by Blake Banner
I nodded. “Yes, he would. He would need to know that. But I worry this theory is getting away from us. What is it actually founded on? The fact that his father is a Colorado redneck, and he is a little odd. There are a lot of suppositions here, Dehan.”
She grunted, then sighed.
We were pulling into the grounds of the Van Etten Building. I said, “I’m not saying we shouldn’t explore it, Little Grasshopper, but let’s get a bit of evidence to build on first. Let’s see what Joe has for us.”
We huddled in our coats and crossed the freezing parking lot to the lobby, then rode the elevator up to the lab. We found Joe in his office and he stood to greet us as we came in.
“Sit down, you want some coffee? It’s cruel out there.”
Dehan shook her head. “No, thanks. I just had some soup.” I shook my head too and he leafed through a stack of files till he found the one he was looking for.
“This was unexpected. Gutierrez had asked us to have a look at Jose Robles’ phone, to see if we could get any idea of where Agnes Shine had fled to, and also why she killed him in the first place. So we had the tech guys doing an autopsy on the cell when we find a deleted app. We look into it and we find he used to have Telegram.”
Dehan raised her eyebrows. “No kidding.”
“Exactly. Now, thousands of people have Telegram, there is nothing unusual about that. But, it always raises a flag with us, because obviously it is the messenger app favored by terrorists and organized crime, the reason being it is so hard to decrypt, and the company is so uncooperative with the authorities. So, we had a look-see what we could retrieve. There was very little…” He opened the file and leafed through a few pages, then said, “Here, this is all we could get. He receives a message on the Thursday before he died that says, ‘Maybe I should become your student,’ to which he replies, ‘I told you never to contact me on my phone!’ The message was from somebody called…” He looked at us both in turn. “Mohamed. We are working on getting the phone number, but I thought you’d want to see this straight away.”
Dehan sighed loudly, pulled her hat off her head and screwed it up into a ball. The static from the friction left small hairs standing up on her head like antennae.
“The fact that his name is Mohamed means nothing of itself.”
Joe nodded. “Obviously. And the fact that his name was Mohamed and he was using Telegram is nothing more than slightly suggestive.”
He smiled in a way that said that his uncle was the Sultan of Brunei and Alice in Wonderland was coming for tea on Sunday. Dehan sighed again. “But add to that the fact that he deleted the app, and that the murder weapon was a pistol favored by pros… oh man!”
I said, “The number that sent the message will be a burner.”
“In all probability, John. And the chances are he will have got rid of it by now. But if he hasn’t, we might be able to get a fix on its location.”
I looked at Dehan. She looked tired and cold. “Let’s not jump the gun, Dehan. ‘Maybe I should join your class.’” I looked at Joe. “It’s a threat.”
Joe nodded. “I agree. It certainly sounds like a threat.”
Dehan had her lips pursed, like she was blowing a kiss at her hat. “To which his response is, don’t contact me on my phone. The clear implication is that Jose has a secret he does not want revealed.”
Joe nodded. “So far, that is sound, yes.”
Dehan looked at him and then at me. “A secret that’s called Mohamed and uses a Sig Sauer Tacops p226.”
Joe leaned back in his chair and emitted a small, humorless laugh. “I’m just here to do the forensics, you guys have to put it all together and give it meaning, but don’t forget that whoever was using that Sig put no less than eight rounds into Jose’s body. He may have been using a pro’s gun, but he wasn’t shooting like a pro.”
“He or she,” I said. “Come on, Dehan. Let’s get home and get some hot food inside us. Things will make more sense after a bottle of…”
I stopped, remembering the bottle on the table by Agnes’ glass, the two dozen bottles in her kitchen and the two dozen more in Robles’ kitchen, and the glass of whiskey by the sink.
For a fastidious man like Robles, the sequence was wrong.
They were both looking at me. Joe smiled. “A bottle of wine or a bottle of whiskey?”
I gave a small laugh, that was more of a snort. “That’s a good question, Joe. First a beer, or a martini if you want a cocktail, then the wine, and then a whiskey or a brandy to round it off. Isn’t that the correct sequence?”
He looked at Dehan and laughed. “The man knows how to live. You have to hand it to him!”
Dehan was laughing and getting to her feet. “He does that! Why d’you think he married me? The man’s got taste!”
“Can’t argue with that!”
It was a short drive from the lab to the house. The streets were empty but for the occasional car that hissed by, casting amber light on the blacktop. The first Santas were beginning to scale the walls, balconies and rooftops, and the first strings of winking lights were beginning to gild the lilies in the gardens of suburbia. I killed the engine of the Jag outside our house and Dehan went ahead in her woolly hat and gloves to open the door.
Inside, as I closed the drapes and started to build the fire, she peeled off her layers of wool and went to the kitchen. I heard the fridge open and thud closed, pots and pans clatter and the warmth of the growing flames washed over my hands and face. Then there was a pregnant silence from the kitchen. I stood, poured two generous Bushmills and went to the breakfast bar with them.
