Mind in Chains

by Bruce M Perrin

  The receptionist held up a finger of one hand while she dialed with the other. “Doc, Liz at the Building 1 desk. FBI Special Agent Rebecca Marte is here to see you.” Then, she turned and said something into the phone that Rebecca couldn’t hear. When she turned back, she laughed, followed with, “You got it.”

  “What was that about?” Rebecca asked, trying to sound only casually interested.

  The woman—Liz apparently—grinned up at her. “Doc is just a nickname. And the laugh? He told me to be nice because you’re probably armed.”

  Rebecca had hoped Liz would say something about the whispered comment, not Price’s quip, but that was probably too much to ask. “Is that a problem? That I’m armed.”

  “Nope,” replied Liz. “He won’t take you any place where it would be an issue. Here’s your temporary badge. You’ll need to display it while on Ruger-Phillips property, and turn it into any receptionist or guard station when you leave. Doc will escort you wherever you go.”

  Rebecca nodded. “OK. Do I need to sign anything?”

  “Doc verified your employment with the local office, and with the badge you showed me, you’re good to go.”

  “So, you know him?”

  She gave a half-shrug, half-nod with her hand extended, then said, “Just from people he meets up here. He’s only about a minute away. Should be coming through those doors any moment now.”

  “Great. Say, what building is the medical research in?”

  “Medical research?” The woman rubbed the back of her neck. “You mean like testing new drugs or medical devices?

  “Yeah, that kind of thing,” replied Rebecca.

  The receptionist held out an empty hand while shaking her head. “Sorry, but I don’t know of anything like that around here.”

  “Something I heard, but I probably have it wrong.” She hadn’t expected the woman to know about work that was excluded from the company’s website, if there was any, but it never hurt to ask.

  Rebecca retreated to a chair and sat. The fabric of the seat hadn’t even warmed to her touch when a man about her age entered the lobby, obviously not Price. He was too young and much more the Midwest farm boy than the frustrated professor. A dark-haired, brown-eyed, somewhat lanky farm boy, she realized as she looked closer. And since Timmy Harris in third grade, males of that specific ilk had been her weakness. Too bad that wasn’t Price. It could have made this talk easy on her eyes if nothing else.

  Rebecca pulled her phone from a pocket. Who knew how long he might make her wait and solitaire would make the time go faster. But when she looked up, the man was approaching. She stood.

  “Special Agent Marte?” he asked.

  “Yes?”

  She was thinking he would introduce himself as Price’s assistant when he extended a hand and said, “I’m Sam Price. Nice to meet you.”

  Same Time, Same Place

  Thank god Liz warned me.

  Without her whispered, “she’s a looker” over the phone, I probably would have spent ten minutes combing the nearly empty lobby seeking an FBI agent. Or maybe I’d just be stuttering my hellos to her because Liz wasn’t wrong. The blue-eyed blonde with the spiky hair would stand out in any setting, her business suit only slowing my appreciation of her striking appearance, not stopping it.

  Liz must not have given Agent Marte a similar heads up on me, as she merely glanced my direction, then turned away. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I thought I heard a soft harrumph as she glanced at the clock over Liz’s head and started fishing for something in her pocket.

  I walked across the lobby, getting to within a few feet of her before she looked up. Her eyes narrowed. Had we been in a bar, I’m certain she would have said, “What are you looking at?” But we weren’t, and instead, she slowly stood. I extended my hand. “Special Agent Rebecca Marte?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Sam Price. Nice to meet you.”

  “Likewise,” she replied. Her look of confusion disappeared so quickly I wondered if I had imagined it. “Are we meeting here?” she asked, dipping her head toward the chair she had just left.

  “We can, or I’ve reserved a small meeting room that would give us some privacy.”

  “The room sounds fine.”

  I turned toward the doors, and she fell in beside me. “Have any trouble finding the place?” But as soon as the well-worn question had passed my lips, I wondered if she’d take offense. She was, after all, a few minutes late. I opened the door to the office area, letting her pass.

  “Nope. The building’s right where you said it would be.”

