Since they couldn’t do the interviews themselves, they'd asked Bennett for a hack into the system at the police department. He'd managed to provide that quickly, which Donovan appreciated. The interviews were always recorded for the sake of both the interviewees and the officers, so all he had to do was find someone who could loop the live feed to his office. If anyone knew that loop was occurring, at least it was going to the mayor’s office and not to the town newcomers. It was the best they could do.
The three of them sat in Bennett's office with him occupying his main seat. Eleri and Donovan had pulled up chairs to his left. They’d once again snuck in through the back way. Donovan didn't like it, and he’d made that clear to Bennett before they’d even sat down.
“Sooner or later, we’re going to get caught. Someone will realize that these two random people just keep showing up at the mayor’s office for no reason. Our only saving grace is that Kate knows who we are and can stall for us.”
Bennett had apparently not considered this before. Donovan entertained a brief, smug thought that while Marshall Bennett might be a fantastic founder and mayor, he’d be a crappy FBI agent. Still, Bennett had been able to get the interview in the PD looped onto his office computer, which at least made a reasonable amount of sense if anyone hacked it. Bennett was up in arms over two murders in his sleepy, intelligent little community, so of course he would want to watch the suspects get interrogated. They were just counting on no one knowing that he had two feds stationed in town.
Bennett nodded to acknowledge Donovan’s problem and then queued up the feed of the interview room as an officer led Greg Whitlow inside. Turning to Donovan he asked, “Do you want a loop back to the officers, so you can feed them questions you want the officers to ask?”
Donovan almost threw his head back and laughed. He barely managed to quell the reaction. “I would love to be able to do that, but it's not the technology that's at issue. If I had a dollar for every time a police officer offered some love to the FBI, I would be in debt."
Bennett had appeared righteously appalled. "My officers are not like that! This is an investigation and the point is solving the crime, not pissing on territory."
From the way he threw the words forward, Donovan at least believed that Bennett believed it. However, though Curie was made up of only the best and brightest, Donovan was confident that the police officers—just like everybody else in Curie—were most likely human.
One of the problems of the best and brightest—as Donovan had learned long, long ago—was that they all believed they were the best and brightest. They didn't want anyone else telling them how to do things, particularly their jobs. So, he shook his head at Bennett and simply said, "That's not necessary. I'm sure your officers will do a fine job. We’ll figure out another way to ask questions we think of on the fly, if we have to."
Bennett shrugged, seeming to both wonder if Donovan was just giving up, and also trying to assess whether he should just take the win that his officers were excellent, and leave it at that.
They grew silent as they watched Greg Whitlow’s interview get started. Whitlow was a physicist with a specialty in kinematics. The officer asked him to state his name, his employment, and his relationship to Marat Rychenkov. Donovan wondered if any of the interviewees would notice that they were not yet getting asked about their relationship to Johanna Schmitt.
Whitlow told them, “Marat and I talked. I think I answered a handful of questions for him. Look, if you toss a ball in the air and you want to know how high it goes, I'm your guy. I can calculate your air resistance, the speed at which it will hit the earth, and the amount of deformation it will experience upon impact—that kind of thing. Whether you can expect your car crash to fling your passengers three hundred feet or not at all."
"So, what kind of questions did you answer for Rychenkov?" The officer asked him. Though the interview was not actually an interrogation, and the officer was not confrontational at all, they could tell Whitlow was a bit nervous. As smart as he was—and especially if he was innocent—he would know that there wasn't anything they could or would get from him in this interview. Still, he seemed twitchy.
Bennett pointed that out. "Do you think it means he's guilty?"
Eleri was the one who shook her head. "Lots of people simply get nervous when interviewed. If you read his level of anxiety, you can see it doesn't really change. He’s reacting pretty much the same the whole time, so the questions themselves don't appear to be triggering his upset. I’m guessing he’d look just as twitchy if they asked him what kind of salad he liked best."
