Out Cold

by William G. Tapply

  Gordie called a little after noontime. “I got some information for you if you want it,” he said.

  “Of course I do.”

  “It’ll cost you a ham and Swiss on pumpernickel, hot mustard, dill pickle.”

  “You want something to drink?”

  “Nah. I got a fridge full of drinks.”

  “I’ll stop at the deli,” I said. “Be there in half an hour or so.”

  Gordie’s office was just a short walk across Copley Square from mine. I took a detour to Manny’s deli on Boylston and got us both a ham and Swiss. When I got to Gordie’s, I clomped the slush off my boots, hung my coat on the hook beside the door, and put the bag of sandwiches on his desk. Gordie was peering at his computer monitor. He didn’t bother looking up. “Grab me a Dr Pepper,” he said, gesturing at the minifridge against the wall near the coffee urn. “Help yourself.”

  I got a Pepsi for myself, a Dr Pepper for Gordie, took them over to his desk, and sat down.

  He swiveled around in his chair and grinned at me. “Don’t suppose you want to hear about the baby who was born without a torso or limbs, do you?”

  “No. Sounds sick.”

  He nodded. “Sure. It is. Later, maybe.” He took his sandwich out of the bag, unfolded the waxed paper, and bit into it. With his other hand, he shuffled through some papers and pushed one of them across his desk to me. “That logo. Something like this?”

  The logo I’d seen on the side of the panel truck was printed on the sheet of paper. It was in the shape of an oval. The bears, I was pleased to see, more-or-less resembled those in the sketch I’d made from my memory. They were crouching there with a couple of pine trees in the background.

  Curving under the bears were the words “Ursula Laboratories Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

  “That’s the one,” I said. “Ursula, huh? That’s how you tracked it down?”

  “Google needs words,” he said. “I tried plain old bear, bruin, Kodiak bear, brown bear, black bear, polar bear, grizzly bear, panda bear, koala bear, Winnie-the-Pooh bear, teddy bear. Got millions of hits, of course, which I had to plow through. To no avail. So then I tried ursa, ursus, ursine, like that.” He arched his eyebrows at me.

  “Latin for bear,” I said.

  “Yes. And lo, Ursula popped up, and there you are.”

  “But this place is in Cambridge,” I said. “I’m positive those were New Hampshire plates on that truck.”

  “They did business in Cambridge,” said Gordie, “but actually, Ursula Laboratories was a New Hampshire corporation.”

  “Aha,” I said. “The New Hampshire connection.”

  “You can incorporate anywhere, you know,” Gordie said, “and do business anywhere. It’s not necessarily a connection at all. Most likely, all it means is that their lawyers thought being a New Hampshire corporation was favorable tax-wise.”

  “And they registered their truck in New Hampshire for the same reason?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t think it works the same way.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Did you say it was a New Hampshire corporation? Past tense?”

  “Yes I did,” he said. “Urusula Laboratories was incorporated in June of 1996 and closed down in October of 2002.”

  “Closed down? Or moved?”

  “Closed down, near as I can tell,” Gordie said. “The corporation was dissolved and the laboratories stopped doing business. I couldn’t find any Ursula Laboratories doing business currently anywhere in the United States. No hits on the Internet except that defunct one.”

  “Well, shit.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I appreciate what you did. It’s just a dead end, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know,” he said, “since I don’t have any idea what this is all about.”

  “Do you want me to tell you all about it?”

  “Actually, no,” he said. “I don’t want to know any more than I need to know. That’s always been my policy.”

  “And a sound policy it is,” I said.

  “Helps me avoid confidentiality issues,” he said.

  “I’m the same way myself.”

  Gordie shuffled through some papers on his desk. “Some notes I made,” he mumbled. He picked up a yellow legal pad. “President of the corporation was a guy named Judson McKibben, M.D. The vice president was, da-da, Ursula McKibben. From what I can decipher of the technical gobbledegook, they did DNA testing and stem-cell research. Biogenetics. Pretty cutting-edge stuff, I infer. Ursula McKibben, the V.P., died in May, 2002, and the corporation dissolved the next October, and since then the doctor appears to have fallen off the face of the earth.”

