had to talk to you. In person.”
He began by qualifying that the story he was about to tell her had to remain confidential. It was something he hadn’t even told her grandfather. He told Dani that he hadn’t really worked for the State Department— he’d been a career CIA officer, rising to the level of station chief before retiring.
“When I heard you mention the name Peter Guryakin,” Stanley said, “I knew I had to come as soon as I could. What do you know about him?”
“Very little, really,” Dani said. “I met him at an art opening the other night at St. Adrian’s Academy.”
“He was here?” Stanley said, poking the coffee table with his finger. “In this country?”
“Yes. He told me he was in marketing.”
“But your message said you’d heard he’d worked in a weapons program for the KGB,” Stanley said. “May I ask where you heard that?”
“From a friend,” Dani said, reluctant to say more. “Someone who had a job offer from Linz Pharmazeutika. Guryakin works for them, apparently.” She wondered if Ed Stanley already had Quinn’s name and decided he probably did.
“I’m a friend too, Dani,” Stanley said. “That’s why I’ve come. I needed to tell you in person that Dr. Peter Guryakin is not the sort of person you should be dealing with. He’s a very dangerous individual. If we’d known he was in this country, we might have . . . wanted to talk to him.”
“So he did work for the KGB?”
Ed Stanley nodded. “We’ve been watching him for some time. Until he dropped off the map. No one knew why. One theory was that he’d been the victim of a lab accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“He was developing nerve agents. Not the organic kind, which they were also stockpiling, like weaponized smallpox or ricin or anthrax, but synthetics that targeted the central nervous system. I can’t be any more specific than that, except to say we believe his research met with some success. He dropped out of view a few years ago, but when I got your voice message . . . You think he’s gone home?”
“I don’t know,” Dani said. “He didn’t act like he was hiding.”
“He may not know we’re aware of him,” Stanley said. “We have reason to believe he could be acting as a kind of biochemical arms dealer. I understand that you may not know why he was at the—what was it? An art exhibit?”
“At St. Adrian’s Academy. It’s a private boys’ school. I was wondering if he might have been connected to the death of a woman in a nursing home who died the night of the exhibition.”
“How did she die?” Stanley said.
“Nobody’s sure.” She was reluctant to tell him what she knew, afraid that he wouldn’t believe her or would think she was delusional.
Stanley leaned forward and lowered his voice to let her know he did not mean to sound aggressive, but he was serious all the same. “Dani, I’ve interrogated a lot of people in my life, and I have a pretty good sense of when somebody isn’t telling me everything.”
She blushed and looked into his eyes for a long moment, gathering herself. “You’re right,” she said. “The medical examiner has the body, and—”
Before she could say more, Otto lumbered into the room. He paused for a second and then walked straight to the old man and laid his head in his lap. Ed Stanley scratched him behind the ears.
“That’s Otto.”
“He’s beautiful. How long have you had him?”
“Not too long,” she said. She changed her mind—if Stanley knew about Quinn, he would probably have known Quinn owned a bloodhound. “I’m keeping him for a friend. Do you know what kind of nerve agents this man was working on?”
“I really can’t say anything more,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She could tell from his reaction that he knew, but she said, “I understand.”
“The old woman,” he said. “It wasn’t natural causes?”
“No. You can talk to the ME if you’d like.”
“I may,” he said, standing up. “I feel like I owe it to your grandfather to look after you. He’s a dear friend and a fine fishing companion, by the way. Be careful.” He handed her a card with a number on it. “If you spot Guryakin, or find anything, call this number. And don’t—well, don’t eat or drink anything you didn’t prepare yourself. Or open any envelopes from an address you don’t recognize.”
“Okay,” she said. She tried not to show how nervous his words were making her.
He picked up his coat. “Dani, you may be chasing questions here you don’t want to know the answers to.” He offered his hand to shake hers, but then impulsively, awkwardly, gave her a hug. “Be careful. I’ve got business in Washington. I’m not quite as retired as I may have led you to believe. I’ll be in touch.”
There was a time when Dani would have said she couldn’t imagine a question she didn’t wish to know the answer to, but that was no longer true.
Tommy pulled his Jeep into his gara
ge and was crossing the cobblestone courtyard when he heard Carl’s motorcycle coming up the drive. He smiled and waved, then opened a text from Dani.
