by Ben Bova
He could feel Danvers’s eyes on him as he went to the door and opened it, thinking, If she’s going to arrest me, she’ll do it now. But Danvers said nothing and Cochrane walked through the subdued intensity of the squad room and out into the hot, glaring sunlight.
It wasn’t until then that he realized he didn’t have his car here. The police had driven him to the headquarters building. Squinting in the heat, he saw a pair of taxicabs parked at the corner. He thought for a moment about going back inside and demanding that Danvers provide him transportation back to his apartment. But only for a moment. Fuck that, he told himself. Take a taxi.
During the ride across town he sat in the back of the poorly air-conditioned taxi, wondering why he refused to name Sandoval to the police. They’re trying to find out who murdered Mike, he said to himself. You ought to be helping them, not holding back information.
But there’s something going on here, he argued within his mind, something deeper than finding out who killed Mike. Or Arashi, for that matter. Why were they killed? What was so important about Mike’s work that it cost him his life? Sandoval knows. She knows a part of it, at least. And she can’t tell me what she knows if she’s locked up in jail.
The taxi pulled up in front of the Sunrise Apartments. Cochrane got out, paid the driver, and gave him a small tip, then limped through the broiling sun to the building’s lobby.
It was blessedly cool inside the lobby. As he headed for the elevators, Cochrane saw out of the corner of his eye that several magazines and journals lay strewn haphazardly on the shelf by the mailboxes. Christ, I haven’t even looked at my mail in almost a week.
Sure enough, the journals were for him. They shouldn’t be out here, where anybody could pick them up, he thought irritably. Then he almost laughed at himself. Who the hell in this building would pick up the latest Astrophysical Journal? Well, you never know, he thought; I might have an astronomy student for a neighbor. He fished his mailbox key from the pocket of his jeans and opened his mailbox. Sure enough, it was stuffed full.
Cochrane tugged the bent and folded mail out of the little box, went to the wastebasket at the end of the row, and started discarding the junk mail. Credit card offers. Discounts from local retailers. Catalogs.
And a letter bearing the return address of the Calvin Research Center, with a scrawled MSC beneath. Mike’s initials.
TUCSON:
SUNRISE APARTMENTS
Cochrane dropped his other mail on the table by his front door, neither noticing nor caring that most of it slid to the floor. He nudged the door shut with his foot, then tore open Mike’s letter. It had been typed on a computer: Mike’s laptop, Cochrane thought.
PAUL: I’m playing with the big guys now. And I’ve had it with Irene. So I’m going away for a while. Please take care of the papers in my safe-deposit box. They’re worth a lot. MIKE.
A small flat key was Scotch-taped to the bottom of the letter. He didn’t even sign it, Cochrane realized. And he didn’t tell me where his goddamned safe-deposit box is!
He went to his desk and phoned Irene. No answer, just that damned voice-mail message of hers. He booted up his computer and started looking up the locations of banks near Mike’s home and near the Calvin lab. Six of them. He started phoning.
“Hello, I’m trying to determine if my brother kept a safe-deposit box in your bank.”
“I’m sorry, sir, we can’t divulge that information on the phone.”
“Look, I’m in Tucson. My brother died last week and he left me the key to a safe-deposit box but he forgot to tell me which bank it’s from.”
“That’s very unusual, sir.”
“His name is… was Michael Cochrane.”
“We can’t confirm—”
“Can you at least tell me if Michael Cochrane was a customer of yours? Did he have an account with you? Please, it’s important.”
“Just a moment, sir. I’ll connect you with the bank manager.”
And Cochrane repeated the same routine with the bank manager. Six times, each with a different bank. The best he could get was:
“We have no accounts with a Michael Cochrane.”
“None? No checking account? Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“How about his widow, Irene Cochrane?”
“Sir, the information you’re asking for is private. We can’t divulge such information over the telephone.”
“I see. I understand. Thank you.”
