The Price of Innocence

by Lisa Black

  ‘Oh. Well, OK, then. It was nice talking to you.’ Inane! She made herself look at him, and hoped her cheeks were not flushing.

  ‘Yeah, I have such pleasant conversation.’ He put a hand on her upper arm, nearly encircling it with his fingers, making her ever so glad she had worn the too-tight shirt. ‘Thanks for listening.’

  She bit her tongue to keep from saying ‘Anytime’, and settled for smiling, curving up her warm cheeks. He skulked away down the catwalk without looking back. She made herself gaze at the workroom and stare at the nearly completed electric car without seeing it.

  Then she took in a deeply contented sigh.

  Ridiculous.

  Bruce Lambert caught her gaze again and she blushed anew, a sure confession that she hadn’t heard a word he’d said about robotic assembly.

  The crowd moved on. She followed.

  You do not like that man. This is a silly flash of infatuation because you’re bored and lonely and you drank wine on an empty stomach. And he’s probably only trying to prove that he can still be found attractive by women who don’t prefer little boys.

  The group wound up back in the conference room. Some collapsed into chairs, as if that had been the longest walk they’d taken in months. Theresa headed for the wine box, ignoring the baby carrots entirely this time. Bruce Lambert moved on to the subject of fuel cells and how they lasted ten times longer than batteries but still ran out too soon and were too difficult to replenish. She wondered if he had agreed to speak to the board to help the school reduce its carbon footprint or to drum up new investors.

  Her eye fell on the yearbooks. Ginny had stacked them in groups of five, sitting alternately on their sides and on their ends, with the tail stacks fanned slightly. The Vice Chairman would slap Theresa’s fingers if she disturbed them.

  She’d have to be careful. To disguise her errand, even from herself, she first located her own year and photograph, noting with a sigh how firm her skin had been. Then she moved four years back and found David Madison’s. He hadn’t changed his hairstyle much; the flecks of gray made it look lighter these twenty-three years later. Schoolgirl behavior, gathering information on her secret crush and squirreling it away. Next she’d be leaving notes in his locker.

  Bruce Lambert wrapped up the discussion of thermoset composites and took some questions. Yes, he expected the car to be on sale within the next year, possibly the next six months. Yes, he had helped create the full-body scanning station for schools and no, he didn’t feel they were an invasion of privacy. No, he had not proposed to his current girlfriend, that was a rumor. No, his brother Carl had not gone to CSU until his sophomore year; like the Kennedys, his father had planned for his eldest child to bring in riches and scraped and saved to send Carl to Columbia, from which he was promptly expelled for a schoolboy prank that remained a more closely guarded secret than Bruce’s new fuel crystals, ha ha. Yes, the new cars would be available in an array of colors, including lemon yellow and something called electric poppy.

  She turned another page, and once again David Madison’s face jumped out at her. In a candid shot under the heading ‘Campus Life’, his younger incarnation hoisted a brew in the tradition of all college students since the beginning of time. He grinned for the camera with a bit more mischief than he had for the head shot. The caption read, ‘The chemistry club confers in the Rathskeller.’

  Chemistry? He majored in accounting. No doubt the yearbook writers meant it as some sort of joke, since the phrase had not been capitalized. Or perhaps he’d been there as a guest?

  At the front of the room, Cleveland’s resident genius explained how his version of the internal combustion engine was fueled by sand-like crystals. Theresa realized that everyone else had taken a seat, and sat down at the end of the last row so that her complete inattention would not be so obvious. She flipped to the index of the yearbook. The Chemistry Club had a nicely framed group picture, which did not include David Madison or anyone else from the Rathskeller photo. The caption had referred only to the chemical compounds of hops and barley.

  The young man next to David seemed familiar. Perhaps she’d shared a class with him; if he had been an underclassman in the photo, he might still have been there when she attended. He had a round face and a little too much curly brown hair to be flattering. She stared at the photo, willing the memory to come back to her, but it resisted until she gave up and examined the other students at the bar. One slender boy in the back stood with his shoulders hunched in, as if cowering, though he smiled, and his body language made her think of that squirrelly guy at Marty Davis’ funeral.

