by Elle Gray
He gets up, a frown upon his lips as he looks at us. Dr. Avila is about five-seven, with a slight build and thick, dark hair that’s graying at the temples, along with a neatly trimmed beard. He has a tawny complexion and hazel eyes behind round, frameless spectacles that seem to lend him a scholarly air . As we introduce ourselves, he shakes our hands, his touch light and delicate, rather than giving us a firm grip. It makes me notice how long and smooth his fingers are. A surgeon’s hands, I seem to remember their being called.
“Please, have a seat,” he gestures to his chairs.
“Thank you,” we both reply as we take our seats in front of his desk.
Dr. Avila leans forward, his hands folded together, his eyes intently focused on us. He looks uncertain, perhaps even a little nervous, which I think is understandable. It’s not every day you get visited in your office by a pair of FBI agents.
“So,” he says then clears his throat. “What can I do for you, Agents?”
“We need to talk to you about one of your students,” I start. “Ben Davis.”
His face immediately lights up, but then as the realization that we’re FBI agents dawns on him again, his expression darkens, and he frowns.
“May I ask what this is about?” he asks. “Has he done something? I mean, I know about his past—he told me all about it—but Ben is a wonderful person. Bright. Charismatic. Passionate. He is going to make a fantastic surgeon. He has a gift. I’m sure whatever you think he did, Ben couldn’t have done. He’s not that man anymore.”
“You two seem very close,” I note.
He nods. “I’m his faculty advisor. I’ve gotten to know him very well over the last year or so. I think the world of him. He’s a good kid.”
His words hit me like a punch to the gut. After having to watch Ben’s mother break down, I wasn’t expecting to have to watch his faculty advisor do it as well. But I can see by the look on his face that this news is going to hit Dr. Avila hard. And I wouldn’t tell him at all if I didn’t think he might have some bit of information that would be helpful. But the fact that he and Ben are as close as he says they are suggests to me that Ben would have confided in him. Perhaps something innocuous to him, but something that can help break the case open.
“Dr. Avila, I’m not sure how to say this, but Ben Davis was found murdered,” I tell him. “We’re looking into his death and—”
“Wh—what?” he gasps.
“He was murdered, Dr. Avila,” I repeat.
Dr. Avila slumps back in his chair and seems to physically deflate right in front of us. His face sags, his eyes go glassy, and tears spill from the corners of his eyes. He sniffs loudly and sits up, shaking his head.
“This can’t be. There must be some mistake,” he says. “Ben would never do anything that would lead to—that. He was a good man. He had a good heart.”
“Even people with the purest of hearts get themselves into bad positions, Dr. Avila,” Astra says. “That old saying is true—sometimes bad things happen to good people.”
He forces his hands, which had been balled into fists, back open, and lays them flat on the top of his desk. I can see them trembling, though, and watch as a tear splashes on the blotter. He’s still shaking his head, trying to deny the truth of what we’re telling him.
“Do you know if Ben was having trouble with anybody on campus, Dr. Avila?” I ask. “Did he mention any altercations or—”
“No, never. Nothing like that,” he replies. “Ben is—was—very well thought of by faculty and other students alike.”
And the myth of Saint Ben grows. I know that people often say a victim was beloved by everybody. But that’s never true. There are always going to be some people out there who just don’t like a person, for whatever reason. Maybe it’s jealousy for how much that person is liked by others. Maybe it’s for some weird reason a perpetrator’s got bubbling in his head that would make sense to nobody else. Maybe it’s even for no reason at all. But the fact of the matter is that nobody is ever beloved by everybody. There’s always an enemy somewhere. The only question is whether that enemy is violent enough to actually cause harm.
“Dr. Avila, did Ben owe money to anybody? Did he have a problem with gambling, perhaps?” Astra offers.
“Ben? No, of course not. He wasn’t a gambler,” he replies.
