The Question of the Missing Head

by E. J. Copperman

  “What do you suggest?” I reiterated. There was no sense in debating who might be at fault when the theft and the murder took place under the commander’s watch, before I was consulted at all.

  “Physical evidence,” he answered. “Interviewing witnesses can only take the investigation so far. What is the physical evidence present at the crime scene?”

  “Detective Lapides has gathered the evidence so far,” I said, and did not react when the commander rolled his eyes at the mention of Lapides’s name. There was no time now for this juvenile turf war. “But what I saw consisted of the receptacle for Ms. Masters-Powell’s remains, which had been removed from its storage site, behind Dr. Springer’s body, which was face down on the floor, blocking the door to the chamber. There was a bullet hole in the receptacle, but not in Dr. Springer. The rest of the receptacles were undisturbed, or at least appeared so to the naked eye. There was no blood on the floor, as Dr. Springer was not shot, but suffocated. In the outer chamber, there was no sign of a struggle, nor was the alarm system activated. Is there anything I am leaving out, Ms. Washburn?”

  She seemed startled at my addressing her. “Not that I saw, Samuel,” she said.

  I turned to face the commander and waited for his assessment. It was not long in coming.

  “Very good,” he pronounced my report. “But another examination of the scene, by a trained eye, couldn’t possibly hurt.”

  I was about to agree with him but to avoid noting that his eye was no more trained than most, when Lapides opened the door to Ackerman’s office and walked back inside. He was wearing a most unfortunately smug grin on his face.

  Lapides strode directly to Ackerman’s desk and pulled a paper from his inside jacket pocket. “There!” he said. “A warrant signed by a judge that gives my technology expert access to your video surveillance system.” He slapped the paper down onto Ackerman’s desk with a theatrical flair. “He’ll be here inside of an hour.”

  Then the detective did something so ill advised that I questioned his social skills as well. He looked at me, winked, and gave me a thumbs-up gesture. He turned back toward Ackerman. “And I will be interrogating Dr. Springer’s friend Amy in the conference room very soon. Be sure to come in and see how I do.”

  Ackerman, taking notice of this, narrowed his eyes and positively scowled.

  At me.

  Lapides, not noticing the damage he had just caused, turned on his heel, no doubt having rehearsed the move, and left Ackerman’s office.

  I avoided the urge to look at Ms. Washburn.

  Ackerman stood up, his face a picture of rage, turning redder as he rose, and pointed his index finger at me. “You!” he shouted. “You told him to get that warrant!”

  “I did not,” I said. “We had an agreement that I would not recommend a warrant to the detective, and I did not violate that agreement, even though I believed it was the right thing to do.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Commander Johnson insisted. “Lapides never would have thought of that himself. I’m surprised he thought to tie his shoes this morning. You had to have suggested it to him.”

  “I did not,” I insisted.

  “There was no one else who could have,” Ackerman told me.

  Ms. Washburn walked to the front of his desk. “There was someone else,” she said. “There was me.”

  Ackerman, who had spent the day mostly acting as if Ms. Washburn were not even in the room, looked positively astonished. His eyes widened and his nostrils flared. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. Even a person with Asperger’s Syndrome without social skills training could tell that he was furious.

  Commander Johnson, unlike Ackerman, was having no trouble finding his voice. “You!” he shouted at Ms. Washburn. “You have betrayed this facility and breached our security!”

  “Oh, I did not,” she answered, her voice confident. “I’m helping the police in the investigation of a theft and a murder. Isn’t that what citizens are supposed to do?”

  Ackerman worked his jaw for a moment, just opening and closing his mouth, and then he looked not at Ms. Washburn, but at me. It’s an eerie feeling for a person with an autism-spectrum condition. Even when we have a decent inkling of the other person’s intent, we know we are at a disadvantage, because we have to take the extra time to extrapolate facial expressions and tones of voice at the same time.