  “Who was Ursula? His wife?”

  “Daughter, I think.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because she was twelve years old when she died.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Gordie. “It’s a bitch, all right. Might explain why he decided to shut down the business. Must’ve loved his daughter a lot to name it after her. Hard to keep yourself going after something like that.”

  “They live in Cambridge, though, huh?”

  “I don’t know. Did I say that?”

  “It’s on the logo,” I said.

  “The laboratory was in Cambridge,” said Gordie. “Who the hell knows where Dr. McKibben lives.” He looked at me. “I bet you could figure that out for youself.”

  “You think so?” I said. “Me?”

  He smiled. “I take it back. Probably not a completely geekless person such as you. But I bet Julie could do it for you.”

  Eighteen

  When I got back to the office, I told Julie what Gordie had told me. “He thinks you could track down this Dr. Judson McKibben.”

  “Me?”

  “He called me geekless. But you’re a whiz at that stuff.”

  “Geekless.” She smiled.

  “So will you—”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “The girl, his daughter, Ursula, she died four years ago, you said?”

  “That’s right.”

  “She was twelve?”

  I nodded.

  “So,” said Julie, “if Ursula had lived, she would’ve been the same age as Dana Wetherbee was when she died.”

  I looked at her. “Sometimes you amaze me.”

  “I hardly ever amaze myself,” said Julie. “That does seem significant, though, doesn’t it?”

  “It surely does,” I said. “See what you can find out about Dr. McKibben, okay? Maybe that will help us understand its significance.”

  I went into my office and fooled around with some paperwork, and about an hour later Julie thumped on my door, then pushed it open with her hip. She was holding a mug of coffee in each hand. A manila folder was wedged into her armpit.

  She sat in my client chair across from me, slid one mug across the desk to me, and kept the other one for herself. She opened the folder, removed a sheet of paper, and laid it flat on my desk in front of her. I could see that it was covered with handwritten notes.

  She studied her notes for a minute, then looked up at me and cleared her throat. “Dr. Judson McKibben,” she said. “He’s forty-one years old. B.S. University of New Hampshire, Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude, major in biology. Ph.D. from Harvard in genetics. M.D., also Harvard.”

  “Smart man.”

  “Good student, anyway,” said Julie. “Not always the same thing. Anyway, he got married when he was in medical school, woman named Greta Gottfried, a med student herself. Judson and Greta had a daughter, and then Greta died. McKibben didn’t remarry. Raised the child, Ursula, himself. The doctor never did practice medicine. After medical school he worked for a biomed outfit for a few years before he started up Ursula Laboratories in Cambridge. Dissolved the corporation when Ursula died. Drowning accident.” Julie blinked at her page of notes, then looked up at me. “Since then, the past four years, Google came up with no hits on Dr. McKibben.”


  “No hits,” I said. “Isn’t that unusual?”

  “It’s extremely unusual for Google to come up with zero hits on a businessman like this McKibben. It’s not particularly unusual for ordinary people who don’t have things published about them.” Julie looked up at me. “You could Google me, for example, and you wouldn’t get a single hit.”

  “But in McKibben’s case,” I said, “the fact that you got no hits on him is significant.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It definitely is.”

  “It means he’s trying to be invisible.”

  “A man like him,” she said, “he’d have to make an effort. That’s right.”

  “Mourning his dead daughter,” I said. “His only child. The light of his life. Already lost his wife. That’s pretty rough. So he sells his business, gives up his life as a public person, avoids publicity, goes into seclusion.”

  Julie nodded. “It would be understandable.” She hesitated. “There was something else.”

  “What?”

  “Guess where Judson McKibben grew up, went to public schools, and where he still owns property.”

  “I bet you’re going to say Churchill, New Hampshire.”

  “Bingo,” said Julie. “There’s a house and a hundred-forty-nine acres that’s been in the family since 1877.”

