THE HOUSE sat on the western edge of St. Paul, on a corner lot enclosed by a rusting fence. An aluminum pool, its sides caved in and filled with leaves, occupied most of a large concrete slab set in what passed for a yard. Along the rear edge of the property, the bones of an upended swing set rose from a weedy sand pit. No one answered when Poincaré knocked, and he thought the house abandoned. He circled to the back, knocked on another door. Again, nothing. He knocked at the front door a final time, prepared to leave when, unexpectedly, a hall light flashed on. A man opened the door and shielded his eyes. He wore a stained, sleeveless undershirt and nothing else. Poincaré introduced himself.
"What is it?"
"Are you Richard Scott?"
"I paid my taxes and the utility bills this month."
Poincaré planted a shoe across the threshold. When Scott slammed the door, it bounced in his face.
"That hurt!"
"Madeleine Rainier."
"You said what?"
"I'm looking for Madeleine Rainier. Or Madeleine Scott."
"How do you know her? Who are you?" He ran a hand through filthy hair and blinked hard in the afternoon light.
"Mr. Scott," said Poincaré. "Pull on a pair of pants, and we'll talk."
"You heard from Maddy?"
"Get dressed, Mr. Scott."
The man looked older than his sixty-three years. Unsteady on his feet, he sat in a wingback chair the same color as his cadaverous face. Hard use had knocked the stuffing out of both. The house reeked of garbage.
"Happy times," said Scott. "What do you want?"
He had worked as a maintenance man at one of the General Mills plants in town. Like everyone else in the Twin Cities twentyfive years earlier, he and his wife Irma, a schoolteacher, had followed the sad fortunes of the Rainier children. "One couldn't avoid the news," he recalled. "For days the papers ran weepers, and Irma finally broke down. We were in our thirties and didn't have kids. We tried. A year before, we got approved to adopt and we were just waiting for the right situation. Then came the accident, and Irma couldn't get those children off her mind. Maybe you've seen the pictures. We contacted the Department of Human Services right off. They took their sweet time, then called one day and said everything had to be completed right away. They said we could adopt one of the children, not all three.
"But we wanted all of them. We applied for three. For years we had saved and built this house for a family. You should have seen it back then, everything new and painted. I built it myself. We could have managed," he said. "We weren't rich but we could have managed with public schools and the State U. We begged them. But some case manager in a bow tie and a string of initials after his name said no—that it was in the best interests of the children to be separated. Best interests? You don't do that to kids—two of them twins, no less. That man had all those degrees, but where was the common sense of it? Better those kids had been dogs in a kennel. At least if they were mutts, I could have brought three home."
Scott moved Poincaré into a narrow galley kitchen for coffee. Unwashed dishes and half-eaten TV dinners overran the sink and counters. There were bugs, and Poincaré figured he was at risk even breathing the air. But Scott was talking, and Poincaré said he would love a cup.
"So they made us choose," he continued. "I was boiling mad, but then you can't go yelling at caseworkers because they'd call you unfit to raise children! Irma took my hand and said these people were professionals, that they knew what was best and that she wanted a daughter. She had always wanted a daughter. I told her it wasn't natural separating them and I wanted no part of it—that they would suffer even if they didn't remember each other. Irma just kept saying she wanted a daughter and this was our best chance. It was like they were selling cars: Buy now or the offer's off the table."
Scott excused himself, and from the next room Poincaré heard a clinking of glass. The wife had died some years ago from the look of things, and Scott himself was on schedule to follow soon. Every horizontal surface not covered by used dishes was piled high with dust-covered magazines. Boxes with broken kitchen appliances and books on duck hunting and cabinetmaking were stacked three deep along every wall.
"Want a drink?" he asked from the doorway.
Poincaré declined.
"What are you doing here?"
"I'm looking for your daughter."
"We wanted to find her!"
Scott chiseled another teaspoon of instant coffee from a jar and offered to freshen his guest's cup. He excused himself again, and this time Poincaré heard a stream of water through an open door.
"Maddy's leaving killed Irma," he called from the bathroom. "It took nine years, but it killed her." No flush, no running water. He rejoined Poincaré at the table. "She was a difficult child. God, how we tried to make her happy. I built a playground out back. Irma knew all about children on account of her work, and she said, 'Give it time, Richie. She'll come around.' Was sixteen years enough time? I could never get out of my head what the state did to those children. It haunted Maddy. . . .
"But our Maddy was smart! The child was born for school— exactly the way I wasn't. Good for her, I thought. I saved all those years, and what were we going to do with the money? We gave her the best we could. We gave her our name. But she was never happy, and I don't think it was us, either. It was destroying Irma.
"So I took Maddy to breakfast one morning, in her senior year. She was eighteen and had been accepted to a school out east—full scholarship. She applied only to colleges in other states. It was time she knew her past, I decided. Irma told me not to, that she might never come back to us . . . and she was right. Maddy just sat across the table, very quiet. She knew she was adopted—we'd told her that her parents had been killed in a wreck out in California. We wanted to spare her going back through those newspaper stories. I told her about her brothers, and the next day she was gone. She kissed Irma and me goodbye, like she always did in the morning. We left for work, but then she circled back and collected some things, and that was it. We never saw her again. She never enrolled in that college, either. The last we heard, just a year later, was that she had changed her name back to Rainier. The state sent us a notice. That's when Irma began dying."