  So having Ackerman stare me directly in the face was a somewhat unnerving experience.

  When he could get his voice under control, he breathed out at me, “She does your bidding. You asked her to do this.”

  His anger did not make sense to me. “I do not understand your position,” I told him. “There is no reason to oppose an examination of the wiring in the closed-circuit system. Allow it to happen, and we will answer your question sooner and more accurately.”

  Ackerman bit his lip hard. I was surprised it did not draw blood.

  “You’re not going to answer anything,” he hissed. “I want you and her”—he pointed at Ms. Washburn—“out of here immediately. You’re fired.”

  There are times when someone like me is lost for a response, and this was one. I have a difficult time dealing with irrational emotion. Even when I have what my mother still refers to as a “moment,” there is thought behind it, not just blind rage. So when Ackerman turned so heatedly and made me that uncomfortable, I was taken by surprise and could not find the appropriate answer to his statement.

  “I … I … I …”

  Ms. Washburn took my arm and started to lead me away from the desk, but my feet did not respond to my command.

  I had never been fired before.

  “You heard him,” Commander Johnson said. He stepped out from behind the desk, perhaps in an attempt to appear physically threatening. I wasn’t sure.

  I tried to think more clearly and took a deep breath, as I have been trained to for years. “I don’t think you have a clear view of the situation,” I said to Ackerman.

  “He didn’t ask me to do anything,” Ms. Washburn said. “We didn’t discuss it. I’ll leave, but Mr. Hoenig should stay. He didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Ackerman narrowed his eyes and looked at me. “Is that true, Hoenig?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Ms. Washburn did exactly what I wanted her to do.”

  He nodded, a short, swift motion. “Then you are still fired. Leave immediately.”

  Perhaps he was simply misinterpreting my intentions, which were obviously to answer his question efficiently. “Dr. Ackerman,” I began.

  “Get. Out.”

  We got out. There was nothing left to say.

  I saw some advantage to the situation, however—now I would not be late for dinner.

  TWENTY

  “YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO do that.”

  Ms. Washburn, sitting in the driver’s seat of her car, did not look at me because she was concentrating on the road. And her inflection was difficult for me to read. I hadn’t done anything; I was sitting quietly in the passenger’s seat, mentally going over the last meeting with Ackerman and trying to understand what had happened.

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “Tell Ackerman that I did what you wanted me to do. I could have taken the heat for what happened, and you would have been able to go on trying to find the answer to the question.”

  My eyes were tired, and I rubbed them with my thumb and index finger. “What I said was true,” I told Ms. Washburn. “You did do what I wanted you to do. There was no point in denying it.”

  “Sure there was. You could have kept the job.” She made a turn onto US Highway 1 heading north. We would be back at my home in fourteen minutes at this speed.

  “I wouldn’t have had a ride home,” I pointed out. “And you wouldn’t have been able to continue on the question.”

  “You don’t need me. I just signed on for the day, remember?”

  That seemed like a long time ago. I had gained a good deal of admiration for Ms. Washburn in the
time we had worked together and did not want her to leave Questions Answered, even if we were not working for Ackerman and his institute any longer.

  “Would you like to continue on with the company?” I asked her. “I’d like you to stay.”

  Ms. Washburn’s lips puffed out a bit. I wasn’t familiar with that expression and did not have time to ask her what it meant before she said, “I don’t think I can, Samuel. You know how my husband feels about this.”

  In fact, Ms. Washburn had taken another call from her husband on her cell phone while we walked from the GSCI building to her car through the parking lot. I tried not to eavesdrop, but Mr. Taylor’s voice was quite piercing, and he seemed quite displeased with his wife’s absence. He also mentioned something about “working with that retarded guy,” which drew an acidic response from Ms. Washburn that I would not care to repeat.

  “How do you feel about it, Ms. Washburn?” I asked.

