Except for the technology. The computer, on a stand next to the desk, must have been purchased recently. The flat-screen monitor looked new. There was also a scanner, a fax machine, a DSL hub, a port for a PDA. Dr. Tobel’s aesthetic tastes might have stalled out decades before, but her facility with technology had not.
Why was I up here again? To find the numbers for her children. The two boys.
Please call me when you get this message. It’s very important.
Ivory Coast.
I looked through the drawers in the ancient desk, hoping to find an address book. Paper, envelopes, staples, office supplies. Personal financial records. I flipped through them, enough to find out that Dr. Tobel’s salary from the university was in the low six figures. A few odd consulting jobs added fifty thousand or so to last year’s income. Interesting, sure, but important?
Ivory Coast.
Forget the kids, I thought. I moved to the book-lined shelves and started to scan for atlases, books on Africa, anything. I found a few, pulled them out, and began leafing through. Nothing. After fifteen minutes, I’d been through all the books I could find and was about to head downstairs to look for more when my eyes rested on the mantel, on the masks I’d sent from Africa.
After I’d been admitted to the University of Maryland, I sent Dr. Tobel two wooden masks carved from ebony to thank her for her help. They were expensive pieces, even in American money, the equivalent of one month’s Peace Corps pay. And they were beautiful. One: a lion’s head, flames spraying out of its mouth across its cheeks. The other: a ferocious-looking goat.
Now, the combo of lion and goat wasn’t totally random; it was kind of a joke. In Greek mythology, the chimera is a two-headed—guess which two heads—she-monster with a serpent’s tail. In biology, a chimera is a mix of different biological components into a single organism. Technically, for example, someone who gets a transplant organ is a chimera. Dr. Tobel had done some work with chimeric cells. I’d actually helped with the transfections when I was in her lab, putting genes from one organism into another. Not to get too metaphorical here, but a chimera is also how I thought of Harriet Tobel. I mean, she didn’t terrorize Greek cities or anything like that, but she was ferocious in her own way. Despite her broken body, despite being a woman in a field ruled for so long by men, despite mentoring a problem like me, she’d prevailed.
Pretty clever joke, hunh?
The pieces, I’d forgotten, were heavy. And they really were gorgeous, I thought: heavy, dark, terrible. I took the goat mask in my hand and held it like I was about to put it on. And that’s when I saw the words, lightly scratched in pencil, gray against the black wood: Marine Bank of CA #12.
“What the hell?” I whispered.
I began turning the mask over in my hands, looking for something else, some new bit of information. Deep inside the nose of the mask, I saw a glint. A key, attached with a small piece of tape.
Ivory Coast.
The room exploded in barking and the dogs tore from the room. I heard the sound of a car door slamming.
CHAPTER 53
From the landing, I couldn’t see the door, but I did hear footsteps on the outside stairs. My hand still gripped the ebony mask. It was unwieldy, but felt heavy and effective enough. I hooked my finger in its eye and gave it a few short swings.
There was a sharp rap at the door, and the dogs, who had been on the steps, bolted down to the foyer, yapping madly and running in small circles on the carpet. I bent down behind the balustrade to get a look at the door. There was another knock.
I steeled myself, gripped the mask tighter, and walked down the steps.
The lights on the porch were out, so that the figure outside stood in darkness. I could see he had on a sweatshirt or something, the hood pulled over his head. He was holding something in his hand. He shifted on to one leg, cocking a hip.
I’d know that hip-cock anywhere, so I stepped to the door and unlocked it.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“You shouldn’t be alone,” Brooke said. A surreal moment passed where I didn’t know whether to hug her or step aside to let her pass. So I stood there, an uncomfortable grin pasted to my face. Meanwhile, the dogs jumped against Brooke’s shins.
She pushed a travel mug into my hand. “Tea,” she said, then bent to pet the dachshunds. “What are their names?” she asked.
“I never found out.”
“Well, it looks like a safety-deposit box key,” Brooke said.
