"So, if you didn’t smell a random and unrelated infection—"
“Which is unlikely, because I also smelled it on Marat.”
“No, it’s plausible they had the same infection. They lived in the same home.” She shot down his caveat. “If they were unrelated, yes, but that’s not this case. Still, I think that’s not it. Likely, something on our list of chemicals is in a compound that was given to her. Unless, she’s smelled like butter before? When she was alive?”
Donovan shook his head no, and Eleri continued. “Then it’s likely something we haven’t tested for. Some medication or street drug that made it less likely for her to fight back."
"Excellent," Donovan said. "I'm not a chemist. I don't know which of those chemicals would cause that kind of response, or which drug would create that kind of chemical when it broke down. I mean, I looked them up, and none of these chemicals is actually a drug that does that or is a breakdown product of a drug that does that."
"I know," Eleri said, "and the shitty thing is, the easiest way to find out would be go into town and find a chemist and ask them. But we can't do that."
"Maybe we can," Donovan mused, his braining churning as he looked off into the middle distance. "Maybe we can get Bennett to get the PD to ask. We could give them the information, tell them what to ask the chemists, but don't tell them what the situation is."
"They'll figure it out," Eleri said. "If we give them enough information—what you smelled, what the possible chemicals are, and that it might have been used to subdue someone, and the PD is asking the questions—they might very well figure out that it pertains to Johanna Schmitt's murder."
The two of them debated for a while whether the question might sound better coming from Bennett, but decided that it ultimately would not, and maybe it didn't matter if the chemists understood that Johanna Schmitt had been drugged. At least, Eleri and Donovan thought it might not.
"What's the worst case scenario?" she said. "Somebody spreads the information around? The killer learns? Maybe people start watching their drinks."
"I don't know."
"There’s some negative to this getting spread around, too. The killer would know that we are onto at least part of what he did.”
"Well, the part that the PD knows," Donovan interjected.
"Yes, but the less they know that we know, the more we can do our job."
"I’m not sure. My hands feel so tied right now," he said. "I really want to interview those kids, too, but we can't do it."
"You got some decent information out of them the other day,” Eleri reminded him.
"Yes, but for the amount of time and effort it took to get that little information, an interrogation would be far, far more useful."
"Interview," she said, laughing. "We don't interrogate kids, remember?"
"I don't know," he said. "I'm about to interrogate these kids. We’ve got two dead bodies."
They’d eventually come to the decision to have the police question a local chemist or two, and they passed that information along to Marshall Bennett. But that task wasn’t their own work for the day. They'd ended up getting up, and getting dressed, and deciding that the thing to do was to get into the Schmitt-Rychenkov house themselves. Johanna had showed them around when they visited, but it had been a brief tour, as they’d spent the bulk of their time interviewing her.
“We haven't done a good, full search of the house,” Eleri pointed out. “We've been letting the killer do it, and we haven't wanted to bother anything, so that the killer wouldn't notice, as Johanna did, that someone else had been in."
"But you think it's time to risk it?"
"I do."
So though they’d already called Bennett with one assignment that morning, they enlisted him for a second. Dressed in disguise so hopefully no one would see them going into the house, or at least not recognize them, they headed out and had the mayor let them in the front door.
It was a Saturday morning, and people would be out and about. In fact, they passed a family with a young girl on a pink tricycle heading down the sidewalk on their way in, and several more as they turned the corners to get to the Rychenkov-Schmitt home.
The stone front looked daunting this morning, Eleri thought. On the other hand, she only looked interesting, with her hair tucked up under a dark brown wig that fully changed the shape of her face. But it wouldn't change her voice, or her size, and if somebody found them, it wouldn't stop them from recognizing her.
Bennett, along with his assistant Kate, met them at the door and followed them into the house. This time, she and Donovan wore shirts that said they worked for Curie Gas. Hopefully, that was something no one would question. With two deceased homeowners and no one watching the place, the gas had to be checked out.
Once inside, Bennett and Kate sat on the couch and worked on their tablets while waiting. Eleri and Donovan began searching.
Eleri took the office upstairs, while Donovan headed for the garage. She searched the drawers and, when that yielded nothing, she searched for panels at the backs of the drawers. She pulled the files out completely, lifting the heavy masses in pieces and knocking on the bottoms. She was looking for false hideaways, fake fronts, and unused space.
The desk yielded nothing aside from a very cute, flip-down front panel, which was part of the design. However, the only thing Marat Rychenkov kept there was a massive pen collection. Eleri even unscrewed a couple of them and rattled the others, looking for information that might have been hidden inside.
The question was, how much effort would Marat Rychenkov have gone to hide his work? He hadn’t seemed to even know he was in danger. However, the answer had to be that he’d hidden it pretty well, because the killer had come back several times, maybe even once with a friend, and still not found it. Eleri renewed her search.
Marat's office turned out to be a bust, and though she had tried to put everything back exactly as it was before, it was clear she had rattled the interior.