“How about drugs?” I ask. “I mean, given his background, was it possible he was dealing or perhaps using and put himself in a financial hole—”
“That’s preposterous,” Avila snaps. “He was clean. Even when he was running around with that street gang, he never used.”
“And how do you know that?” I counter. “Because he told you?”
Avila sighs and nods, apparently conceding the point. When somebody reveals his background, even if he tells you the lowdown, shady things he did, he still might not have been one hundred percent truthful. Most people will always hold something back. Something they’re too ashamed to admit, or something they just want to keep to themselves. It’s a universal truth that nobody is ever fully and completely open about everything in his or her life, no matter how much you might want to believe the person has told it all.
“I’ll only say then, that in the entire time I’ve known Ben, I’ve never seen evidence of drug use. I never once suspected he was high or strung out,” Avila admits. “And I’m certain I would know if he was using. I would have been able to tell. I’m a doctor, after all.”
“Fair enough,” I acknowledge.
“So, no beefs with other students, no drugs, and no gambling debt,” Astra recounts.
Avila shakes his head. “No.”
“Is there anything you can tell us you think might be relevant? Any change in behavior. New friends. Anything like that?” I ask.
“No, Ben kept to himself mostly. I mean, he had friends in the lab, but I don’t believe those friendships extended beyond the lab,” he shrugs. “Ben was focused and driven. He was serious about his goal and didn’t have time for extracurricular relationships.”
This has been highly unproductive, unfortunately. He hasn’t been able to give us a single thing that could lead us to another bread crumb on the trail. But that often happens when you’re being thorough—you tend to run into a lot of blind alleys and dry holes.
“Okay, well, thank you for your time, Dr. Avila,” I say as I get to my feet. “If we have any other questions, we’ll give you a call.”
“Please find who did this. Find them and punish them,” he says with steel in his voice.
“We’re doing our best,” I reply.
Twenty-One
Macpherson Hall Medical Labs, Washington State University; Pullman, WA
“Do me a favor and shoot Rick a text,” I tell Astra as I hold the door open for her. “Ask him to do a deep dive into Ben’s financials. Your question about a possible gambling addiction was a really good one. I think we need to see if there’s a money trail.”
“What makes you think I didn’t ask him to do that already?” she chirps.
I arch an eyebrow at her. “Did you?”
“I was just about to.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. “Still, good idea. Good question.”
“I honestly doubt it’s going to come to much. It was a shot in the dark,” she tells me. “But you never know. And to quote you, that’s why we do our due diligence.”
We share a laugh as we walk down a flight of steps that takes us down into the basement of the science building. We pass different labs for prosthetics, robotics, and biology. They’re all filled with students working on a hundred different projects. If what Avila said about Ben’s friendships not extending outside the lab is true, I doubt we’re going to find much here. Just another dry hole, but that’s the job. We’re paid to run down as many dead-end corridors as are necessary until we find the one that leads us to the truth.
It takes us a minute and several very literal dead-end corridors until we find the anatomy lab Ben most often worked in. The doors slide open w
ith a pneumatic hiss, and all eyes turn up to us as we step inside. There are half a dozen students in white lab coats huddled around various machines and implements that look absolutely alien to me. I couldn’t tell you what ninety-nine percent of the equipment in here does.
“Can I help you?”
I turn around and find a tall, thin Asian man approaching us. He’s lean and has straight dark hair that falls to his shoulders, dark almond-shaped eyes, warm, fawn-colored skin, and a little feather duster of a mustache on his upper lip. Of course, his apparent inability to grow a full and thick mustache makes him look more like a little kid who’s desperately trying to look older.
Astra and I badge him, stopping him in his tracks. He suddenly looks nervous, caught in that moment between fight or flight.
“You alright?” I ask.
“Fine. I’m good,” he says. “I just haven’t dealt with the police that much in my life, let alone the Feds.”
