The Price of Innocence

by Lisa Black

  She pictured sodium hydroxide, seeing the atoms as neat, bulbous little things, the sodium connecting to the oxygen and then the hydrogen. Or ammonium hydroxide, the nitrogen surrounded by hydrogens, in an ionic bond with an oxygen–hydrogen pair. Then nitrogen triiodide, the simplest, just a nitrogen atom in a triangular arrangement with three iodines. In her mind she picked up these little structures, trying to fit them together like puzzle pieces.

  Frank dozed next to her, a difficult thing to do in a metal folding chair, his head resting against a box of latex gloves mounted to the wall. No point asking him. He had made it through high school chemistry only with help from her, two years his junior. He knew no more about elements and compounds than, supposedly, David Madison.

  Yet Madison worked for a chemical supply company. He had proven himself adept at creating shadow accounts to cover up the activities of a meth ring – how much harder could it be to cover the activities of a terrorist group? Theresa knew terrorism functioned on its funding just as an army once marched on its stomach. Who would be better suited to serve their purposes than an accountant? She didn’t see why he’d be involved with Georgian independence, but then, the college meth business had been a moneymaking venture, so home-grown explosives could be the same – available for sale to the highest bidder.

  Marty would have let David walk up to him without drawing his weapon. Lily and Ken would have bought meth from David. For all Theresa knew, David had never stopped selling it, had used the business to pay for private schools and lawyers. Perhaps he had a reason other than embarrassment to avoid the scrutiny of the media and the police.

  But why use the meth? Why not merely strangle her in her own bed and leave? No one could place him there. Her mother had seen him, but earlier.

  ‘Frank!’

  He nearly slid from the chair. ‘What?’

  ‘Call my mother! She stopped over my house earlier and if he’s tying up loose ends then he might worry that she saw him approaching my house and—’

  ‘Relax.’ Frank leaned his head against the wall and once again closed his eyes. ‘I just talked to her a half-hour ago. You didn’t think our late-night foray would go unnoticed? My mother and yours have already had an early-morning conference call and decided that these late nights are going to break down our respective immune systems. They watch too much Discovery Channel.’ Then he seemed to nap once more.

  Theresa sucked in a deep breath. The momentary panic had sharpened her mind, though, and she continued to apply reason to the situation. Or very slightly educated guesswork that might pass for reason, she couldn’t be sure.

  Why use such an uncertain method as meth intoxication? Even if she killed herself, people such as Frank and her co-workers would be much less likely to accept it. Theresa didn’t have Lily Simpson’s life and, psychology aside, he had to know every possible tox screen would be run. The adulterated meth compounds would be found.

  Perhaps he’d hoped for a fatal car accident – she used the water bottle for her commute. But a tox screen would still have been done.

  Maybe her death was not strictly necessary. One way or another her condition would be noticed, and then any testimony offered would be discredited. Who would believe a morgue ghoul with proven drug usage when she started spouting theories of terrorism and its ties to an ancient meth lab?

  Hell, the truth sounded unbelievable. She let a complete stranger stay in her house overnight and he then poisoned her bottle of water, having no idea if or when she would ever drink it, with some bizarre version of meth that managed to be odorless and tasteless.

  Right. And on top of that, she had a crush on the guy, this man who only wanted to make sure she knew nothing useful about who shot Marty Davis. He had approached her at the funeral and she had not recognized him. Good. He came back again, perhaps to see if any new information had turned up, and found her holding the evidence that might tie him to the old meth lab. Not good. Now something had to be done.

  Theresa had to be neutralized.

  So much for her taste in men.

  ‘Frank,’ she said, once more startling him from his position against the box of gloves. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  Leo found her at the infrared spectrometer when he returned from lunch, her hands still a little shaky, with eyes that felt as if the inside of her lids had been coated with sand. ‘About time you got here. What are you working on?’