She was standing, staring at a can of tomatoes. On the bar she had a pack of minced meat, an onion, some garlic, a red pepper and a pack of spaghetti. I said:
“It’s a can of tomatoes. It has tomatoes in it. They grow them like that in Italy, in the cans, especially for making spaghetti and pizza.”
She put down the can. I sipped my drink and went to look for a can opener, fearing dinner might be slow in coming if I didn’t.
She said: “Who stands to lose the most if Jose Robles’ research is successful?”
I set about opening the can. “That is a very wide question, Dehan. You’d need to be a bit more precise about what you mean.”
I handed her a vegetable knife and an onion. She took them and frowned at me. “I mean, if everything that Am said is true. If they are on the verge of a revolution in lithium battery technology, and soon all forms of transport are going to be running on lithium ion batteries. Who stands to lose the most?”
I ground some black pepper into the tomatoes and took the onion and the knife from her. “Peel the garlic, will you?” She picked up the garlic and followed me to the frying pan, where I peeled the onion and started cutting it into the pan. “Obviously the petroleum companies would be the worst hit. But, Dehan…”
“No, just humor me a moment, Stone. Where are the most powerful petroleum interests in the world?”
I took the garlic from her fingers and started peeling it. “Slice the red pepper for me. Saudi, Egypt, the UAE, Jordan, Iraq… all of them. I know where you’re going with this…”
She went and came back waving a red pepper at me. “Don’t talk, just answer the question. Now, obviously, if you are heavily invested in oil, you can’t go around murdering every scientist who comes up with an alternative energy source. But what you can do is try and take possession of that technology.”
I took the pepper from her and said, “Olive oil, and salt.” I started chopping the pepper. “Yes, that is true. But how do you get from there to…”
“I said don’t talk. Now, suppose a Middle Eastern government got to hear about Dr. Jose Robles’ research, and they approached him to buy him out…”
I took the olive oil from her hands and poured it into the pan, with the onion, the garlic and the red pepper, then turned on the heat. She had gone quiet. I took the salt and sprinkled it in. The pan started to sizzle. I stirred it with a wooden spoon.
“Hand me the meat and open the wine.”
She brought over the pack of meat in one hand and the bottle in the other. As she started peeling off the lead from the bottle, she sighed and shook her head. “Whichever way you look at it, there is always something that doesn’t fit.”
I nodded. “I keep wondering about that threat: to join his class.”
She screwed the corkscrew in, stuck the bottle between her knees and pulled. The cork popped. She carried the bottle away and put it on the table. Then she came back and leaned her cheek on my shoulder, watching the onions brown. “Wanting to own or control his research is a motive for blackmail, even torture, but it’s not a motive for murder.”
I dumped the meat into the hot oil and started breaking it up. “Yup. But whoever shot him, really wanted him dead.”
“That much is clear.” She went and started filling a pan with water. “But I’ll tell you what else is clear: we need to start looking at his research. Because it either has everything to do with his murder, or it has nothing to do with it.”
SEVEN
Next day, we were knocking at the deputy inspector’s door at eight thirty A.M. He made a muffled noise from within which we took to mean ‘enter’ and opened the door. He had his face in a large paper cup of coffee, which explained the muffled noise, and one arm out of his coat.
“Good morning, detectives. How can I help you?”
Dehan relieved him of his coffee and helped him off with his coat while I sat and said, “We need a court order to see Jose Robles’ research, sir.”
He frowned, then smiled as he thanked Dehan, and returned to frowning as he sat behind his desk. “Clearly you think there is a connection between his murder and his research, and that’s why you want the court order, but if I recall correctly it looked as though his colleague… um…”
“Agnes Shine.”
“Exactly, had shot him out of jealousy, or something like that.”
Dehan was wearing the expressionless expression she wore when people got on her nerves. Now she used it to say, “But the case was given to us, sir, because the ADA didn’t like that explanation.”
He grunted. “So what makes you think it has something to do with his research?”
I’d been rehearsing it in my mind all the way there that morning, and I still couldn’t nail it. I looked at Dehan and she shook her head. “There is no single thing, sir,” she said. “It’s a number of small things that, when you take them together, suggest very strongly that ADA Varu… That the Assistant District Attorney may be right, and the murder has more to do with Robles’ research than his love life.”
The inspector smiled at her. “That’s your introduction, Detective, now what are your reasons?”
She looked at me and I took a deep breath.
“Let’s start with the gun, sir. It was a Sig Sauer Tacops p226. That is a professional’s choice of gun. It is expensive and not the sort of thing you buy just for home defense. It is something you would use for a hit, or for an execution, or if you were being shipped out to Afghanistan, but not if you just wanted a gun around to make you feel safe.”
He flopped back in his chair. “There could be any number of explanations…”
“Bear with me, sir. As Dehan said, it’s an accumulation of things. Then there is the fact that all those who knew Robles and Agnes are adamant that neither of them would own a gun, far less spend the kind of money you’re going to spend on a Sig. So already we are seeing the as yet unexplained presence of an unregistered, professional’s choice of handgun at the scene of the murder.