  “This is excellent,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “The rest is details,” she said. “I’ll type up my notes for you if you want.”

  “Good,” I said. “Thank you. I do want. Hold my calls for a while, okay?”

  She stood up and collected our empty coffee mugs. “Gonna talk to Detective Mendoza?”

  “If she’ll let me.”

  After Julie left my office, I called Saundra Mendoza’s cell phone.

  “What do you want, Mr. Coyne?” was how she answered.

  “How’d you know it was me?”

  “It’s a feature on my phone,” she said. “Alerts me to nuisance calls. So naturally your name pops right up. I thought I warned you about calling my cell phone.”

  “I’ve held off calling you,” I said, “until I thought I had good information. I’d hate to be a nuisance.”

  “Ah, come on, Mr. Coyne. I’m yanking your chain. What’s up?”

  “I’ve learned a couple things.”

  “Give me a hint.”

  “Where Dana Wetherbee went when she ran away, maybe. That van with the bear logo.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m on the road. Can’t talk now. I’ll be there in an hour.”

  Saundra Mendoza actually arrived less than three-quarters of an hour later. Julie ushered her into my office.

  “Where’s your partner?” I said.

  “In the car. We’re double-parked in front of the library.”

  “Did Julie offer you coffee?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I declined. What’ve you got for me?”

  “Did Roger Horowitz talk to you about a girl named Misty?”

  “The hooker up in Danvers?” She nodded. “He did. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  I told her that Misty called, said she wanted to hire me, claimed she had information that somehow related to the van with the bear logo and her friend Kayla. She was worried about Kayla, and even though she denied it, I’d sensed that she was worried about herself. I told her that Misty didn’t show up after we agreed to meet, so the next day I tracked her back to the Happy Family restaurant on Beach Street. Thirty-six hours later she was dead. I told her how Bonnie at the restaurant said Misty, Kayla, and Zooey had been arguing. I told her about talking with Dana Wetherbee’s grandmother, how Dana had been more-or-less abandoned by her father after her mother died, how she’d been living with her grandparents in Edson, Rhode Island, how she left home when she turned sixteen and sent a Christmas card to her brother that had been postmarked from Churchill, New Hampshire. I reminded Mendoza that the panel truck with the bear logo had New Hampshire plates, and I told her how I’d learned that the logo was for an outfit called Ursula Laboratories out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, which did DNA testing and stem-cell research and went out of business four years ago. The president of the company, I told her, was an M.D. named Judson McKibben, and the vice president was his daughter, Ursula McKibben, who drowned at the age of twelve. I pointed out the interesting age coincidence between Dana Wetherbee and Ursula McKibben. I told her that Judson McKibben had deep roots in Churchill, New Hampshire.

  “Where’s Churchill, New Hampshire?” she said.

  “Way up north near the Canadian border.”

  “A long ways from Chinatown.”

  I nodded. “Over two hundred miles.”

  She looked at me for a minute out of those big somber brown eyes. Then she shook her head and smiled. “It’s really interesting information. Intriguing. I’m glad you shared it with me. I think you’re onto something. But you know, Mr. Coyne, I’m just a Boston cop, stuck here in the city limits, and my case, the Maureen Quinlan case, my only actual case here, is only indirectly connected to all of this.”

  “It’s directly connected,” I said. “Don’t forget Dana’s photo, the one I gave to Sunshine, was stapled on Henry’s collar.”

  “I didn’t forget that,” she said. “Have you talked to Lieutenant Horowitz?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I intend to. I just thought—”

  “Please talk to Roger,” she said. “Tell him all this. Ask him to call me. We can work together on this. He can liase with the New Hampshire police, if it comes to that.” She stood up and reached her hand across my desk. “It’s good information, Mr. Coyne. Thank you.”

  After Saundra Mendoza left, I tried Roger Horowitz’s cell phone.

  He answered the way he always did. “Coyne? Whaddya want?”

  “I don’t want anything,” I said. “I have some information you might be able to use.”