NEED TO TALK. ED STANLEY HERE THIS A.M. GURYAKIN INVLVD SOVIET NERVE AGENT PROGRAM, POSS A CHEM ARMS DEALR. WILL CALL WHEN I CAN.
He showed the message to Carl.
“Interesting,” Carl said, removing his helmet.
“You look terrible,” Tommy said.
Carl’s eyes were red and his face appeared to have lost color.
“Rough night. Didn’t sleep very well. How was your night?”
“I figured out another clue. We were right. Abbie was trying very hard to tell us something. Don’t look back meant Look forward. To the future. Which could mean just about anything, I suppose.”
“Let’s go inside,” Carl said. “You can fill me in.”
17.
“So this is where you put the bamboo splinters under their fingernails to pry the truth out of them,” Quinn said.
The only free room Dani could find at the DA’s office with a computer was Interview 2 in the basement, a windowless cubicle with acoustic tiles on the ceiling and the walls, a desk, and three chairs. The interrogator’s chair had wheels, which allowed him to roll forward or back to open or close the distance between himself and the person being interrogated, depending on how much pressure or space he felt was appropriate. The monitor was generally left off because it gave suspects a welcome distraction, but sometimes it was used to show them pictures or videos.
“We don’t need to put bamboo splinters under their fingernails,” Dani said, typing in her password to log into the system. “Mostly we just bore them until they can’t take it anymore and confess.” She looked at him. “You think I’m kidding.”
He held up his hands in surrender. “I wouldn’t last ten seconds. Do you do interrogations?”
“Rarely. I mostly observe,” she said, pointing to a video camera mounted at the ceiling in the corner of the room. “For most people, lying generates enormous stress loads. Generally the interrogator leaves the room after an hour or so, sometimes just for ten or fifteen minutes, so that we can watch how the suspect responds to the relief of that pressure. I’ve seen people so exhausted from lying that they fall asleep in here.”
“You don’t use lie detectors?”
“Occasionally,” she said. “When the suspects don’t give themselves away. You do it in three parts. First you’re just friendly and nonjudgmental. You say, ‘Tell me what happened, in your own words.’ The second time, you get them to repeat the story point for point, almost like you forgot what they said the first time or you want to get it straight. Then you compare the two versions, and in the third interview you challenge them and say, ‘The first time you said the car was blue, but the second time you said the car was white.’ People who tell the truth tell the same story twice. The truth doesn’t change. People who lie can’t remember what they said the first time they lied. Or they start adding details they think will make the lie more believable.”
“And then they crack!”
“Usually,” Dani said. “You have to know where to apply the pressure. It’s the ones who believe their own lies or who feel nothing that are the scary ones. Which brings us to this guy, Amos Kasden.”
She brought up the photograph of the murderer. He was fair-haired and had a fair complexion, a long neck, a prominent Adam’s apple, thin lips, an aquiline nose bending slightly to the left, and blank blue eyes. She told Quinn what she knew of Amos’s childhood, the abuse at the hands of his alcoholic father, and how Amos had ruthlessly dealt with it. She’d diagnosed him as having a severe dissociative identity disorder, a boy who did not feel real. He could do brutal things to Julie Leonard because he didn’t think she was real either. Dani didn’t mention any of the supernatural elements that had led her to the conclusion she knew Quinn would never accept. She had pictures of the body taken at the crime scene, and she had Julie’s autopsy report, if he wanted to see it, but he didn’t.
“Well then, let’s get to the good part,” he said. “That’s why I’m here, right?”
She opened the file containing the proteomic workup Banerjee had ordered. Quinn studied it all quickly.
“No neuroimaging to go with this, I wouldn’t suppose?” he asked as he read.
“We have an MRI.”
“Oh goody,” Quinn said, reading from the report. “Microtiter plate format, good, like that. Antiserum binding sites . . . blah, blah, blah . . . peroxidase conjugates, excellent . . . so on and so forth. . . So we have just two tissue samples, one from the cerebellum and one from the forebrain?”
“This is it,” Dani said.
He read a moment. “And you say there was no cytomas?”
“No tumors,” Dani said.
“Where’d the dopamine go?” he said to no one in particular. “Probably where the vanillylmandelic acid went. Hmm . . .”
He read in silence for another minute, then asked Dani if the computer had unrestricted Internet access. When she said yes, he told her if she had anything else she needed to do today, now would be a good time, because he was going to need to look at all the numbers for the next hour or so, and he did his best thinking alone. Dani knew that once Quinn was lost in thought, it could be awhile before he found his way back, so she wrote her password on a Post-it, stuck it on the screen, and left.
