by B. J. Graf
“Unless she hired Pink,” I said. “According to Lee’s boss, he had it in for Lee. She might have met him outside Genesys. Let’s see what Pink has to say before we talk to the widow.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I spat the name Harvey Pink into the California Department of Justice voice-activated information network and got a hit. Pink’d been popped three times before 2030. Like many an addict in need of cash to fuel his habit, he’d strewn criminal breadcrumbs all over town, jacking money from an unlocked car here, perpetrating a little B&E there. On collar number three Pink had spent some time behind bars.
That must have been where he found God. Pink was paroled September 1, 2041. Upon release he’d suddenly demonstrated an obsession with pro-life activism, practically taking up residence outside Genesys. Pink already had a protest-related citation for rock throwing and a recent restraining order against him.
“The rock throwing fits with what Maclaren told me about somebody exercising his pitching arm on Lee’s windows,” I said.
“We’ll need to get hold of those Genesys security disks too,” Shin said. “We have to at least consider the option this Harvey Pink is behind it all, but I don’t buy it.”
“Agreed. He vibes too small time for a double-homicide perpetrator,” I said. “And a guy who gets caught on petty theft and B&E isn’t smart enough to engineer these two deaths.”
I linked to the county probation department and traded Pink’s name and DOJ number for his current address.
Shin nodded. “Plus, why would he target the Devonshire girl? If he did.”
I paused. “Let’s ask him.”
An hour later we found Pink’s address on a converted garage tucked away on a rundown street in Van Nuys. The street had peeling paint on all the houses and multiple cars spilling out of the driveways. Other vehicles sat on blocks on the parched lawns.
The bell on the house with Pink’s address didn’t work. Shin knocked, but Pink didn’t answer. He hadn’t bothered to put any curtains on the windows, so I walked around the place and peered in. A sagging couch with stains on the faded green fabric and a folding card table with scratched legs were the only furniture in the living room - except for a 2041 4D virtual reality wall-film television so new the sticker was still on the bottom corner. Some ultimate caged fight was playing – Apollo Silver versus some other steroidal wonder. This set up would put the viewer ringside – close enough to feel the streams of sweat and blood shooting off the fighters.
The goggle-eyed Oculus VR helmet that made a viewer look like a black lacquered praying mantis, had fallen to the floor. Pink was slumped on the couch in front of the screen. His head had fallen back. His mouth was open and there was drool all over his already none too clean tee shirt.
A smear of greenish white powder lay on a piece of cardboard next to the spoon and matches he’d used to cook the drug and the dirty syringe that must have injected it not long ago. Pink had the sickly greenish yellow pallor, loose skin and rotting teeth that brand all long-time slaves to the Green Demon.
“Green Ice,” Shin said. “That explains the minimalist décor. The furniture probably went to pay for his habit.”
I nodded. “So, where’d he’d get the cash for the TV?” I activated my glove phone and shot a little footage of Pink at home, making sure he was clearly visible in the same frame as the drugs. Drug use was a major parole violation. That gave us probable cause to enter. I turned the knob. The door wasn’t locked, so I let us in.
“Hey, whaddya doing?” He raised his bleary-eyed head and struggled to get up, but the drug in his veins pinned him down. “Who the fuck are you?” Pink yelled in a slurred voice.
Recognition slowly swam through the glaze in his eyes. “Oh shit.”
While Shin went through the rest of the house, I pulled Pink to his feet, shoved him up against the wall, spreading his legs with my foot and patted him down. “Wake up, Harvey,” I said, spinning him round. “We’ve met before. Outside Genesys. Remember? I’ve got some questions for you.”
When I spun him around again and released him abruptly, Pink thumped back into his seat on the couch and oozed back down into his former semi-recumbent posture.
I loomed over him. “What were you doing in Clara Vista last Friday, Harvey?”
“Clara Vista?” Pink’s face showed a lot of rapid blinking and a mouth gaping open like a fish. “I doan know what you’re talkin’ about.”