  ‘The plastic I found in the driveway next to Davis’ body.’ People and their actions and their stories only continued to confuse her. Time to get back to the plain facts of physical evidence and she had too many of them still outstanding. ‘I thought it came from a home-made silencer, like a plastic two-liter bottle. It’s the right material – polyethylene – but it’s thicker than pop bottles.’

  Leo surveyed her, carefully, eyes darting from her wayward hair to her scuffed Reeboks and settling on her face. The flushed face, bare of make-up, made him cringe, and the very un-Leo-like look of concern made her cringe. If Leo felt sorry for her instead of bawling her out for embarrassing the department, then that was it. Her career, looks and competence were in the toilet. She might as well shoot herself.

  But all he said was, ‘Any residues?’

  She sighed. ‘Only the usual stuff from gunshots – barium and antimony from the primer, and copper from the jacket. A little bit of lead, probably left over from earlier firings since the lead shot from the round wouldn’t be exposed until it hit its target.’

  ‘What did he stuff the bottle with, then?’

  ‘Good question,’ she said. Usually home-made silencers were filled with rags to absorb the sound. She would have found tufts of cloth along with the few pieces of plastic. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What’s that?’ He pointed to another glob of plastic, one that had softened and rounded into a rough oval.

  ‘I picked that up at the Lambert factory explosion – don’t even know why. Just something to do with my hands, I guess, while talking to the superbly rich guy.’

  ‘You’re running it? Why?’

  ‘Why not? Because it’s here, and I need more plastics for my database anyway.’

  ‘You don’t have enough to do that you’ve got to run unnecessary samples? Seriously?’ he grumbled, then reached out a hand. ‘Give it here.’

  She frowned.

  But her wrinkled eyebrows were no match for his trademark scowl. ‘The fine equipment in this lab is intended for the analysis of evidence, not random debris. Evidence. The stuff the attorneys want to hear about, that the juries need to see. That stuff.’

  She gave in … largely because she had already scraped off a sample for the FTIR window. He dropped the glob into his pocket, then gave her one last worried scowl before trundling off toward the coffee pot.

  Speaking of which— ‘Hey, what did you do with my box?’

  ‘I’m not responding to that one, missy. You’re not going to slap any kind of sexual harassment charge on me.’

  ‘The box from the Bingham building that I had in the amphitheater yesterday. Where did you put it?’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘Back in the garage, of course.’

  She started to ask for more specifics, but didn’t bother. No doubt Leo would have dropped it just inside the door. She knew no room remained to go much farther and he had never been one for exploration. After he refilled, she went on: ‘Did they call us to the Forty-Ninth Street scene?’

  ‘No, that’s the fire marshal and Homeland Security, and best of luck to them. They did bring us the body, complete with fire marshal department escort who insisted on telling me all about it with both a color and a play-by-play version. Firemen. They never have enough to do.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  Her boss paused, hitched half of his bottom over the workbench edge and sipped from a steaming mug. ‘He took the paint cans we collected from the victim. Only two – blue jeans and a melted plastic glob. I guess the guy had been we
aring a nylon sports shirt. I don’t get wearing football jerseys when you’re not, at that moment, playing football.’

  She eyed his plaid shirt. ‘Anything else on the body?’

  ‘A few pieces of bling, they’re in Property. I asked if the guy was a terrorist and he said they were working with that theory, since the explosive seemed to be the same stuff from the Bingham building.’

  ‘Nitrogen triiodide.’

  ‘Yeah. Weird choice for a bomb, but easy to make. The point of origin seemed to have been against the interior wall, next to a dresser or in one of the drawers. He rigged it with a mercury switch, to go off when disturbed. I guess he didn’t count on being the guy who disturbed it.’

  ‘Why would you booby trap your own place?’

  ‘Because a bomb is a little hard to explain when the maid or a pilfering neighbor stumbles on it? They don’t lock the doors there. Honor system.’

  ‘So he blows them up?’

  ‘Does a guy like Beltran strike you as a guy deeply concerned for his fellow men? He shot a cop down in cold blood.’

