by Susy Gage
“I suppose we were being stupid,” Lou admitted, carefully putting away the eyedrops, then washing his hands with sanitizer. “I mean, thinking he could be innocent. If he had really just been misunderstood on the trail, why is he hiding?”
“Exactly! Because he’s in Mexico already.” Lori was damned if she would cry, so she kicked the desk again. This time her foot made a distinct dent in the crappy old wood. “I quit, and you’re a moron if you don’t quit, too. In fact I don’t know why you’ve stayed as long as you have.”
“I don’t know either.” Lou gave a helpless shrug. “But what else can I do in life? This is the only place I feel normal.”
See how normal you feel when your eyeballs rot out, Lori thought, but decided that was a bit much. After all, Wigbert wasn’t a biologist and wouldn’t know how to culture the eyeball-eating amebas.
But if he learned, watch out.
“We’re all exhausted,” Lou continued, in his wooden Denial-Man way. “I agree, let’s let the proposal go. But I wouldn’t do anything else until we know the truth.”
“We already know the truth. I should have guessed sixteen years ago. I can only blame myself for everything he’s done since.”
“Lori, calm down.” The door clicked shut. Abby had returned—hands empty. “Now that the signature page is somewhere very safe, I want you to listen to me. I think it’s Kuzno after all.”
Thirty-Four: Be Thou Clean
Carol hadn’t made it five miles out of town before she swore to herself that she would never go back to STI or the LEPERLab again.
What did one call an ex-leper?
She was still going to deliver the proposal to DC, because she’d promised to do it and because she didn’t want to start her new life off on the wrong foot, so to speak. After that, she didn’t know what she was going to do, but dragging out her days fixing typos for mad killers wasn’t it.
People were scurrying about campus like cockroaches, and she had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting someone who she thought at first was the Chief Scientist. After a second she realized it had to be his son; those Walter Waddleses all looked alike. Oblivious to his near-death experience, Walter IV tore off towards town without even glancing in her direction.
She cut through the movie-star neighborhood, still shaking from the close encounters with Wigbert and Walter, and merged onto the freeway where she came to an immediate and total standstill. It was a good thing she had five hours before her flight. After a good ten minutes without moving an inch, she followed a growing train of other cars in making a highly illegal U-turn the wrong way down an on-ramp, finding herself on a charming street decorated fifties-style and strung with Christmas lights.
Not wanting to face the surface streets to the airport without sustenance and a map, she pulled in to a diner with big glass windows and red barstools around a soda fountain. Words she knew only from books of her childhood, like “egg cream” and “malted,” swarmed in her head as she pushed the glass door open against a blast of warm air. The diner was crowded, and she took the last place at the bar, opposite the TV set.
Fighting her impulse to order one of everything, she finally settled on a tuna melt and a chocolate egg cream (who could resist!). Most of the people around her looked and talked like STI professors, reminding her that she hadn’t made it very far from campus and that she’d need to be getting back on the road pretty soon. Fragments of familiar names reached her ears, which she ignored until a phrase leapt from the TV set in undeniable clarity.
“Celebrated microbiology professor Benedict Gerson remains unable to explain how he found himself travelling down the freeway in the wrong direction, at the tail end of downtown’s morning rush hour,” the newscaster announced brightly. “The 110 remains obstructed between Chinatown and the 405…”
Carol tried not to react, hearing others guffaw around her and imagining that they were the villainous spies of Lori’s tales. But who, really, were the bad guys? she wondered, sipping slowly at her soda to savor the chocolatey taste. Abby was right that as soon as Lori showed up, terrible things started happening. Ben Gerson was allegedly on their side, and he sounded like an irresponsible space-head. Not to mention that horrible van Gnubbern, who’d hired their department psychopath and then foisted him off on the LEPERLab once he got sick of him.