  She went back to the young man holding a bottle of Pabst and leaning on David Madison. Maybe if she took off twenty years and added some pounds – that was it. She hadn’t met him in a class but at the crime scene where he’d been shot to death.

  Marty Davis.

  She paged briskly through the rest of the yearbook. David said he attended the funeral because Marty had been kind to him during the brouhaha with his wife. Well, why not because they had been classmates first? She had wondered at the time why a patrol officer would have had steady contact with him after the case had been assigned to detectives – surely Marty would have done what he could to walk his old friend through the myriad of events that made up an investigation, arrest and prosecution. But why not say, ‘I’m an old friend,’ and leave it at that, instead of bringing up the errant wife?

  Maybe the investigation loomed so large in David’s life that he’d forgotten how he first got to be friends with Marty. Maybe some perverse impulse made him bring up his wife with any woman he felt attracted to – is he attracted to me? – the same way people pick at scabs.

  She could imagine what Rachael would say. ‘You work in a morgue and met this guy at a funeral? Mom!’

  ‘I am in there,’ Bruce Lambert said, materializing next to her. He poured himself a plastic glass of very cheap wine. ‘Somewhere. I wasn’t exactly Mr Popularity.’

  After the initial shock, Theresa found her voice. ‘Me either. I mean—’

  From some place nearby she heard a long, warning rumble. Then the floor began to quake.

  ELEVEN

  There was no force, no propulsion pushing her away. Just a deep-seated sound, at once too loud to have a rational explanation and too muffled to be identifiable. The room shook, glass shattered somewhere, and Bruce Lambert pushed her to the floor, partially under the table that held the wine and baby carrots. Suddenly her cheek pressed into the linoleum and his body partially covered hers while a wave of vibration passed through them, almost imperceptibly separate from the noise that followed.

  Then it receded, and Bruce Lambert got to his feet, pulling her along. The air filled with dust that rolled toward them like a living thing. ‘Are you all right?’

  She could only nod, stupidly. There must have been some sort of accident. One of Bruce Lambert’s many experiments hadn’t turned out so well.

  Then a man somewhere to her left said, ‘Was that an explosion?’

  ‘They really are trying to blow this place up!’

  Thirty-odd college graduates scrambled for the doorway, Ginny Wilson leading the way.

  Out in the hallway, a door three to the west leaked smoke and showed the erratic lighting of flames within. She followed Bruce Lambert toward that ominous glow.

  Then she smelled it.

  The wispy smoke carried odors of melted plastic and charred upholstery, but also a faint aroma of disinfectant. The same acrid smell from the Bingham building, and the crystal that she’d carried in her pocket. Nitrogen triiodide.

  She pulled out her phone.

  ‘You almost got blown up for the second time this week?’ Frank demanded.

  ‘It sounds bad when you say it like that.’ She had been all right until now, calling the lab, retrieving her camera to take photos of the charred storage closet outside the fishbowl workroom, helping the EMT move a badly burned technician and forbidding him to move the engineer he pronounced
dead, trapped beneath one of the overturned robots – they were much larger up close – all the while trying not to ponder why the area she had been in only ten minutes beforehand had turned into a smoking hole.

  But now the tremor in her cousin’s voice made her realize that neither one of them had even begun to deal with the close call they’d had at the Bingham building. She had grown accustomed to the physical threats of the job, and mostly of Frank’s job, by not thinking about it – after all, there was little she could do to control it. But clearly that would not be sufficient, not for this round.

  She tried not to cough. The air still stunk of iodine. ‘I’m all right. Not even a scratch.’

  Her cousin said, ‘It’s you. Someone’s trying to kill you.’