She headed next into Johanna Schmitt's office, and here, she got lucky. Three drawers in, she found a rack with hanging file folders, but the drawer wasn't very full. However, as she pulled it out, she noticed it weighed ever-so-slightly more than she'd expected. At first, she thought she was wrong, but when she tapped on the underside of the drawer, a false bottom slightly shifted. After three tries, Eleri managed to pull it up.
Three lab notebooks waited inside for her.
Johanna's? she thought, lifting them out. Johanna had no idea her husband had anything worth killing for. . . Unless she’d been lying.
Eleri flipped over the lab notebooks, checking them for marks or titles. They were unlabeled on the front, just like Johanna's. However, once she looked inside, these pages were clearly not in Johanna Schmitt's handwriting. Deciding not to search further until she had more information, she picked up the notebooks and headed downstairs to Donovan.
"I found three lab notebooks," she told him, "in Johanna's office."
"Johanna hid them?"
"Maybe. But they are in Marat's handwriting."
"What do they say?"
"That's just it. They're coded," she said. Her irritation, mixed with admiration, showed in the depth of her voice. She handed the notebooks to him and watched as he flipped through.
"Hmm," he said. "The code doesn't look unbreakable, but I can't read it."
"Same here. Did you get anything in the garage?"
"No," he said. "I have the feeling that I'm looking directly at it and I can't see it."
"So, let's do two sets of eyes. Come up to Johanna's office with me and help me check, and then we'll both come back down here."
While Marshall Bennett and Kate looked up each time Eleri passed by, she just shook her head and they went back to reading. Having them sitting there was a good reminder that this wasn’t a full FBI home search. They only had as much time as the gas company would use, and that probably wasn’t much longer.
Together, she and Donovan searched the rest
of Johanna’s office. They checked the back of the closet, the high places and the low, and found nothing more than the notebooks Eleri had already discovered. When they declared the rest of it a bust, they headed back down into the garage and began a similar search.
"He's already used a false bottom drawer once," Eleri said, so they put extra effort into checking the drawers.
“I already looked at the circuit panel, but it’s legit,” Donovan told her. She nodded and checked behind the punchboard Marat had used to hang his tools.
“Shit! El. I got something.” Donovan held a piece of wood in his hand. There were only four drawers in the built-in workstation in the garage, but the bottom one had also had a false panel.
Given the pile of papers and old motherboards on the floor, Eleri guessed it had been buried deep. “What was in it?”
Donovan held his hand out displaying a small drive.
26
Donovan found himself once again sitting at the main table in the Frank Lloyd Write house, thinking maybe this wasn't the best idea. He had set up offices for both himself and Eleri upstairs. The offices were upstairs on purpose. However, in the issue of working together, they'd wound up almost exclusively working at what should have served as a dinner table.
He’d put the offices out of the way on purpose, to keep their work away from anyone stopping by. With the open floor plan down here, anyone who made it to the front door would see they worked at the table. And if a visitor saw what that work was, their cover would be blown.
Still, the table down here gave them the space they needed to spread out. Here, they could work face to face, tossing their problems back and forth. They would run into each other working here and catch an idea, so it seemed worthwhile, although both knew that if someone came over to the house, he and Eleri were running a huge risk.
Interestingly enough, a knock came at the door right then. Eleri was upstairs in the shower, and so Donovan popped up even as he rotated his laptop to keep the screen away, hitting several buttons to blank out the screen. He also had to make sure that Rychenkov's notebooks were well hidden, so he pushed them deep into the bag he kept beside his seat for just this purpose. God forbid somebody recognized those.
When he finally got the door open, Maggie Wells stood on his small front patio. As Donovan said hello, Maggie’s visit made him proud, and he chalked it up to his and Eleri's ability to go out and make friends in this community as quickly as they had.
LeDonRic stood on the step just behind her, but even so, managed to tower over his girlfriend. Still, it was Maggie who spoke. "Hey, I'm sorry, this is late notice, but we wanted to invite you to dinner tonight."
"Oh?" Donovan asked, letting the question hang, as it sounded as if Maggie had more to say.
She did. "Apparently, the kids were talking about Marat and Johanna when they were over here helping with the cookies yesterday. The kids said they wanted to thank you, that you had gotten them thinking about what their friends had contributed that would live on.”
“We mostly talked about cookies,” Donovan mumbled.
“You helped them more than you know. So, anyway, we all decided we wanted to do a dinner tonight and just tell our good stories to remember Marat and Johanna. I know that you never met Marat and that you only knew Johanna a little bit, but I got the impression she and Eleri really hit it off. I know—I'm the one who pushed them together.”
Donovan only nodded.
“So anyway,” Maggie continued, “it's up to you, but we thought you guys might like to come. We just wanted to share our memories. We think it's going to be a while before we have Johanna's funeral because of the … situation."
Ignoring the phrasing about the “situation,” Donovan quickly thanked her for the invite and readily accepted for both him and Eleri. He'd been looking forward to sitting down and reviewing whatever was on Rychenkov's USB. His hope was that there was a key for the code or a clue to help them break it.
