“I’m sorry.” He shifted in his chair. “That must have been difficult.” Just as with Terri, he struggled with what to say whenever someone revealed personal information, especially when the other person was female.
He’d never been smooth with the opposite sex. His friends always prodded him to approach girls, assuring him that his tall frame and mass of dark hair worked in his favor, but in his mind he only saw the lanky, awkward kid who was more comfortable discussing Star Trek: Next Generation than whatever it was girls liked to talk about. In junior high his classmates had nicknamed him SB, stick bug, because that was what he’d looked like. Even after he’d filled out during his last two years of college, he hadn’t been able to shake the image from his mind.
“Yeah, well, the first chance I had to escape home I did. Wanted to get as far away as I could.”
“That’s why you went to Africa?”
“Kenya changed my life.” The spark returned to her eyes. “I’d always loved animals, but working with them in their natural state, not to mention in the cradle of civilization, fueled my interest in both animal behavior and evolutionary biology.”
He nodded. “Working in the field can often be more educational than the classroom.”
“It was more than that.” She reached out and rested a hand on his forearm. “Spending days in the savannah, I felt a connection to nature that I’d never experienced growing up in an urban environment. When I sat in the grass with my camera and notebook, I could literally feel an energy to life that seemed to radiate around me.” Her grip on his arm tightened. “I sensed that I was also part of that same energy.”
“You’re starting to sound like Whitman.” He laughed.
“When I discovered him in frosh English, I was moved by how he put into words the feelings I had there.”
He noticed that her hand still rested on his arm. He enjoyed the touch but simultaneously felt guilty about doing so. He moved his hand to his lap. “When you returned to the States, were things different with your parents?”
“They got divorced while I was away—really the best thing for both of them. Mom found AA, which probably saved her life. She’s been sober for almost five years now. After watching her miserable marriage, I told myself that I would never depend on a man to take care of me or to make me happy.”
“And your dad?”
“Our relationship improved, but we still have our rocky moments. He’ll never be the warm, comforting father whose lap I wished I could curl up in when I was a little girl. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen how we share some of the same interests.” She leaned across the table, closer to him. “But enough about me. What about your family?”
“I’m an only child, and my father passed away during my junior year in high school.” The memory of his dad, a math teacher, spending hours helping him with his homework—usually by giving him more challenging problems to do—caused his chest to constrict. “Pancreatic cancer.”
“Wow, losing your father as a teenager, just as you were starting to explore who you really were, must have been so hard on you.”
The compassion and understanding in her tone eased the tension in his chest. He had come to terms with his father’s passing many years ago, but he still missed him. Natalie’s death, on the other hand—he pushed that memory back into the box in which it belonged.
“Mom coped by joining a new church where she became born again. Dragged me with her every Sunday. We argued a lot then. The fundamentalist preacher was rampantly superstitious and unscientific. He railed against everything from evolution to homosexuality.”
“Religion doesn’t have to be intolerant and exclusive, you know.”
“That’s what Elijah says.”
She laughed. “He’s a smart man. You should listen to him.”
Her laugh, like her touch, seemed to pierce through his exterior, warming his core like the espresso he’d just finished. In spite of the frosty start to their conversation, talking with Rachel was unexpectedly easy. He hadn’t spoken to anyone about his parents since . . . Natalie.
This time the memory burst through the box in his mind and struck him like a blast of cold air upon opening a door on a winter morning. Suddenly he realized that he’d asked Rachel to meet him in the same coffee shop where he’d first met Natalie six years earlier.
He had stopped into the café after leaving SSS, where he’d interviewed with Elijah for his application to the PhD program. When he’d turned from the counter with his large double espresso filled to the rim of the ceramic mug, Natalie had been standing in line behind him. Tall and slender, with shimmering black hair and smoky eyes, she flashed a smile that struck him like a car’s high beams. Momentarily blinded, he tripped over his size thirteen feet and splashed his coffee all over her fleece hoodie. In his attempt to recover his balance, he knocked into the table beside him, spilling the two drinks sitting on it. He was mortified. He tried to apologize to the people at the table and then to the beautiful woman he’d just soaked with coffee, but the words came out as a jumble of nonsense.
He’d cringed in anticipation of the angry words that he expected to spill from the exotic beauty’s mouth. Instead, she looked down at her fleece and then back up at him and started to laugh—a warm, infectious laugh that caused him to take in the carnage he’d created in the coffee shop and begin to laugh himself. They started dating that afternoon and rarely spent a day apart for the next three years—until the accident. She was a student at the Drama School, hoping to become a playwright, and was like no other girl he’d dated before. Natalie was alive and a little dangerous. Many nights they would stay up into the early morning talking. Somehow, she was able to draw out of him his deepest secrets, concerns, and worries. He even told her about the incident that had happened when he was a teen. She was the only one he’d ever confided in regarding his true motivation behind his professional interests. He felt safe opening himself to her. Sex with her had been creative, intense, fulfilling—and on more than one occasion they were almost caught in a compromising situation in a public place on campus.