  ‘No, someone’s trying to kill America’s first truly popular electric car.’ She glanced over at Cleveland’s resident genius. Lambert stood over the dead engineer. Neck bent, he had one hand on his belt and the other covered his face, a still life of regret and grief. His brother Carl, a taller and handsomer version of Lambert, had draped one arm around his shoulders. The rest of the staff crowded in and out, gaping, exclaiming, some crying. All other movement had ceased. The huge robotic arms hung limp as if they, too, wept.

  ‘You think so?’ Frank asked.

  Theresa explained what she had learned on the tour, the few things she had picked up when not distracted by David Madison. ‘This is where they design robots that assemble parts and suchlike. Bruce says the explosion obviously came from a supply closet off this main workroom.’

  ‘So now you’re on a first name basis with the richest man in the country?’

  ‘No, I heard him say that to the firemen. What I mean is, who knows how long the bomb could have been in there?’

  ‘And it just happens to go off when you are up the hall.’

  ‘Exactly – up the hall, not in the room.’ Outside, the sun emerged from behind one of Cleveland’s many clouds and surged through the skylights above them. Its beam picked up the swirling motes she’d been breathing in and turned the car parts, smoke and people into a masterpiece of surrealism. She did not mention David Madison’s early exit. The man had been with her every minute and could not have snuck a bomb into the supply closet during the tour. From what she knew of nitrogen triiodide it would take a chunk the size of a concrete block to cause this much damage, and he could hardly have been carting that around in the pocket of his suit coat.

  Of course, he could have planted it before the tour. But still, size of a concrete block, strolling around a strange facility … ‘The security here seems adequate. Locked doors, security guards. We all had to sign in, get a pass, had a monitor with us during the tour, not to mention the said richest man. I’ve seen cameras. Plus every member of the staff seems to be best buds with every other member. Shipping a box here would be much easier than trying to get in yourself.’

  ‘Unless you already work there,’ Frank said.

  ‘But if you could get into this building, why blow up the Bingham next door? That sounds like someone who doesn’t work here.’

  ‘How long has that tour been scheduled?’

  ‘At least three weeks.’

  ‘What about Lambert? Any damage?’

  ‘Not hurt.’ Because he’d been lying on top of me underneath a table, she thought but didn’t say. ‘One of his engineers wasn’t as lucky.’ She and Lambert had worked to uncover the man’s head and one shoulder. One of the assembly robots had fallen over, crushing him before he could die of smoke inhalation or extreme heat. Blood seeped from his scalp, the puddle now thickened with ash and debris.

  ‘So the bomb was planted by someone with access who screwed up the timing and miscalculated Lambert’s movements—’

  ‘Or by someone who mailed it here in a box of supplies and didn’t care about access or timing, who targeted the facility and not the people in it. The bomb squad will have to figure that out.’

  ‘I have to go to a death call,’ Frank told her. ‘Try not to get killed in the meantime.’

  Snappy comments such as ‘No guarantees’ or ‘I’ll take that under advisement’ stuck in her throat, and in the end she simply assented and then hung up, still without mentioning David Madison.

  She snapped another photo of the dead engineer.

  ‘Do you have to do that?’ Bruce Lambert asked. He stood with a smudge on one cheek and a slump to his shoulders. He had lost his glasses at some point, exposing large brown eyes. His brother had disappeared. Two firemen combed the room for residual fires but stopped every foot or so to exclaim over some unusual gadget.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I do.’

  He squinted at her camera as if a bit perplexed. ‘You were on the tour, weren’t you? We were just underneath a table together, right?’

  ‘I’m a fellow alumnus, yes.’ She introduced herself, stating her position with the M.E.’s office.

  ‘Did we have any classes together?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I’d have remembered you. He would have.’ He gestured at the dead man on the floor. ‘Aaron never overlooked a pretty girl. He said science didn’t reward the unobservant and neither did cupidity.’

  ‘You’ve known him since college?’

  ‘I’ve known him since grade school.’ The man collapsed into a singed task chair, unable to take his gaze from his dead friend. ‘He was brilliant, generous, and sometimes a supercilious pain in the ass. He’d get ideas so fast that the rest of us couldn’t keep up, then he’d want us to finish developing them so he could go on to something else.’