As she ate, she calmed down a little and asked herself if she’d misjudged van Gnubbern on the trail, feeling a little guilty for leaving him to walk several miles back home in the rain. Still, he was far from innocent, and she couldn’t help but wonder if his choice of the LEPERLab for Jim Kalb had some additional sinister motive that he hadn’t dared express. The LEPERs wanted to get rid of Bob—were they hoping he’d be murdered so they didn’t have to fire him? Was that why Tripp had deigned to interview someone as lowly as Dim Bulb?
The food warmed her belly and helped her to suppress those thoughts, and she felt cozy and protected from the elements as she climbed back into her car, clutching a napkin scribbled with detailed directions for getting to LAX along the surface roads.
It was more than just Ben Gerson who’d tied up the freeway, she realized as she cut through the foothills, the 110 off to her side. There was a knot of police cars and fire trucks around a van that had been almost completely devoured by flames.
Carol hadn’t really prayed since the Bible study group in grad school drove her off, but she bowed her head at the sight and murmured a few words, knowing that anyone inside the van wouldn’t have survived. She prayed not only for the bodies and souls of those involved, but also that the incident please not have anything to do with the LEPERLab.
Thirty-Five: Hope Springs Eternal
Abby stood at the back of the room, arms folded as if daring anyone to interrupt her. No one did.
“Kuzno could have tried to make everything look as if van Gnubbern was responsible,” she began unconvincingly. “Remember, Kuzno has been here for exactly sixteen years—he showed up, then Silverman died. The guy killed by the deer was his postdoc. He had known grudges against both of you for trying to change the department.
“And finally,” she concluded with a conspiratorial glance round the room, “Walter called me this morning and said that Kuzno had something in his writing pen that was very dangerous. I thought you would have a mass spectrometer to check it out.”
“Waddles Jr. has a mass spec,” said Lou.
Lori whirled around and stared at him. They were just manipulating her.
But she was so easily manipulated. All it took was some mention of chemical analysis, and a funny-looking pen, and she was running off with them to the lab. Never mind that she wouldn’t have minded seeing the whole university burn to the ground, she still couldn’t resist the lure of the “poison” pen. Abby’s hatred of scientists seemed to have volatilized like a low-molecular-weight solvent, and she followed Lori across campus babbling about gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and how it could identify any toxin in the world.
Grandpa Waddles wasn’t in his lab, but Lori had a running invite to use any of his instruments. She started with the mass spec, breaking open the pen and extracting its dark blue contents, wearing gloves only because Abby insisted. Everything she did she noted carefully in the latest of the Waddles Jr. notebooks, arranged in perfect order over the benchtop back to 1975, the year he was hired. Back in the day, Grandpa Waddles had been Lori’s favorite professor. He made every class seem like a voyage of discovery into the secret life of atoms and molecules.
Lou and Abby babbled absurdly as she worked, urging her to identify the peaks almost before they came spitting out of the old, internet-unfriendly instruments.
Lori almost threw up when she saw they were holding hands. What the hell had gone on in Denver? she wondered, taking the rest of the ink towards the back of the lab so she wouldn’t have to see the revolting spectacle.
The ICP-MS gave the elemental analysis, and she also did an absorption spectrum and visible Raman. All of these tests led to a singl
e, inescapable conclusion.
The pen was a gel pen.
Pasting the graphs carefully into the Waddles notebooks, she explained to Lou and Abby, “There is a mixture of three solvents of different boiling points, including butyl alcohol and the butyl ether of ethylene glycol. There is some zinc. And then a cyanine dye that makes up about half a percent of the compound.”
“Cyanine?” Abby wondered. “Sounds like cyanide. Is it dangerous?”
Lori and Lou shook their heads at once. “We use cyanine dyes all the time in the lab to label things,” said Lou. “Is there anything special about the pen?”
“Well, I’m sure it flowed freely and smoothly and was a joy to write with,” Lori snorted, stripping off her gloves and lobbing them at the trash. “In fact, we could test that, there’s plenty of ink left.”
Abby looked completely baffled. “But then why—?”