"Ah," Bennett said, shaking his head and taking her word. They watched as Whitlow explained more about his interactions with Rychenkov.
“Marat and I even went out one day with a handful of drones. With the drone off, we threw it as high as we could into the air and let it smash the earth at top speed.” He almost smiled at the memory. “I asked him if the drone was fully-loaded, wanting to calculate for the right weight and all. But Marat brought a launcher with him, so we launched these things higher and higher, to see how much damage they sustained upon hitting the ground. They held up pretty well, but there was a definite maximum velocity of impact they could withstand.” Whitlow was in his element now, and this was the least twitchy he’d looked the whole time. “We discussed the necessary changes to keep a drone from breaking, should it fall out of the sky.”
They'd done this experiment in a local field, he told the investigators. As it turned out, Whitlow had never even been in the Rychenkov-Schmitt home. The officer then followed up, asking, as Donovan had hoped, what kind of relationship he had with Joanna Schmitt. That turned out to be almost nothing. Whitlow's answers were once again anxiety-ridden and so short that the interview concluded almost immediately.
Donovan looked to Eleri, and he could see in her eyes that she, too, believed Whitlow to be a dead end.
The next suspect they led into the room was Kaya Mazur. She did not have Whitlow's natural nervousness. In fact, she tried to interview the police officers, clearly curious about what was going on.
"I'm a nuclear physicist,” she said. “I mean, sure, he asked me about atomic numbers and he was looking at some alloys. But, honestly, he was just always asking questions about the work I was doing. There's a huge push to move computing into subatomic particle devices, and he seemed to think that would be the future of robotics, too. He wanted to make his ‘bots so they could have their systems easily swapped out as the programming and even the hardware for that changed. While I'm more on the reactor side, I've got a great interest in subatomic computing, and he was smart to be thinking ahead."
It was clear that her area of expertise did not overlap that of the police officers, and it appeared they weren't even sure what questions to ask next. Eleri glanced at Donovan, and he almost laughed as both of them shrugged simultaneously as well, understanding no more than the basics of what she was talking about.
Donovan wished they had gotten Wade in to watch this, but it was mid-morning and Wade was in the middle of teaching his class. Donovan pushed a note across to Eleri. They decided to write them to keep a record of what they'd said, and also in case Bennett's office was bugged, or if their own hack line into the interview was also hacked.
He scrawled, We need to put Wade on Kaya. They need to be friends.
Eleri nodded, clearly thinking the same thing, and merely wrote a check mark next to his note.
Just then, Kaya jolted forward. “Do you think he was killed because he was trying to make his drones sub-atomic computing compatible?”
The officers remained steady, answering, “No, ma’am, we don’t suspect that.”
But now we do, Donovan thought and jotted it down on the page while Eleri nodded.
The officer then steered the conversation to Kaya’s relationship with Joanna Schmitt. Kaya Mazur went on about it for almost an hour. The two had been good friends from the time Johanna had moved to town. They'd been in each other's homes.
Her children had gone over and had been given coding lesson and cookies.
"Joanna Schmitt made cookies for your children?" the officer asked, making a note even as she asked.
"Marat did." Kaya was not able to hide the hitch in her voice. "He taught my children how to fly drones and how to make the perfect, crackled-top gingersnap. We exchanged holiday presents with them every year."
As Donovan watched, Kaya's voice broke, and he understood why it wasn't long before the officers let Kaya Mazur go as well.
Donovan again glanced to Eleri and they shook their heads simultaneously. Kaya Mazur did not play as their killer. Eleri looked relieved. Donovan had tried not to let his partner's friendship interfere with his assessment, but Kaya’s grief felt authentic.
Jivika Das was the last one in. A biological mimicry specialist, she ranked the lowest on Donovan’s radar. She studied spider’s webs and human knees. Her resume said she’d helped a small town in the Gulf of Mexico replace their oyster population with two non-bivalve species that would accomplish the same ends and anchor the brackish water ecosystem that was failing. He had yet to connect her to anything anyone might have killed Marat Rychenkov for.