  “Use how?”

  “On the Misty case.”

  “Go ahead.”

  I repeated to Horowitz what I’d told Saundra Mendoza.

  When I finished, he said, “New Hampshire, huh? Very interesting. I’ll check it out.”

  “When?”

  “Whaddya mean, when? I’ll do it when I do it. Since when am I required to report to you?”

  “I just—”

  “Look, Coyne. You know how it works. I’ll make some phone calls. I can’t just go slamming around in some other jurisdiction without being invited, but I know some New Hampshire state cops.”

  “Meanwhile,” I said, “while you guys are arguing about jurisdictions, I’m worrying about Kayla. That’s the one thing Misty said to me. She was worried about her friend Kayla. She linked Kayla to the guy in the van with the New Hampshire plates. My guess is, he’s got Kayla.”

  Horowitz didn’t say anything.

  “Misty got killed, for Christ sake,” I said. “So did Maureen Quinlan. Dana Wetherbee, she died, too.”

  “You’re worried about Kayla,” he said.

  “Yes. And Zooey, for that matter.”

  Horowitz was silent for a minute. Then he said, “Thanks for the information. Mendoza and I will take it from here.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Good.”

  “You hear me, Coyne? We’ve got it now. Thanks for all the help.”

  “I hear you,” I said.

  I bought a loaf of fresh-baked anadama bread from the bakery on Newbury Street and picked up a dozen eggs, a hunk of extra-sharp cheddar, a yellow onion, a green pepper, a dozen oranges for fresh-squeezed juice, and a pound of unsliced bacon at Savenor’s on Charles Street. It was my turn to cook, and I had Friday-night omelettes on my mind.

  Henry wagged his tail and gazed hungrily at my bag of groceries when I walked in the front door. I took the bag into the kitchen, where a pitcher of Bloody Marys sat on the table.

  I heard the shower running upstairs.

  I put the omelette makings in the refrigerator, poured two glasses of Bloody, added some ice cubes, took them upstairs, and set the
m on the bedside table. I hung my necktie and jacket in the closet, took off my shoes, and lay down on the bed.

  Pretty soon the bathroom door opened, a cloud of steam billowed out, and Evie emerged like a redheaded ghost in the fog. She was wrapped in a giant pink bath towel.

  When she saw me, she smiled and unwrapped herself.

  Afterwards, we dozed. When we woke up, we lay there propped up on our pillows sipping our Bloody Marys. The ice had melted, but they still tasted good.

  I told Evie about my conversations with Gordon Cahill and Saundra Mendoza and Roger Horowitz.

  “So you don’t think the detectives will do anything?”

  “Jurisdictions,” I said. “There’s not a lot they can do without something solid. Roger will probably talk to his counterparts in New Hampshire. That’s about it.”

  She was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “So now what?”

  “I think tomorrow I’ll head up to Churchill, New Hampshire,” I said, “poke around a little.”

  “Why did I know you were going to say that?”

  “You love me,” I said. “You know me inside and out.”

  “What do you mean, poke around?”

  “Just try to get some information. Don’t worry. I won’t do anything stupid.”

  “Ha,” she said. “Can I come?”

  “Nope.”

  “I knew you were going to say that, too.” She studied my face for a minute, then shrugged. “The Lone Ranger rides again.”

  After breakfast the next morning, I opened my overnight duffel on our bed. I packed it with underwear, socks, sneakers, sweatshirts, flannel shirts, blue jeans, and woolen long johns, along with my tattered copy of Moby-Dick and my toiletry kit.

  Then I wandered around the house gathering the other stuff I wanted to bring and piling it on the bed—binoculars, tape recorder, Swiss Army knife, cell phone, digital camera, flashlight, spare batteries, Space blanket, Leatherman.

  Evie was sitting there watching. “I see you put a padlock on the back gate.”

  “I’ve been meaning to get the lock fixed.”

  “To keep out pregnant teenagers?”

  I shrugged.

  “Kind of a horse and barn door thing, isn’t it?”