Firewalk

by Chris Roberson

  “It was around that time that I left the university on a year-long sabbatical to perform a series of experiments with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, so much of what I know about what happened next came to me secondhand.” He gritted his teeth. “Maybe if I’d been here at the time, I could have been able to do something to help. Maybe Nicholas would have listened to me when he ignored the others. But …”

  He broke off, shaking his head as though to shake something loose.

  “In any event, as I understand the sequence of events, Nicholas began having … difficulties with some of the other researchers. At first everyone just assumed it was nerves, or that he was simply eager to take his turn, but as time went on his clashes with the teams that were conducting experiments with the equipment became increasingly hostile, even violent. He began acting paranoid, insisting that other researchers had hidden agendas that they were keeping from the rest of us. No one was allowed to enter the shaft while an experiment was in progress, for fear of interfering with the measurements, but several times Nicholas had to be physically barred from going down there, anyway. And all the while, his claims about his own hypothesis continued to get more grandiose.”

  “Sounds almost like schizophrenic delusions,” Izzie observed.

  “Or the paranoia of a meth head,” Patrick added.

  “All such explanations were considered at the time, believe me,” Hayao answered, sadly. “What choice did we have? And from what I’ve been told, I believe that Nicholas had started taking some kind of psychotropic by the end.”

  Izzie remembered the vials of powder that were in the evidence boxes back in the 10th Precinct community room.

  “But his behavior got even worse when he became obsessed with the history of Recondito. Nicholas had first come to the city as a graduate student, having done his undergraduate work at the University of Texas, and in all the time I’d known him he’d never displayed even a passing interest in anything to do with his present surroundings beyond which numbered parking spot was his and where he could find the best chicken fried rice near campus. But I was told that when he was denied entry into the mine shaft for the last time, he started pestering the geology department, interested in anything they knew about the hills and the surrounding countryside. And then the history department, and archaeology, and comparative religious studies, driven by a seemingly insatiable curiosity about the land and uses to which people had put it. Then he happened to meet the family of one of our colleagues. They had lived in this area for centuries, since it was still part of New Spain …”

  “Aguilar,” Izzie interrupted.

  The professor looked at her with mild surprise.

  “He was one of the staff members I interviewed when I was part of the F—” she paused, then said, “part of the Reaper task force five years ago. He was one of our principle sources of information about Fuller’s behavior leading up to the … incidents.”

  “Yes, well,” Hayao answered, “if anyone were to know, it would be Ricardo Aguilar. His grandfather Roberto was still alive at the time, and somehow Ricardo got it into his head that it might help satisfy Nicholas’s burning curiosity if he could talk to someone who could answer more of his questions about the city’s history. So Ricardo introduced them, though his relationship with his grandfather had always been somewhat strained, as I understood it. And from that point onwards, until the old man passed away some months later, he and Nicholas were virtually inseparable. The elder Aguilar owned a considerable amount of property in the city—”

  “Including the Ivory Point Lighthouse.” Izzie could not help interrupting.

  “Yes, including that.” Hayao’s expression was grim. “And as Ricardo told the story, when they weren’t holed up in the old man’s private library, his grandfather and Nicholas could be found walking the city streets together, visiting various apartment buildings or offices or even mausoleums in the cemetery, as though they were searching for something. Or for someone.”

  “Did they find it?” Patrick asked.

  The professor shrugged. “Who can say? The elder Aguilar had a stroke shortly afterwards and never regained consciousness. And Nicholas …” He sighed, a pained look on his face. “Nicholas isn’t around to explain himself.”

  “And it was after the old man died that Nicholas attacked Tompkins and got fired?” Izzie asked.

  “Within a few days of the old man’s passing, as I recall,” Hayao answered. “The way it was described to me, Alice Tompkins and Francis Zhao were interviewing Martin Something-or-other, an undergraduate student who had applied to assist them in recalibrating the Undersight equipment for the next Undersight experiment, when Nicholas burst into the conference room, shouting like a madman, and proceeded to attack poor Alice with a hammer. Thankfully she only suffered a few broken bones in her hand before Francis and the student were able to restrain Nicholas. Campus security came and took him away, screaming and ranting the whole way.”

  Hayao shook his head sadly.

  “Alice graciously decided not to press charges for the assault, but the scandal was such that the administration had no choice but to pursue disciplinary action of its own, and terminated his employment. By the time I came back to the university at the end of the year, Nicholas had broken off contact with the entire department. I tried to reach out to him, but he refused my calls and my letters were returned unanswered. And none of us ever saw him again.” He winced. “Well, I suppose that Francis and Alice … and all of the others … they saw him before he … he …”

  Izzie knew that each of them had indeed seen Fuller one last time, and then had never seen anything else, ever again.

  Hayao had one hand held across his eyes, head tilted back slightly.

  “I’m sorry …” he said, his voice strained. He took a deep breath, collecting himself. “Hm.”

  He lowered his hand, and Izzie could see that his eyes were red-rimmed and welling with fresh tears.

