by Brad Parks
Sheena was gazing out the window the whole time. I left her alone with her thoughts as we approached Wilder Hall.
The Town Car pulled up in front, where earlier in the day there had been a crowd of military, government, and law enforcement vehicles.
They were all gone now, replaced by two Dartmouth College Safety and Security cars. As we climbed out of the Town Car and into the frigid early evening, we were greeted by a man with a flattop.
“Ms. Aiyagari? Mrs. Bronik?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Steve Dahan. I’m with safety and security. I was told you two would be coming my way.”
My eyes went to his belt, which had a pistol attached to it. In nine years hanging around Dartmouth College, I had never seen anyone carrying a firearm before.
“The only other person in the building right now is Beppe Valentino,” Dahan said. “The state police should be here shortly. They want the Crime Scene Unit to be able to dust for prints while Ms. Aiyagari does her work. In the meantime, they’ve asked that anyone who goes inside wear these.”
He held up a box of latex gloves. I took two, feeling the grit of the cornstarch as I slid them over my hands.
Then I walked inside with Sheena and started climbing the staircase. My plan was to hole up in Matt’s office, so I wouldn’t get in Sheena’s way.
I was about to plunge through the DO NOT ENTER sign when I stopped and looked toward Sheena, who was already continuing toward the third floor.
“Sheena?”
She stopped and turned.
“Thank you for doing this. I really . . . I can’t even explain how grateful I am.”
Sheena bowed her head, almost like she was embarrassed, then brought it back up.
“You don’t have to thank me,” she said. “I’m just doing what I’d hope someone would do if it were my family.”
I was desperate for more information. How long would this take? Entanglement was instant, wasn’t it? Or would Sheena need to have another fit first?
But I stopped myself from asking any questions.
I already knew, from Sheena’s testimony with the judge, there were no answers.
CHAPTER 45
Emmett tailed the Crime Scene Unit truck back to Hanover, then parked behind it, just outside Wilder Hall.
He briefly chatted with Steve Dahan, thanking the man for allowing the state police back inside—even though, technically, he didn’t have a choice. With the Department of Defense out of the way, it was now a regular crime scene again. Which meant the state police could do as it pleased with it.
Haver Markham and her team quickly got to work. Sheena Aiyagari was already bent over some boxy metallic contraption whose purpose Emmett could not begin to discern. He still wanted to ask her about why she put Matt Bronik on her witness list, but that could wait until she wasn’t quite so busy.
As the only person who didn’t have a real purpose in the lab, Emmett excused himself and strolled down the hall.
He was, for lack of a better description, on standby. He had to stay ready to take Sheena wherever she wanted to go, as soon as she wanted to go there. There was just no telling when that would be. This precluded him from starting a trip down any of the avenues that might meaningfully move the investigation forward.
But it also meant he had time to kill.
Luckily, that was a game at which your typical detective excelled. He strolled down the hallway, looking at the folderol professors had tacked to their doors—the comic strips, the pictures, the funny quotes, most of which were physics references that sailed well over Emmett’s head.
He was somewhere in the midst of reading a yellowed, brittle The Far Side cartoon when his cell phone rang.
The number came up as “Unavailable.”
“Webster here.”
“Detective, this is Gary Evans with army counterintelligence.”
“Hello, Agent Evans.”
“I’ve got some information about your victims in the forest.”
Emmett permitted himself a brief smile.
The veteran’s touch finally comes through.
“That was fast,” Emmett said.
“Two fingerprints and a few phone calls. It’s not that hard when you’re dealing with nobodies.”
“Come again?”
“The Chinese guys. They’re not spies. They’re not assassins. They’re nobodies. Tourists.”
“But they are Chinese?”
“Yes,” Evans said. “They came here on tourist visas. One of them was Langqing Wu. He was thirty-two. The other was Yiren Jiang. He was twenty-eight.”
Yiren Jiang. So he had used his real name on his fake license.
Evans continued: “We have an asset in China who checked them out. They’re two ordinary guys who went to different technical universities in Fujian Province. Then they got jobs. They’re with an outfit called Huangpu Enterprises Limited. They have no ties to the Chinese government that we know of. And we tend to know that kind of thing.”
Fujian Province. Huangpu Enterprises. These were things beyond the reach of Detective Emmett Webster of the New Hampshire State Police.
“If they’re nobodies . . . ,” Emmett started but then couldn’t decide how to end the sentence. “Why would two nobodies come to New Hampshire to kidnap someone?”
“No idea. To be honest, that’s part of why I’m calling you. If they were government agents of some sort, that would actually give us something to go on. Civilians are more problematic. I was hoping we could work together. Maybe with what you know and what we know, we can put this together.”
“In other words, we’re all on the same team here.”
“I seem to recall someone suggesting something to that effect earlier today,” Evans said good-naturedly.
