Critical Mass

by Sara Paretsky

  Mr. Contreras arrived with coffee and milk, for me, a glass of grappa for himself. Through some mysterious dog mathematics, Mitch and Peppy distributed themselves so that both were equidistant from all three of us. I gave the old man a quick précis of what Alison had told me so far.

  “Someone from the FBI came to my computer lab looking for Martin,” Alison said. “Dad hadn’t warned me that he’d called them in, and when an agent of the U.S. government showed up, he got everyone at the lab totally terrified. Mexico kind of looks the other way if the FBI or DEA want to interrogate someone. But when I called my dad, to tell him he’d destroyed the trust the program people had in me, he started yelling at me about national security. He said Martin stole our software, Metargon’s software, I mean, and that the FBI is going to find him and I’d better stop being a bleeding heart if I’m ever going to be able to run the company.”

  She picked at her cuticles, looking very young and vulnerable. “I couldn’t talk him out of it. I couldn’t make him see that Martin isn’t like that.”

  “What is Martin like?” I asked. “I’ve never met him, and I can’t seem to talk to anyone who understands him as a person, except his high school physics instructor.”

  “He’s a cactus,” Alison said. “Hard and prickly on the outside, sweet as honey on the inside.”

  “Were you dating?” I asked. “Is that why you invited him to the barbecue at your folks’ place, even though he wasn’t in the summer program?”

  She made an impatient gesture. “We slept together twice, but Martin backed away because I wouldn’t tell my parents. Martin said it was because I was ashamed of him, but it wasn’t that, it’s because my dad would have fired him on the spot. Martin belongs at Metargon in a way I never will. I’m a good computer engineer, but Martin, he’s special, he sees things in three-D that the rest of us only see linearly.”

  “Kind of a hard secret to keep,” I said. “You sleeping together.”

  “I see that now,” she said bitterly. “Someone who wanted to suck up to Dad gave him a hint. I hope it wasn’t Jari, he’s a good guy, but everyone at Metargon is so competitive, they’re always pushing each other out of the way even if they’re all on a project together! It could have been one of the other kids in the summer program. This one girl from MIT, she had a thing for Martin.

  “Anyway, someone told Dad, and he said he didn’t want some overambitious school dropout taking advantage of me. Which was also unfair. Martin wasn’t a dropout, he just didn’t go to college. He’s taking courses part-time at Illinois-Circle, but really, he’s so brainy—do you know he got a perfect score on his math SAT and the top score on the physics C exam?”

  “People keep telling me that,” I said. “His high school physics teacher tried to get him to apply to Caltech or MIT when she saw his scores, but his family were set against college for him.”

  “Well, there you have it. He has a chip on his shoulder about my family being so rich, and me being at Harvard, but once you knocked off the chip, he was such a sweetheart. Do you know what he did for my birthday? He remembered I told him when I was little I used to beg my dog to talk to me: I was lonely, my dog was my best friend. For my birthday he found this toy dog that looked just like Lulu, and he programmed a chip that he put into her where she sings happy birthday, and says, ‘Alison, you’re my best friend, no one comes closer to my heart than you.’ He even got her tail to wag. He’s pretty amazing.”

  Fatigue and unshed tears turned her honey-colored eyes red. Mr. Contreras nodded approvingly. He thinks Romeo and Juliet is a great story except that Shakespeare got it wrong at the end; if he, Mr. Contreras, had been there, he would have stayed in the tomb with Juliet so that Romeo knew she was just sleeping. That monk was a fool, in his opinion. “You don’t leave a girl in a drugged sleep and expect some high-strung boy like Romeo won’t overreact,” is his verdict on the Bard.

  “You tell Vic here what you need her to do and she’ll take care of it for you,” he told Alison. “You did the right thing, flying all this way.”

  I grinned wryly at the tribute. “Sure thing. I can handle the FBI with one hand behind my back, which is good, because Homeland Security is already tying it there.”