  She paused for what seemed like a long time but was really only eight seconds. “Samuel, my marriage has been a little … troubled for a while now. I don’t want to give up on it, and my working with you seems to be a sore point for my husband right now. I’m sorry, but I have to make that a higher priority than Questions Answered. Do you understand that?”

  “Of course I understand. I am not … that is, I have an IQ of one hundred thirty-seven, Ms. Washburn.”

  Ms. Washburn smiled, but it did not seem a happy smile. “I know. And you can call me Janet.”

  “Thank you, but I don’t think I will.” She just seemed like Ms. Washburn to me, and I do not especially care for change, particularly change in the way I think.

  “Why do you think Ackerman is so dead set against someone looking into his closed-circuit system?” Ms. Washburn asked, skillfully changing the subject after what I perceived was an awkward moment. “Do you think he’s involved in the theft, or Dr. Springer’s murder?”

  “I do not have enough facts to form an opinion yet,” I reminded her. “But it would seem illogical for Ackerman to participate in the crime, then hire me to investigate the crime and answer the question. And he would have no motive to steal Ms. Masters-Powell’s remains. He couldn’t ransom them from himself.”

  “Maybe the theft was just a distraction. A red herring set up to provide cover for the murder of Dr. Springer,” Ms. Washburn suggested.

  There was a high-pitched chirping sound, which I had come to realize was the ringing of Ms. Washburn’s cellular phone. She pulled it out of her pocket and extended it toward me.

  “I don’t want to take my eyes off the road,” she said. “Who does it say is calling? Because if it’s my husband, he can wait until I get home.”

  I did not take the phone from her because I prefer not to handle other people’s personal belongings unless it is necessary, but I could read the writing on the screen. “It appears to be a call from Detective Lapides,” I reported.

  “Oh, go ahead and take it,” Ms. Washburn said. Again, the phone was pushed in my direction.

  It would have been rude to have taken a handkerchief from my pocket to handle the phone. Mother has told me that, and I have found her word to be reliable under similar circumstances. If the phone had been a stranger’s, I doubt I would have touched it. But Ms. Washburn was, I had come to believe, a friend, and I did not want to insult her. Still, the idea of the microbes and microorganisms existing on that telephone was daunting. I don’t understand why people think it a good idea—or, more to the point, don’t think about it at all—to exchange such items freely. I am not technically germaphobic; that is not part of my Asperger’s Syndrome. But it seems like simply good common sense to protect oneself.

  I decided, therefore, to touch the phone as little as possible. “Just touch that button for speakerphone, and talk,” Ms. Washburn said. “That way we both can hear. Go ahead, Samuel.” She held out her hand far enough that I became concerned about her ability to make turns accurately.

  Gingerly, I took the phone from her hand and held in between my thumb and index finger, mentally resolving to wash my hands immediately upon getting home. I pressed the button Ms. Washburn had indicated, and heard the familiar static sound often associated with a speakerphone call.

  “Yes, Detective Lapides?” I said. “This is Samuel Hoenig.”

  There was a brief delay. No doubt my voice on Ms. Washburn’s phone had confused the detective. “Hoenig,” he said. “Where are you?”

  It seemed an irrelevant question, but since I did not know the reason for Lapides’s call, it was impossible to know what was relevant. But that thought had taken longer than it would for someone without Asperger’s Syndrome to reply, so Ms. Washburn said, “We’re in my car, detective. What can we do for you?”

  “You can come the hell back is what you can do,” Lapides said. He sounded irritated. Someone at GSCI must have done something to annoy him, I assumed. “I got the warrant for my tech guy to come in and search through the video surveillance system, and now I don’t know what to tell him he’s looking for. Why aren’t you here, anyway?”

  “We have been dismissed from the investigation,” I told Lapides. “Ackerman fired us.”

  “What? Why?”

  “For recommending that you seek the warrant,” I answered. “So there is no point in your asking for my advice on your case. I am no longer involved.”

