Interference

by Brad Parks

  I moved on to the cabinets and drawers, moving quickly but leaving nothing uninspected. They were so neatly organized it didn’t take long to see there was nothing out of the ordinary.

  The same could not be said for the living room, which had an empty spot where it looked like a couch may have been. And a large rust-brown stain on the carpet behind it that looked like dried blood.

  Like someone had been killed there. Perhaps one of the Chinese men? Or Scott Sugden?

  I pointed it out to Aimee.

  “That’s not Matt’s, you know,” she said.

  “I know,” I said, then moved quickly away from it.

  A sitting room came next, but again, there wasn’t much to see. Because this was not anyone’s full-time residence, all the rooms had an impersonal sparseness to them.

  Then I arrived at the other guest bedroom on the lower floor.

  Immediately, things felt different.

  There were more pillows on the bed. More knickknacks on the dresser. There was a sitting area by the window, which had another terrific view; but there was also a desk shoved up against a wall, like someone wanted to be able to do work here.

  This was no longer the product of an interior decorator on a nearly unlimited budget, looking to show off. This was a more functional space. Someone used this room.

  And I could already guess who. There was a Rothko print on the wall.

  I slowed down. Enough so that Aimee, still trailing, nearly ran into me.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “I think this is Sheena’s room when she stays here.”

  “Okay,” Aimee said, and left it at that.

  I inspected the dresser, which was perhaps quarter-filled with Sheena-size clothing. Most of it was summer appropriate.

  Then I moved on to the nightstand and opened the drawer. It was again filled with assorted stuff—scrunchies, moisturizer, tissues, a small teddy bear.

  And a framed photo.

  It had been placed facedown.

  I was less concerned about disturbing evidence in here—this was just Sheena’s stuff, after all—so I turned it over.

  It was a selfie of Sheena with Scott Sugden, who looked like Westley from The Princess Bride even when he wasn’t in costume. It had been taken at sunset on the shore of the lake. She was wearing a bikini. He was topless. She had her arms snaked around his torso and her cheek pressed against his bare chest.

  I immediately recognized the flush to Sheena’s face, the way her hair was just a little askew, the look of extravagant contentment.

  It was the same look I wore just after Matt and I made love that day at Lake Carnegie.

  These were not merely friends. These were two young people, very much in love.

  Sheena really was having an affair. Just like Dafashy said. And apparently it had been going on for a while—since at least last summer.

  I showed the picture to Aimee, whose raised eyebrows told me she immediately understood the implications.

  Even the location of the photo—tucked away in a drawer, rather than out in the open—was suggestive of a hidden relationship. She must have shared stories about Scott with Leonie Descheun, who had apparently been a close confidante for Sheena; but she had kept it from everyone else, including the neighbor she only sort of knew.

  I continued into the bathroom that was attached, recognizing the same products that had been in Sheena’s bathroom at Sachem Village.

  This had to be some life for Sheena. Especially in the summertime. Sneaking away to a multimillion-dollar vacation home on Lake Sunapee with her boyfriend. I was somewhere in the middle of that fantasy when I opened the bathroom closet and saw the towels.

  They weren’t quite as perfectly square and flat as they had been in Sheena’s other bathroom closet.

  There was something wedged behind them.

  Something hidden.

  I moved the top towel and uncovered a small box.

  It was white with a blue band across the top. I reached for it, extracting it from the closet.

  My close vision was rapidly failing with age, so I couldn’t make out all the small type. But I could easily read the larger lines.

  ROMPUN.

  SEDATIVE AND ANALGESIC.

  FOR USE IN HORSE AND CERVIDAE ONLY.

  “Check this out,” I said, holding up the box for Aimee to see. “What is Rompun?”

  Aimee pulled out her phone. As she jabbed at it, she shuffled around in front of me so I could hear her, then started reading.