  Theresa lined up her shard of plastic on a microtome, slicing a thin sample from the piece. ‘Then he panicked when the cops showed up at his door? Do you think he was going to try for some sort of stand-off? Threaten them with the bomb if they didn’t let him go?’

  ‘We’ll never know now, will we? But they found a gun in his hand – a hand no longer attached, by the way. His body became almost completely disarticulated but by God he didn’t let go of that gun. So the marshal’s theory is that the victim went to that drawer to get the gun, forgot about the bomb or forgot he armed it or was in too much of a hurry to be careful. So he grabs the gun and boom.’

  And Frank came within about ten feet of going boom with him. Theresa caught her breath, held it, let it out. ‘What kind of gun?’

  ‘9 mil.’

  The same caliber that killed Davis. It might be able to be connected, if the shell fragments in Marty Davis’ brain had any usable toolmarks. ‘So he left an armed bomb in his dresser drawer? Where would a guy like Terry Beltran learn how to make a mercury switch?’

  ‘Prison. You can learn anything there.’ Leo shook his head. ‘Or the Internet. Seems you can learn pretty much anything there, too. How is your cousin?’

  ‘OK. He’ll be all right,’ Theresa said, pleased that he had asked.

  Her pleasure evanesced with Leo’s next words. ‘And he’s going to keep any mention of you ingesting methamphetamine out of any report anywhere, right?’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault!’

  Leo gave her a look both sad and stern. ‘You want to explain that to a jury when you’re asking them to accept the professionalism and expertise in your assertion that this fingerprint matches that one or that you found gunshot residue on the suspect’s shirt? That you accidentally got higher than the combined attendees of Woodstock?’

  Theresa began to feel nauseous. ‘It wasn’t accidental. It was a murder attempt.’

  ‘Yeah. And Ross Perot dropped out of the presidential race because someone tried to blackmail his daughter. We have got to keep this out of print, Theresa. I cannot emphasize that enough. And you have to recuse yourself from this entire case.’

  ‘Marty Davis’ murder? Leo—’

  ‘The Davis case, the Bingham explosion, everything. We have plenty of more standard homicides and suicides which are every bit as important. Work on them.’ Again that look, equal parts sorry and don’t screw with me. ‘Whatever you have, give to me, your evidence, your reports, everything. No arguments, MacLean. You know this is how it has to be.’

  She did. Leo would do everything he could to protect her career, but he would do everything to the tenth power to protect the lab. Period.

  She put the piece of plastic back into its envelope and handed it to him. She even gave him the piece from the Lambert explosion.

  ‘Sorry, kid,’ he said, and seemed to mean it.

  She went next door to see Oliver.

  Most of the staff had left for lunch and it took much pounding on the door and shouting before the man would rouse himself from the workbench to let her in. The unexpected activity obviously left a bad taste in his mouth. ‘Have you come for another assassination attempt? Carrying a little C-4 in your pockets, are you?’

  ‘I need more chemistry.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’ He moved past a bench with Nalgene jars of bodily specimens and the gas chromatograph, back to his lair, and left her to follow if she wished. No flashes of empathy here, to her relief. Coming so soon after Leo that would add one more layer of surrealism to her day. ‘You might be all right if you combed your hair, and got the proper amount of sleep. And stopped taking drugs.’

  A response to this seemed quite beyond her present abilities, and in her silence he relented enough to say, ‘It shouldn’t be all that bad. You didn’t get the same stuff that killed Lily Simpson.’

  ‘Yeah, Frank said that. So he dosed me with plain old meth?’ Technically this violated Leo’s edict, but surely she had a right to know what she had been poisoned with?

  ‘I didn’t say that, either.’ Oliver took a large bite of what appeared to be an egg and sausage muffin, and not a feeble fast-food version, either. This muffin had at least a five-inch diameter. An oversized Styrofoam cup of coffee steamed next to it and she wondered when she had last eaten. Yesterday – lunch? Had she eaten lunch? ‘He – do you know who this mysterious he is, by the way?’