Her question was cut short by the out-of-breath, door-slamming, screaming appearance of the youngest of the Waddles clan. “Grandpa?” he called out desperately.
“Do I look like your grandpa?” Lori wanted to know.
Walter seemed incapable of words. His mouth opened and closed several times and his arms waved, but none of this appeared to be under conscious control. “Tripp…” he squeaked.
“Walter,” said Abby with great patience, “you have to expel air when you speak.”
“Tripp, from the LEPERLab,” Walter managed at least, his breath ragged. “He put a package on the FedEx truck. We’re all sure it’s a bomb.”
“Who did you say put a bomb on a truck?” Abby moved towards Walter Waddles IV, cornering him.
“It’s Ellis D. Tripp.” Walter went and leaned against a lab bench, staggering a bit as if his knees had gone weak. “The Chief Engineer at the LEPERLab. But it’s too late to do anything.”
Lori, Lou, and Abby all stared at him, like three cats examining a fallen baby bird. No one said anything, and after a moment Walter began to talk.
“My dad took the fake `bait’ proposal and made sure all the LEPERs knew you were really submitting after all. Then he brought it down to me and I took it to the FedEx just before the 1:15 truck. But apparently Tripp had been there just before me, and the Bubo spies didn’t recognize him.” He stumbled over the words, seemed confused, and added, “Or maybe they were just watching for Kuzno? Anyway, they said everything was fine, and the bait went out. But then my dad went back to work and found out that Tripp had left just before me—sneaked out while Dad was taking me the box. Dad then rushed down to the FedEx and showed the Buboes a picture of Tripp, and they realized he’d been there, wearing some kind of huge raincoat and umbrella to hide himself. They tried to stop the truck, but it was already too late.”
“Well for God’s sake, call the cops!” yelled Lou.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Lori snapped. “They’d just call him a Bubo and threaten to arrest him.”
“That’s exactly what happened,” Walter admitted, with a scared giggle. “They said they’d had enough of our troublemaking, and asked if I’d like to spend a night in the Bubo Tank like my boss.”
“If the cops don’t listen to you, we have to find another way to stop the truck,” Lou interrupted before Walter could finish. “Call in a bomb threat to the airport! They’ll tear the place apart.”
“Ben Gerson promised to do that,” said Walter. “He also said he’d try to stop traffic, but…”
“You believe him? Ben Gerson is flakier than a good croissant!” Lou rummaged around in his bag for a moment, finally extracting his cell phone. “We’re just talking and someone’s life could be in danger! I’ll do it myself.” He dialed three numbers—they all knew which ones.
The others stayed silent out of excitement, or embarrassment, or maybe a bit of both. Walter looked hopeful, but Lori just wanted to see Malibu-boy learn what dumbshits cops were.
“Yes, a FedEx truck,” Lou explained patiently. “Yes, of course… No, no I haven’t. Why? WHAT? Oh. Yes, of course. Thank you.” He stared at the phone for a moment before closing it. After a very long pause in which no one spoke, he said, “They already know. Apparently the bomb went off on the freeway about fifteen minutes ago.”
“So there was a bomb…” breathed Walter.
“How could the Buboes fail?” Lou sounded furious.
“Because they’re just kids.” Lori took off her lab coat and hung it up, then replaced the Waddles notebooks carefully on their shelves as she spoke. “We can’t expect them to understand evil. We should have given up this project the instant Marybeth died.”
Abby turned away from Walter and stood beside Lou, gripping his shoulder. “We were busy chasing the wrong leads. We thought it was Kuzno, or van Gnubbern…”
Deep down, where she didn’t dare to trust it, a tiny flicker of hope sprang up in Lori’s heart. “So maybe it wasn’t van Gnub—”
“Lab coats! Gloves!’ Grandpa Waddles burst in, pushing them all out of the way. “What are you all doing here?”
“Your grandson told us Kuzno’s pen was dangerous!” Abby accused.
Walter IV turned bright pink. “Well, maybe I exaggerated a little. I wanted you to test it.”