  “‘Rompun,’” she said, “‘is a sedative reserved for veterinary use, primarily horses and cattle. Absorbs and metabolizes rapidly. It’s banned for human consumption because it causes a dangerous combination of hypotension’—that’s low blood pressure—‘and bradycardia,’ which I’m pretty sure is a slowed heart rate.”

  Low blood pressure. Slowed heart rate.

  That was the one-two punch that nearly killed Matt both times he went to the hospital.

  I could feel myself losing my bearings again. I had to lean against the sink for support.

  “Rompun is the brand name,” she continued. “The generic name is xylazine. It’s described as ‘an opioid, many times more powerful than heroin. In recent years, humans have started abusing it as a recreational drug. It—’”

  Aimee abruptly stopped reading and took in a sharp breath.

  “‘It induces a coma-like state that, at low, nonfatal doses, causes the user to walk around hunched forward, in a state of semiconsciousness. For this reason, it is known as . . .’”

  Aimee was having a hard time continuing.

  “‘As the zombie drug,’” she eventually said. “‘Because it causes the user to resemble a zombie in appearance. The effects usually last’—oh God, Brigid—‘approximately six hours. The drug can be difficult to detect by conventional toxin screens because it voids rapidly from the body. The primary aftereffect is a thunderous headache.’”

  “A thunderous headache,” I repeated.

  “The zombie drug,” she said.

  We just stared at each other, neither of us needing to say more.

  The effects of xylazine were a perfect match for Matt’s symptoms.

  His inexplicable fits, suddenly explained.

  And the drug was in Sheena’s bathroom. Sheena’s private, personal bathroom.

  “Sheena,” I said, still a little stunned. “Did she really do this to Matt?”

  “She must have,” Aimee said.

  “But how did she get the drug into him?” I asked. “Did she pour it into his coffee or something? Wouldn’t Matt have noticed the taste?”

  Aimee looked down at her phone. “It says here it can either be injected or administered as an aerosol.”

  “An aerosol? Oh my God.”

  “What?”

  And then I told her about what Emmett and I had found in Sheena’s other bathroom.

  The electronic atomizer.

  A device that expels a liquid in aerosolized form.

  If you used dry ice, the atomizer would create a fog, perfect for a haunted house. But with a room-temperature liquid? It would be invisible. And the hum of the laser would easily cover whatever noise the atomizer made.

  Matt wouldn’t have heard or seen a thing. Just been stricken as the cloud floated down on him.

  As for me, it was like a cloud had been lifted. Beppe said the visible spectrum of light was like one inch on the journey from New York to Los Angeles.

  I was seeing everything now.

  All twenty-five hundred miles.

  Because I even knew where Sheena had hidden when she delivered this poison. Those old retrofitted air-handling ducts that ran through Matt’s lab and the rest of the third floor of Wilder.

  They were big enough for a large child to crawl through.

  Or a small adult.

  Sheena could have hoisted herself up into the ducts from a closet somewhere—anyplace the air-handling system had an intake port. She would have worn a mas
k, so she didn’t sicken herself. Then she let the atomizer and the xylazine do the rest.

  She had started weeks ago, dousing him twice to establish the pattern that something was wrong with Matt, even if medical science was powerless to explain it.

  Such that when the third time came around, and three EMTs showed up to carry Matt away, the people watching would think this was normal.

  Just Matt Bronik, having another fit.

  Matt wouldn’t have been able to fight those EMTs off. He was incapacitated, not even aware of what was happening.

  Aimee had said this was an inside-Dartmouth job. She had been absolutely right.

  It wasn’t just inside Dartmouth. It was inside Matt’s own lab.

  I thought back to the judge’s chambers, and Sheena’s hysteria when she thought the Department of Defense was going to kill the virus. That would have been a serious setback, having to recreate Matt’s work. Perhaps she wouldn’t have been able to. In which case all her efforts would have been for naught.

  Dafashy, unlikely prophet, had been right. She was going to publish Matt’s work as her own, then ride it to academic stardom.

