by Joe McKinney
“Would you please sit down, Dr. Myers,” I said.
I put my hand on his shoulder and tried to guide him to a chair, but he wouldn’t let me.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Thank you.”
After a moment he sat down and took a few deep breaths until the color started to come back to his face.
He was thirty-three, English, effeminate to the point of being prissy, with a black mop of curly hair that spilled over the top of his collar. His uninjured eye was wide open all the time. His other eye was a slit between two bruised and puffy lids, the skin around them the color of damaged fruit. The lab coat and surgical mask he was wearing didn’t hide his weak build, and I tried to imagine him standing up to Kenneth Wade, who was about as SWAT team tough as they get. It figured it probably wasn’t much of a fight.
“We understand there was some trouble last night,” I said. “You mind telling me about it?”
“Trouble,” he said, and made a disgusted noise. “Do you see this?” He pointed at his eye.
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes, I’d call this trouble. This is Officer Wade’s handiwork.”
“I’ve heard that,” I said. “Why?”
“Because he’s a psychopath.”
I waited.
He looked at me, then at Chunk, and made a harumph sound. “Your Officer Wade has been trying to get into Emma’s knickers from the very first day he was assigned here. Fortunately, Emma’s a smart woman and she recognized what kind of man he was from the very beginning. When he tried to get her to leave our little party with him last night, she told him no. There was an argument, and she appealed to me for help. Luckily, I was there to tell him to stop behaving like an ass. You see, Emma and I have always been rather close. Officer Wade knew that of course. Everyone around here does. My only guess is he felt threatened. He did this, and then he left.”
As I listened to the lilt of his English accent--upper class English by the sound of it--I thought to myself that this was the kind of man my husband Billy referred to as Nancy boy, meaning a wimp. Me personally, I could never be attracted to a pansy man like Myers, and I couldn’t imagine Emma Bradley finding anything in him either.
“Was this the first time Wade ever tried to horn in on your friendship with Dr. Bradley?” I asked.
“Horn in?” he said, chin in the air. I could tell he was thinking about all the ways he hated that phrase, how low class he thought it was. “Yes, if I understand your meaning correctly, last night was the first occasion. She told me he has made several inappropriate overtures to her in the past few weeks, but each time she told him she was not interested and the matter was dropped.”
“She told you that? That the matter was dropped?”
“Those are my words, detective. Not hers. Emma Bradley, for all her many wonderful qualities, was still an American woman. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington. Her words for it were a bit rangier. She told him to”--there was a pause while he savored the bittersweet humor of the memory--“to keep it in his pants.”
I tried not to smile.
“Do you know why she chose to go with him this morning?”
“I don’t pretend to know her mind completely, Detective. I can only tell you that Emma was very self-assured. I am sure that she felt Mr. Kenneth Wade was someone she could handle easily enough.” He looked away for a second, and I thought, Oh Jesus, wimp boy is gonna cry. The tears didn’t come, but when he went on, there was a hitch in his voice. “My God, but if I had only known he would prove to be a killer.”
“We don’t know that he is Dr. Bradley’s killer yet,” I pointed out.
His face wrinkled into an expression somewhere between indignation and surprise. “Not her killer?” he said. “You must be joking. I would have thought that was patently obvious. Or is this going to be yet another example of the San Antonio corruption we’ve already seen so much of?”
I ignored that. “We haven’t spoken to Officer Wade yet,” I said. “We’ll know more when we do, but for now, we’re gonna concern ourselves with the twenty-four hours prior to her death. The most critical points for our investigation will have happened during that time.”
Myers rolled his eyes, passive-aggressive style. He didn’t believe a word I was saying.
A printer in a little cubby on the wall to my left started spitting out papers and a lab tech came into the door without knocking. She looked at Dr. Myers, then at Chunk and me and her eyes got very big.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s fine, Angie,” he said. He rose from his chair and took her document off the printer and handed it to her. “Give us a moment, love,” he said.
She nodded and he closed the door behind her.
“We have small quarters here,” he said by way of apology, and went back to his chair.
“We could use some help generating that timeline, Dr. Myers.”
He nodded.
I said, “We know about the fight. What time did that happen?”
“You mean when I was assaulted by one of your officers?”
“Yes sir. What time was that?”
“Two o’clock. Maybe two-thirty.”
“And what time did this party get started?” I asked.
“Ten-thirty. We left from here at perhaps ten-fifteen, after we shut down the lab.”
“The lounge is in the main building, correct?”
“Yes,” he said, and crossed his arms over his chest. In the interviewing schools they sent us to when Chunk and I became detectives we learned little things like crossing your arms across your chest or where you point your eyes are indications of defensiveness or lying, but with Myers I got the feeling he was simply holding himself, trying to keep his composure. “Second floor, east side of the building.”
“Was Officer Wade with you when you left here for the party?”
“He showed up later. Maybe twenty till eleven.”
“And afterwards? After Officer Wade hit you? What happened then?”