They had been planning to marry the following spring when the accident occurred. As intense as his love for her was, his depression the weeks after her death was deeper. On some mornings he’d wondered how he could make it to the end of the day. Sleep at night came only courtesy of Ambien. Then he’d started the SSRI medication. As his serotonin levels increased, he’d returned to work with a renewed focus on his research rather than the tragedy. He’d chastised himself for becoming vulnerable and allowing himself to be hurt. Unlike love, science could be controlled.
“Professor?” Rachel’s voice brought him back from the memory.
He smiled. “Sorry. I took a vacation in my mind for a moment.” Part of him was tempted to share the memory that was so much more painful than his father’s passing. The urge surprised him. He didn’t really know this woman, and he was not a sharer.
“No worries. My dad does that too.”
“So now I remind you of your father?” It occurred to him that he hadn’t asked what her father did that had made him so unavailable when she was younger.
She made a point of looking him up and down. “In some ways, but don’t worry”—she winked—“I’m not searching for a father figure.”
“Good. I don’t think I’d make a very good one.” He laughed again and then glanced at his watch. As much as he’d enjoyed his time with the attractive grad student, Elijah was waiting for them in their lab. His stomach began to knot in anticipation of what his mentor might say.
Ethan dug into his pocket, searching underneath his wallet for his keys. Rachel waited beside him outside the door to the Neuropsychology Lab on the third floor of SSS. He noticed the hum when he inserted the key into the lock. He cocked his head to listen. Other than the hum, the building was quiet. They had passed only one of his colleagues on the walk down the hallway. The noise seemed to be coming from his lab.
Could it be?
He tur
ned the key. It moved freely. The door was already unlocked. Pushing it open, his eyes widened at the sight in the center of the room.
“Elijah?”
His mentor lay semi-reclined in the green vinyl chair of the Logos. His eyes were closed and the solenoids were placed above his head. The hum he’d heard outside the lab was the machine vibrating as it cycled through its various frequencies of electromagnetic pulses. But the noises coming from the machine were louder than during their usual tests.
“Elijah!” he shouted over the machine as he hurried to the center of the room.
The elder professor was unresponsive. His mind raced. Did he come in early to test the machine on himself? Did he of all people choose to violate our protocols? But something struck him as odd. The machine wasn’t acting the way it should have with his programming. He reached out to shake his friend out of his trance. That’s when he noticed Elijah’s pallid complexion.
“Oh my God,” Rachel cried.
He felt his blood jump from his chest to his head, as if his heart had kicked into overdrive. He searched for a pulse in the carotid artery on his neck. Elijah’s skin was cold and firm to the touch. Even as he probed his fingers next to Elijah’s trachea, he knew he wouldn’t find a heartbeat. He pulled back Elijah’s eyelid, exposing a fixed, glassy pupil.
“Call 911!” he shouted.
He grabbed the metal lever on the side of the chair and wrenched it downward. The chair flattened so that Elijah was prone at the level of Ethan’s waist. He knocked the arm of the Logos out of his way. The sound of the metal bouncing on the wood floor hardly registered with him. With the heel of his right hand, he pressed Elijah’s forehead backward while pinching his nose with his thumb and index fingers; with his left hand, he pulled the professor’s gray, stubble-covered chin up and outwards. He delivered two forceful breaths, watching out of the corner of his eye as the professor’s chest expanded with each breath. Then he began chest compressions.
“Come on, Elijah!” he begged.
But he knew his efforts would be in vain. The sharp compressions made Elijah’s body jerk, and the remnants of the breaths he’d given him fluttered out of his lips, but Ethan’s medical training told him that it was an illusion of life. Nothing he could do would bring his mentor back. In spite of this knowledge, he continued the CPR.
“Why, Elijah? Why?” He spoke quietly to his friend as he continued to pump away on his chest, as if his sheer willpower could work magic. The recliner squeaked in time to his compressions.
He heard Rachel frantically explaining their emergency to the operator, yelling over the continued hum of the Logos. He tried to think of the possibilities of what had happened, but his thoughts came in slow motion, like they were trudging through a bog on their way to his consciousness. Did he have a heart attack or a stroke while testing the machine? The blue tint to his lips suggested that oxygen deprivation of the brain had been involved in the cause of death. The calm way in which his body was lying in the chair suggested that unconsciousness had come quickly and unexpectedly. But why would Elijah test the machine on himself, and why is the Logos acting so strangely?
The doctor within him told him to stop. But he couldn’t force himself to give up on his friend. He had lost his fiancée three years ago and his dad years before that; how could he lose Elijah now? When he paused the compressions to give another two breaths, something caught his attention that he hadn’t noticed earlier.
Tilting the professor’s chin upwards, he saw a thin red welt across his neck. He traced a finger along its path. The possibility of a more disturbing cause of death began to circle his mind.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. “The paramedics will be here in five minutes.”
He nodded, unable to speak the words that went through his head. An ambulance wouldn’t matter now. He stumbled back from the recliner.
“Why are you stopping? You’re a doctor! You can save him, right?”