Besides, Kaya Mazur had asked about alloys, which tied into Greg Whitlow’s ideas. There was at least now a clear path to follow toward what Rychenkov might have been killed for. So Donovan sat back and much more casually watched as Jivika Das was asked similar questions to the first two. She produced similar answers until she was asked what Marat Rychenkov had been discussing with her.
"Bees," she said. "We talked about bees. He had an army of drones that he was making."
Donovan frowned and leaned forward. There was something in her tone, and he looked to Eleri. Lying? He scratched on the paper, wishing he was there and he could smell the suspect.
No … she wrote back. But the ellipses following the word were telling, and he knew she had the same questions he did.
"Why would he ask you about bees?" the officer inquired, tapping his pen on the tablet in front of him as though it were an absentminded gesture. It wasn’t. It was the officer’s tell. Donovan had picked up on it and he wondered if Jivika Das had, too.
"They function as a hive. Marat was trying to get his robots to function similarly to the bees." She smiled, but the smile seemed crooked. "He also asked me about spiders. He was trying to get one of his robots to walk with an eight-legged, tripodal gait. Then he asked about my work with bivalves.”
The interview continued on as the other two had. Though he couldn’t tell if the officers noticed, Donovan did. Jivika Das was lying.
That's our suspect, he wrote on the pad of paper beside him.
Eleri didn’t take her eyes off the monitor but for a second. Still, she nodded.
21
It was that same afternoon that Donovan tried one of his most underhanded tricks. LeDonRic next door often was home early in the afternoons and appeared to watch his nieces, though Donovan had yet to figure out what the brother, Marshawn, was doing that kept him out later in the day.
According to Bennett’s files, Marshawn was an inventor, while his older brother LeDonRic worked in one of the local think tanks. If he had to guess, Donovan would have thought it would be the other way around, with Marshawn more likely to be home in the afternoons. But LeDonRic seemed to enjoy having his nieces around, and often the Mazur kids followed along.
While Donovan felt that Kaya Mazur had directed them to tug at some interesting threads during her interview, he did not think she was a major risk. No one had yet interviewed Nate Mazur, and Donovan wasn’t sure if he and Eleri would be around to watch that interview, if it happened.
Also, Donovan desperately wanted to interview the kids. While he didn’t know about Emersyn and Madisyn James, he knew the Mazur twins had repeatedly been inside the Rychenkov-Schmitt home. Donovan was hoping, whether or not any of the family was at fault in any way, that they might be able to help him solve something—anything.
If Cage and Joule had gotten lessons in robotics and how to bake a cookie to perfection, then they might know what else he'd been working on. They might just know better than any adults would. While Marat might have hidden his secret from the adults around him, it was possible he’d flat-out told the kids. Or, more likely, maybe he just didn’t guard himself as well and let something slip. The kids might not even know that they knew something.
It was a tricky game, Donovan knew, to get something out of them without flashing his badge. He had to be incredibly subtle—and that was not his strong point. Ever.
Donovan had already pulled school records. All four children were exceptionally bright, even by Curie standards, and that stunned him. Because both the Mazurs and both James brothers had tested in at the high bracket, the children weren’t required to meet their own IQ bracket. Still, the school tested all the incoming children to make sure they were putting them into the proper classes.
The top-of-the-curve scores in that group were probably the reason they were all friends in the first place. In the high-quality mix that was Curie High School, these kids were the cream of the crop. But that meant Donovan had to tread even more carefully. If he fucked it up at all, they would likely catch him—even before their parents did. Kids were less likely to have preconceived notions he could play to. At least they’re high schoolers and not pre-schoolers, he thought.
When the teens came home, he was still out at the mailbox, having lingered just a little to make the walk take longer and hopefully run into them. He waved as they all headed up the walk behind LeDonRic.
"How are you doing?" Joule hollered out, and Donovan leapt at the opportunity.