  “Oh. I wasn’t really paying attention when you said they could be bugging your apartment. Why are they—is it because of my dad? Is it because of Martin?”

  “It’s because of some papers I found in the house downstate where Martin’s mother had been living. I only found a few documents—I think there were others which Martin took. The ones I found were stolen from me before I could get them to a lab for analysis. Homeland Security doesn’t believe me. They think Martin and his mother had a file of nuclear secrets that I’m hiding. Do you know anything about this?”

  “Be reasonable, cookie,” Mr. Contreras said. “How could she, when she don’t even know what you found.”

  “It’s possible Martin confided in Ms. Breen,” I said. “He was a lonely guy; he had to talk to someone.”

  Alison shook her head. “He never claimed he knew anything about weapons. And he didn’t talk to me about his mom, not like that, anyway.”

  “But when he went to that party at your folks’ house, Martin saw something that rattled him. What?”

  Alison’s face scrunched up in misery. “I don’t know. He was always pretty quiet, and even quieter when the rest of the group was around. All I can tell you is it’s something he saw when I took the group up to my granddad’s workshop.”

  “What, your grandfather designed his computers in your house?”

  “Granddad always had a workshop at home, even when he got to be famous. All the kids wanted to see it. They probably thought if they saw where Granddad came up with his brilliant ideas, some of his brains and his luck would rub off on them if they looked at the workshop. It’s on the third floor of our Lake Forest house. Even though he designed the core for Metargon-I in his first workshop, behind the garage in his Hyde Park house, all his scale models and papers and stuff are in Lake Forest.”

  I nodded. “So everyone went up there. Who suggested it first?”

  “I honestly don’t think it was Martin,” she said defensively. “Not because I’m shielding him, like Dad says, but because, oh, the chip on his shoulder. He wasn’t going to admit he cared about something a rich and powerful man did. Anyway, everyone was playing with the scale-models, and admiring the letters—Granddad had framed letters from all these incredible people, Nobel laureates, President Eisenhower, you knew he’d done something special, just seeing who wrote him.”

  “And one of those letters or papers or something upset Martin. Think! What was he looking at?” I demanded.

  “I told you, I don’t know!” she cried. “Tad, that’s one of the guys in the summer group, he didn’t like Martin because Martin rewrote some of his code without consulting him. Anyway, he was standing next to me. Actually, he had an arm around me.”

  Tears spilled over the edges of her eyes. “Martin came over to me. He said, ‘Something doesn’t add up. How much do you know about your grandfather’s work?’ I asked him what he meant, but Tad made this snide comment about how the human calculator was always right, and that if Martin said the Metargon-I didn’t add up it must have been an illusion that it worked so well all those years.”

  She fished in her backpack for a tissue, but Mr. Contreras was ready with a napkin, dabbing her cheeks for her.

  Alison thanked him with a watery smile. “So then Martin took off. I ran after him, but he said, ‘I need to think this through. I hope you haven’t been making a fool out of me.’

  “I said, ‘What, you mean with Tad?’ and he said, ‘With Tad or any other way.’

  “That was the last I heard from him. I tried calling him later and he didn’t answer, he wouldn’t answer my texts or my e-mails, so I wrote a pretty nasty message.”

  “Oh?” I prompted.
>
  “‘To hell with you, mister, my dad was right, you are just a blue-collar boy with a chip on your shoulder.’” She mumbled the words so quickly I barely made them out.

  “Of course I didn’t mean it,” she added, “but why wouldn’t he write back? Why didn’t he tell me he was going dark? All these weeks in Mexico, I thought he was avoiding me, until I got the message from Jari. Jari said he’d gone into Martin’s ISP servers, he’d tracked Martin’s e-mails and his cell phone. Martin hadn’t sent any messages since the day he disappeared, and he hasn’t been in his in box, either on his cell phone or his e-mails—Jari found five addresses for him. They’re all untouched.”

