Deadly Pasts (Agent Nora Wexler Mysteries)

by CR Wiley

  “Nora, I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you’d get needlessly worried. It’s going to be fine. I’ve been taking some lessons from Francis during lunch, and as long as I’ve got him distracted and Danny and I are logging in at the same time, he should be free to find what he needs.”

  A disappointed sigh escaped from her lips.

  “That’s not the point. Why would you take the risk at all? There must be another way to figure this out.”

  “Nora,” Travis said simply. His voice was straightforward and honest. “I know what I’m doing. Tell Danny that the FBI knows he’s in Berkeley. He’s got to lie low until Tuesday and then log on. We don’t have time to put together another plan or he’s going to jail and we’ll never find out what really happened. All three of us are in this too deep to turn back now.”

  The pressure in Nora’s head grew as she thought about Travis losing his job. The conversation she was having now would be discovered and she’d be charged as well, and her father wouldn’t be able to help her. Nora knew Danny didn’t do it and didn’t deserve to spend the rest of his life in jail for someone else’s crime.

  “I can’t believe you would put yourself on the line like that for me,” she said. The words escaped from her lips before she even had time to think about them.

  “It’s how I like to prove I’d do anything for you…‌by doing the craziest thing possible.”

  Nora rested her head in her hand and smiled to herself.

  “Just make sure it works and that we’re all out of this by the time it’s over,” she said.

  Now that she’d accepted they were going to go through with it, the nerves started to bundle inside of her stomach. The worst part was that she’d have no control over how any of it turned out.

  “We’re going to be fine. I’m counting on Danny to want to prove his innocence badly enough that he’ll find out who really did this,” Travis said. Nora took another look at Danny and the dark circles developing under his eyes.

  “One more thing. Speaking of Tuesday, which is after Lauren’s hearing, I booked my flight home for that day. You mind picking me up at Albany’s rinky dink airport? All we have to do is live through the next few days,” she said, smiling to herself.

  “That’s not going to be a problem, is it?” Travis said. It reminded her of the masked gunman who broke into Caroline’s house. Nora nearly getting shot was something he didn’t need to hear about at the moment.

  “I hope not.”

  On Sunday, the Devonshires and Stephanie were having a lazy afternoon while Nora looked into the possible connection between Professor Gupta and Maria’s death.

  “Don’t you think you should let the police handle that?” Stephanie asked from the couch. Resting her hands over her enlarged midsection, she appeared in modest discomfort.

  “I’m just going to do some more searching,” Nora said without glancing away from her laptop.

  She ran search after search for anything having to do with animals in Berkeley in 2010, but nothing even vaguely out of the ordinary came up. It began to frustrate her because she suspected there was something out there, but the only place it seemed to exist now was inside Gupta’s mind. And he sure wasn’t about to tell her what he did.

  There were half a dozen pet shops in town, and Nora resorted to cold calling them for clues.

  “Do you have any idea if Professor Gupta from the college, a man of Indian heritage, made any purchases from you back in 2010? You weren’t working there back then. Is there anybody around who was or who might know?”

  Nora made call after call like that without any luck, and she started to wonder if there was any other way to track pet shop purchases. If the town had an animal control officer, that would be someone to ask. She was about to dial one of the larger and more established pet shops when Lauren came in from the other room.

  “If you want to find out if the professor was involved, why don’t you do the fingerprint thing you did with the other guy?” she asked.

  “I’m sure he won’t get suspicious if I show up at his house and ask him to write out directions for me,” Nora said sarcastically. Lauren reached into her bag and pulled out what looked like a quiz from her chemistry class. Gupta had scribbled a very respectable grade and a special note at the bottom to see him after class. Her eyes widened at the realization that his hands had been all over it.

  Suddenly someone was speaking through her phone. She didn’t even realize she’d placed the call to the pet shop. The person had been there through 2010 and spoke in a raspy voice.

  “I wouldn’t remember it if hadn’t been so unusual, but a fellow like the one you described came in and took near three dozen dogs. Paid cash on the spot, everything checked out, and he loaded them into the back of a van. We were hoping he’d come back for chew toys and dog food but figured he was getting them at the grocery store because we’d never seen him again.”

  “Three dozen dogs?” Nora gasped. Lauren turned to her with a look of utter shock.

  “Don’t tell my parents, but I’ve been to his house and I can say without a shadow of doubt that Professor Gupta doesn’t own a single animal.”

  Nora promised the store clerk that she’d be in touch and turned to the quiz that Lauren handed over. Thirty-six missing dogs, one academic journal article about the impact of uranium on canine cancer, and a work-study student found dead in an alley all added up to something terrible. Being able to match the professor’s prints to those found on the murder weapon would cement the link.

  Dusting the quiz for prints using cocoa powder was more of a challenge than it had been with Seanie Green’s directions. Lauren’s fingerprints were all over it too, and Nora needed to be able to recognize them before homing in on Gupta’s. After isolating one, she repeated the procedure and snapped a picture of it with her phone to blow it up.

  Holding the phone next to the print out of the fingerprint from the crime scene, Nora compared the two.