  I couldn’t read any ire in her tone but decided a quick change in topic was in order. Marte, however, was already moving on. “So, this building’s open to the public?”

  “Not exactly,” I replied, as we resumed our walk down the hall. “But the restrictions here are minor. With your position in the FBI, I could have gotten you a badge to the building where I work. But that requires that your security send your credentials to my security. I’ve seen that take a day or two, and I figured you wouldn’t want to wait. After all, time’s the enemy of memory.”

  “I guess you’d know.”

  I looked sideways at her, not certain what she meant. The questioning glance was enough to get an answer. “It’s just that you have so many papers. Doesn’t ‘publish or perish’ only apply to universities?”

  “Yeah, here it’s more like, publish and get a pat on the back, maybe a little bump in pay, but at least they don’t stand in your way. I wrote a couple of papers before I got here—one from my master’s thesis and one from my dissertation. That’s fairly typical at most schools. And I’ve done two on my own since I started work. Truthfully, I would have been happy with that—two papers in two years—but I also had a few months of desk time working with one of our more senior scientists. He was nice enough to add my name to four other papers. It’s a great start in my line of work. I’d be lucky to get another eight, even if I worked here 30 more years.”

  I stopped by a door, saying, “Well, this is it. There’s a small break room just ahead. Would you like a cup of coffee? Maybe a bottle of water?”

  “I’m fine,” she replied, so I opened the door and she entered. The room was small and somewhat Spartan: just a table, four chairs, and a whiteboard. At least it had a window, although the view was the parking lot I’d crossed to get to this building.

  Marte sat, and I took the chair across the table from her. She opened her notebook, studied it a moment. “You’ve been through the sequence of events at Ms. Veles’s apartment on the evening of May 8 a couple of times now, and we’ll cover it once more in a few minutes. But first, there are some other things I’d like to discuss. Things that fall outside the time period of the attack. First, did you mention your plans to dine with Dr. Greenwood to anyone else?”

  “I did. My boss, Ken Waters. Unlike me, he’s not that much into research, but it came up when we were talking.”

  “No one else? Not a colleague? Not a friend outside of work?”

  “No.”

  Marte’s head tilted to one side as if she was pondering my response. Or maybe she was waiting for me to fill in the silence. But I’d never been that uncomfortable with gaps in a conversation and found them preferable to rambling on about something that hadn’t ever been the issue. After a moment, she clarified.

  “You sound very sure.”

  “I thought you might ask because the Crusaders either followed Laura—Dr. Greenwood—from Biomedical Engineering Associates, or they knew she’d be at Nicole’s apartment. So, I gave the question some thought. As for being sure, we occasionally use medically-related equipment at work—machines to monitor reactions like heart rate or brain waves when we’re testing some new training technique. But no one I know gets into the kind of work Dr. Greenwood does, so it wouldn’t have come up naturally. So, yeah, I’m pretty sure Ken was the only one, although, as we both know, memory isn’t perfect.”

  “But it does sound
like you’ve thought about it,” said Marte. She spent a few moments jotting something in her notebook before going on. “Immediately after receiving a text, Dr. Greenwood excused herself to make a phone call. Did one of you walk Dr. Greenwood to the room where she called?”

  My first thought was, that’s not outside the timeframe of the incident. But if she wanted to change the ground rules, they were hers.

  “No, Nicole just told her where the office was.”

  “And that’s through a door into the kitchen, across it into a hall, and then the second door on the right?”

  “Correct,” I said, somewhat surprised. “Is that level of detail in the police reports?”

  “It is,” replied Marte. “It just seems that those directions are a bit involved for someone who’s never been in Ms. Veles’s apartment.”

  Her observation sounded odd to me, but perhaps it was leading up to something I hadn’t considered. “Getting around Nicole’s apartment is not as complex as that description makes it sound. It’s small and Dr. Greenwood had already been in the kitchen, helping us set the table. So, she’d been most of the way there. And the first door on the right is a coat closet, so there’s not much that could have gone wrong.”