“So I tested it,” said Lori. “It’s a gel pen. And so?” All of a sudden she thought of something. “Dr. Waddles, what will zinc chloride do to cyanine dyes?”
“Decolorize them, of course,” said Waddles Jr. “Now out of here, all of you. You have some friends waiting in the physics department.”
“But the bomb?” Lori wondered.
“Well, the bomb,” said Grandpa Waddles slowly, not seeming to notice the others hopping with impatience. “No harm done. I must say I had the time of my life—it was like being a Bubo again. Go back to your office and you’ll see what I mean.”
Abby and Lori glanced at each other then sprinted out the door, with Baby Waddles hot on their heels like a badly-imprinted duckling. Lou followed more slowly, clutching his cell phone as if it would tell him something. It was raining hard, making Lori think of the old physics problem: do you get wetter if you run in the rain than if you walk slowly?
Reaching the physics building, she dashed inside and immediately damned Grandpa Waddles to the depths of hell. The place was swarming with police. There were two cops right at the entrance, and she passed a third in the stairwell, coming down as she was going up.
She was out of breath from stairs and the beginning of panic when she reached her office—only to find that there was a cop there, too. Not just a cop: a cop, Radhika, and Wigbert van Gnubbern.
Thirty-Six: Disappearing Acts
“Well, well,” van Gnubbern was chuckling, “I hope that clears everything up.” He shook the cop’s hand.
Lori pressed herself against the wall to let the policeman slip out the door, and Abby and Walter slip in. They all gaped in utter confusion as Radhika and Wigbert collapsed on each other’s shoulders, dissolving into nervous titters.
“Oh!” Radhika gasped. “I was sure we were going to get busted for what we did!”
“Oh, no, quite unlikely,” Wigbert replied, but he looked mighty relieved, mopping his forehead with a tissue from Lori’s desk. “The police just wanted to clear up a little misunderstanding from yesterday. I doubt we’ll be in any trouble for our antics; after all, we saved at least one life.”
Lori looked at each of them in turn—her childhood hero and the only person who had ever loved her—and prayed they would give a reasonable explanation.
Radi was wearing nothing but a lime-green camisole, a pair of board shorts, and her eternal rubber sandals—she probably owned no other footwear off there in Darwin. She was soaked and shivering but looked tremendous, strong and tanned and without a single white hair in her frizzy chocolate-brown curls. Her hair was longer than Lori had ever seen, down past her shoulders, and her unlined face looked the same as the day they had met seventeen years before. Lori thought her heart would break.
“I got here yesterday evening, expecting
to find all of you in your offices,” she began, suddenly seeming to realize she held a coil of copper wire, and turning to place it carefully on the desk. “But all I found was a soggy man in lederhosen who appeared hysterical.”
“That would be me,” said van Gnubbern unnecessarily. “I’m afraid I frightened Carol Dugoni on the trail, and was forced to walk back here in the rain, worrying that I would miss the excitement surrounding the false proposal.”
“We stayed discreet and watched the action,” Radi continued. “It became clear pretty quickly that the effort was disorganized, and that all the key players were unavailable for one reason or another.”
“I was in Denver,” said Abby.
“I was in jail,” added Lori.
“Right. And Wiggy here asked me when you’d last spent a night in the Bubo Tank, which gave me a genius idea.” Radi picked up the copper wire and waved it meaningfully.
“Oh no,” Lori wondered suspiciously. “You didn’t—?”
“—Use railroad tracks to broadcast a warning on all radio frequencies? Yes, we did.” Radi chuckled fondly. “How could I forget the only real crime you ever committed?”
She was so familiar and sweet and warm that Lori wanted to cry. She suddenly realized that she had given up so much for such a small amount of success, only to find that it wasn’t really success at all. The “best department in the world” was scraping the barrel because everyone they hired tended to die suddenly.
“So we saved the driver’s life and didn’t even go to jail for it,” concluded van Gnubbern, who didn’t seem to mind at all being called “Wiggy.”