Cochrane thought about phoning Purvis and asking him to find out which bank Mike used. Not McLain. He realized the two detectives were using a good-cop, bad-cop routine on him, but he still didn’t like McLain. He found the card Purvis had given him, picked up the phone again, and hesitated.
Do I want to tell the police about this? They’ll be all over me, worse than ever. Can’t I find which bank Mike used by myself?
He put the phone down, leaned back in his desk chair, and tried to think. Okay, all those banks claim Mike didn’t have an account with them. No reason to think they’re lying. It’s one thing to say they won’t tell me, but if they say Mike wasn’t a customer of theirs, I guess they’re telling the truth.
Cochrane closed his eyes, tried to picture his brother alive, that wiseass grin of his. If Mike wanted to hide his papers, Cochrane told himself, he wouldn’t have gone to a bank in his own neighborhood. Great. That leaves about six zillion other banks in the region.
Why didn’t he tell me which bank the damned key is from? And the answer rose in Cochrane’s mind: Because he thought I’m smart enough to figure it out for myself. Another one of his little practical jokes. Here you are, Paulie. You’re so frigging smart, find the answer to this one.
Not a bank in his neighborhood, Cochrane mused to himself. Then where?
Trip reports! Buried in Tulius’s files were reports that Mike sent to his boss after every trip he took for the company.
He inserted the first of the CDs that Arashi had given him and started searching for Mike’s trip reports. The sun was setting when he finally pushed himself from the desk, bleary-eyed, and shambled to the refrigerator for a glass of fruit juice. Mike had traveled a lot: scientific conferences, consulting meetings, visits to other laboratories around the nation. Sipping at the grapefruit juice he’d poured for himself, Cochrane went back to the computer and listed Mike’s trips in chronological order.
Almost all Mike’s trips had been to different places: Denver, New Haven, Ann Arbor, Albuquerque, he’d even visited Tucson three months earlier. And he never told me. Never looked me up or let me know he was in town, Cochrane grumbled to himself.
There were only two destinations that Mike had visited more than once: NASA’s Johnson Space Center near Houston three times, and MIT in Massachusetts six times. Cochrane remembered that Mike was working under a contract from NASA Ames; he must have gone there plenty of times. But Ames was only a short drive from the Calvin Center; traveling there wouldn’t be considered a trip, necessitating a report that detailed expenses and told what results had been accomplished.
Maybe I should find out who he was working with at Ames, Cochrane said to himself. Then he realized that the police would already have covered that base. McLain and Purvis must have been there.
MIT. Near Boston, where we grew up. A rush of memories flooded through Cochrane’s mind. Massachusetts. Playing in the snowbanks after a blizzard. Sailing Sunfishes on the pond down at the end of our street. The leaves in autumn. Going down to Fenway to see the Red Sox.
His door buzzer jarred Cochrane out of his reverie. With something of a jolt he saw that it was fully night. And his stomach was growling with hunger. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast with Sandoval.
The thought of her soured him. She’s in Palo Alto, probably climbing into bed with Tulius right about now. Cochrane remembered the way Tulius had looked at her, his smiling comment about his two vices.
The buzzer sounded again. Probably the cops, Cochrane thought. Or some pizza delivery kid who’s got t
he apartment number wrong. Reluctantly he went to the intercom by his front door.
“Yes?”
“Paul, it’s me.”
Sandoval’s voice!
“Where are you?” he asked, and immediately realized it was a stupid question.
“Down here in the lobby. Would you let me in?”
“Sure!” He leaned on the button that unlocked the building’s entrance door, then rushed out into the corridor toward the elevators, impatient as a kid at Christmas.
The elevator pinged, the doors slid open, and there she stood, wearing the same sleeveless frock she’d worn when he’d driven her to the airport.
For an instant he didn’t know what to say, what to do. And then she was in his arms and he was kissing her and holding her body pressed tightly against his own. A door opened down the hallway and an elderly woman walked hesitantly toward them, smiled as she pressed the elevator button. Cochrane took Sandoval’s shoulder bag and walked her back to his apartment, his arm around her slender waist.