  “This isn’t even close,” she moaned. “Look here. This is called the core of the fingerprint, and Gupta’s has got a much more pronounced ridge. A spot like this is called an island, and the killer doesn’t have one at all. Everything is wrong here.”

  Lauren looked a little relieved, and Nora couldn’t blame her. Who wants to find out their professor has a history of killing people? But Nora was beside herself that the professor might not have done it either. Who else could it have possibly been?

  “So he didn’t do it?” Lauren asked.

  “It’s safe to say he did not wield the pipe that killed Maria. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved or that we shouldn’t find out what happened to these missing dogs. I’m going to the police right now to bring this up with them,” Nora said, getting the notes together from her phone conversations. She had a strong feeling that if she could get to the bottom of Gupta’s research, she would also find out what happened to Maria.

  “But we were supposed to play Yahtzee,” Steph called from the other room. Nora glanced over and saw Steph playing on her phone in the other room.

  “I’m going to have to take rain check. Maybe you could play with Lauren, help her relax a bit before the hearing tomorrow,” Nora said.

  In moments she was out the door and in her rental car heading toward the police station. By now she’d become familiar with their shifts and wasn’t surprised to see Officer Plevy at the desk. It turned out he had some news for her.

  “We traced the gun from the break in and concluded it must be a stolen weapon bought illegally on the streets, probably in Oakland. The owner’s a Nevadan who was a gun aficionado killed in a home invasion.”

  Nora set her jaw and accepted the reality of another tough turn of events. Somehow they weren’t going to be able to find out who she’d been fighting with in the dark.

  “Thank you for looking into that,” she said. “I’ve got something else that needs to be taken up immediately. Before Maria died, she told Seanie Green she’d stumbled onto something at wor
k that creeped her out. Professor Gupta bought three dozen dogs earlier that year, and later he published a paper on cancer treatments in dogs. I think he was doing some testing on them on the side. Here are my notes.”

  Officer Plevy was reluctant at first but then he nodded. He called over Detective Wyeth who read through everything herself. The detective was not what Nora would’ve expected. Older, wearing a brown suit, and with a thick puff of curly brown hair, she seemed better suited to baking pies than solving crimes. But Nora knew that looks could be deceiving and there had to be a lot of grit beneath her cheery disposition.

  Wyeth put in a call to the pet store to confirm the details Nora had gathered.

  “What do you say we take a ride over to the professor’s house and see what he has to say about all this?” she asked Nora, who was raring to go.

  They hopped into an unmarked sedan and spent the entire ride talking about Maria’s case and how they led Nora to make the discovery about Gupta. Wyeth seemed to take the tragedy to heart.

  The road took them up into the hills, almost all the way to Orinda. The scenery and the homes were beautiful, but Nora was focused on the questions she wanted to ask Gupta. He had to know something about what happened to Maria, and he wasn’t going to be able to lie his way out of it this time. They turned onto Wilder Road and continued right to the end, where they found Gupta’s single-story home in a secluded area. The hills and the trees added an eerie sense of isolation once the car was off and they stepped out onto the driveway.

  “Doesn’t look like he’s here,” Wyeth said. The garage was empty. Nora spotted tire marks where the driveway met the road. She squatted down to touch them.

  “Looks like he left in a hurry. I wonder if that last call I had with him hit too close to home,” Nora said. Wyeth came over to look and released a long sigh.

  “That’s all I needed to see,” she said. “Getting warrants on a Sunday isn’t my favorite thing to do, but we’re not leaving until I’ve taken a look inside this house. I’ll want to have somebody on the lookout in case he comes back here.”

  Nora glanced at the house and saw that lights were left on and heard an air conditioner humming. The man left in a hurry.

  “His life as he knew it is over now. He’s not coming back, but what did he leave behind?”

  CHAPTER 22

  115 WILDER ROAD

  ORINDA, CA

  A few calls gave Wyeth the all clear to enter Gupta’s home. She got the professor’s cell number and called him as well. It went unanswered. Predictable.

  A squad car with a male officer had pulled up to the house right as they were about to attempt entry into the building. Nora pondered what secrets lay beyond the sturdy wooden door.

  “Do you need me to open it?” the officer asked.

  “No,” Wyeth said with offense, grabbing a hulky battering ram out of the trunk of her car. “I always come prepared.”

  Nora had a new appreciation for the detective after she popped the door open on the first shot with the ram.

  Inside, the house was remarkably neat. There were small sculptures of dragons and other winged creatures everywhere. Tasteful artwork lined the walls.

  Wyeth came in from the bedroom and shook her head.

  “I’m not having much luck.”

  Together they entered the home office; it was full of stacked textbooks and journals, chemical diagrams, and even some samples displayed on the shelves. A big monitor sat on an old wooden desk, but it wasn’t connected to anything.

  “He had time to take his computer’s hard drive. I’m going to guess we aren’t going to find any data stored here that’ll be of any use to us. I wonder if any of these chemicals are significant,” Nora said, glancing at the tubes.

  They spent another minute poking around when an officer lumbered in. He was a burly guy by the name of James. It was immediately apparent that he’d seen something that rattled him.

