The Camelot Gambit

by A. J. Scudiere

  Then, she asked something else. "When we were in the car with Darcelle, you said you could smell her fear, that she was really afraid. Do you smell any of that on him?"

  Donovan only shrugged. "If he'd been brought to me fresh, maybe."

  Shit, she thought again. Rychenkov’s body had come here. He'd gone to the medical examiner. His clothes had been removed, and he'd been laid out on the table. His body had been cut open and cleaned, and it was only after the ME’s office had worked it up that Donovan had seen any of it. Eleri tilted her head. "What about his clothes?"

  "Good call." They wouldn't have been laundered. They would have been saved as evidence. It took the two of them a good thirty minutes to get their hands on the clothing the man had been wearing. They pulled the items out, and Donovan took a sniff. "Shit," he muttered, and Eleri's heart sank.

  "No fear?"

  "A little," he said, "but not overwhelming, not like Darcelle was in the car when she was panicked. Not like the fear somebody has when their life is threatened."

  Eleri swore to herself under her breath. Eventually, after putting the evidence back in the bag and restoring it and the body, she said to Donovan, "If we can't figure out how, then we have to figure out why."

  "I know, and I want to get into the house and examine the crime scene."

  "But," Eleri picked up the sentence, "his wife still lives there."

  "Then I guess we're going to have to break in," he said.

  4

  When they finished—or effectively gave up—at the CDC, Donovan drove Eleri around the streets of Curie. Though it was in fact a sightseeing event to help her become familiar with the place, they had also agreed that they would drive by the home of Rychenkov and his wife, Johanna Schmidt, in an attempt to see how they might possibly break in and check out the scene. Without being able to flip open an FBI badge and demand a way in, illegal entry might be their only option to get what they needed.

  Donovan watched as Eleri's head swiveled one way then another as they drove past the various points of interest in town. Though the types of places were normal—grocery stores, restaurants, grid-style streets—nothing about Curie was average. Donovan had already survived these eye-opening moments.

  He pointed to the street sign at an intersection and waited for her reaction. Instead of using letters and numbers for the main grid, Bennett had laid the town out with famous scientists running north/ south and the cross streets sporting periodic table elements.

  While they sat at the light, Eleri read their green intersection signs and commented to Donovan, "We're at the corner of Tesla and Mercury."

  Donovan nodded with a grin. The standard green street sign didn't even say the word “Mercury,” it just had the two letters “Hg.” It was assumed that everyone in this town would know what that meant.

  "Are the elements in order?" she asked.

  "Nope," Donovan answered. "They go out from the middle. Carbon runs through the center of town. It seems to be their main street.”

  “That actually makes sense,” Eleri commented, though she was still looking out the window like a newbie tourist.

  “From there, the main section of town uses the first several rows of the periodic table, but after that, it appears they picked favorites. They don’t seem to have a hundred plus east-west streets."

  She was shaking her head, but still hadn’t looked at him. There was too much to take in.

  "Check this." He pointed as he took a soft left onto a cross street that ran at an angle through the grid.

  "Copernicus Way?" she asked.

  "Absolutely. One of the locals told me it was because Copernicus was always at odds with everything else. So they made him the slant street."

  He took that street for a while, angling back toward the middle of Curie. They needed to head to the other side of town anyway, where Rychenkov and Schmitt had their home. As they approached the middle of town, Donovan went around the traffic circle that marked the center several times, so Eleri could scope it out. She had to lean over to see out his window. Copernicus Circle had a central sculpture that rose out of a well-tended garden bed. Rotating slowly around a thin central pillar with a huge sun model on the top, all eight planets and Pluto circled with traffic.

  "Oh my god," she commented. "They got the moons around Jupiter and the rings on Saturn."

  "And," Donovan commented, "having looked at this several times, I'm pretty confident that—though it moves quickly—the planets move in proportional rotation to each other."