As soon as he shut the front door he kissed her again, longer, deeper.
“I thought—” he started to say.
“I know,” she said, her green eyes locked on his. “I couldn’t do it, Paul. I just couldn’t. I had to come back to you.”
He was breathless with the wonder of it.
“Tulius was very slick,” she said, taking her bag back from him. “He told me a little about your brother’s work, but it didn’t amount to much. He hinted pretty strongly that he knew more, but it was tied up in the company’s proprietary rights and he couldn’t talk about it. Then he invited me to dinner. He knew what I was after, and I knew what he was after. It might have worked out. But I left him at his office and took the next plane back here.”
“To me.”
“To you.”
Cochrane felt like baying at the moon.
TUCSON:
SUNRISE APARTMENTS
In the morning Cochrane told Sandoval about Mike’s note and the key to the safe-deposit box.
“But he didn’t say which bank it’s from?” she asked, sitting across the kitchen’s tiny fold-down table from him.
Cochrane spooned up a mound of bran flakes, dripping milk. With a shake of his head, “That’s just like Mike. Typical.”
“He forgot to tell you.”
“Either that or he’s playing head games with me. I can just hear him: You’re so smart, Paulie, let’s see you figure this one out!”
Sandoval looked thoughtful. “Or maybe he thinks you already know.”
“How the hell should I know? There must be a thousand banks within a five-minute drive of his house.”
“His wife?”
Cochrane shook his head even harder. “He didn’t want Irene to know about it. He was going to leave her. Whatever’s in the bank box was supposed to be his insurance, his stash.”
“But you don’t know which bank it could be in.” She looks disappointed, Cochrane thought. Disappointed in me.
“I even went through his trip reports, to see where he’d been traveling. Figured he might have opened an account in one of those cities.”
“And?”
“Nothing popped out at me. He didn’t seem to go to any particular city on a regular basis, except maybe Cambridge, MIT.”
“Massachusetts,” she said, lifting a white Steward Observatory mug to her lips. She had brewed tea for herself; Cochrane was drinking coffee out of a maroon and gold Boston College mug.
“Massachusetts,” he confirmed. “Land of the bean and the cod. Where Mike and I were born and grew….” Cochrane’s voice faded into thoughtful silence.
“What is it?” Sandoval asked.
Slamming his mug down on the flimsy table hard enough to slosh coffee out of it, Cochrane said, “I bet I know which bank he used! I’m sure of it!”
By midafternoon they were on a Delta jetliner, heading for Boston’s Logan Airport.
Lionel Gould interrupted a meeting with a group of bankers from Lebanon to take Kensington’s call. He excused himself from the conference room and went to his office next door. Sitting heavily in his high-backed swivel chair, he fiddled with the keyboard on his desk until Kensington’s dark-jowled face appeared on the plasma screen mounted on the walnut wall paneling.
“Boston, you say?” Gould said, making no effort to hide his surprise.
“Two tickets to Boston. First class,” said Kensington, nodding tightly.
“Boston,” Gould mused.
A grudging smile crept across Kensington’s face. “That Sandoval is something else. She got Delta to bump two confirmed first-class fares back to coach.”
Gould rubbed a stubby-fingered hand across his fleshy chin. “She can be very persuasive, true enough.”
“So you want me to go to Boston, track ’em?”
“I suppose so,” Gould said uncertainly. “How quickly can you get there?”
“Can I use the Citation? I could land at Logan before their flight comes in.”
“Very well,” said Gould. “I’ll phone the airport.”
It was sunset by the time their flight landed at Logan Airport. Sandoval rented a Subaru Outback Sport wagon, a glittering metallic aqua blue, the only car available at Dollar Rent A Car.
“Couldn’t you at least get a different color?” Cochrane complained as he slid in behind the wheel. “This thing looks like it ought to be at a baby shower.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Sandoval replied. “I got a good rate for this. And it’s got four-wheel drive.”