“Next, and still on the subject of the gun, there is no sign in her financial records that she made an outlay of a thousand bucks in the weeks leading up to the murder, plus, it is hard to imagine Agnes Shine would have any idea in the first place of where to find an unregistered weapon. So the deeper we go, the more we have to wonder how that particular gun comes to be at the scene of the murder.”
He sighed. “I am far from convinced, John. What else have you got?”
“Well, sir, on top of the unexplained presence of the gun, there is no indication that Jose and Agnes were in any way involved with each other except as friends. They spent a lot of time together, he was cruel and unkind to her at times, but so far we have no reason at all to believe that they were lovers. I, personally, am still struggling to see what her motive was.
“Finally, we have reason to believe, from testimony given by one of his students, that he was engaged in some radical research into lithium ion batteries that could be worth a fortune. That could provide a serious motive for murder, and we have forensic evidence that he was in secret communication with somebody called Mohamed. So there is an at least even chance that the motive for the murder stemmed from his research, rather than his sex life.”
He grunted and sipped his coffee. “You know I like to give you guys every assistance I can, John. But no judge in New York is going to sign off on a request like that, where highly sensitive research is concerned. I agree you have grounds for suspicion, but you have no grounds whatsoever to believe that his research is behind the motive. That is a very different proposition.”
Dehan sighed. “We need to see that research, sir.”
“He was at University College New York, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then, at this stage, the best thing you can do is go and talk to his head of department, explain your concerns and ask to see his research. Point out it will not become public property, we are prepared to sign a nondisclosure agreement, and that the safety of other researchers may be at risk. That is the best you can do at this stage.”
We thanked him and on the way down the stairs, I pulled out my cell and called Patricia Meigh. When she answered, I could hear children in the background.
“Detective Stone, how can I help you?”
“In a big way, I hope. We have reason to believe Dr. Robles’ murder may have been related to his work, and not to his private life.”
“That is absurd.”
I stopped on the stairs. Dehan turned to watch me. I suppressed a pellet of anger in my belly and said, “With all due respect, Dr. Meigh, how would you know that?”
The momentary silence said she’d been taken aback. Then she said, “Well, I mean, how could it be?”
“That is a question, and a very good one. But what you made before was a statement of fact and an unfounded one. So with your permission, I am going to go with the question. Our investigation has turned up several inconsistencies which suggest it is possible Agnes Shine did not kill Dr. Robles, but that his murder may have been related to his research. If we are right, then other people on your team could be at risk.”
“I see…”
“Now we can apply for a judicial order, but then you’ll have to get your lawyers involved, it will be costly and slow, and during that time somebody else could get hurt…”
She cut me short. “Look, Detective, there is no need for all that. Just give me half an hour and I’ll get back to you.”
We returned to our desks and Dehan lowered herself into her chair. Outside it had started drizzling and the tops of the naked branches across the road were bouncing gently in the desultory, wet wind. It occurred to me it was almost Christmas. I smiled down at Dehan.
“We have to get the tree.”
She nodded. “Tonight.”
Behind me, Mo at his desk said, “Hey, you know, this year you ain’t allowed to say Merry Christmas, in case it offends the GBL…whatever, bacon, lettuce and tomato brigade, on account of Christians being homophobic. Now we gotta say a Gay Christmas and a Rainbow New Year. Seriously. I read it in the paper. If you don’t believe me, look in the Post. I got it right here.”
Dehan put her boots up on the desk. “They have words in that? I thought it was just pictures.”
Mo grinned. “Hey, you know why Jesus wasn’t born in Vegas?”
“I know you’re going to tell me.”
“They couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin!” He laughed noisily. “That’s good. Three wise men and a virgin. I like that. Like you’re gonna find three wise men and a virgin in Vegas! Right!”
He turned back to his desk, shaking his head and laughing. My phone rang.
“Stone.”
“Morning, Stone. Joe. OK, it’s piecemeal, but I’m giving you what I’ve got. We took all the bedding from Dr. Shine’s house and Dr. Robles’ house. We kept it all in three separate piles: on the bed, in the dirty washing, and clean and in storage, so that they would not contaminate each other.”
“Good.”
“Now, as a first step, we examined each piece of bedding to see if they did in fact have any latent fluids. We examined them thoroughly.”
“And?”
“They didn’t. ”
“Could they have been washed out?”
“No, recoverable semen stains will resist time and the washing machine, John. There was not a trace on any of the sheets. I’d be prepared to swear he never had sex in his own bed. Nobody had sex in his bed. And the same goes for her. They seem to have been celibate, at least in their own beds.”
I frowned down at Dehan, then asked, “What about the glasses?”
“Working on it.”
“Thanks, Joe. I appreciate it.”
I hung up and sat. “There was no sexual relationship between them, Dehan. The sheets were clean. Not a trace of semen on his or hers.”
“All the damn forensic evidence we have is negative. It all shows what didn’t happen and who didn’t do it.”
“We need to find this Mohamed guy. We need to know what he wanted from Jose, and why it was a threat for Jose to have Mohamed in his class.” I leaned back in my chair. “Why do I keep getting the feeling we need to talk to Am again?”
Dehan shrugged. “If Dr. Meigh won’t play ball, maybe he can give us a better insight into the research they were doing.”