After telling both of them that it was nice to meet them, she watched as they walked away, heading down the street hand-in-hand to wherever they were going. Good, she thought, one-and-a-half days in, and she was at least getting some part of the job done.
She still had no freaking idea how Marat Rychenkov had been murdered, though she did firmly believe he had been. She was no closer to the why of it either, but at least she was starting to get to know the town's residents.
Heading into the garage next, she started Phase Two of her morning and climbed into “her car” and headed out. Donovan’s car was still in its space as he’d slept in late this morning, supposedly to work a late shift consulting in Lincoln this evening. She wasn’t sure how that would play out, if any of the neighbors would notice the discrepancies they were surely creating.
The same concern held true for the car they'd picked up for her yesterday. They were to act as though they had just bought it, and it even sported a decal from a dealer at Lincoln. The car itself would hold up to scrutiny, but Eleri and Donovan only would until someone asked specific questions. She couldn’t answer which salesperson she’d bought the car from, or even what the dealership looked like, or who’d helped sign the paperwork. It would have been better to claim they’d gotten it from a dealer in Omaha. Fewer people would have likely been familiar with the dealership, as Omaha was simply farther away. Given the conversation she'd just had with her two neighbors, she didn't put it past these people to figure out what she was, or that she hadn't been gone long enough to get to Lincoln and buy a car and get back. She would have to hope nobody asked.
Doing as Donovan suggested, she headed down Carbon Street and over to the Up N Atom, where she stepped into line to order a frothy coffee and quickly discovered that nothing in Curie was safe from the smart people getting their hands on it. She’d eavesdropped as several people placed their orders in front of her, which helped, but she was still woefully underprepared.
She listened as the man in front of her became gently pendantic, correcting his adorable barista from listing the sizes as “Veni, Vidi, and Vici” with the hard V sound and pronouncing them with the—albeit correct—W sound of Latin. When the barista turned away, he then uttered another word which Eleri believed sounded like Latin, though she couldn’t be sure. His tone and expression did make her confident it was a swear.
As she stepped up to the counter, she pointed up to the sign and ordered a “Caffeinator.” Eleri chose the Vidi option, saying it “Widi” with the Latin pronunciation. She did not want the other patrons correcting her, but she froze when the bored barista rattled off the next question. “Type Two or Ant Killer?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.” Eleri looked at the signs for help, but it wasn’t there.
The woman behind her in line stepped up even with her and gestured to Eleri, “May I?”
“Oh God, please help.”
“We were all new here once, too. I’m Kaya Mazur, and ‘Type Two’ refers to cane sugar and ‘Ant Killer’ means you want aspartame, artificial sweetener.”
“Oh! That actually makes sense.” But Eleri was almost laughing too hard to tell them she preferred hers as “Type Two.”
“I recommend a shot of ‘Climate Change.’” Kaya was now stepping up to the register beside her and rattling off a list of seeming nonsense that she and the barista both clearly understood.
“What’s that?” Eleri had to ask, as her adorable but maybe not Curie-IQ-worthy barista just smiled at her.
“It’s a shot of extra chocolate from a rare cacao bean that’s slowly going extinct as the temperature climbs.”
“Wow, apart from the obvious side of impending doom, it sounds great.” She was grinning though and so was Kaya. Another new friend. Check. She told her barista to add the Climate Change, and then thanked the woman beside her for her help.
Kaya waved goodbye and headed to the other side of the shop to wait for her order while Eleri moved toward the tables and settled herself in the corner with her laptop. She positioned herself in an attempt to be open to conversation while still keeping people from seeing what she was looking up. No one needed to see that she was scanning information Marshall Bennett had sent to her and Donovan about the town.
When her name was called, she picked up the coffee from a different barista at the other end of the counter. This one was not as young, maybe in her early thirties. Maybe she'd moved here as an adult, but had the baristas all passed the IQ test? It seemed the job couldn’t pay enough or be mentally challenging enough for anyone who had.
Eleri was suddenly very curious who made the tacos, who stocked the grocery store shelves, and who took out the trash. Surely, Maggie and her new neighbor LeDonRic were not the ones doing that—and would the people who did have passed Bennett's requirements?
Back at the table, she opened her computer and began reading the details. Curie’s IQ requirement made her blink; it was that high. Bennett was gunning for the best of the best. Eleri found he also wasn’t using the standard Stanford-Binet test, which was good. That test was racially biased, among other things. As she glanced through the test questions, she blinked at the difficulty level.
On top of all the testing, there was an application. It was almost as bad as getting into college, maybe worse. Though hers and Donovan’s applications had been greenlit by Bennett through the FBI, had she been required to fill it out, she wasn't sure she would have qualified.
The details interested her the most. One spouse could get in with the requisite high IQ and their spouse could come in at a lower entry level. That helped. She’d wondered how would that work if one spouse qualified but the other didn't. The children didn't have to test if both of the parents passed the first mark. However, if one of the parents was at the lower rating, the children would have to take their own entry testing. The schools reserved the right to hold them back a grade if they weren't keeping up, even though they might have been fine in a normal public school system.