"You haven't heard anything since, Mr. Scott?"
"Not for ten years. Then two weeks ago, out of the blue, I get a letter. Maddy writing like she left yesterday. No return address. Stamps from Europe, I think. She said she had to leave when she did, the way she did, and that she was sorry for hurting us. She knew about Irma because she checked on us from a distance, and that she still loved us—but that not to know for her entire childhood about her brothers was too terrible. She said she suffered every day as a child from half-remembering people who were important to her. She had dreams of playing with the same two boys but could never see their faces. She knew it wasn't our decision to split them up, but it was just too hard to come back to this house."
Scott opened a cupboard and produced an envelope.
Poincaré snapped on a pair of gloves and read the letter. It looked like Rainier's handwriting. To be as certain as he could be outside of a lab, he opened his file from Amsterdam and found a photocopy of her registration at the Hotel Ravensplein.
"Is she in some sort of trouble?" asked Scott.
"Possibly. I saw her last in Amsterdam just over three months ago. I need to find her. Could I take a picture of this letter? And the actual envelope would help—I'd like to conduct some tests."
"I suppose . . . under one condition."
"What's that?" asked Poincaré.
Richard Scott turned toward a window. "If you find Maddy, ask her to visit."
When he said that, the space in the narrow, filthy kitchen grew very small; for the man had driven home a distressing truth: if Claire, Etienne, Lucille, and the boys did not return to Poincaré, this kitchen would one day be his kitchen. Scott stared at him as if from some future mirror: rheumy-eyed, unshaven, bitter coffee in one hand and a half-glass of toxic
whiskey in the other. Poincaré said nothing. One could not sit in the presence of such destruction and say a word.
"What kind of trouble, Inspector. What happened to her?"
"Someone died. There was a bombing."
The man set his whiskey aside, then his coffee cup. "You're saying Madeleine was involved?"
Poincaré nodded.
"It's not possible," he said. "Even if my daughter disowned us, I know her heart. She was kind. She is kind. Once she came home from school without her winter coat. And it gets cold in Minnesota. Irma asked what happened, and Maddy said that there was a child at the bus stop in a sweater, and that she gave him her coat because he didn't own one. No," said Scott, "she didn't kill anyone."
"And if the facts suggest otherwise?" asked Poincaré.
"Then you had better check your facts."
Somewhere over St. Louis, Poincaré attempted to sleep. Wedged into a window seat, he tried maneuvering into a comfortable position but could find none. The woman ahead of him had reclined her seat; the young man to Poincaré's right dozed with his mouth open, snoring softly, his book—How You Can Profit from the Rapture— open on his lap. The lad had body piercings to rival St. Sebastian's: tiny steel swords in both ears, a safety pin in one nostril, and rings in his eyebrows, lower lip, and who knew where else beneath a ripped T-shirt and jeans. All he needed was a good cause and an untimely death: someone might have named a chapel after him.
The plane tracked south, following the Mississippi before making a hard right to Los Angeles. Several rows ahead, a young woman extricated herself from a middle seat and made her way to a restroom. Poincaré had noticed her while boarding—confident, with her hair tied back and a shoulder bag brimming with books. He saw her and mourned the adult Chloe would never be; the pearls he would never buy her; the bottle they would never share in a café, late into the evening, in Paris, as she—lost in the enthusiasm of new studies or a new young man or her first job—would talk without realizing he listened not so much to her words as to the music of her voice. Was she truly gone? Was it not possible she would greet him when his plane landed in Los Angeles? Poincaré ached with an ache that would not mend. Had he the skill of prayer, and had he read his Bible, he might have asked for the strength to accept what the Psalmist long ago had accepted: that the child would never again come to him but rather he, howsoever long it took, must wait and one day go to her.
CHAPTER 30
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory looked to Poincaré like an aging industrial park spread across seventy scrubby acres—at first glance, hardly a place one would expect cosmologists to be analyzing the structure of solar wind or searching for Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars. But among JPL's dozens of buildings could be found a spacecraft assembly plant and a mission control center. In the late 1930s when a Cal Tech professor used the site to test early rocket designs, the area was relatively remote. Over time, the expansion of Pasadena gradually bumped homes and then a freeway up against the sprawling campus, leaving Poincaré to wonder at the weird proximity of hamburger joints to clean rooms where errant flecks of dust could doom $80 million space missions.
The grounds were pleasant, with mature trees and, oddly, small herds of deer that wandered down from the San Gabriel Mountains. Poincaré had arranged to meet Dr. Alfonse Meyer, who worked on propulsion systems for each of the unmanned space vehicles NASA had launched in the previous decade, including the Mars Rovers and the long-range bullet, Deep Impact, shot into the heart of a comet 268 million miles from Earth. Escorted from Visitor Control by an officer through a maze of numbered buildings, Poincaré was shown into a nondescript mid-rise office complex and up a stairwell into a large laboratory.