She took the elevator up to the second floor and found Stuart Metz at his desk, working on his computer.
“Got a sec?”
“Sure,” he said as he hit Save and turned toward her.
“Anything on Abbie?”
Metz shook his head. “The LEOs want to call it an FDSTW and punt it back out the Sally port,” he said. “Or to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, ‘When you’ve eliminated the possible, just admit you’re too stupid to figure it out and give up.’”
Dani had heard enough cop slang to know that a LEO was a law enforcement officer. The garage where they let prisoners out of the back of a squad car was the Sally port. FDSTW stood for found dead, stayed that way.
“Casey’s getting the okay today from Irene for a warrant to search the Gardener house,” Metz told her. “He’s afraid they’re going to find George in bed ART.”
“Stuart—”
“Assumed room temperature,” he said. “Last one, I promise. Casey thinks George might have assisted his mother’s suicide and then done himself in.”
“I must PMN,” Dani said, smiling, as she spun around. As she left she called over her shoulder, “Powder my nose.”
She wanted to ask Luisa, the receptionist, if she knew when Detective Casey was expected, but at the front desk she saw a note saying Luisa would be back in five. As she waited, Dani tried to read the cover of a Spanish-language edition of People, her attention drawn to a photograph of Cassandra Morton. She appeared to be doing nothing more than walking through an airport. The headline read, in a large red font, SE LE ROMPIÚ CORAZÚN, and beneath that, in a smaller font, Su Lucha Valiente. When Luisa returned, Dani asked for a translation.
“It says ‘He broke her heart.’” Luisa told her, “‘Su lucha valiente’ means ‘her brave struggle.’ That poor woman. She has such bad luck with men.”
“Poor Cassandra,” Dani said, “picking 999 bad men in a row. I mean, mathematically, what are the odds that that could possibly be true?”
She stopped when she saw the look on Luisa’s face—she couldn’t have been more hurt if Dani had told her her baby was ugly.
“I’m sorry,” Dani said, feeling like an idiot.
“That’s okay,” Luisa said. “I bet that’s the kind of thing you sometimes wish you could say to your therapy patients.”
Dani laughed. “Promise me that will be our little secret?”
The lights above the elevator indicated that someone was on the way up. She waited, hoping it was Tommy, though he didn’t know where she was and she had no reason to expect him. When the doors opened she saw Detective Casey, wearing a tan
windbreaker and a Boston Red Sox cap.
“You’re a brave man to wear that hat around here,” she said.
“If you’re brave enough to be seen with me,” he said, “we’re going up to the Gardener place in about an hour. I’ve got a locksmith meeting us there. What are you doing here, by the way?”
“I brought in a friend,” Dani said. “An expert, to consult on the Amos Kasden postmortem. Just in case there’s more where that came from.”
“More kids like Amos?” Casey said. “I certainly hope not. One was too many. Let me know if you learn anything. I’ll be in my office. You’ll be in the building?”
“Sure,” Dani said. “Do you mind if I bring Tommy?”
“He knew George, right? I mean, well enough to ID him, if it comes to that?”
“He did.”
“Yeah, bring him. And, Dani? If your friend figures anything out about Amos Kasden, I’d like to hear it.”
“You will.”
When she called Tommy’s cell, she was surprised that Carl answered.
He said Tommy was out in the chicken coop, getting eggs from the exotics he kept as a hobby. Dani told him about the warrant to get inside the Gardener house and asked him to have Tommy call her.
“My friend Quinn is going over the labs we got back on Amos Kasden,” Dani said. “Hopefully between that and the sample we got from whoever left it at Starbucks, we’ll know more soon.”
“What sample was that?”
“Are you getting forgetful in your senility?” Dani joked. “Anyway, I’ll let you know if we learn anything. If Quinn can’t figure it out, nobody can.”
“Where are you now?”
“At the DA’s, in Kisco. Can I ask you a question, Carl? And please don’t tell Tommy I asked. But does he ever talk to you about Cassandra Morton? Just guy-to-guy stuff?”
“Guy to guy?” Carl paused, but in the silence, Dani had her answer. A simple no would not have taken any thought. He coughed. “Excuse me. Not since it happened. Why?”