Shit, Eleri thought, even the kids were expected to be geniuses here. Then again, Donovan had showed her the high school, and it gleamed like the top of the Chrysler Building. She was afraid to know what she would find them studying if she went inside. Hell, Wade was teaching their physics classes.
After a few more minutes of scouring the documents and legalese, she discovered a key piece of the puzzle: people could come into Curie to work during the day. There was no curfew, but they could not own a house or rent an apartment without the IQ test and Bennett's approval. Her barista probably had not passed the test.
She called Donovan. "Donovan, we have to get Bennett to go through all the applications and tell us if there are any he doesn't specifically remember admitting. And we need to find out if anyone is living here without official permission.”
The more she looked through it, the more Eleri became convinced Bennett’s application process was faulty. There were enough people in Curie that some could have cheated their way in without him noticing. The application and the IQ requirement and Bennett’s need for approval was a breeding ground for motive.
6
When Eleri arrived back at the house after spending the morning at the Up N Atom, her immediate plan was to dive into the fridge and build herself a sandwich. However, despite her caffeine and sugar high from two frothy coffees and a pastry, she didn't aim for the food.
Donovan was at the table, his head almost in his hands, looking dead in the water. Heading toward him, she asked what was going on.
"We can’t figure out the murder, so we have to figure out why Rychenkov was killed. I have nothing on the why. Nothing!”
Somehow this didn’t surprise Eleri. She wanted to help but could also feel her blood sugar bottoming out.
“Want a sandwich?" She tried to speak the words over the sound of her stomach growling.
“Please, anything.” He hadn’t lifted his face out of his hands.
She knew him. She knew what he ate, and she knew how much
he ate. So she dove into the fridge while he spoke and began pulling out all the pieces she needed. She was organizing the sauces and knives to bring to the table for them when he started talking again. Listening while she worked, she stacked the meats and cheeses.
"Here’s what I have so far, and it’s basically worth jack shit as far as I can tell…” Donovan warned her before launching into his information. “Rychenkov was a robotics expert. He worked for Boeing for four-plus decades and then retired."
"So he was in his seventies? He didn't look like he was in his seventies." Eleri forced herself to put the bread away, but she stuck a slice of turkey into her mouth so she wouldn’t pass out.
"Oh no," Donovan said. "He began working for Boeing when he was fifteen."
"Of course he did," Eleri replied, and realized she was going to have to stop doing that before she said it out loud to someone like Maggie or LeDonRic next door. "Go on."
"So he was in his fifties when he left," Donovan added, which more closely matched what Eleri had seen of the body.
"And he was retired?" she asked.
"He had retirement payouts from Boeing, and he'd apparently sold several other ideas and was a consultant in a think tank."
"And his wife Joanna Schmidt also had income," Eleri filled in.
"Right. She had money of her own."
"What does she do?"
“She’s a programmer with an electrical engineering background. She holds several patents. And that's it," Donovan said.
"Sure, just a handful of patents!” Eleri would have waved her hand around but it was holding a plate with sandwiches on it. “What do you mean that's it?"
"They've lived in Curie for five years. He’s continued to have an income from various grants, so he's clearly working on something, but I can't figure out who he's working with or on what."
She went for the obvious questions as she headed back into the kitchen area for drinks. At least the open design made this easy. "Who did Rychenkov meet with? Who did he spend his time with? Where did he go often? Can we look at the police files?"
"That's just it. The police, specifically the forensics team, did not perform the best assessment of the case."
"Why not?" Eleri asked, "Everyone's so smart here."
"Well, as smart as they are, they didn't figure out he was murdered until they got him to the ME's office. The ME only found it because of the lack of an obvious cause of death. Natural causes didn't suffice, not on a man so young. A heart attack would have created a chemical signal. So that’s ruled out. He had no unknown diseases ravaging his body while no one paid attention. He was in great health. And he's too young to have his heart simply stop beating. Even if it had been a freak MI, like I said, there were no chemical signals, and his heart was healthy. So no one even knew it was a murder until the ME in Lincoln sent him to the CDC because of the lack of evidence. The oddity of the case apparently triggered the CDC call to the FBI, which got Westerfield involved."
"So all of that domino-effected after the crime scene was already processed," Eleri said.
"Exactly. The death investigator came in from Lincoln, but the death investigator is apparently no Curie resident."
Eleri understood. She took the first bite of her sandwich and felt her blood sugar respond. She almost let out an audible sigh.
"There are two forensic techs here," Donovan said, "and they could go in and they could collect evidence. They're the ones that got the hair from the room later, and luckily Mrs. Schmitt hadn’t cleaned or vacuumed because she was, well, grieving."
"Understood," Eleri said. "So we have two forensic techs we can use and we have a police department that didn’t or couldn’t collect enough evidence."
"And we want to get in the house ourselves," Donovan added.
Eleri looked up and saw a good half of his first sandwich was already gone. His eating speed always amazed her. "Bennett got us the police files, right?" Eleri asked.