“After he mauled me he stood in the middle of the room, yelling obscenities at everyone there. He was a beast. He dared us to fight him. When no one did, he stormed out. We didn’t see him again until this morning.”
“We didn’t?”
“I didn’t.”
“And after the fight?” I asked. “Where did you go?”
“I walked Dr. Bradley back to her trailer. When she was safely inside, I returned to my trailer.”
“Do you know if maybe Officer Wade tried to contact her again last night?”
“I don’t know if he did or not. Her lights went out at three-fifty or so. As did my own.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Chunk rocking back and forth in his chair and I could tell we were thinking the same thing. Little Mr. Lonelyhearts sure keeps close tabs on his girlfriend. Little things to make you go hmmm.
“How about this morning?” I asked. “Where did you go after Dr. Bradley and Officer Wade left here?”
He cocked his head at an odd angle, like I’d just started speaking Hebrew or something. And then he said, “Oh. Detective, are you suggesting that I...”
“I’m asking a question, Dr. Myers. Nothing more. I’m going to ask the same question to every member of the staff.”
“Oh. Well, I was here. Till around ten-thirty. From here I went down to the loading docks, where I collected lung tissue specimens for our experiments.”
“Okay,” I told him. “And there are others who can vouch for you?”
“For someone who is just asking questions, Detective, you are doing a very good job of making me feel like a suspect.”
“Yes or no, doctor. Did anybody else see you on the loading docks, collecting lung tissue specimens?”
I had insulted him, and it flustered him. His one good eye took on a pouty look and he turned slightly toward a row of files along one wall. Outside I could hear a truck backing up, and a man yelling orders at somebody.
“Almost certainly,” he said. “I met
Dr. Herrera on the floor of the main building. We had a conversation with Dr. Laurent, and Dr. Walter Cole from the Metropolitan Health District, and probably four or five members of Dr. Herrera’s staff. One of his nurses, in fact, a Ms. Susan Hinton, helped us take tissue specimens.”
“Okay. How about other members of the WHO staff? Were any of them out in the field today?”
“I’m sure they were,” he said, and then waved his hand in the air like he wanted to put me back on the right track. “Listen, Detective, if you want to know Emma Bradley’s mind, you should really read her research journal.”
“Her journal?”
“Yes. A red hardcover book. She wrote in it constantly. Emma always took exacting notes on her field research. It would contain a minute by minute diary of her work.”
“That might be very helpful, Dr. Myers. Do you happen to know where she kept her journal?”
“She would have had it with her,” he said. “She always had it with her.”
Chapter 5
Chunk and I spent another hour interviewing members of the WHO staff, then, after getting a list of Dr. Herrera’s staff, finally made it back to our car. We left Arsenal and drove to the Research Protection Unit’s office, hoping to contact Officer Wade.
I was driving. Chunk was on the phone with Tom Treanor, the lieutenant in charge of the Research Protection Unit and Officer Wade’s direct supervisor. I heard Chunk say, “Yes, sir. Okay. Ten minutes maybe. Okay, sir. See you then.”
He hung up.
“Well?”
“Treanor said he hasn’t heard from Wade since this morning. Said he hasn’t checked in all day.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“Treanor didn’t seem concerned about it. He sounded more upset that the folks at WHO were bad-mouthing one of his boys than anything else.”
Outside, on the curb, I saw small groups of men standing around, talking, looking angry. They watched us drive by.
“What do you think?” I asked Chunk.
“About Wade?”
“Yeah.”
“It doesn’t look good for him, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah, but how likely is that?” I said. “I mean, really. The guy’s a cop. Why feed the body back into the system, knowing how easy it would be to trace back to him?”
“He might’ve just lost his mind,” Chunk said. “It happens. Even to cops. And I’d believe it of Wade before most.”
“Really? Why?”
“Because I’ve seen him lose it before.”
“When?” I asked.
“When he was a cadet. Back when I was helping out the PT staff with baton training at the Academy.”
Back before we got promoted, Chunk used to teach tactics to the cadets. They used him on account of his size and reputation. What they did, they put him in this red padded suit of armor and let him attack the cadets while they fought him off with their batons, only the batons they were given were padded too, so they were practically useless.
“When it was Wade’s turn,” Chunk said, “I went after him. He stroked my legs a couple of times, like he’s supposed to, but I could tell he had something the others didn’t, and I want to see what that was. You know how some people are. You can tell just by looking in their eyes that they’re fighters. So I slapped him in the ear a couple of times.”
“You provoked him.”
“Sure. Anyway, he got pissed. He threw the baton down and charged me. Laid me out with the best damn tackle I’ve ever seen.”
“He laid you out?”
“It gets better,” Chunk said. “I’ve got all that padding on, so when he knocked me on my back, I couldn’t get up. He got on top of me and started throwing punches. Landed a couple of good shots to my jaw before the PT staff managed to pull him off me. I was wearing one of those catcher’s mask things, too. He was bare-fisted, and he still did more damage to my face than my mask did to his hand.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, he’s a nut.”