“I have security footage from the casino parking lot if that’ll help jog your memory,” I said. “So, let’s try again. What were you doing there?”
“None of your fuckin’ business.” He rubbed his eyes.
“My case, my business. And you violated parole here, Harvey.” I reached down for the piece of cardboard under Pink’s used syringe on the table, flipping it over. The cardboard serving as the base for Pink’s works had been torn from a box housing what looked like the TV remote. Only half a picture of something black with the words ‘titanium alloy’ remained.
I picked up the remote. It was black plastic inside what looked like a titanium casing. “Nice TV,” I said. “Expensive, huh?”
“Hey, give that back.” Pink grabbed for the remote.
“You’ve got a real bug problem, Harvey. Cockroaches. Let me help you with that.” I let the remote drop to the floor and stomped on the black plastic. The image on the screen of the two fighters froze.
“Aww – fuck!” Pink groaned. With difficulty, he pulled himself up to an upright sit and shot me an angry glance.
No way this guy had taken out Lee on his own. Not to mention Frank. I ground the broken plastic with my heel. “Last Friday, Harvey. Clara Vista Casino. Your memory coming back yet?”
That’s when he rushed me. And somehow managed to smash his balls into my fist. Pink shrieked, sank to his knees and groaned again.
“Everything okay, Eddie?” Shin’s voice called out from the back of the house.
“Fine, here.” I waited for Pink’s eyes to roll back into place and his breathing and color to resume.
“We’re talking homicide of a retired cop,” I said, “and murder one of a world-renowned scientist you’re on record for harassing. You’ll never see the light of day again, Pink.”
“What?!” he cried. “I didn’t kill anybody!”
The image on the casino security disks played back in my head - Pink kneeling down to put something under the chassis of Lee’s car – dissolving into the fireball that had been Frank’s Toyota.
“You tampered with that Lexus in Clara Vista,” I snapped. “You caused that crash. That’s murder, Pink.”
“That’s right.” Shin nodded from the doorway.
Pink was looking confused now. Anxiety was mounting on his face.
“We don’t want to charge you with murder, but we will.” I shoved him deeper into the cushions of the couch. “What did you put under the chassis?”
“I didn’t mean for anybody to die,” he whined, eyes richocheting back and forth between Shin and me. “I swear I didn’t.”
I stepped back and regarded him. Pink’s defiant posture collapsed like a balloon losing air all at once.
“You know what, Harvey? I believe you.”
“Me too,” Shin echoed. “You’re just the fall guy.”
“But unless you tell us what you put under that car,” I continued, “and the name of the person who hired you to put it there, you’re going down anyway.”
“Don’t make me go back,” he pleaded. Pink leaned down, arms over his head. He wiped the snot from his nose with the palm of his hand.
“It’s looking bad for you, Harvey. Help yourself here.”
“I didn’t even know whose car it was till I saw the news that night,” he whined, wringing his hands, tears streaming down his filthy face. “It was supposed to be a joke – you know. He said the owner of the Lexus was screwing around on his wife, and they wanted to catch him in the act, and put it on the net.”
“He?”
&nbs
p; “The guy who paid me to stick a GPS tracker under the car.”
Pink pointed to the bagged remnant of cardboard box which had been under his works, the one that looked like a television remote. “There’s the box for the tracker. Part of it anyway.”
“Who’s the guy?” I said, eyeing the cardboard. The brand name had been torn off too. There was no identifier on it. “What’s his name?”
“I don’t know his name,” Pink wailed. “Not his real name. His tag’s Apollo.”
“Right.” I glanced back up at the television wall screen with the frozen image of the caged fighters, one of whom was named Apollo Silver. Pink wasn’t even a good liar.
“How’d you meet this Apollo?”
“At an NA meeting,” Pink stammered. “I was clean. I swear. He’s the one got me started using again.”
“Describe him,” I said, “this guy you met at Narcotics Anonymous.”