"Not so good. I mean, the whole thing sucks, and on top of that, Eleri likes to bake when she's sad. So she's making sugar cookies and she's not baking them right."
Joule frowned, "So?"
"So now I'm sad and I'm eating bad cookies," he said, "Just to be nice."
It was Cage who leapt into the conversation then. "You need to hit them with high heat and then turn it down a little bit. It helps the tops get crispy and then crack, while the insides stay soft."
"Thank you," Donovan said, and he looked down at the ground and then looked up, hopefully with a question on his face. "How would you know if your oven was miscalibrated? I think part of the problem is that the oven is off a bit."
It worked. Curie was likely the only place that scheme would work, but it did.
LeDonRic and the children took pity on him, and they headed across the lawn and in through the front door he held open for them.
"Let us take a look at it," LeDonRic told him.
The oven was miscalibrated. Donovan knew this because he had turned the knob and then rotated the print dial on the knob ever so slightly so that it would misalign. It had taken some work to create the problem and not make it look like an idiot had messed with it. He’d made sure that when the dial said the temperature was 300 degrees, it was actually closer to 325—enough of a difference to overcook something but not really burn it.
Inside of five minutes, he had another batch of “Eleri’s” already prepped, raw cookies on the tray and baking. Four kids crowded their faces around the window to his oven, watching as the cookies softly rose.
"It does look like it’s running a little high," Joule was saying, and she reached up, absently turning the knob, ever-so-slightly adjusting the heat for him.
While they watched and tinkered with the heat settings, Donovan turned to LeDonRic. "So, I noticed our house has a gas stove top and an electric oven. It was built that way, right? Seems like an odd combination."
LeDonRic didn't appear to think so. "The first residents voted for that combination. I voted for it. I guess it is unusual to find both in the same house, but it’s the best for each application. Whether you're making cake or a science experiment, that's the best way to be able to control the settings."
"Huh," Donovan said, revealing that he baked neither cakes nor science experiments, at least no
t with any precision. But since that lack of skill went along with what he'd already demonstrated, it didn't matter.
He paused as he turned and saw that Joule's shoulders had dropped. Even Cage beside her didn't look any too happy about the cookies, though Donovan had eaten a few from the first “failed batch” and could say he and Eleri had managed to make a reasonable recipe.
"What's wrong?" Emersyn asked her friend.
"Marat taught us this."
As Donovan watched, fat tears fell from Joule's eyes, and he felt like a complete shit for doing this to kids. He reminded himself that the kids would want Marat and Johanna’s killer—or killers—found.
It was Madisyn who reached over and put her arm around the girl. "He's living on in you. See? It's only been a few days, and already you're spreading one of his secrets. You just have to keep doing that and keep letting people know so that he keeps going."
It was a nice sentiment, Donovan thought, but the man had been murdered, and it was up to the FBI to solve it. He tried to steel himself against the young woman’s tears and get down to business. "He taught you this?"
Joule nodded, "He taught us how to make the perfect top on cookies. He probably would have voted for the electric ovens and gas stove tops if he’d been here when the town started."
"Madisyn is right. You can carry on his legacy by sharing him with other people," Donovan said softly. "What else did he teach you?"
In that moment, he prayed they would answer—and luckily, they did.
It was Cage who spoke up next. "He taught me how an accelerometer works. We learned in school, too, but he taught me the year before, so by the time we got to class, I already knew."
Donovan smiled and waited for more.
"Johanna taught me how to write code in two languages," Joule piped up, "And how to knit." Her eyes looked downward for a minute, and then up. "We knitted a sweater in binary that had the best pages of Winnie the Pooh on it."
Donovan tried to keep his mouth from falling open. He had to remind himself he was learning things. For example, the kid spoke binary. The kid knit Winnie the Pooh in binary into a sweater. He should not have been surprised. But it also meant that Johanna knew binary. He wanted to jump on them and say, “What else? What else!” but he kept his expression sad and waited.
The Camelot Gambit Page 13