  Marte looked away a moment, her brow wrinkled. She turned back to me. “Just before Dr. Greenwood’s arrival at Ms. Veles’s apartment, did you observe anyone or anything suspicious in the neighborhood?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “No loud sounds, no one in the alley, nothing like that?”

  “With respect, Agent Marte, it’s the city. There are lots of noises at all hours of the day. Nicole’s place isn’t far from one of the big hospitals, so we hear sirens all the time. But something out of the ordinary that night? No, I don’t remember anything like that.”

  “OK, how about in the days leading up to Dr. Greenwood’s visit?”

  Days?

  My perplexity must have shown. “Something wrong?” Marte asked.

  “I’d never thought of it that way,” I said slowly. “I’d been thinking in terms of Tuesday, after Nicole extended the invitation, and Wednesday as the relevant time period—maybe 32 to 35 hours. But in the days leading up to the dinner? I’ll have to give that some thought.”

  Marte paused a moment, studying me. “But you have thought about Tuesday and Wednesday?”

  “Oh, yeah, sorry,” I said, realizing my mind was already drifting back to the earlier time periods. “On Tuesday night it was raining. I remember because I had to shelter our takeout Chinese dinner under a raincoat. Hunched over that way, I didn’t notice anything during the walk to Nicole’s apartment. And nothing during dinner or as I left. And on Wednesday, I was at work.”

  She nodded and again took a note. “Is there anyone you know who might want to harm you or Ms. Veles? Or maybe just put the fear of God in you?”

  “Enough to climb a fire escape and fire a rifle into Nicole’s apartment? No, no one has that kind of grudge against me. Or Nicole, as far as I know.”

  “Perhaps this person took a potshot from the ground?”

  Hadn’t the police eliminated the possibility of a random shot after simply looking at the scene? I had, when I finally got into Nicole’s office to clean. “Maybe,” I said slowly. “But that would require that the bullet ricochet off something before entering the apartment.”

  “What makes you believe that?”

  What’s going on?

  An FBI agent doesn’t ask a private citizen to analyze bullet trajectory. Well, not to get an answer to that question anyway. So, what does she get if I describe what I think happened? Nothing. I’m almost positive it’s the same thing the police concluded, unless ….

  Damn!

  Unless I start elaborating, making up stories that somehow implicate the Crusaders. And I might if I was involved and wanted to draw attention from myself. Maybe Constance opened the window in the building across the alley to take the shot, I’d say. And now that I thought about it, I remember hearing a squeaking sound. Soon, the rope from my lies would be enough to hang me.

  I could always stop the interview and demand a lawyer. Even if Marte didn’t consider me “in custody” and so, was required to read me my rights, I could ask for one anyway. That would increase her suspicion, of course, and probably drag this process out even more.

  Let’s play this out, see where it goes.

  “Well, if you go into Nicole’s office, stand in front of the wall where the bullet hit, and look out through the window, all you would see is the building across the alley and the fire escape. I cleaned up some of the glass before the superintendent boarded up the window, so I’ve done exactly that. For a shot from the ground to hit the wall where it did, the bullet would have had to change direction by almost 90 degrees. Maybe that’s not impossible, but it’s not likely, and it would have left a scar on whatever it hit before the window. That much of a deflection would have also robbed the slug of most of its power, and yet, I heard one of the crime scene investigators say it was buried pretty deep. Of course, your experts would be able to answer this question a lot better than me.”

  “We’re still testing,” Marte said simply, her expression unreadable. She looked down at her notebook.

  Undoubtedly the FBI was still testing, but I doubted that a 90-degree deflection was among their hypotheses. Marte looked up, paused a moment. “So, let’s assume it wasn’t a ricochet. Constance has been getting deadlier, killing that professor at St. Louis University in her last attack. I’m sure you’ve heard about that?”

  I nodded.

  “So, why do you think she missed so badly at Ms. Veles’s apartment? That alley must be, what, 15, 20 feet across?”

  “Maybe she’s unfamiliar with rifles.”