“Sure does.”
“And Marine Bank of California is a bank.”
“Sure is.”
“Number twelve is probably a branch number.”
“Yup.”
Brooke and I sat at the dining room table with the tea, the ebony mask, and the key between us.
“It’s weird, Nate. It’s almost as if she knew something might happen to her, so she called you to get this . . .” She trailed off.
“I know,” I said.
“So, what do we do now?”
That was the question, wasn’t it? Contact the cops? No. Call the FBI or Tim Lancaster? No way.
“Well,” I said, looking at my watch, “in five hours, we find Marine Bank of California, branch number twelve—”
“Nate, I don’t know if we should—”
“She left this for me. Not for the police. Not for her kids.”
We sat in silence for a while. Finally, Brooke said, “You’re right.”
I took a sip of the tea.
“But what do we do now?”
“You should sleep,” I said.
“While you do what, Nathaniel?”
I took another sip of the tea, then looked square at Brooke. “We’re not going to have access to this house after tomorrow, after her sons get here.”
“And . . . ?”
“I think we need to find out everything we can about what Dr. Tobel was doing.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying we should search through Dr. Tobel’s files. Find what—”
“Oh, good God, Nathaniel. No way. This is like breaking and entering.”
I wanted to tell her that the breaking and entering had already been taken care of earlier by yours truly. Instead, I said, “Look, Dr. Tobel was very important to me, okay? She’s dead, it’s weird, and I want to find out what the hell went on.”
“You have the key.”
“It’s not enough. Go home if you want. Call the police on me if you want.” I stood up from the table. “But I’m going upstairs.”
After I walked out of the room, I heard a quiet “Jesus Christ, Nathaniel”; then I heard Brooke on the stairs behind me, the two dogs scrabbling behind her.
As luck would have it, searching through the files in Harriet Tobel’s study took very little time.
“There’s nothing here,” I said.
I stood in front of a large wooden credenza that ran under the windows on one side of the room. Keys had been easy enough to find—in a coffee mug on the desk—and I’d opened the top drawer to find it only half-full. I rifled.
“There’s nothing here,” I said again.
Well, it wasn’t actually nothing, but it wasn’t interesting to me that evening. Though I didn’t know what, exactly, I was looking for, I knew it wasn’t copies of Dr. Tobel’s old journal articles, as impressive as they were—many of them A-list: Science, Nature, Biochemistry, etc.
I closed the top drawer, opened the bottom. More research, the recent projects. This was more exciting, but as I made my way through the hanging green folders, I realized all the recent projects weren’t here, only Dr. Tobel’s HIV work. Odd. She had an entire lab devoted to the work she was doing with Chimeragen, and yet there was nothing on that work here. On second thought, knowing how paranoid biotech companies can be, maybe it wasn’t surprising there was no information at her home. Not secure enough, perhaps. Still . . .
“There’s nothing here, either.” Brooke was fooling with the computer.
<
br /> “What do you mean?”
“I mean nothing nothing. I can’t even boot up. The hard drive’s been reformatted.”
“You’re kidding.” True enough, the screen was black but for a pulsing white bar. “Let’s try again.”
Brooke held down the power key for a hard boot and the machine began to whir. After thirty seconds, we got nothing but the damned white bar. There was a drawer under the computer stand, which I opened. I found a Windows boot disk and put it into the computer. Finally something happened, and, after a few minutes, I got the familiar Windows screen. But there were no files. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Brooke was right: the computer had been reformatted.
I flipped through the disks and saw there was only program software—the Microsoft Office suite, some data-analysis programs, her PDA installation software—but no data files. We searched around for the PDA, for any CDs, any floppy disks, but found nothing.
For kicks, I shut down the computer and booted it up again. Same old Windows desktop with nothing interesting on it.
Brooke yawned.
“You’re dragging,” I said.
“It’s almost five,” she said, stretching. “This reminds me of residency.”