  “In any event, the Undersight program continued for several more years, though many of the chief researchers ended up leaving the university for the private sector once their own projects were complete. I had plans to conduct some experiments of my own, but after … after the killings …”

  He blinked rapidly.

  “The university decided to shutter the Undersight project afterwards. There were simply too many painful memories for everyone involved, with so many colleagues lost and … and …”

  He gulped a breath awkwardly, tears rolling down his cheeks. He raised both hands to his face and pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes.

  “I’m sorry…. It’s just very difficult to …”

  Izzie and Patrick exchanged a glance, and she could see that he was thinking the same thing that he was. They would not be getting any additional useful intelligence out of the professor in his present emotional state, and it was clearly time for them to leave.

  “We appreciate your assistance, sir,” Patrick said. “I think we have what we need.”

  The professor wiped his eyes, struggling to regain his composure. “Are you sure? I’m not normally so … so …” He flapped his hand. “You know.”

  “We completely understand,” Izzie assured him as she collected the scientific journals back into the folder, and she and Patrick started towards the door.

  “Well, if there’s anything else that you need, you know where to find me.”

  Izzie paused at the door as Patrick stepped out into the hallway. She looked back at the professor. “Actually, there is one thing. Would you happen to know if Dr. Aguilar is available? We may have a few follow-up questions for him.”

  “Let me check the departmental calendar.”

  Hayao turned to the standing desk and tapped the keys of his computers’ keyboard. As a window unfurled in the middle of the three monitors, Izzie saw that the simple acting of engaging in such a mundane task seemed to give the professor something to hang on to, an anchor in the present moment to keep his mind from drifting bac
k into the past. When he spoke again, his voice still sounded somewhat strained, but he was pushing through it, moving past the darkness behind him into something beyond.

  “It looks … looks like he’s still in New Mexico today, but his return flight is scheduled for late tonight.” The professor swallowed hard, blinking, and when he continued his voice was a little clearer still, less strained. “I’m not sure whether he’ll be back here tomorrow or if he plans to take the day off, but he has office hours posted for the day after tomorrow and the rest of the week, so I’m sure you won’t have any trouble catching him.” He glanced over his shoulder at her, a fragile smile on his face. “He’s doing some very interesting work at the Very Large Array out there. You should ask him about it. Fascinating stuff.”

  “I’ll definitely do that.”

  The fragile smile widened slightly, and then almost immediately began to fade once more. It was as if she could see the dark memories surfacing in his mind, shadowing his expression.

  “Thank you again, sir. I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us.”

  He nodded a cursory goodbye and then looked away, staring into the past.

  Izzie couldn’t think of anything to say that might help, and so she turned and walked through the door, leaving the professor alone with his memories, and followed Patrick down the hallway and out into the light.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Well, that happened,” Patrick said as they walked back across the university campus to the lot where he’d parked the car. “Wasn’t quite how I expected that conversation to go.”

  “But maybe that was a conversation that would have been more useful five years ago.” Izzie scowled, and couldn’t help but feel a burning shame of self-recrimination. “It’s clear that Kono was close to Fuller, and probably knew personal details about his life that the rest of their colleagues might not have shared.”

  “Possibly.” Patrick glanced over, searching her face. “What of it?”

  “So I should have talked to him back then.” Izzie gestured angrily at the black bunker behind them. “Sure, Ricardo Aguilar gave us the evidence we needed to find where Fuller was hiding, but we only approached him in the first place because he was the head of the department. My focus was entirely on the people who had been directly associated with Undersight.”

  Patrick nodded, and answered in a conciliatory tone. “Which made sense, once we realized that all of the victims had worked on the project at some point, even if they weren’t at the university anymore. That’s how we identified Fuller as the primary suspect in the first place.”

  “Okay, sure.” She was exasperated, in no mood to be patronized. “But if I’d done a more thorough job, if I’d asked the right questions …”

  She stopped short. When Patrick turned to her, she had a stricken look on her face.

  “Could we have found Fuller sooner?” There was a pleading edge to her voice. “Maybe Francis Zhao would still be alive if I had known to talk to Kono first …”

  Patrick put his hand on her shoulder. “Look, you did everything right.”

  “But if only I’d—”

  “No,” he interrupted, his hand squeezing her shoulder a little tighter in a comforting gesture. “You did everything right. You couldn’t just interview everyone at the university on the off chance they remembered a guy who had been fired from a job there years before.”

  “Kono would have remembered him, obviously.”

  Patrick nodded, grudgingly. “But it was Aguilar who gave you the list of Undersight staffers to interview, remember? There was no reason to think that you needed to talk to anyone else, especially once we made the connection between Fuller and Aguilar’s grandfather and the lighthouse. We knew where to look, and doing any additional digging would just have been an unnecessary delay. You, me, Henderson, Ramirez, and Johnson went straight from the 12th Precinct house out to Ivory Point as soon as the judge signed off on the no-knock warrant. We couldn’t have gotten there any sooner than we did.”

  Izzie sighed. “Maybe you’re right. But that doesn’t make it any easier to accept.”

  A moment stretched out as they stood in silence, then Patrick dropped his hand from her shoulder.