  "Of course they do. We’re in Curie, where there’s an IQ requirement to become a resident," Eleri said even as she blinked at the sculpture. It was a work of art.

  "Of course they do," he replied with a smile before taking his exit and continuing on Copernicus Way to the other side. He pointed to things they passed. To one side was the small grocery store that he liked, not quite a standard big box store—though he hadn’t found any of those here. He didn’t know if it was because the place wasn’t big enough or if the residents were too green or too conscientious to let a behemoth in, but if he wanted a WalMart, he’d have to go into Lincoln.

  "But," he said, "when I went into that grocery—Food for Thought—the people talked to me. The workers were polite enough, maybe a bit standoffish—but the other shoppers tried to say hello. So, I figured that might be a good place if you're going to go try to casually meet people and get any ideas what the town is really like."

  “It’s weird,” she volunteered right away. “And super nerdy.” But she nodded and waited until he pointed out the next sight.

  "If you go down Boron Street all the way to the end,…"—he heard her she snicker again at the use of elements for cross streets, but continued—"No, it gets better. There's an entire Hobbit neighborhood."

  "What? Take me there. Take me there now!" Eleri practically clapped her hands and bounced in her seat. For a moment, Donovan thought she might not believe him, but then he realized the woman who thought a grocery called “Food for Thought” was nerdy was disturbingly excited about a neighborhood of Hobbit houses. Though they were supposed to be solving a case, the town wasn’t huge enough to get them too far off track, and part of their job was to learn their way around. So he took the turn and headed straight down Boron.

  They passed a small theater that had only two screens, but at least was showing current movies. There was a bowling alley with arcade games, and he commented as they passed it. "If you go over to Carbon Street,” he said, pointing in the general direction, "there's a really great restaurant. It's called The Atomic Diner. They have wonderful food, and there's a coffee shop next door."

  "Excellent."

  "It's called The Up N Atom."

  "A-T-O-M?" she asked.

  "Of course," they replied together.

  "I'll take you by for coffee on the way back so you can see exactly where that is and maybe even go hang out. You can get online and pretend you're applying for jobs tomorrow, to get to know some other people. It's in a pretty different location from the grocery store, and I'm hoping we'll get different crowds there."

  She nodded, apparently once again having been reminded that they actually had a case. They drove through the Hobbit neighborhood, appropriately named The Shire, both of them looking out the window like kids. Though he'd seen it before, he was still in awe at the little houses with the round doors and windows, all mounded under the dirt. Though he could have neighborhood-gawked for much longer, he pulled them out of the subdivision and took a left-hand turn. “I think LeDonRic’s girlfriend Maggie lives in there.”

  “Are all the houses in subdivisions?” Eleri was frowning but she hadn’t looked away from the small homes.

  “Everything I’ve seen is. Remember, this isn’t an organically grown town with settlers picking the best spot to farm the land and open a saloon. This town was designed from scratch. Apparently, even most of the people who specialize in that only do growth plans for existing cities or design hypothetical places. Benne
tt bought up the land through his own funding and grants and laid it all out. So I think, yes, all the homes are in named subdivisions. At least they didn’t build to the trends of today.”

  “True,” she commented absently because she was looking at a veterinarian’s office they passed. Long in Tooth and Claw. It made Donovan wonder what they would do with him. “I guess a Hobbit home will never be ‘so seventies’ or such.”

  He headed for the Schmitt home where Rychenkov had lived. "This is our problem," he said pointing into the next subdivision.

  "C’thulhu Heights?" she asked. "Our problem is in a place called C’thulhu Heights?"

  "I told you, Eleri, it is a town for smart people, and Bennett did his research. He had all these things on deck before he laid the asphalt on Carbon Street. He had people lined up to live here five years before the town was built. They passed their IQ tests and paid their down payments, and apparently, they voted this stuff in. He named it Curie, but the town legend. . ."

  "There's a town legend? Of C’thulhu? The town is only ten years old!" she protested.