I went over to the bookshelf, started looking across the spines of the books as if there might be a folder sandwiched in there.
“Nathaniel, you’re right. This is really off somehow.”
“I know it is.”
“So let’s think about it—”
I started pulling books off the shelves, letting them fall to the floor. The dogs, who were sleeping in a corner of the room, jolted awake.
“That’s not helping,” Brooke said.
“I’m pissed off and I’m tired.”
“Like I said, that’s not helping.” Brooke yawned again. “Okay, did Harriet Tobel have a company office or just the university?”
“I don’t know.”
“So, we don’t know that. Back to what we do know: You tell her about Casey and about the situation in Baltimore; you say she seems very disturbed, doesn’t want to talk with you. But later that day, she calls you, sounds desperate to talk. You can’t get in touch with her, you come over here, and she’s dead.”
“Yes. She’s dead.”
“So, maybe she wanted to get you the key and wanted you to find her, you know, upstairs.”
“For Christ’s sake, Brooke, Harriet Tobel did not kill herself.”
“I’m just brainstorming here, okay?” Brooke said stubbornly. “Maybe she was involved in this whole Casey thing somehow. How, we don’t know. Maybe she wanted to get rid of everything having to do with it. That’s why we find all these holes in the files, why the computer’s been tampered with. Except, well, there is the key. But maybe the stress gets to her or she—”
“Don’t you listen to me? She. Didn’t. Fucking. Kill. Herself.”
Brooke looked at me, shocked. I softened my tone a little. “Look, I know Harriet Tobel. And she did not commit suicide. Case closed.” I began to put the books back on the shelves. “Another scenario. She wants to tell me something—say, something about this Casey thing—and someone comes into the house and kills her. That person cleans out the files and erases the computer.”
Brooke sat up. “I think we’re very tired. She was an old lady, Nathaniel. You said she had a medicine cabinet full of heart medication. Most likely, she had an MI. Maybe she’d reformatted her computer, maybe she just got the computer and was transferring the files—”
“Then where are the disks? Where’s the backup? Where are the paper files?”
“I don’t know.” Brooke stretched her arms out on the desk and put her head down on the blotter. “It’s five o’clock in the morning and I don’t know.”
No rest for the weary.
We didn’t find a damned PDA, we didn’t find a goddamned address book, or any list of friends, colleagues, kids. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I went into the living room to look for something, and the next thing I knew, I was emerging painfully from a deep sleep. It—the pain of waking—reminded me of residency, of sleeping for an hour in the call room, of having a pager jar me awake. It wasn’t a pager this time, thank God; it was Brooke Michaels, sitting next to me, gently shaking my shoulder.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey yourself,” I said. There was a blanket on me. “I fell asleep.”
Brooke nodded. I tried to blink the sleep away, tried to sit up even though it was the last thing I wanted. More than anything, I wanted to pull her to me, bring that body next to mine, feel its warmth. Forget everything that’s happened.
“How long?” I asked.
“Half hour.”
I sagged down on the sofa. “I feel like shit.”
Brooke smiled at me. “Oh, Nathaniel. Are you okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “No. I’m not okay.”
She reached over and lightly stroked my hair.
“She was always there, you know. Always, always there. I don’t talk to her in a year and I know I can call or write and she’d . . .” I closed my eyes, felt the fingers moving gently across my scalp. “Get this, Brooke. When we were in Atlanta, I e-mailed her. I said I met this fantastic woman and she’s engaged and what should I do?”
“Wow. Who’d you meet?”
“Funny. She wrote back, ‘Well, Nathaniel, you should probably pursue it. God forbid you look back on it in five years and think, If only . . . The last thing you want in life is regret.’”
Brooke was quiet. I opened my eyes and saw she wasn’t looking at me.
“So, stupidly, I took her advice.”
“Nate . . .”
“What?”
She just shook her head.