  “It was Sheena,” I said. “It all started with Sheena. And now Matt is—”

  Aimee reached out, took my hands.

  “He’s going to be okay,” she said. “I don’t know how, but he’s going to be okay. You have to keep believing that. You have to.”

  She squeezed hard.

  “Okay,” I said, shaking off her hands. “We should tell Emmett about this.”

  It was exactly eleven o’clock.

  Fifty-eight minutes to go.

  CHAPTER 63

  Emmett had never heard of Rompun or xylazine. But he had seen the atomizer. Even before Brigid talked him through it, he already grasped the key details.

  He went to his car to retrieve some gloves and an evidence bag, then carefully placed the Rompun box inside. It would surely have Sheena’s fingerprints all over it. He took the item back to his car, and was just returning to the house when he met the Bomb Squad captain, who was rushing down the steps, wild eyed.

  “There you are,” he said breathlessly. Then he took a big gulp of air and said: “We found them. They’re up here. Come on.”

  The Bomb Squad captain led Emmett upstairs, through a bedroom, to a door of what appeared to be a closet. Then the captain treated Emmett to an overexuberant explanation of just how perfectly Michael Dillman had engineered everything.

  The wiring that had been connected to the explosive appeared to be powered by the house’s electricity and by a backup battery—the work of a man who knew what he was doing, and had done it well.

  The door was monitored by both a pressure sensor and a motion detector, a difficult combination. On their own, either could have been defeated.

  But both together?

  That, the Bomb Squad captain said, was impossible. And while he might have been able to go through the ceiling to lift the hostages out—there appeared to be a good-size attic above them—they couldn’t, because Dillman might be watching remotely.

  There were redundancies on top of redundancies. The perp had thought of everything.

  And now he had disappeared to who knows where.

  But, Emmett realized, there was at least one person who knew who he was.

  And, at the moment, that person was tied up and trapped behind a heavily wired door. Emmett walked up to it and stared at it for a long moment, letting out a long breath before he started talking.

  “Sheena? It’s Emmett Webster.”

  “Oh my God, do you have a way of getting me out of here?” Sheena chirped, her voice high and panicky. “Because these Bomb Squad people are worthless.”

  “We’ll get you out,” he said. “I want to talk about what happens after that. We found the Rompun in your bathroom downstairs. And we found the atomizer in your bathroom at Sachem Village. We know you were the one behind the kidnapping.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sheena said petulantly.

  “Look, I’m just trying to help you here. Once we get you out, you’re going to prison. There’s no question about that. The only issue now is for how long. And that’s going to depend on how much you cooperate. That cooperation starts right now. Do you understand me?”

  There was no reply.

  Emmett continued: “See, here’s the problem. We keep finding all these bodies. Langqing Wu. Yiren Jiang. Scott Sugden. Now, kidnapping is one thing. And it’s bad, don’t get me wrong. But if you cooperate, and the prosecutor decides you didn’t mean to hurt Matt, and we’re able to determine you weren’t involved with those murders, you’d probably be looking at a class B felony. Three and a half to seven years in prison. Given that you don’t have a record—and, again, if you cooperate with us—you’d do the three and a half.

  “Now, personally, I think you got double-crossed by the people working for you. So I don’t think you had anything to do with these bodies. But if you stonewall us, it’ll look like you were involved. Even if you didn’t pull the trigger, you would be convicted as a coconspirator. Murder for hire is a capital offense in New Hampshire. Kidnapping and murder together is also a capital offense. We don’t have the death penalty anymore, but a capital offense conviction is punished by a mandatory life sentence with no parole. So, really, it’s up to you. Do you want to be in prison for three and a half years? Or do you want to be there for the rest of your life? Like I said, cooperation starts now. And it had better start fast, or I’m out of here.”

  At first, there was silence from the other side of the door.

  Then came the low murmuring of a man’s voice. Matt Bronik. Talking to Sheena in the gentle tones of a professor, correcting an errant student.