He shook his head. “He’s been dead for hours.” The words sounded so clinical coming from his mouth, as if another doctor was delivering the news.
“But—”
He swallowed back the burning in his throat and turned to Rachel, but he was unable to prevent the tears that began to stream down his face.
“Oh, God.” She threw her arms around his neck.
He held her tight. Why, Elijah? He buried his face in her hair, finding some comfort in the embrace of this woman he’d only just gotten to know. Then her body began to shake as she started to cry.
After several minutes, the vibration from the Logos box and the rattling of the arm against the floor pierced through the fog of confusion and sadness in his mind. He couldn’t think properly. He gently moved her hands from his neck, walked behind the recliner, and jerked the power cord from the wall. A wave of silence washed over the room.
CHAPTER 20
SSS, YALE UNIVERSITY
“When will the autopsy take place?” Ethan looked up from his office chair at the New Haven police officer, one of several crowded into the lab.
“Weekend’s coming up.” The officer, a thirty-something African American male with close-cropped hair, tore off a piece of paper from a white spiral pad and handed him a phone number. “Call the coroner’s office Monday.”
The officer flipped back several pages and reviewed the notes he’d taken over the past two hours. The crime scene investigators had arrived an hour earlier. They had photographed the scene and were now zipping Elijah into a black body bag. Rachel stood by his chair and squeezed his arm.
“Now, Doctor,” the officer said, “I want to make sure I have this correct. You noticed this welt on Professor Schiff’s neck some time after you began CPR?”
Ethan dropped his head and ran his fingers through his hair. If he weren’t so drained, he would have yelled at the officer. How many times did he have to answer the same questions? Although the officer spoke in a cooperative tone, Ethan had the feeling that he was trying to twist his account around, as if to insinuate that he had played some role in his friend’s death. He was grateful to feel Rachel’s touch. Her eyes were red and puffy, but they were dry now, and her gaze was strong. He was comforted having her by his side.
“That’s exactly what I said. Will the coroner be examining that as a potential cause of death?”
“We will be looking into all the possibilities. Now, again, just so I’m clear. This machine of yours”—he turned a page in his notebook—“this Logos was running when you entered the office?”
“You could hear it from the hallway it was so loud,” Rachel said.
“Was it normal for you to run experiments on yourselves, with no one else present?” The officer peered over his notebook at him.
“I’ve already answered that.” He started to rise. He didn’t like either the officer’s tone or the direction in which the questioning was heading. Rachel’s hand on his arm tightened. He sat back in the chair and released the breath he’d been holding. “Elijah never would have done that.”
Then a thought occurred to him. “Wait a minute!”
He jumped from his chair, causing both the officer and Rachel to flinch. He hurried to the Logos. Everything about Elijah’s death was wrong: his presence alone in the chair, the red welts on his neck, the way the machine had been running.
Ethan knew one thing with certainty: Elijah had been murdered.
“Over here,” he called.
The officer approached the Logos as if the peripherals on his belt weighed him down. Ethan pointed to the controls on the back of the metal box. A faint layer of powder covered the box where a technician had just finished dusting for fingerprints. Ethan and Rachel had given prints to the technician so that theirs would be distinguished from any unknown persons.
“The Logos isn’t set up properly.” He tapped on the empty Ethernet jack. “It’s just a reconditioned TMS machine.” Noting the blank look on the officer’s face, he elaborated, “A medical device used to treat depression by sending mag
netic impulses to the brain. We developed a proprietary programming for our experiments that is delivered from my laptop into this jack here. These dials”—he gestured to the dials on the machine underneath the square LED display—“also control the machine. They are all turned up to the maximum level. None of these settings are consistent with our work.”
“Is it possible—”
Ethan shook his head, anticipating the question. “The machine in its original configuration is FDA-approved. Even at these high settings, it could never be fatal. The electromagnetic fields it generates are much too small for that.”
“You’re saying the machine couldn’t have killed him, in your medical opinion?”
The last phrase rubbed him the wrong way. It isn’t opinion, he thought. “What I’m saying is that Elijah was murdered.”
“Who would want to kill the professor?
“No one.” He cast his eyes to the floor. The words came out softly. “Elijah was the gentlest man I’ve ever known.”
The officer closed his notebook and nodded to two of his colleagues, who stood by the door.
“We’ll be in touch, Dr. Lightman.” He handed him a business card. “In the meantime, please call if you think of anything else, no matter how insignificant.”
“Certainly, I . . . Wait! What are they doing?” The two other officers had coiled the power cord on top of the Logos and were lifting it off of the cart.
“Your machine is evidence in our investigation. We’ll need to take it with us.”
“But it’s one of a kind! I already told you it couldn’t have caused his death.”
“It will be returned, eventually.”
“You don’t understand. This project was the culmination of Elijah’s lifetime of research.”
“Well, it’s not going to continue until after this investigation.”
As the officers carried both Elijah’s body and his most important work out the door of the lab, Ethan felt as if they were taking his life with them too.
The Jericho Deception: A Novel Page 12