At the mention of the word “Feds,” everybody seems to stop moving all at once—as though it was choreographed. All eyes turn back to us and there is a palpable tension in the room. I look at each studen in turn, eyeballing them closely as I search their eyes for signs of something—guilt, maybe? I’m not sure. But this crowd looks as if their worst crime is not eating their vegetables with dinner. I refuse to tease them or call them nerds, though, since it’s entirely possible that at some point in the future, my life will very literally be in their hands. And I’d hate to think they’d remember a snide remark from twenty years earlier.
“I’m guessing nobody in here has ever had to talk to the Feds, huh?” Astra asks.
They all shake their heads in unison, but nobody speaks. It’s so ridiculous I want to laugh, but I manage to it in. Just barely. As long as I have their full attention, though, I should probably take advantage of it.
“How many of you were friends with Ben Davis?” I ask.
“Were?” a blonde in the corner pipes up. “You said ‘were’. Is he dead or something?”
A hush falls over the lab and everybody exchanges glances as the weight of the moment settles down over everybody. They’re somber but not sad, telling me that Avila was right—Ben really wasn’t close to anybody here. Which will make trying to get any useful information out of them an exercise in futility.
“I’m not sure any of us are really friends with him. Lab buddies maybe, but that’s about it,” the tall Asian guy offers. “I’m Monty, and I guess you could say I’m the closest to him. We worked together in here a lot.”
“Alright, well, is there someplace we can talk, Monty?” I ask.
“Uhh, sure. Yeah.”
“Astra, can you go talk to the others? See if they have anything that can help?”
“You got it,” Astra nods.
I follow Monty over to a long, rectangular contraption. It’s a stainless steel box of some sort set atop a pedestal, bringing it up about waist high. It’s hollow in the middle with a reflective black plate at the bottom of the box and the sides are studded with dozens of—sensors, I guess. Safe to say, I’ve never seen anything like it before.
“What is this?” I ask.
Monty smiles. “This is our 3-D operating table.”
“A 3-D operating table?”
He nods excitedly, the smile on his face stretched from ear to ear, as if he’s thrilled to be showing off his new toy to somebody.
“Wow. I guess you and Ben really weren’t friends, were you?” I ask, a bit jolted by his lack of concern for our victim.
He shrugs. “I mean, it’s a bummer. He was a cool guy. But how can you be sad if you didn’t really know somebody? If I broke down and was all boo-hoo about it, I’d be a hypocritical, disingenuous douche,” he replies. “I mean, I feel bad for the guy. But he didn’t really occupy an important space in my life. He came in, we worked in here, said goodbye, and that was it.”
“Huh,” I say. “Well, that was refreshingly honest, I suppose.”
He chuckles. “That’s me. Refreshingly honest,” he says. “Now watch.”
He goes to the head of the table where there’s a computer set up attached to the table. He punches in a series of keys, and a moment later, the inside of the box flares to life and I find myself staring at a holographic body. He picks up an instrument that looks like a scalpel and comes to stand next to me at the side of the table, grinning like a fiend.
“Check this out,” he says.
He leans down and slides his pseudo-scalpel along the torso of the body, and I watch with morbid fascination. It really looks as though he’s making an incision—minus the streams of blood, of course. I’m glad the designer of this contraption opted to not go for hyperrealism.
“This gadget allows us to practice our incisions and even delicate surgeries on a hologram. No more having to go out and dig up fresh corpses for the lab.” He beams, but then seems to recall that he’s talking to a Fed and quickly adds, “I was kidding. I’ve never had to dig up a corpse. People donate their bodies all the time. It’s just that this thing is more practical now.”
I give him a small smile. “Don’t worry. Grave robbing isn’t really within my purview, anyway.”
Astra walks into the side room we’re in and peers down at the holographic body inside the box with a strange look on her face.
“What in the hell is that?” she asks.
“It keeps them from having to go dig up fresh corpses,” I say.
“Hey, want to see me remove a malignant tumor from a lung?” Monty offers.
“Oh, that’s so tempting,” Astra says. “But I’ll pass.”