“Still, I can’t believe he laid you out.”
“Well, it ain’t the size of the dog in the fight.”
“It’s the size of the fight in the dog,” I said. “Yeah, I know. But still...”
It was getting dark out beyond our headlights. We took Bandera Road south to Culebra, then Culebra over to 24 Street, where we entered some rough neighborhoods. Most of the houses and businesses we passed looked deserted, though I could see candlelight in a few of the windows. Power shortages had made it necessary to black out the power grid to most parts of the city after dark.
All through that August, when Chunk and I drove through town, we saw more and more people in the streets. There was a mood you could see in their faces that was unsettling. It was desperation, and frustration, and the terrible, aimless need to smash something all rolled into one.
It made me afraid, even with my Glock on my hip.
“Is that smoke?” Chunk said.
He was looking off to our right, past of a stand of pecan trees, and I could see wisps of curling smoke reeking through the trees and between the houses.
I could smell it, too. It smelled like burning rubber, foul and noxious.
“Can you tell where it’s coming from?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
But we didn’t have far to go before we found the source. We turned the corner onto Dartmouth and I skidded the car to a stop.
There, in front of us, blocking the street, was a wall of burning tires.
“What the...”
I looked where Chunk was looking and saw a group of men in their early twenties dancing like Indians on the far side of the bonfire.
“What are they doing?” he asked.
“Beats me. Looks like--”
There was an explosion of breaking glass in my left ear as a rock hit my window. The window shattered, but the tint kept it from exploding all over me. I was stunned for a moment, the explosion echoing in my head. I looked at the busted window, but couldn’t see anything. It was an opaque spider web of cracks.
I glanced out the windshield and saw a huge group of men running at us. They were shouting, waving their fists in the air. Some carried sticks, others rocks.
More rocks beat against the car.
“Go!” Chunk shouted. “Go, go, go!”
I put the car in reverse and mashed down on the gas. The tires barked against the pavement, stuttering as they tried to grab the road.
We glanced off a parked car with a sickening grind of warping metal but didn’t slow down. Chunk wouldn’t let me stop. He was hollering the whole time, “Go, go, go!” and somewhere in the confusion of it all my training kicked in.
Without letting up on the gas I spun the wheel hard one half turn with my left hand while with my right I dropped the gear selector into Drive. No brakes, all gas.
The car spun one hundred and eighty degrees, rocking violently over to the passenger side as it landed facing back the way we’d come. The back tires fishtailed, but held the road under constant acceleration, and then we were speeding down the road.
I looked over at Chunk. He was breathing hard. He turned and looked over his shoulder at a group of at least fifty men chasing after us on foot, some of them still launching rocks.
“Don’t slow down,” he said.
I didn’t.
A moment later Chunk slid down into the seat and let out a long breath. “That was some good driving, Lily.”
“Thanks,” I said, but I was still holding the wheel so tightly my knuckles had turned bone white.
Chapter 6
“Okay,” I said to Chunk. “How about this? A hang glider. It’s quiet, and it can travel a long distance. You could get over the wall and well beyond it without drawing any attention from the ground troops.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But you’d still have to deal with the helicopters. They’ve got heat sensing equipment on those things. They’d pick you off in the air before you ever got anywhere near the wall.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“Besides, where are you gonna find a hang glider?”
“True,” I said. “Okay, how about this? We dig a tunnel under the wall...”
# # #
Lieutenant Tom Treanor had short blond hair that was going gray at the temples, but he still looked young for a lieutenant. He was thirty-six years old, and at five-eight, not a tall man, but he was built solidly. There was a picture on the wall behind his desk of him as a younger man, wearing a Marine officer’s uniform, and I got the feeling not much had changed since those days. Not much except the uniform. He still had the same hard look in his eyes.
And he didn’t waste time on small talk, either. He hadn’t even finished shaking our hands before he started firing off questions. We filled him in on where we were at, the dead girl, the doctors on the WHO staff, the fight in the doctor’s lounge.
“And you’re buying that shit?” Treanor said. “You really think Ken Wade has gone off and done something as stupid as kill the person he was assigned to protect?”
Chunk handled it with Treanor. “We’re following down the leads as we get them, Lieutenant. We’re not saying nothing against Wade. All we want to do is talk to him about it.”
“Yeah, well, he hasn’t come back yet.”
“Don’t you think that’s a pretty good indicator something’s wrong?” I said. “We already know Dr. Bradley’s dead. If Wade didn’t kill her, then it’s probably pretty likely that something’s happened to him too. Wouldn’t you agree with that?”
He just stared at me. Even before H2N2 started dropping people like flies, the Department was small enough you got to know just about everybody after being on the job a few years. I first met Treanor back when he was a junior Homicide detective. I’d gotten a call for a man barricaded in his room with his father’s vintage World War I rifle. When I got there, the front door was open and the father was crying against his son’s locked door, slapping it over and over again with the flat of his palm, begging his boy to open it.