  I drummed my fingers on the couch arm. “I’d like to see your grandfather’s workshop: I want to know what Martin saw.”

  “I can’t take you up there! I don’t want Dad to know I’m here. Besides, if it was the Metargon-I design he was looking at, like Tad said, anyone can see it: it’s in every beginning computer engineering textbook, where they step you through the history. What von Neumann and Bigelow did at Princeton, what Rajchman did at RCA, and what Edward Breen did in his old coach house.” Despite her distress, she couldn’t help ending on a note of pride.

  “If we looked at the drawings, would I be able to follow them?” I asked.

  “I could step you through them, but I don’t know what the model or the drawings would tell you,” she said. “I don’t know what they told Martin, or even if that is what he was looking at.”

  Maybe Cordell Breen was right and I wasn’t enough of a detective for a case this intellectual. “What’s next to the drawings? Could it be something else that he saw?”

  She made a helpless gesture. “I studied everything near where Martin had been standing. There’s the original drawing Granddad made for the Metargon-I core, just a sketch of the idea, when he was sitting on some battlefield during the war. That’s what’s on the wall. There’s a letter from Stan Ulam, the mathematician, saying that Granddad’s proposal for memory registers was bold and revolutionary, but they were too far down the road at IAS to change designs, especially when it wasn’t clear that the Fermi surfaces could be calculated accurately.”

  I definitely would not gain anything from Alison stepping me through the computer’s design: a Fermi surface already was more complicated than anything I could follow.

  “A few weeks after your party, Martin went downstate to where his mother was living,” I said. “That was when they argued over these papers that have disappeared. Did he ever talk to you about her?”

  “You mean, her being a drug addict? Yes, it weighed on him. It was why he didn’t think he should have children, in case they turned into crackheads. I couldn’t convince him that addiction wasn’t genetically determined.”

  “He didn’t say anything about wanting to talk to his mother that night at your party?”

  She shook her head. “He did say me not telling my parents about him and me was like him not telling his gran that he sometimes visits his mother. He didn’t tell his grandmother about us, either, although he said that was because she had gotten so strange, he just didn’t want to introduce me unless, well, you know, if we got really serious.”

  I rubbed my gritty eyes. The coffee hadn’t helped; I was unbearably tired. “Yes, well, speaking of that, it’s going to be impossible to keep your parents from knowing you’re in town right now. Someone—this Ramona you mentioned—will have seen you leave your place in Mexico. Even if she doesn’t report that to your dad, they’ll put out an APB on you in Mexico City when they can’t find you. If you used a credit card to buy your ticket, you already left a trail. If Homeland Security is, in fact, watching this building, they’ll ID you from surveillance photos.”

  Alison’s shoulders sagged in misery. Mr. Contreras went to put an arm around her but frowned at me. “Why get her all upset, cookie? She’s here, we got to figure out what to do with her.”

  “She can’t stay here,” I fretted. “We’re too exposed, too vulnerable. Ditto for taking her down to my office.”

  Mr. Contreras started to protest reflexively that he could look after Alison, but stopped himself mid-sentence. “I could if it was just ordinary punks, but not when it’s the government and her dad and all. Come on, doll, put on your thinking cap. You gotta have some kind of hideout.”

  I gave him a tired smile. “Like Br’er Rabbit’s briar patch? Whatever you do, don’t throw me in there?”

  The words conjured up an unexpected chain of associations. “I may know a place at that. Come on, Ms. Breen. Let’s put on some disguises.”

  30

  PLAYING DRESS-UP

  YOU BOYS KNOW how to get to Union Station? You sure I don’t need to ride downtown with you?” Mr. Contreras said loudly.

  “Come on, Grandpa, we’ve made this trip a million times.” That was Alison, who made a compact boy in jeans and a T-shirt. A backward baseball cap covered her glossy hair.

  “I don’t know,” the old man fretted. “It’s late, there are perverts on the train. I should ride down with you.”