I laugh, but Monty looks kind of bummed. Clearly, he enjoys having an audience who will “ooh” and “aah” while he works. With that kind of narcissism and need to have his ego stroked, he’s going to make a great surgeon.
“Alright,” I say and hand him one of my cards. “If you think of anything you think might help, give us a call.”
“Will do,” he nods as he tucks my card into his pocket. “And for what it’s worth, I am sorry to hear about Ben. As I said, he was a cool guy.”
I purse my lips and nod then follow Astra out of the lab, waiting until we’re out of Macpherson Hall before I speak.
“Get anything from them?” I ask.
“Squat,” she replies. “Nobody knew him other than to say hi, and they didn’t have a feeling about him one way or the other. You?”
“Same. Monty had nothing to offer other than that he’s bummed Ben’s gone, but not really all that sad about it,” I say.
“Those are some strange kids.”
“I guess you have to be kind of detached from humanity to do the work they want to do,” I say. “I mean, it takes a certain kind of person to go rooting around in somebody’s insides, I think. I imagine you have to be kind of—cold.”
“Huh. Funny,” she says. “That’s what they say about cops and FBI agents, too.”
“Nobody says that about cops and FBI agents.”
“They really do,” she tells me with a grin. “You need to read more.”
“Yeah, sorry, Buzzfeed and Reddit aren’t really high on my reading list.”
“What, you don’t want to know which “The Office” character you are, based on your taste in desserts? You’re missing out.”
“I think I’ll survive,” I say. “Come on, let’s hit the next stop on this magical mystery tour.”
Twenty-Two
Garden Village Apartments; Pullman, WA
Using the key his mother gave us, we let ourselves into Ben’s apartment and walk around in silence for a few minutes. The air inside is heavy, with the fading trace scents of cleaning solutions and a jar of dried-out potpourri that’s sitting on the bar that separates the small kitchen from the living room. Ben’s place isn’t big, and it’s sparsely furnished—couch, flatscreen TV sitting on top of a stand, a bookcase, and a coffee table. None of the furniture matches, but like his mom’s house, it feels comfortable. Well lived in.
“
I will say, he knew how to keep an apartment,” Astra observes as she snaps on a pair of gloves. “Not a speck of dust to be found anywhere.”
“I think we know exactly who he got that from,” I remark as I put on my own gloves, then walk into the kitchen.
Astra remains in the living room, going over to the coffee table to look at the closed laptop sitting there alone. She opens the machine, boots it up, then watches as a log-on screen materializes. “Damn,” she says softly. “I’m not surprised it’s password protected, but I’d hoped we might get lucky.”
“Not in the cards,” I say. “We’ll just have to take it in.” Turning to my search area, I open up his refrigerator and notice that the plastic containers that hold his leftovers are all marked with dates and contents. Everything is organic and healthy. No empty pizza boxes or Chinese food cartons anywhere. I close the refrigerator and open the pantry door. Everything is perfectly lined up and obsessively organized—each can has a sticker with the expiration date clearly marked. The man’s body was very clearly his temple.
I wander from the kitchen and into his bedroom, gently pushing the door open, and see that it’s as clean as everything else in the house. His bed is neatly made, the hamper is half-filled with clothes, and his drawers are all as well organized as his pantry—everything is folded with military precision and the stacks of clothes are spaced apart equally inside the drawers. Same with his closet—all his hangers are one uniform color, all of them spaced equally apart. He obviously had a touch of OCD to his personality.
I don’t know exactly what it is we’re looking for in here. I doubt we’re going to find a signed confession from the killer. We’re more than a week into this now, and not only do we not have a viable suspect, but we also don’t even have a real direction to steer the investigation. I’m starting to get impatient, but I have to remind myself to slow down. It’s just as important to get to know the victim as it is to profile the killer. That’s just the basics. I’m just frustrated that I took us pretty far afield by pouring so much of our energy into the idea that we were looking at a gang hit or a drug deal gone wrong .