  Marte hadn’t been slouching, but with my words she sat up even straighter, her eyes now locked on mine. “So, you don’t think we could glean anything about her marksmanship from the previous attacks?”

  Ah, a chance to either lie, ask for a lawyer, or incriminate myself by admitting I knew a lot about the Crusaders’ attacks—even the early cases before Constance drew blood. But the reason I knew so much made sense to me, and it had nothing to do with being their ally. I just had to hope it would make sense to Marte, too.

  “Rifle skills? From three bombings? Not really. I guess we learned that Sister Constance is pretty good at blending in with a crowd. How else did she get that bomb under the doctor’s car in the middle of the day? And the bombs at the clinic and at SLU say a lot about her physical conditioning, although the fence around the clinic didn’t appear that tall. But can she fire a rifle? Who knows?”

  “You know a lot about the Crusaders’ handiwork,” Marte said. “You follow them closely?”

  My answer to this question would either shift me away from her “persons of interest” spotlight or increase its illumination to the point where I’d end up sunburnt. “If you’d asked me two days ago, I could have given you a few vague details on the bombing at SLU and nothing about the earlier cases. But there’s something about having one of your dinner guests used for target practice that grabs your attention and won’t let it go. I’ve read a lot about Sister Constance and the Crusaders in the last day. And there’s no lack of material.”

  Marte frowned, her ramrod posture slackening a bit. She looked off toward the corner of the room.

  “Actually, I can’t imagine not reading up after what Nicole and I went through,” I added, hoping I wasn’t going too far.

  “Sure. Something like that would get my attention, too,” she said after a moment. I released a mental sigh of relief. “So, you originally from St. Louis?” she asked.

  “Nope. Born and raised on a farm near Kansas City. Came here after school.” I wasn’t sure what was significant in the statement, but Marte drew back, her eyebrows raising. “How about you?” I asked.

  “Born and raised in St. Peters,” she replied, mentioning a city just across the Missouri River from St. Louis. “There were some kids in my s
chool from surrounding farms, but I was a city girl—or maybe, a small-town-near-a-city girl if you want to be technical.” She released a long breath. “We didn’t get a chance to review the incident itself, and I can’t close out this interview until we do. Unfortunately, I have to leave for another meeting—probably should have left five minutes ago. And I’m tied up all afternoon. Can we schedule something for tomorrow, preferably in the morning?”

  A Friday? Even in the best of times, a Friday would be difficult, and tomorrow was jammed with status meetings and customer calls. “Any chance we could meet tonight?”

  Marte paused, appearing on the verge of agreeing, so I added, “I can come to your office if that helps?”

  She looked at me a moment, then asked, “Are you sure that’s not too much of an inconvenience?”

  “No problem,” I replied. “I’d like to get this finished, let you get on with your job—for obvious reasons.”

  We worked out the details of the meeting as I walked her back to the entrance of the building. As we neared the door, she said, “So, this paper about some aptitude affecting what you learn in an immersive environment?”

  “Yeah, what do you want to know about it?”

  She turned to me, a half smile on her lips. “Is it as dry as it sounds?”

  I couldn’t hold my laugh. “Unfortunately, yes. You might want to wait for the movie.”

  She found that more amusing than I anticipated, barely suppressing a laugh of her own. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she finally said. She turned and left.

  4:33 PM – A Downtown St. Louis Hotel

  Special Agent Marte sat in the break room for the hotel’s kitchen. The din that had been increasing since 2:00 was now nearly deafening. Who knew cooking could be so noisy? She laced her fingers behind her head, leaned back in her chair, and stretched her legs in front of her. She wouldn’t keep this pose if any of the help came by. It tended to emphasize her chest, and she’d already received her fill of ogles and catcalls for the day.

  After talking to Price, she’d broken nearly every speed limit and run every stop sign to get back to the field office. She wanted as much time as possible to put the finishing touches on her notes for the handoff meeting with Agent Hawkins. Not that she gave a damn what he thought, but she wanted to do her job to the best of her abilities. And in her estimation, that meeting had gone well; she hadn’t called Hawkins an ass once.