“Young, Asian, not so tall as you. I think he’s prob-ly a med student cuz of the tee shirts,” Pink said, his head moving up and down like an antique bobble-head toy. “He always wears these tee shirts with equations and shit. And he’s got money. Rides a nice bike. A rice rocket.”
Shin and I exchanged a glance. Then I pulled up a sixpack of pictures on my glove phone, swapped one out for another shot and I held it out for Pink to see. “Any of these guys Apollo?”
He blinked a few times and peered, eyes narrowed. “Him. I think it’s him.” Pink pointed to the headshot on the bottom right.
“You think, or you know, Harvey?”
“It’s him. It wasn’t me. I swear.”
I looked down at the picture of the surly kid Pink had identified. I showed it to Shin. The picture was Raymond Lee.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Cuffed and tucked into the back seat of the detective sedan, Harvey Pink slumped against the window as we took the 101 back downtown to Nokia P.D.
God, Pink stank. I raised the soundproof barrier between the seats.
Pink had identified Raymond Lee as the guy who’d given him the gizmo he’d put under Ray’s father’s car.
“Raymond’s an engineering student at Cal Tech,” Shin said. “He’d have the savvy to engineer a remote explosive of some kind.”
“Yeah. And Pink’s little narrative about how they’d wanted to catch Dr. Lee cheating on his wife hints at the involvement of more than just Ray. I’m guessing Mrs. Lee roped her son into it.”
We rode in silence for a few miles. Then I put in a call to Tony Gomez, the automotive forensics expert on the Clara Vista crash.
“You find something on the underside of Lee’s Lexus?”
“What, are you clairvoyant?” Tony shouted, wiping grease and sweat from his other hand on his green coveralls. “Hold on.” The clanking din inside the automotive forensics unit was muted as he moved outside for the call. “This model Lexus chassis is comprised of carbon fiber,” Tony said, standing on the tarmac outside the forensics garage now. “Or should be. But when I did a metallurgic analysis, I found an anomaly. A metal that shouldn’t be there. Titanium.”
I glanced at the evidence bag on the front seat between Shin and me. Shin lifted up the bag with the piece of cardboard from Pink’s place and tapped the letters ‘Titanium alloy’. I sighed. “Thanks, Tony.”
Harvey Pink was snoring now, his mouth open, his cheek pressed flat against the glass.
“You don’t sound as surprised as I was,” Tony said, “Or as happy as I thought you’d be.”
Shin and I drove on in silence. In some remote corner of my mind a tiny window of irrational hope I hadn’t even been aware of closed. It was official. Lee’s death was no accident. Which meant neither was Frank’s. Sometimes you don’t want to be right.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Raymond Lee was registered at Caltech for advanced mechanical engineering, robotics and fluid dynamics this term. Engineering some sort of IED to rupture the fuel line to his dad’s car should be in his playbook, but I needed confirmation and specifics. So while Shin charged Pink and got him seated in an interview room, I went to get it.
Attractive and surprisingly human-scaled, the CalTech campus boasted lots of low-slung off-white buildings and plenty of places to sit outside under old oaks with a cup of coffee as you pondered the mysteries of dark matter.
Professor Paul Reiter had agreed to meet me at one of the tables planted next to the campus Starbucks under a cluster of old oaks. The thirty-something man who matched Professor Reiter’s online photo barely looked up from his glove-phone as I flashed him my badge and introduced myself. I sat opposite him across a worn table with several generations of students’ names scratched into the white paint. Immortality on the cheap.
Reiter was a thin hollow-chested man. His lank reddish-blond hair was pinned atop his head in a man-bun, anchored by thick black plastic glasses with a kind of geek-chic. He wore a plaid shirt older than he was over faded black jeans. The robo-server read our barcodes and gave us our orders, a shot of coffee snuff for him and a cup of bad java from burned beans for me. I waited as Reiter peeled the foil top from the little silver shot cup of espresso crystals and raised it to one nostril. He took a snort as I navigated away from the obligatory small talk to queries about Raymond Lee.
“Was Lee in class on October 6th from two to five p.m.?” I asked.