Just inside an open double door sat Meyer with his high-topped sneakers propped on a chaotic desk, blue-jeaned, bearded, and with a ponytail that barely corralled his graying brown hair. He was holding a phone the way cartoon bullies do victims, by the scruff of the neck, yelling: "And another thing, you Bozo—It'll be your ass if you don't get me a sample of that new ceramic by Friday!" He ended the call making arrangements for beer and something called a "canyon run" later that week. Turning at the security officer's polite knock, Meyer took one look at Poincaré and another at his watch: "As I live and breathe—an actual Interpol agent! My official position, Inspector, is that murder by rocket fuel has got to be a first."
He rose to shake Poincaré's hand vigorously, opened a refrigerator stacked with soft drinks, and offered his visitor his pick of six different diet colas. On his desk sat an empty pint of ice cream.
"Any relation to Jules Henri?"
"Slightly. Yes," said Poincaré.
"Really, now! Do you know the last problem he was working on? The stability of the universe—using nothing but a pencil, paper and that remarkable brain of his. . . . The news is good, by the way." Meyer laughed his belly laugh. "Is that your business, too—proving the universe won't unravel while we're eating dinner?"
Poincaré hadn't been sure what to expect from someone who held doctorates in chemical and mechanical engineering, owned a pilot's license, and sang in a Methodist choir. At the very least, he could now see, Meyer would make an excellent drinking companion. The tables in his lab were chockablock with motor parts, containers with long chemical names, centrifuges, and mixing chambers. At three separate stations, large ventilation hoods rose through the ceiling. Poincaré counted eight computers and four refrigerators, one marked with a radiation warning. At the rear of the lab, a technician worked beneath a large red and yellow sign that read: "DANGER: Discharge Static Electricity Before Entering Area."
Poincaré had known scientists who wanted nothing more in life than to buy expensive toys and be left alone. Meyer looked to be one of them. His lab was a slice of adolescent heaven in which aging boys got to build things that went boom. He insisted on giving Poincaré a tour and a brief lecture on the evolution of propulsion systems. As they edged around burn chambers and simulators, Poincaré saw miniature thrusters and solar arrays, lasers and at one station hydroponic grass growing beneath heat lamps—for a study of energy gain, he learned. Twenty minutes later, he found himself contemplating a poster-sized photo at Meyer's desk.
"That's a good one. My personal favorite."
Poincaré considered the image from different angles. "I'm at a NASA facility, which means that whatever I'm looking at has got to be far away. But if you told me it was a slice of pancreas under a microscope, I wouldn't be surprised."
Meyer laughed. "It's further away than your pancreas."
"How far?"
"Eight billion light years, more or less. It's a computer simulation of galaxy clusters in a particularly dense part of the universe. The inset is an x-ray image of an actual cluster. What's interesting is that large clusters look essentially the same as small ones, and distant ones look essentially the same as near ones—provided you make an allowance for red shift. That is, galaxy clusters scale just like nested Russian dolls. Take a smaller one and a larger one, resize them: you can't tell the difference. The inset image was taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. I worked on the thrusters for that. . . . But you didn't come to talk about scaling phenomena in the cosmos. Tell me, Inspector. Who died?"
Poincaré made sure he had heard correctly. "Galaxies scale, too?"
"That's right—in size and distance. What do you mean by too?"
"Forgive me," he said. "A mathematician, James Fenster. Perhaps you knew him, or of him?"
"Mathematical modeling?"
"That's right. He was killed for something he knew—exactly what, I'm not sure. So your answers here matter, Dr. Meyer. I read your report. Very thorough on the additives to the rocket fuel. I would have come earlier, but there were . . . some developments at home."
Poincaré's host shifted uncomfortably.
"When they start coming for mathematicians, Inspector, no one's safe. The Dutch chemists largely got it right in naming the propellant, but you were smart to send post-burn samples. Wha
t you're dealing with is a more powerful, less stable cousin of ammonium perchlorate—double base ammonium perchlorate cyclotetramethylene tetranitramine aluminum, to be exact. Your bomber mixed in nitroglycerine and solid crystals of the explosive HMX. Which is good for you because if this were your grandma's rocket fuel, you'd be shit out of luck. Every space program, every military ordnance program, and every amateur rocket jock and fireworks manufacturer in the world uses straight-up APCP. You'd be hunting for a needle in an impossibly large haystack. But your Amsterdam propellant has these two distinctive signatures. That's a thread to hang onto, anyway."
"Some questions, then, if you don't mind."
Meyer kicked back in his chair and locked his hands behind his head. "Take your time, Inspector. The meter's running."
"Excuse me?"
"Lost in translation. Continue."
Poincaré opened a notebook. "First, I know nitroglycerin is difficult to handle. What about HMX crystals?"
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