  "No, there's a legend like a map’s key to the town. It’s posted downtown, if you go into the library."

  "Holy shit," she said.

  "I know, but the people voted on the Shire, and Pythagoras Point."

  "And C’thulhu Heights," she added.

  "Exactly. Here's the problem with C’thulhu Heights: The houses are all stone."

  As he drove into the neighborhood, she looked. Unfortunately, it was a neighborhood much like theirs. The houses on adjoining streets had relatively small yards separated by fences. They were made of stone that bounced sound and showed off intruders. "Fuck," she said.

  "Exactly. I've been trying to figure out how to get into the house so that we can check out the crime scene." Basically, they were driving around the neighborhood and casing the place like criminals while waving like new friends to the people they saw.

  "Do you know anyone who lives adjacent to the house?" she asked.

  "Unfortunately, not close enough—not anyone that I'm supposed to know, anyway. I mean, I have a couple files."

  "So no one we can stop and talk to, no one's house we can go into, get a lay of the land?"

  He shook his head. It sucked. He'd thought the same things. It seemed, after working a handful of cases together, they were starting to think alike. He wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not, but it wasn't anything he could fix right now, and this case was on deck. "If we go in at night, she'll be there. As best I can tell without looking like a bona fide stalker, she's at home every night, in bed."

  "So we need to get in during the day," Eleri said.

  "Exactly."

  "Is she at work, or is she at home on leave?"

  "I don't even know. She was at home one time I came by, and I'm trying to get a bead on her, but there's only Wade here helping us. Westerfield couldn't bring in a whole crew. Wade arrived the day before I did, and Westerfield managed to install him in a house in this neighborhood, so that helps us. But the only house that was available for him was four streets over."

  "Too far," Eleri commented.

  "I know." Donovan shrugged. "And with the fences the way they are, we can't climb over them, because we'd have to go through another house to get into their backyard to climb over it. Which leaves us clearly sneaking through someone’s yard."

  Eleri had seen the aerial of the plot, Donovan knew. There was no real alternate way into the house. They would most likely have to go through the front door.

  They took a turn and drove around the neighborhood, eventually coming up to the door of Wade's house, although Donovan didn't stop or slow down. They couldn't act as though they knew Wade—not unless something changed on their cover. Wade was here as Dr. Wade Duncan and was teaching one class a day at the high school. Westerfield had worked with Bennett to install Wade in a class that it was hoped would give him access to the parents most likely on the suspect list. It was a long shot, but cover was necessary.

  "So the trick," Eleri told him as she finally turned and faced him, "is that we have to get her to let us in."

  5

  Eleri was up the next morning and on the job, though the job itself was odd. Her first task was heading out to the sidewalk as though she were checking the mail, to make herself visible to her neighbors. She’d aimed for an optimal time to run into someone. Though she could have gone through the garage to get to her car, she headed down the front walk, grabbed the two pieces of junk mail, and slowly meandered up the flagstone walkway.

  She saw a woman who must be Maggie at the next house, knocking on the neighbor's door. Eleri waved, and the woman waved back. Eleri tried to look as though she didn’t already have a dossier on as many townspeople as she did. It was hard keeping straight what she was allowed to know and what she wasn’t.

  "Hi. Are you new?" The woman had stopped knocking and was calling out to her.

  "Yes. My name's Eleri." She paused for a moment as she forgot what her last name was supposed to be. Quickly, it came back to her that it was “Miller,” but that had been a stupid gaffe. Luckily, she left it at “Eleri” and it didn’t seem out of place. She waited until the other woman offered up, "I'm Maggie."

  "Oh, you're the one who made us that amazing apple pie, with the fractal design on the top." She couldn't help but grin and was grateful that her undercover job mostly allowed her to be herself—with the exception of trying to remember that her last name was now Miller.