  ‘Um, no – not yet.’ Naturally she held out a tiny, foolish hope that David Madison had not tried to kill her, but circumstances refused to throw this hope a bone. Frank had immediately sent the local police to her home, but David and his vehicle were both gone. His children were, as he had said, at his sister’s and had not seen him since Friday after school. Frank issued a BOLO but so far neither the man nor his car had been sighted. ‘We’re working on it.’

  Oliver’s eyes, surrounded by puffs of flesh, peered out from behind round glasses. ‘Uh-huh. Well, he used the same stuff he gave to Ken Bilecki. Plain meth, as you might say, none of the additional compounds that bind the neurotransmitters. Chemically, no different than any other meth that turns up in an unhealthy portion of the victims we see here.’

  ‘Not chemically different.’

  ‘No. The difference is in the purity. Most meth is not perfect to begin with and laced with unintended impurities, having been cooked by street thugs who barely made it out of grammar school. Then it is cut with some innocuous substance to add volume without additional expense – same way snack foods are often sold in boxes one-third larger than they need to be. It fools the consumer into thinking they’re getting more. So most meth is also laced with intended impurities.’

  Her brain did not feel like following Oliver’s ping-ponging interests. ‘And the stuff I got?’

  ‘No impurities at all, intentional or otherwise. It’s the most chaste, most potent methamphetamine I’ve ever seen.’

  She tried to assimilate this. ‘So he would not have had to add much to my flavored water. It wouldn’t alter the taste. And if a chronic user like Ken took the same amount he usually did—’

  ‘He’d be guaranteed to overdose.’

  Ken and Lily, both killed by bizarre forms of meth – forms tailored for each of them. The killer didn’t only know chemistry, he knew his victims. He knew them well.

  Of course this only added to the mounting evidence against David Madison. When this case ended she would lock herself in her bedroom and throw the key down to her mother lest she ever make the acquaintance of another man. And if she lost her job in the wake of this morning’s incident, it would only make hibernation that much easier to accomplish.

  OK, move on. ‘Did you get anything from the samples I sent you from our Bingham victims?’

  ‘In indirect violation of federal instructions regarding the evidence? Oh yes, my dear, I know about that. What do you mean by anything?’

  Oliver functioned as a particularl
y cranky form of Google. Make your search parameters too narrow, and you might miss some results. ‘Anything interesting?’

  ‘More residue of what you tried to kill me with, nitrogen triiodide.’ Oliver chewed, swallowed, flicked his ponytail back over his wide shoulder and added, ‘Found some phosphorus, too.’

  Theresa had been staring at the mass spectrometer to distract herself from the sausage and egg combination, which, of course, was not permitted in the lab, but rules did not apply to Oliver, especially when no one else was around. Now she switched her gaze back to the portly toxicologist. ‘Phosphorus.’

  ‘Chemical symbol P, number fifteen on the periodic table. A multivalent non-metal. Surely you’ve heard of it.’

  ‘I have a theory,’ she said. ‘About why the meth lab blew up twenty-five years ago.’

  He washed down his breakfast with approximately a pint of steaming coffee, taken all at once. ‘Oh, excellent. A biologist with a theory based on chemistry. I do have to hear this.’

  ‘Ken Bilecki told me DaVinci—’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Long story. DaVinci mentioned ammonium hydroxide. They synthesized the meth using iodine and red phosphorus. One of the steps calls for the addition of sodium hydroxide, to bring up the Ph. If the dead student used ammonium hydroxide instead, maybe he wound up with a bunch of nitrogen triiodide crystals instead of meth in the bottom of his flask.’

  Oliver considered this. ‘Hmm. Might be an interesting experiment. Though I’ll bet workers’ comp wouldn’t cover any maiming injuries, party-poopers that they are.’

  ‘As long as the crystals are kept cold and wet, nothing bad happens and he doesn’t know anything’s wrong. However, the next step in the meth process calls for heating the flask.’