“It’s amazing how fast you can fall for someone, Brooke. You know, when you let things go, when you try to will things to happen.” I don’t think I would have been saying these things if I hadn’t been a little drunk on melancholy and lack of sleep. Or maybe I would have. Who knows?
She said bleakly, “I was confused—”
“I don’t care.”
“I told you I was confused.”
“I told you I was falling for you.”
“So why do you think I ended things?”
How was it, I wondered, that three days ago I was alone in Baltimore and relatively happy about it, and now I was in Northern California, enveloped by three of the biggest female forces of my life? Perhaps it was best that I strap on my armor, shield myself, go back to that lonelier, safer time.
“You know what else is amazing?” I said. “How quickly you can kill something off when you want to. How completely you can do it if you want.”
Brooke glanced down at me, surprise or hurt or whatever on her face. Then she stood and left the room, giving me the chance to contemplate one of the biggest lies I ever told.
Five minutes later, Brooke handed me a telephone. “Larry and Don,” she said.
“What?”
“The children.” She handed me a piece of paper with some scrawl on it.
“Where did you—?”
“Their numbers were programmed into the kitchen telephone. The first two to come up on the screen when I scrolled through were Larry and Don.”
“How do you know these are the kids?”
“Come on. The first two numbers on the phone? My mother does the same thing. Jeff’s mother . . .” She trailed off.
“Jeff.”
“The ex-betrothed, Nate. Look, I don’t want to talk about him, or last summer, or anything like that, okay? Your friend just died; we just rummaged through all her stuff. . . . Anyway, trust me. With the numbers.” She pointed to the phone in my lap. “It’s time to call.”
“Thanks. Seriously.” I looked at a clock across the room; almost six. “Brooke, I didn’t mean to get too heavy. I’m tired and sad, that’s all. And I got to say I was a little pissed about how things ended in—”
“It’s okay. Really,” she said, cutting me off
. “Why don’t we just focus on what we need to do? I’m going to get a cup of tea.”
The phone seemed very heavy in my hand. I held it for a second, then scrolled to the first name in the memory. Larry. I dialed.
CHAPTER 54
After breaking the unpleasant news to Larry Tobel—corporate lawyer, denizen of Chicago, asshole—I taped cardboard over the windowpane that I’d smashed. Then I walked through the house once more to make sure I hadn’t missed anything or left something out of place. Brooke was already gone; we’d agreed to head back to her apartment to catch some winks and clean up.
On my way out, I noticed, hanging on a coatrack to the right of the front door, a clutch of ID badges. On top was a thick plastic card for Chimeragen. Dr. Tobel’s computer-generated picture decorated the lower right corner. Below it was a hospital badge, also with her picture. Under these hung older ID cards, long past their expirations.
I pushed the Chimeragen and hospital IDs into my pocket. Then I left the house.
Larry Tobel. He was shocked, of course. But he was also pissed at me—wondering who I was, wondering why I’d found his mother, wondering what I was going to do with the damn dogs. I told him I was a former student and a friend of his mother’s, told him I’d had a meeting with her, which is why I’d had the opportunity to find her dead. As for the dogs? Well, they were en route à chez Brooke, going insane in the backseat of my car. I smelled urine, which I was reasonably sure wasn’t mine.
Thankfully, Larry said he would call and inform his brother, Don, about their mother’s death. I sure as hell didn’t want to talk to another distraught, gruff Tobel kid.
By the time I’d arrived at Brooke’s place, she’d already surfed the Web and found the address for Branch #12 of Marine Bank of California. It wasn’t far—in a town called Redwood City—and it opened at ten, which gave us a few hours to sleep.
“Where’s the cat?” I asked as I set the dogs’ cage down in the living room.
She pointed to the top of the refrigerator. “It’s where he goes when he’s scared. You can let them out.”
I did. The smaller of the two dachshunds poked his nose tentatively out of the cage, then took his first steps. The other followed. The cat stared down from the refrigerator, and if looks could kill, there would have been two smoldering piles of ash in the middle of the room.
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