“Excellent. If you’ve got a Chinese asset”—Emmett felt ridiculous using the word—“could that asset maybe tell me a little more about Huangpu Enterprises? I can’t exactly fly to China and start asking questions. Do they have any ties to American companies? Are they trying to develop some kind of technology that could benefit from this quantum-whatever thingamajig that Professor Bronik was doing? I’d love the lowdown on them.”
“You mean a dossier?”
“Whatever you want to call it.”
“Sure. I can have something put together. We’re thirteen hours behind them, so it’s already morning over there. Give me a little time and I’ll send it to you. I assume the email on that card you gave me works?”
“Sure,” Emmett said.
For once, he was fine with someone sending him an email.
CHAPTER 46
When I reached the second floor, I turned down the hallway toward Matt’s office, a route I had walked many times.
Back before I had started working for Dartmouth—when Morgan was small and the boredom of stay-at-home parenting got particularly stifling—Morgan and I used to visit Matt regularly.
We called it going to Daddy’s “office hours.” Matt would let Morgan sit on his lap while he graded exams and would even talk through why a certain answer was worth full credit while another answer was only good for partial. Morgan would wear his most serious expression, absorbing every word, even while he couldn’t possibly have understood any of it.
There was nothing all that exciting about it, and yet if I ever suggested we might go to office hours, Morgan would run through the house yelping, “Office hours! Office hours! Office hours!”
The boy just wanted to be with his father. He didn’t care about the where or what.
How I yearned for office hours now.
It was mostly dark on the floor. There was only one light on. I slowed as I walked by it. Beppe Valentino was talking on the phone, with both his elbows propped on the desk and his head resting on one of his hands.
Rather than interrupt him, I continued on to Matt’s office. The door was closed, but he never locked it. The lights, set on a motion sensor, switched on as soon as I entered.
; I eased the door shut behind me, then looked around.
Earlier in the day, I had been convinced I would find something there that would help me make sense of what was happening.
I took a tentative step inside, touching my gloved fingers together, feeling the starch chafing against them. Army counterintelligence had surely been in here, snooping around, but any materials relating to Matt’s research—the stuff the army would want—were upstairs, in the lab. Down here, it was mostly about teaching.
Nothing appeared to be out of place. The shelves that lined the right side of the room from floor to ceiling were their usual untidy chaos, books of all different sizes and colors, arranged arbitrarily.
A few years back, the anal librarian in me volunteered to organize Matt’s collection into something that resembled sense—alphabetical, by subject, whatever. He declined, then astonished me by demonstrating that he knew where every single volume in his collection was.
I walked over and pulled out a book at random. It was called How the Hippies Saved Physics, by an MIT professor named David Kaiser. I opened it, scanned it idly, then replaced it on the shelf.
The next book I selected claimed to be able to explain string theory. I was lost after half a page.
Giving up on the bookshelf, I swiveled my gaze to the other side of the room, where a large whiteboard was affixed to the wall. It was covered in equations that were, both literally and figuratively, Greek to me.
A Nerf basketball hoop hung from the top of the board.
Behind the desk, under the window, were shelves with more books and a few knickknacks, mostly gifts—a lot of them pertaining to basketball, a few of them of the gag variety—given to him by students and fellow faculty members.
The desk was covered in sloppy paper piles of varying elevations, again with no apparent system.
I sat, feeling exhaustion wash over me. One of the piles was a stack of journal articles, printed out and stapled. I picked up the top one. It was beyond impenetrable.
My eyes then fell on the corner of the desk—the only part of it not overwhelmed by paper—where our once-simple, once-happy life was documented in a series of photos.
Morgan’s school portrait, the one from two years back, when the photographer had somehow tricked him into smiling for real. A snapshot of Morgan and me on the Point Pleasant Boardwalk, taken during a trip to the Jersey Shore. A selfie of the whole family standing atop a bluff in Gile State Forest, with the fall colors spread out beneath us.
But there was one photo that really sent the memories flooding back.
It was of me. Just me. From our first fevered spring together.
We had gone canoeing on Lake Carnegie, one of those Ivy League absurdities—a man-made lake funded by Andrew Carnegie, who felt the Princeton crew team needed a better place to practice.
After paddling along for a while, we pulled the canoe up to a quiet spot along the lake, then walked inland a few hundred feet until we reached an abandoned canal. There, in a grassy spot under a tree, near a field of wildflowers, we had thrown down a blanket.
I kissed him first, which I usually did in those days, because he was still so shy. But his hesitancy never lasted long.
We ended up making love, right there under that tree, heedless that there was a popular biking path just on the other side of the canal.
Matt had taken the photo sometime after we had reassembled our clothes and started acting more respectably again. My face still had a flush to it. My hair was provocatively askew. I looked, above all, fabulously content.
I picked up the picture, studying my long-ago self. I was twenty-eight, unaware that the small bones in my ears were already starting to betray me. Matt was, what, twenty-three? I could barely remember us having been so young.