  "Oh, I'm glad you liked it," Maggie said, now making her way across the lawn as there was no fencing or shrubs that separated the houses. The grass in the subdivision was very un-Frank Lloyd Wright, who tended to build houses into the landscape rather than on top of it. Eleri had no idea if the yard maybe resembled the works of I. M. Pei. The flagstone walkways cut the center of each lawn, heading straight up to the front steps, and Maggie was at a perpendicular, heading straight through the sod while Eleri stepped out to meet her.

  "I grow the apples myself." Maggie smiled, and Eleri wanted to reply, "Of course you do," but figured that was not appropriate right now. Maggie was the norm here, and Eleri was not.

  "What varieties are they?" She wondered if she should have said “varietals,” as she did not know her proper apple terminology, but she let it stand, and Maggie didn't seem offended.

  "I use a mix. I have one tree of each of several of my favorites. My Fujis didn't come in well this year, but that may be because my beehive caught something last fall, and I put a new hive of bees in the year before. Anyway,” Maggie seemed to notice that she'd wandered off into her own thought process and brought herself back on track, "the pie was a split of two-thirds Galas and one-third Grannies."

  "You've got quite a set of varieties. Is it an orchard?"

  "Oh, it’s not really an orchard, but I also have peaches and pears if you want anything. And I have a wonderful Chinese Bing cherry tree.

  There was something in the way she said “orchard" that made Eleri wonder, but she was still grinning.

  "Oh my god." Maggie threw her hands up as though she’d forgotten something. “I’m not completely crazy, I'm a botanist."

  "Oh," Eleri replied, thinking that that at least helped explain Maggie's obsession with having a variety of trees. "Where do you live that you have so many trees? I don't think there's enough space in Donovan's backyard for that much." She’d remembered at the last moment to say “Donovan’s backyard,” as it was technically supposed to be his house and not hers.

  "Oh, I'm in The Shire, and we don’t have any real land there, either. I did once try to grow blackberry bushes on top of my house, but they didn’t ever take well enough to fruit," she mused. "I have a plot of land that’s supported by grant money for my experiments, and I'm growing a lot of it there. I try not to tell my grant providers that I'm sneaking some of the apples for pies."

  Eleri hoped her grin stayed in place. She was wondering what kind of experiments Maggie was running on these app
les that she'd seen fit to put into her pies. Instead of asking what kinds of pesticides or apple-squirrel hybrids she might have been fed, Eleri aimed for simple. "What else do you grow?"

  "Mostly marijuana," Maggie said, as though that were just the normal thing to say.

  "Oh, and that's your research?" Eleri worked to keep a straight face.

  "Yes," Maggie said, "but I'm actually not allowed to speak about the details. I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be rude."

  Eleri almost laughed out loud, as if Maggie was rude not explaining to her whatever marijuana varietals she was growing on what seemed to be a government grant. Those grants were hard to get, Eleri understood. "Well, it sounds like interesting work." It was the best she could come up with to say, and Maggie headed back toward the other house as LeDonRic appeared in the now open front door.

  Eleri waved at him too, and Maggie made a formal introduction. The man was close to seven feet tall, looming over them both as he approached. His skin was a deep shade of ebony and his smile was warm enough that it made her wish that she wasn't deceiving him, even about something as simple as her last name and her ultimate profession. Eleri wanted to ask him if maybe he had gotten an apple pie as well, but she was now wondering if maybe the pie tasted so good because Maggie might have slipped some weed into it.

  "Maggie was telling me about her apples and the pie," Eleri said, by way of continuing the conversation.

  LeDonRic put his arm around the smaller woman, and the familiarity of the gesture made it appear that Donovan was right about the two of them being a couple. Eleri filed that bit of knowledge away.

  "Don't let her fool you." He leaned in close, and whispered as though it were a secret, "She's one of the world's premier marijuana botanists."

  Of course she is, Eleri thought. Even with her cover profession, she was going to be the oddball out, merely a biodiversity specialist. She needed to be the world's leading expert in something to fit in here, she thought.