Reiter called up the attendance roster on his glove phone. “The auto-roster doesn’t show him logged in that day.”
“Does he miss a lot of classes?”
“Lately he does.” Reiter nervously tapped his steepled fingers against his lips. “His work has fallen off. I understand there are some problems at home.”
I nodded. “He talk to you about that?”
“No. After Mid-terms and before Final Exams Student Health sends us notices about students struggling with severe anxiety and depression. With student permission, of course.”
“You got a notice about Ray?”
Reiter’s turn to nod.
“Did you see signs that he was self-medicating?
“I don’t want to speculate. And he’s a good student otherwise,” Reiter said hurriedly. “One of my best actually.”
“Good enough to alter a GPS tracker?”
Professor Reiter pulled his glasses down from the top of his head and peered at me. “Alter how?”
“Into something that could cause a fuel line on a Lexus to rupture?” I pulled out the piece of cardboard Harvey Pink had given me. “This is the equipment we’re talking about.”
Professor Reiter picked up the piece of cardboard and examined it from several angles. Reiter slouched so much that when he angled his own body to examine the cardboard in the dappled sunlight streaming through the oak leaves, he looked like a backlit question mark.
“You wouldn’t need to alter much,” Reiter said. He tapped the words “titanium alloy” on the box. “I can’t be sure without more detail, but I don’t think this is a GPS tracker.”
“What is it - exactly?”
“We call them Disrupters. DARPA declassified them a few years ago.”
DARPA was the research and development group that worked on top secret defense technology and scenarios for the government.
“They resemble GPS trackers externally,” Reiter continued, “but they release nano-bots you control remotely or via a timer.”
“The microscopic robots used in surgery and construction?”
Reiter nodded.
“So somebody could release these nano-bots and direct them to cause a fuel leak or shut down transmission, if this disrupter was affixed to the underside of a car?” I flashed on the pink trail of fluid spraying from Dr. Lee’s Lexus.
“They can perform multiple functions,” Reiter said. “That’s what makes disrupters so useful. Very versatile. They were initially designed for remote control of rovers on Mars.”
“You said they were declassified. How would a civilian get hold of one?”
“Oh, they’re available in a l
imited way now,” the professor said. “We use them.”
“In robotics?”
He paused. “Some of my students do work at JPL for the Mars and lunar rovers. When parts break down on another planet, we can’t just send a repair team. We use remote control nano-bots to do repairs.”
“That’s a pretty powerful tool. Do you take precautions about access?”
Reiter nodded. “Disrupters are registered like explosives or poisons. Homeland Security keeps track.”
“Do you keep a copy of that log? For your robotics classes? I’ll need to see it.”
He nodded and began to root through his glove phone files. “Here we are.” The professor bumped the information to my phone.
His face told me even before I looked that Raymond’s name was on the list.
“Of course I collect them back from the students at the end of term,” Professor Reiter said. Or deactivate those we can’t recover. We’ve never had a problem.”
There it was: the perpetual refrain cops hear when we’re mopping up after a tragedy. He was such a nice guy, a quiet neighbor, kept to himself. Nobody can believe that silent cypher could – fill in the blank – rob a friend, murder his father, or blow himself and half the city to smithereens. But the evidence says different. That’s the dark matter in the human soul.
“I don’t think you’ll be getting Ray’s disrupter back, Professor,” I said. “But let’s put the request on record. Text him now and let me know if he responds.”
The flesh on Professor Reiter’s face sagged as he watched me leave moments later.
Raymond Lee didn’t pick up Reiter’s text about the disrupter. Further checks with the rest of Ray’s professors told the same sad story.
As I walked back across campus to my car an hour after that, I spotted students perched on the roof of one of the taller buildings chucking a giant pumpkin to the ground where it splattered with a satisfying thunk. It was a Caltech Halloween tradition. I found myself humming a remix of the Smashing Pumpkins’ alt-rock anthem “Disarm.” The killer in me is the killer in you. What I choose is my choice.