Ordinarily I might have regretted the passing of the years, just a little—perhaps felt a wistfulness in knowing I would never again be that beautiful and that Matt and I would never feel quite the same urgency toward each other. Then I would remind myself the passing of years had brought us many gifts. Morgan. Some form of wisdom. A love that was far more profound.
I allowed myself the fantasy that when springtime came, and we were somewhere near New York, we could leave Morgan with my parents for a day, and try to find that same tree again, and . . .
Wait.
There was something about the picture, about the photo paper itself—a slight warping near the edges of it. In a perfectly rectangular shape.
Like there was another piece of paper beneath it.
Had Matt hidden something behind this photo? Some kind of message, perhaps? This picture frame would be a perfect place for such a thing—out in the open, yet perfectly concealed.
I flipped the frame over. The clasps that held the back panel in place swung easily, having apparently been opened and closed many times before. Matt—or someone—had accessed this often.
Because the hidden message needed to be changed frequently?
I had thought my hunch about finding anything in Matt’s office was baseless, but was there really something to it? Did I know all along I had been meant to find this? Were my and Matt’s brains truly entangled as well?
My hands trembled as I removed the panel, then a piece of cardboard. And then, yes, wedged against the back side of the photo, there was a piece of white paper, folded in thirds.
I unfolded it and was soon looking at a printout of an email.
From me.
2004 13 April 01:24 a.m.
From: BEzzell@West_Windsor.NJ.us
To: [email protected]
Subject: you
Matty,
I’m watching you sleep right now. Does that freak you out? Well, you’re just going to have to deal with it, because I think you’re so, so beautiful and I like watching you sleep.
You said earlier tonight that I had saved you from being a workaholic physicist. But you’re the one who saved me in so many other ways. I don’t want to think about where I’d be right now if I hadn’t met you all those months ago. You’ve made me feel happy, and beautiful, and loved like I’ve never felt before.
Yes, I daresay you have made me the happiest woman alive. I am very much in love with you. And if that freaks you out, you’re just going to have to deal with that too. :)
All My Love,
B
I had no memory of sending the email, though I certainly remembered the sentiments behind it.
So this was Matt’s big secret: He liked to revisit a romantic interlude with his wife. And he did it with reasonable frequency, if the way those clasps swung was any indication.
I slowly refolded the paper and, with pain squeezing my overwhelmed heart, returned it to the frame.
CHAPTER 47
For all the vastness of his fortune, five million dollars was still nettlesome to Sean Plottner.
Not because of the actual amount. That was basically walking-around money.
The issue was the form it came in. The majority of Plottner’s wealth was numbers in a computer somewhere. Want it as a wire transfer? No problem. A check? Sure.
Want it as actual cash? Now there are issues. Five million dollars, even meted out in hundred-dollar bills, is fifty thousand sheets of green paper. And, little known fact, all US currency, regardless of denomination, weighs one gram per bill.
Therefore, five million dollars, in hundreds, weighs fifty thousand grams, also known as fifty kilograms, also known as a hundred and ten pounds.
Also known as a lot to lift for a guy who let his director of security do most of his weight-bearing exercise for him.
The other issue was that your local branch of Ma & Pa National did not maintain anywhere near that much hard currency on hand. Depending on the size of the local population, a bank’s vaults held anywhere from fifty to two hundred grand.
Five million would have to come from the nearest Federal Reserve bank. Meaning Boston. And it would have to be delivered to Hanover. The bank would likely insist on an armored truc
k.
Once it arrived, Plottner wouldn’t need an armored truck.
He had Lee.
Time to start the process. It was now after five. The banks were, technically, closed—except banks were never truly closed to a man of Plottner’s net worth. He asked Theresa to get someone from the bank on the phone.
“Sir, why don’t I make the first call,” Theresa suggested. “That way if we need to increase the pressure later, we can have you intercede.”
“That’s a fine idea,” Plottner said.
There was little doubt in his mind the money would be needed. He had a deal with this new person who had Matt Bronik, this Michael Dillman character. And now Plottner and Matt Bronik’s wife had a deal too.
Plottner had few qualms about any of it.
Some might call it excessively opportunistic. But, really, what was life if not a series of opportunities?
You either seized them or you didn’t.
CHAPTER 48
Having determined that Matt’s office was not going to be a source of enlightenment, I decided to go up to the lab and check on Sheena’s progress.
On the way, I passed Beppe’s office, now dark, and Emmett Webster, who nodded at me and said . . . something.
I just smiled at him.
When I opened the door to Matt’s lab, three state police crime scene investigators looked up at me.
But not Sheena.
She didn’t appear to be there.
“Where’s Sheena?” I asked.
A woman with strawberry-blonde hair turned toward me and said, “She left a little while ago.”
I felt my face bunch into a frown.
“She left? Where is she?”
“I’m sorry, who are you?” the woman asked.
“Brigid Bronik. Matt’s wife.”
“Oh, sorry, Mrs. Bronik. I’m Haver Markham. I’m with the Crime Scene Unit.”