"He did, and that's part of what I've been looking at. But the investigating officers didn't ask who Rychenkov was associating with. They didn’t even know to ask questions. It looked like an unfortunate and sudden death. If it hadn’t been for his age, they still wouldn’t know," Donovan said.
"Then what's the problem?" Eleri asked. "We need to get in and get these questions asked."
"Right, that's exactly the problem," Donovan said. "How do we go to Johanna Schmitt and ask her who her husband was involved with without revealing what we're really doing here? By the same token, we can ask the forensic techs to go back, but we're going to have to trigger someone. Someone will know who we are and what we are really doing here. Every link in a cover story is a point of failure.”
Eleri knew that one from experience, too.
Donovan continued, “Now, Bennett knows who we are, so maybe Bennett can ask the police force to ask the forensic tech to do a follow up. But my concern is the quality of information that we want is going to get lost going through a chain like that—and honestly, I'd rather have eyes on it myself."
With a sigh, Donovan tipped his head back as though it had simply fallen, as though he was at a complete loss, and Eleri understood. They'd always been operating as FBI agents before, and now being stuck with a cover to maintain was doubly difficult.
"I was thinking about that." Eleri set her sandwich down for a moment and tapped her fingers on the table. "We might be able to get into the house as techs."
"Sure, but if we go in as techs, we actually have to do the tech work, because Johanna Schmitt will be there watching us."
"So how do we get her out of the house?" Eleri asked. "Does she know Wade? As long as we don't openly interact with Wade, we can communicate with him, right?"
"Yes," Donovan said, "that's the one upside here. We just can't act in public as though we know him or get caught on the phone with him or anything like that."
"Okay. Can we get Wade to get her out of the house? Then we go to the house dressed like techs."
"Which works fine," Donovan said, "until somebody recognizes us. You're a biodiversity specialist and I'm an ME. So there’s no reason for us to be in that house. No good one. We’d need to think of a reason for us to be in the house. Then we could go in and it wouldn't matter if we were recognized."
Eleri took a deep breath. "She has a new breed of cockroach?" She suggested with a shrug of her shoulders.
Donovan laughed. "You're a human biodiversity specialist."
"Well, that’s monkey balls." She took another bite of the sandwich as consolation. He was right, this was hard. She was used to flashing her badge and walking in.
"Another downside," he said, "is the size of the town. Everyone does seem to know each other, and that's a problem."
"The whole Nebraska Nice thing?" Eleri asked. It was a phrase used around the state. They prided themselves on being polite. "Seems to be a thing, even though most of these people are transplants." Eleri looked at him. "I noticed a lot of people here are foreign—immigrants, I would guess."
Donovan nodded. "That's something I learned the other day, too. Apparently, Nebraska opened their doors wide a good couple of decades ago. There are huge immigrant populations, not like what you would expect to find in such a rural state so far from the southern borders. But there are clear cultural neighborhoods in Omaha and some in Lincoln as well."
"Interesting. So, our scientists come here, and Nebraska's very welcoming to immigrants, and Curie is very welcoming to smart people."
"That's our other problem," Donovan lamented. "I mean, we could dress up like cable workers, and if we could get someone to let us in… but then we’d want somebody else to get her out of the house so we could examine everything. Who would leave the cable workers unattended?”
“We’d have to have someone she trusted stay behind with us. But someone we trusted not to tell what was happening. Which breaks cover for someone again.” She threw her head back. “Oh my God, I am totally spitballing here."
Even with that,
Donovan had another problem to throw out. "There’s still the issue that someone might recognize us. They would want to know why the new people are going into her house like they're working on her cable…And the people here are smart enough that they will recognize us."
"I don't know," Eleri shrugged. "Some smart people have terrible facial recognition."
"It doesn't matter," Donovan corrected. "We only need one person good enough to point a finger at us and we're done."
Eleri took a moment to be grateful she had not been given a new first name, or a profession she was going to struggle to keep up with, since she wasn't even undercover in a general population. She was having to fool the best of the best.
Eleri ate in silence and polished off her sandwich before she had a better idea. "Let's get Bennett to take her out for the afternoon. He has to have told a secretary or assistant of his about us already. So that’s not a cover break. Then we put on our best disguises and don’t get ourselves busted. We can do this."
7
Donovan pulled the bill of his hat low. Being undercover was a bitch. He was in a coverall and a baseball cap—two things that definitively did not say “Donovan Heath.” But that was the whole point, wasn’t it? So he was wearing a cap that felt unusual on his head and was borrowed from the local power company. He and Eleri had talked Bennett into not getting a fake company name embroidered on anything. It would be noticed here.
The coverall had been hard enough to find in his size. Thank God there was an FBI branch nearby, and they kept things like that handy. As much as it wasn’t his usual wear, it also wasn’t Eleri's. He was chalking that up to being a good thing. Even as he stood on the front porch ready to knock and get let in, he thought the size difference between himself and Eleri might be enough to get them recognized. Her hair was pulled up and tucked under her hat, and his hope was that no one even recognized she was female. It would help throw anyone who noticed off their scent.
The Camelot Gambit Page 4