  ‘I thought that was you,’ Theresa said, having read several articles to that effect.

  ‘It is me. It’s also Aaron and every other guy here. We thrive on the pace but that doesn’t stop us from driving each other crazy with it. My brother kept telling him to get married, that maybe that would channel some of that intensity and give the rest of us a few moment’s peace. For the first time I’m glad he didn’t.’

  ‘The man who was hurt – did you know him personally, too?’

  Lambert finally looked at her instead of the dead man. ‘Leroy, yes. Met him at MIT. He’s one of those guys that got rich counting cards in Vegas. I convinced him to use his powers for good.’ This brought the touch of a smile to his face, which Theresa returned. ‘He loved to catch wild animals. They’d just migrate to him, squirrels, crows, raccoons, like he was some sort of St Francis. Then he’d leave them in my room. The skunk was the worst. I had a wild rabbit as a room-mate for half a semester. I couldn’t get it out from under my bed so finally I just left it food and water and it would come out at night to drop little bunny bombs all over the carpet. Him, I’m glad he got married. His wife put a stop to that sort of thing.’

  Theresa leaned over, scooped up a twisted piece of clear material. ‘What were they working on in here? The lights?’

  ‘Headlights and taillights, yeah, and all the other molded plastic to be used in the design. The radio cover plate, the inside door handles. Gearshift. Battery cover, power steering tank. The entire body is a plasticized metal alloy.’

  ‘Do you think whoever planted the bomb is trying to sabotage your car?’

  Anger flashed across his face, hardening his features. ‘Could be. It could also be half a dozen other things we’re working on here, but the car is definitely the biggest project and the most far-reaching. It will change the face of the American landscape. It will also shift its power structure. This country has always been run by the most profitable corporations, insurance, banking and oil, and this will take one-third of that block out of the equation. It will also make me a tanker full of thousand-dollar bills, which I had hoped to use to ransom some groups of people from poverty, both here and internationally.’ This did not sound like a speech, using the moment to stump an agenda. He spoke absently, as if sorting through possibilities in his mind.

  She worried the chunk of plastic between her fingers. ‘What about you personally? Any
threats – enemies?’

  His look changed to one of pity at her naivety. ‘I have a lot of money. A lot. Everyone hating me comes with the private jet and the villa in Barbados.’

  Three people appeared at the far end of the room, moving cautiously over the rubble. The two FBI agents from the Bingham followed Lambert’s brother. Johnny-on-the-spot, as always.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Theresa told Bruce, ‘for your loss, and because the FBI will now ask you all the same questions that I just had the audacity to ask you, and many more besides. But they’ll find out who did this. We’ll find out who did this.’

  He climbed out of the task chair, stretching to an unexpectedly tall height, and regarded her. ‘But I love women with audacity.’

  She had just begun to smile when Carl Lambert reached them and began speaking. ‘These two are from the FBI. I don’t know what they’re doing here, and I don’t think you need to talk to them.’

  ‘Aaron’s dead,’ Bruce reminded his brother.

  ‘That doesn’t make it a federal case.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ the male agent asked Theresa. ‘How did you get here so fast?’

  ‘I was taking a tour.’

  ‘She’s OK,’ Carl Lambert insisted. His face was structured like his brother’s – elongated with a shock of brown hair on top – but his eyes were a cool blue. ‘You have no jurisdiction here. It’s an industrial accident on private property.’

  ‘It’s not an accident,’ Bruce gently pointed out to his sibling, nodding at the damage the bomb had wrought for emphasis.

  The female agent put in, without rancor: ‘We have the investigation at the Bingham building. This is obviously related, so this becomes our investigation as well.’

  ‘It’s not obvious to me!’

  ‘It’s the same explosive.’ Theresa also did not want to enter this argument, but saw no choice. ‘And it’s a relatively unusual one.’

  ‘How could you know that?’ Carl demanded.