  Emmett couldn’t hear exactly what was being said. He held his breath, put his ear close to the door. It was still too soft.

  Then:

  “Okay,” Sheena said. “I’ll cooperate.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I’ll cooperate.”

  “I can’t have you holding back on me. I need you to be a hundred percent straight with me about everything. If you lie to me now about even the littlest thing, I can’t help you later. You understand that?”

  “I get it, I get it. I’ll help you.”

  “Very good,” Emmett said. “Now tell me about the men you’ve been working with. We know Langqing Wu and Yiren Jiang worked for a subsidiary of your father’s company in China. Who’s the third man, the one who used the alias Michael Dillman?”

  “His real name is Johnny Chang. He worked for my father, too, but in America. He’s total scum. He’s the one who has been killing everyone.”

  Emmett glanced behind himself. Brigid and Aimee had wandered into the room, though they were being kept at a distance by the Bomb Squad. Emmett turned back to the door.

  “So you hired Johnny Chang, Langqing Wu, and Yiren Jiang to come here and kidnap Matt?” Emmett asked.

  There was a short pause. “Not exactly. I didn’t hire Johnny. He had been stealing from my father’s company and he got caught. Our deal was that I was going to destroy some evidence my father had so he couldn’t press charges. In return for that, Johnny was going to help me. He was the one who brought Wu and Jiang over. Johnny’s deal with them was that they would get the money he had stolen from my father—it was something like a hundred thousand dollars. But they weren’t supposed to hurt Matt. I swear. They were just going to do the kidnapping. Then Wu and Jiang were going to go back to China with my father’s money, and Johnny was going to hold Matt while I . . .”

  Her voice trailed away. Emmett thought he could hear her crying.

  “While you what?” he prompted.

  “My own research was hot garbage, okay? It was this big dead end. My postdoc was ending in a few months. I didn’t have any job offers. I wasn’t even getting interviews. My father had given me this deadline: Once my postdoc was up, I was going to have to return to India and marry
this . . . this asshole that I had been promised to when I was, like, six. This stupid, arrogant doctor. And there was no getting out of it. I had tried to explain to my father that I was in love with someone else, but it didn’t matter. All my father could think about was the shame the family would suffer if I broke off the marriage. He told me if I didn’t come back home to India, he was going to cut me off. I literally wouldn’t have a dime to my name. All my bank accounts, all my credit cards, it’s all my father’s money. And Scott . . . Scott was just a student. He didn’t have anything. I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t ask him to support me, it . . . it was just a mess.

  “But then I had this amazing idea about how to get Matt’s project across the finish line. And I was going to just tell him, but you know how that goes. The professor publishes the big paper. The postdoc gets thanked in the acknowledgments. Then I thought, wait, if I was the one to publish Matt’s research, I would have all the job offers I needed. I could tell my father to go to hell. And Scott and I . . .”

  Again, she couldn’t finish. Emmett did it for her: “You could be together. You could be with the person you loved most. You’d do anything for that.”

  Emmett certainly understood that. All too well.

  “Yes,” Sheena said in a small voice.

  “So those three guys kidnapped Matt. Then what?”

  “Those idiot feds came in and closed down the lab,” Sheena said. “Without access to the lab and the virus, I wasn’t going to be able to do anything. So I . . . I came up with the whole idea of my brain being entangled with Matt’s. I thought once I dangled out the hope that I could find Matt, the Department of Defense would let me back into the lab.”

  “That was all made up?”

  “Yes. There’s no quantum compass. That cottage I led you to, I had found that earlier in the day. I made it look like someone had slept there. Then I told Johnny to go out there and plant that potato chip bag with Matt’s fingerprints on it. I thought that would convince the government that I needed to get back into the lab.”

  Emmett shook his head. Of course the quantum compass was a fraud. He should have known. But he wasn’t the only one who had been fooled. People much smarter than him had fallen for it too. That was the power of the quantum physics. It felt like magic, enough that everyone had started to believe in the impossible.