  “There’s something in the backyard you should see.”

  Nora and Wyeth dropped what they were doing to follow him through a back door, across a beautifully stained deck, and into a cozy backyard surrounded by thick forest. The professor had gotten himself a home worth at least a million dollars, but when Nora saw what Officer James was pointing at she had to revise her estimate upward.

  She spotted an iron door set into a hill.

  “It’s unlocked. I took a quick look inside the bunker before I came to get you. Hope you have strong stomachs,” he said.

  It made it so much worse that the officer left Nora to imagine what might be inside. There probably wasn’t another house within a quarter mile, but the distance didn’t seem to be enough sound-proofing for whatever the professor was doing underground. Wyeth needed both hands and a full twist of her body to pull the door open.

  The first thing that hit Nora was the strong smell of bleach. It was completely dark inside except for the light passing through the open door. Nora stepped inside to take a look around. The detective and the officer produced small flashlights and followed her in.

  It only took a moment for Nora to see it. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

  “You were definitely on to something,” Wyeth agreed.

  To the left, along the cement-lined wall, there was a row of metal kennel crates stacked one on top of each other. There had to be at least fifty of them, all empty. Nora used her phone to shine more light on the area, spotting strange black marks charring the floor. She turned to find equipment like thick rubber gloves, full-body radiation suits, and ominous-looking rusty farm tools hanging from the other wall. Finally there was a dusty steel desk with a few scattered papers next to a set of noise-cancelling headphones.

  “What do you make of it?” Officer James asked the detective.

  “Maybe the bleach is starting to go to my head, but it’s like I can feel what happened here. All of these animals were in excruciating pain as he conducted experiments on them. He shut out their cries as soon as he put on those headphones and burned them right on the floor when they died. It’s monstrous,” Wyeth said, echoing Nora’s sentiments.

  Nora started to choke up at the thought of it as struggled to find some kind of rationalization for what happened. “How could someone do this? What kind of Faustian bargain did Gupta make that drove him to seek knowledge through such deplorable means?”

  Wyeth sighed. “I’ve known people who regarded other living creatures, whether people or animals, as inanimate objects. They play with them, take them in, and then make them dance as a form of amusement. Then when the fun ends they’re thrown away. Everything is a means to an end for them.”

  “That reminds me of the way Gupta acts with his students, playing favorites and trying to get them emotionally involved with him. Lauren said she’d even been to his house, though I’m sure she didn’t get anywhere near here,” Nora said, coming to another realization. “He must’ve done something similar with Maria. He brought her in too close, felt threatened, and had to dispose of her.”

  “I thought you said the fingerprints didn’t match,” Wyeth said, crossing her arms and glancing at the door. Nora wanted to leave as well.

  “They don’t, but maybe the crow bar wasn’t the murder weapon at all, just something Gupta found and dropped at the scene. Look at all of these metal hooks and bars on the wall. Any of these could’ve been the real murder weapon.”

  The light on the wall shifted along with the sudden sound of scraping metal. Nora looked at the door just in time to see it close shut. All three of them ran to the door, slamming into it in an attempt to push it open. It refused to yield no matter how hard they pushed.

  They were locked inside the bunker.

  Nora struggled to keep her breathing calm.

  “He must’ve known we’d find our way over here. Maybe he even left it unlocked on purpose then hid in the woods so he could come and shut us in.”

  “I should’ve been more careful. This is unbelievable. The tire tracks, it was all a setup. I knew we
’d pushed him completely out of his life and should’ve been ready for anything. He probably parked a bit up the road and came around on foot. I’m so incredibly stupid,” Wyeth said.

  “This isn’t over yet,” Nora said, putting a hand on her shoulder. In her other hand she held her phone. “No service.”

  “Sealed shut is my guess,” James said, inspecting the door with his flashlight. “We need to do something before we suffocate.”

  The strain increased in Nora’s mind. They needed to do something quickly before Gupta could get clear of the area and disappear just as Danny had. The smell of bleach was overwhelming. The cement was impenetrable.

  The three of them searched the bunker for anything that might help. Beyond the kennels was a back area with large containers of bleach and other cleaning chemicals. Nora spotted something that looked promising.

  “This container is labeled hydrochloric acid. Maybe we could use it to eat through the door,” she said. There was barely enough light from the flashlight shining on Officer James to show the pained expression on his face.

  “That door is two inches thick. I’m not even sure there’s enough acid in the jug to eat through, especially with it all running down the side. Plus, wouldn’t there be dangerous fumes from the reaction? I’m not confident it would work,” he said.

  Wyeth had a look in her eye that said these might be the last people I ever get to see.

  “Was anyone else following you up here?” Wyeth asked James. “Sooner or later they’re going to figure out that we’ve gone missing and come to check on us.”

  “There was talk about it, but nobody I know had planned to make the trip for a routine search. We could be here for hours before another car arrives.”

  Nora already felt like she had trouble breathing, though it was hard to tell if it was the chemicals, an amplified sense of claustrophobia, or any actual lack of oxygen. She left the back area and continued to search the bunker. She studied the lock on the iron door. It was rusty but a candidate for lock picking.