  “How can you not be involved?” the detective lamented. “I’ve got Amy Fitzgerald walking in here in two minutes to be interrogated, I told that Johnson asshole that I’d really show him when I interviewed her, and I don’t even know what to ask. I need you back here.”

  “I’m sorry, detective,” I reiterated. “I have no client. I have no question to answer. You are a professional police officer. This is your job; I’m sure you can conduct a very effective interview.”

  “No, I can’t,” Lapides argued. “I’m no genius, Hoenig, but I know my own shortcomings. It took me years to be promoted to plain clothes, and I had to take every test six times, but I did it. I’m persistent, not insightful. I’m going to botch this interrogation and that Johnson asshole will be able to laugh at me again.” In such ways does the criminal justice system operate.

  My patience and my willingness to handle Ms. Washburn’s cellular phone any longer had reached an end. “It’s simple, detective,” I said. “All you need to do is establish whether Dr. Springer was a close friend of Rita Masters-Powell, and how often they saw each other. What the basis of their relationship might have been. And while you have Ms. Fitzgerald there, you’ll probably want to know whether Ms. Masters-Powell had talked to her about her motivation to seek a divorce, and her decision to be cryogenically preserved at the time of her death. Are there other detectives you work with?”

  “There’s one other in the department,” Lapides answered.

  “Record your interview with your laptop and play it back for the other detective. Is that detective male or female?”

  “Female,” Lapides said.

  “Ask her to look at the interview. See if there is anything you have left out or missed. See if there should be a follow-up session with Ms. Fitzgerald. And by all means, get that technical expert in to examine the GSCI video surveillance system as quickly as you can.”

  “Why?” Lapides asked.

  “Because Ackerman doesn’t want you to,” I told him. “I am no longer involved with your case, but I wish you good luck, detective. Good-bye.” I disconnected the phone and placed it in a console cup holder before Lapides could protest.

  “So we really are off the investigation,” Ms. Washburn said.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “We really are.” I sat back, and while I did not close my eyes, I did allow myself a moment of relaxation. Not pondering the GSCI questions seemed like a strange sort of relief.

  We rode in silence until Ms. Washburn pulled the car into the parking space in front of my house. “This is the right house, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Yes, you arrived here quite accurately,” I sa
id. It wasn’t exactly what I meant, but the right phrase had not presented itself to me in time.

  “Well, thank you for the day’s work, Samuel,” she said. “It was very interesting.”

  I was reaching for the door release, but I stopped. “You’re not coming in?” I asked. “Mother will be very disappointed to have missed you.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m late for home already.”

  I nodded. Her family responsibilities did have to come first. “But you should come in so I can pay you,” I said. “You have more than earned your wages for the day.”

  She smiled. “You can mail me a check. You have my business card.”

  I did have it, so there was no point in arguing. “Thank you, Ms. Washburn,” I said. I got out of the car, but before I closed the door, I looked inside once more.

  “You’re sure, then? About not staying on?” I closed the door, but the window was still open.

  She just shook her head.

  That move confused me, because when people shake their heads, it usually means no. That could mean Ms. Washburn was not sure, and that she might want to continue working with me at Questions Answered. But before I could ask Ms. Washburn any further questions, she put the transmission into drive and the car moved down the street.

  I stood there for a moment, trying to discern what that might have meant, but I was at a loss to explain it. I decided to ask Mother about it, so I turned and walked around the back of the house and inside through the mudroom.

  She was not immediately visible when I entered through the back door. That was unusual, but not terribly so. Mother is usually in the kitchen when my friend Mike, who drives a taxicab, drops me off in the evening, and therefore in the sight line of the back door, but this was seventeen minutes later than my usual homecoming, I’d called Mike to tell him no ride would be necessary, and Mother’s routine was surely disrupted.

  Sure enough, she emerged from the direction of the living room as I entered the kitchen. She was carrying a platter, the one she usually uses for roast chicken dinners, and seemed a little startled when she noticed me near the door.