“Just what we need for driving in Boston,” Cochrane muttered as he put the car in gear. But he smiled at her as he said it.
He didn’t go into Boston proper, of course. Cochrane remembered the route over the Tobin Bridge (which he still remembered from childhood as the Mystic River Bridge) and out the back way through Chelsea and Everett to Route 60 and finally Arlington, where he’d grown up. But it was all changed. In the gathering darkness he hardly recognized any of the old familiar landmarks, and the bridge was clogged with trucks and semis, all bleating their horns as they snarled through the unforgiving traffic.
Then it started to rain.
Cochrane was sweating by the time they reached the familiar intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Pleasant Street. Squinting through the sloshing windshield wipers, he saw the bank, just as he remembered it from the days when his family lived a few blocks away, down Pleasant Street. But the sign on its front said Cambridge Savings Bank. Cochrane remembered it as something else, Shawmut maybe. It was a long time ago, he told himself. You’ve been over at Amherst for years. A lot has changed in the old neighborhood. Little local banks get bought out by the big guys.
“There it is,” he said as they waited for the Mass Av traffic light to change. “That’s where Mike and I started our first savings accounts, when we were kids.”
“It’s closed,” said Sandoval.
“Well, yeah, this time of the evening.”
The light turned green and he nosed the car across the avenue, down Pleasant Street, past Lakeview and the house he’d grown up in. He felt a brief tug of curiosity, or maybe nostalgia for his childhood. It was never that wonderful, he told himself. It’s nothing to feel sappy over. He drove past the street without slowing down.
While he turned onto Route 2 and headed toward Cambridge, Sandoval phoned for a hotel room.
“Is the Radisson decent?” she asked, one hand covering the phone.
“Used to be,” said Cochrane. “It’s right on the Charles River. Nice view.”
It was too dark and rainy a night to enjoy the view. Cochrane closed the heavy drapes across their window and climbed into bed beside Sandoval. She turned out the light.
“Tell me something,” he said in the darkness.
“What?”
“Where do you get the money for all this—airlines, hotels, car rentals?”
She was silent for a moment. “You don’t really want to know.”
&
nbsp; “Yes, I do,” he said earnestly, turning toward her. “I have to know if we’re going to have any kind of a future together.”
Again she hesitated. At last, “I found out in high school that I could get boys to jump through hoops if I wanted them to. But I was more interested in getting someplace, learning, making something of myself. I didn’t want to end up a druggie, or a whore.”
“Where’d you grow up?”
“Right here in Boston. Not the best part of town, though. Brighton.”
“Brighton?”
She pulled in a sighing breath. “Crappy old Brighton. I got a scholarship. I was going to be an anthropologist. The new Margaret Mead.”
“Really?”
“Except I got married and quit school. Then the bastard dumped me for a bigger bustline.”
“You’ve got a terrific bustline.”
“He didn’t think so. Or maybe he was intimidated because I was brighter than he was. Anyway, there I was, broke and alone in goddamned Denver, Colorado.”
“Denver?”
“He was a petroleum geologist.”
“Oh.”
“And… well, one thing led to another and I wound up doing industrial espionage. I found out that I was good at it.”
Cochrane thought she had jumped across a lot of territory. Just as well, he told himself. I don’t need to know all the shitty details.
He turned over onto his back and tried to fall asleep. But all the shitty details filled his mind with images he wished he could erase.
Is It Time to Shoot for
the Sun?
Ask most Americans about their energy concerns, and you’re likely to get an earful about gasoline prices. Ask Nate Lewis, and you’ll hear about terawatts. Lewis, a chemist at the California Institute of Technology, is on a mission to get policy makers to face the need for sources of clean energy. He points out that humans today collectively consume the equivalent of a steady 13 terawatts (TW)—that’s 13 trillion watts—of power. Eighty-five percent of that comes from fossil fuels that belch carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Now, with CO2 levels at their highest point in 125,000 years, our planet is in the middle of a global experiment.