He hadn't found one while searching through the notebooks, though it made sense that he wouldn’t. Anyone as smart as Marat would not take the time to code his notes and then leave the key right there with the notebooks. But now, instead of going through the USB and looking for files, he was heading to the grocery store looking for a side dish.
He knocked on the bathroom door upstairs and informed Eleri about the new plans for the evening. She sounded excited, though he couldn’t quite tell if she wanted a dinner with friends or a mining expedition for information. Likely, it would be both. So the two of them headed out to put together their part of the meal.
Donovan figured they had just enough time to buy their food and show up to the dinner. He'd volunteered them for a salad and was proud that he’d remembered to ask what other foods the guests might be bringing and how many people would be attending.
Eleri was walking him through the necessary vegetables for two different salads. He wasn't really following, but he understood where she was aiming. Then she made them buy two big bowls to serve it in. “We don’t have these.”
“Yes, we do.” He could have sworn he’d seen something.
They made it home and, though he’d argued against it, it turned out that Eleri was right. They had no serving-size salad bowls. Only cookware. Undercover life was going to be the death of him.
“I knew it!” Eleri said with the kind of limited glee one got from winning something almost useless. They had two pans, three pots, and only the most rudimentary of kitchen supplies. "I wonder if our lack of kitchenware and our lack of buying any new kitchenware makes it look like we're not planning on staying?"
For a moment, Donovan almost wished he could stay here. Curie was a big, bubbling pot of crazy, but he liked it. He shook his head. "I don't think that's the case. I showed up with a moving van and I don’t think people saw that it was mostly empty. Also everyone seems to understand we don't cook very well, so I don’t think our lack of kitchen supplies is a red flag."
They put the fixings into the bowls, gathered their bottles of dressing into a spare bag, and headed next door. Eleri could not have been more excited, and truth be told, neither could he. All four of the kids would be there, as would both the Mazur parents, LeDonRic and Maggie, as well as Marshawn James, LeDonRic's brother, and the girls' father.
LeDonRic had a table much larger than Donovan would have expected for a single man. Then again, it was a big house, and when Donovan looked at Maggie, he wondered if maybe his neighbor didn't plan on being single for much longer.
Marshawn and his two daughters arrived last as Maggie was setting everything out with Joule and Cage’s help. Once they were all seated, Maggie decided a little reverence was necessary. Though it wasn't religious, they all joined hands and Maggie gave them a short time to offer a prayer in whichever way they thought best, or a moment of silence for the two stunning losses the group had suffered.
When the moment ended and Maggie lifted her head, everyone dug in, chattering about the food. The melancholy left briefly, but it was Maggie who brought the meal back onto point. "Okay, let's do this. We're going to eat, and we're going to try and keep it happy, but let's share our best stories."
Cage started, but first he looked to his mom. "Do you remember the time Johanna's crock pot cracked?"
"Oh, my God." Kaya put her face in her hands, and she laughed though she had tears in her eyes. She motioned to Cage to tell the story.
"So the crock pot was very old and the ceramic bowl was built into the housing with the heating mechanism. So, when it cracked, all the food went into the heating unit. The chili she'd been making fried on the coils. I would think you couldn't set chili on fire, but somehow she managed to do it."
"It was on fire?" Eleri said. "Did she burn down the house?"
"No, it was a small fire. It was relatively contained, and she actually laughed at it—”
“She loved that chili though. She had to have been mad to lose a batch.”
Cage nodded, “But she had Fritos sitting out f
or when she served it. So she took one and held it into the fire and we lit Fritos off of the flames and she explained to me about the coils and how they worked." He offered a sad smile.
"Please tell me you eventually put out the fire?" Donovan entered the story for the first time.
"Of course! She had these little fire extinguishers, four of them. Even though only two people lived in the house, she said she knew things like this tended to happen, especially around her. So she had a little fire extinguisher for every person. We each grabbed one and we put it out. It was a horrible mess, though."
Joule chimed in next. "Marat left her with the cookies one time, remember? And she put some special kind of sugar on them, and she caught that on fire, too."
"Oh, that's right. She wanted to use the baking glitter on it, and she didn't know that cake glitter was for decorating and not baking. Because it’s flammable," Kaya filled in the rest of it.
Eleri smiled, and Donovan did, too, although he wondered about the Mazurs leaving their kids for science lessons with a neighbor who seemed to repeatedly create open flames in her home. "Did she have a history of setting things on fire?" Donovan asked, hoping for information and trying again to be part of the conversation.
"Only in her kitchen," Kaya replied with a smile. "In her lab, things sparked and arced, but those conflagrations were always on purpose."
"She had a lab?" Eleri asked, and it was Emersyn who began to fill in that information. "She had a job for a few years when she got here. That’s where her lab was, right?” She looked to the adults for confirmation before continuing. “And I know the garage looks like it's Mr. Rychenkov’s, but if you've been in there …"
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