  “We should get going,” he said, his tone serious. “There’s something really important that we need to address.”

  “What is it?” asked Izzie. As Patrick turned and continued walking towards the parking lot, Izzie raised an eyebrow, curious. “Did I miss something?”

  “Yes,” he answered with a smile as he glanced back over his shoulder at her. “We missed lunch, and I’m starving.”

  For many years the south side of Prospect Avenue between Argent and Gold Streets had been a vacant lot, ever since a notorious fire in the 1940s completely destroyed the Guildhall building that had once stood on that spot. It was notorious in one respect because so many notable city leaders and captains of industry had perished in the fire, and notorious in another because the blaze had weakened the structural integrity not only of the building itself but of several levels of subbasements below, causing the whole affair to subside into a massive makeshift landfill. Surveyors and engineers determined that in order for any new structure to be built on the spot, the whole block would need to be excavated and refilled and graded before the ground there would be stable enough to safely support a building of any significant size. And when that effort was decided to be prohibitively expensive, no investors were willing to risk the capital necessary to rehabilitate the lot, and so the city took possession and simply had the landfill bulldozed flat, dumped a thin layer of soil on top, and designated it a city park. It was a park in name only, though, just a couple of acres worth of patchy grass bordered by sidewalks on all four sides, the only notable feature being the stone archway that stood at the corner of Prospect and Gold Street, which had once been part of the main Guildhall entrance, and was all that remained of the building after the fire.

  But while it stood vacant for decades, real estate was at too high a premium in Recondito for the lot to be unused forever. As the local economy began to shift from flagging concerns like shipping and fishing to more lucrative industries like technology and telecommunications, there was increasing pressure on the city to put the lot to productive use. The ground was too unstable to support a permanent structure, but it was strong enough that cars and small trucks could be safely parked on it, provided the trucks were not too heavily laden, and so local businesses petitioned the city to sell the block for parking. A vote from the city council was required to change the lot’s designation as a city park, but many coun-cilmembers were reluctant to pave over yet another midtown block for a parking lot, and so the issue was stalled until a compromise was proposed. The site of the former Guildhall building could be paved for parking, the city council declared, but only if a percentage of the space was leased to food cart vendors. Available seats at restaurants in City Center and the Financial District, which were separated by Gold Street and bordered by Prospect Avenue and Northside Boulevard, had increasingly become a problem as more and more businesses moved into Recondito’s midtown, and food trucks and carts had recently begun to offer a solution. But parking in mid-town was always an issue, and many local business owners balked at having trucks and carts stationed for weeks at a time in front of their storefronts. Designating the empty lot as a home for food carts and visitor parking alike solved more than one problem, and support for the proposal was enthusiastic and virtually unanimous.

  None of which Izzie had known fifteen minutes before, but which Patrick had decided to explain at length as they walked the perimeter of the food cart pod, trying to decide what to eat. As she dithered between bratwurst on the one hand and pho on the other, Patrick put in an order for grilled cheese at one cart and poutine fries at another, all the while enthusiastically declaiming his love for the idea of food carts and trucks in general.

  In the end, Izzie settled on Korean barbeque tacos and a sparkling Italian limeade, and she and Patrick r
etreated up the street to lean against a wall while they ate.

  “It’s good, right?” Patrick said around a mouthful of cheese curds and gravy.

  Izzie chased a spicy mouthful of chicken and kimchi with a swig of fizzing limeade and then nodded, eyes watering slightly. “Though I’ll admit that I kind of prefer to sit when I’m eating.” She set the bottle of limeade back on top of the mailbox that they were using as a makeshift table.

  Patrick shrugged. “Variety is the spice of life.” He bit off a hunk of his grilled cheese, and then gave a little moan of delight as he chewed.

  “You really do think about food an awful lot, don’t you?”

  He took a sip of root beer and grinned. “It’s hard not to, living in Recondito. This is a fantastic town for eating.”

  Izzie finished off the last of her taco, and used a paper napkin to wipe the corners of her mouth and clean off her hands. “I strongly suspect that you brought me here and gave me the living history tour of the food cart lot in an attempt to distract me from my feelings of guilt about not questioning Kono sooner.”

  “Well?” He swallowed the last bite of his poutine fries. “Did it work?”

  “Maybe. A little.” A faint smile played across her face. “Thanks for trying, either way.”

  “My pleasure.” He stuffed wrappers and napkins into a Styrofoam container and tossed it in the trash. “It wasn’t the Izzie Lefevre Show back then, you know. It was a joint task force, and a lot of people shared those responsibilities. You did your bit, and so did the rest of us.”

  “And this Ink investigation? Is that the Patrick Tevake Show? I don’t see you bringing anybody else from your vice squad into this yet.”

  Patrick drew a ragged breath. “I’m not the only one assigned to the Ink problem, no. There are a few other detectives who have been trying to locate informants who could help us identify the source. But I’m the only one working this particular line of inquiry … for obvious reasons.” They started walking up the street. “Besides, it’s not like Ink is the only drug we’re dealing with out here.”