  “You’ve got the dogs, Grandpa. No one’s gonna mess with us.” My cousin Boom-Boom’s old hockey jersey was a little heavy on a warm night, but it hid my breasts; away from the streetlights, with my own baseball cap, I could pass for the older grandson, who was nineteen now and a freshman at Northern Illinois.

  Mr. Contreras clapped my shoulder in a hearty squeeze, hugged Alison, who squirmed away from him just as his own younger grandson might. He blundered around the station entrance with the dogs. This gave me a chance to see if any of the late-night riders who cursed him for not controlling his animals were keeping up with us. It was hard to be absolutely certain, but I was ninety-five percent sure we were clear.

  I’d only sketched out the scene, but Alison and my neighbor had risen nobly to their roles. I fed my CTA pass through the machine and lolled at the bottom of the stairs, reading the notices. When I heard an outbound train approaching, I grabbed Alison’s arm and we sprinted up the stairs. The doors were closing as we jumped on board.

  We were both tense. We didn’t talk during the milk-run up to Howard. Alison, who felt at ease navigating the labyrinth of Mexico City, had never been on the L; she kept looking around with a nervous frown anytime a late-night beggar started a sales pitch in our car. We were lucky at Dempster—we just made the Skokie Swift’s last run of the day.

  At the end of the line we had a mile walk to Kitty Binder’s. Boom-Boom’s jersey hid not only my breasts but my picklocks, a flashlight and my gun. By the time we got to the bungalow on Kedvale, the flashlight was hitting my rib cage in an unpleasant way.

  It was well past midnight and the little houses were shut down for the night, or so I hoped. The last thing we needed was for an insomniac dog-walker to spot us.

  Alison’s nervousness increased when she saw the police tapes and a Cook County State’s Attorney seal on the doors. “If we get caught, won’t they put us in prison?” she whispered.

  “If we get caught, you hop off like a bunny; if anyone stops you, say that I kidnapped you,” I muttered: a prison-yard guttural doesn’t carry the way whispers do.

  The authorities hadn’t bothered to seal the garage, which had a back door with a simple lock. While Alison held the flashlight in an unsteady hand, I quickly undid the tumblers. We were inside within thirty seconds. I put a hand over her mouth as she started to speak, counted eight slow breaths in my head. No one shouted out or tried the doorknob behind us.

  I used the flashlight sparingly, since the garage had a couple of skylights in the roof. We could see a workbench where Len had kept his tools. They were dusty now, but chisels and wrenches were laid out on a cloth in careful size order. He’d hung pictures of himself with his grandson across the wall behind the bench. I’d seen the one with Martin and the rockets, but others showed the two of them playing ball, or working on a car together. A
lison gave a crow of delight when she saw them and insisted on taking them down from the wall to carry into the house with her.

  On the far side of the bench, a door led into the kitchen. It, too, was easy to open. Strange that Kitty, with her fears, and all the dead bolts on her front and back doors, had left this easy route into her home. Odd, too, that the intruders, who’d torn up the house with a ruthless hand, had left the garage alone. Maybe they’d found what they were looking for inside, or maybe they hadn’t been looking for anything. If these were drug dealers going after Judy Binder they might have trashed the place on principle—or lack thereof.

  Inside the house, the crime scene hadn’t been touched. Books and papers were still strewn across the floor. What I hadn’t noticed when I ran through here on Friday was that the intruders had also emptied flour and sugar canisters and dumped the contents of the freezer. The food was beginning to rot. A trail of ants led from under the back door, which had been boarded over, to the spilled sugar.

  Alison wrinkled her nose in disgust. “This smells as bad as the barrios I pass on my way to one of our schools. We can’t stay here.”

  “Unless you want to call a cab and go home, we don’t have a lot of choice right now. Let’s do some cleaning, my sister,” I said. “It’ll make it all seem bearable.”

  I didn’t want to run appliances or turn on lights that might alert someone to our presence. I stopped Alison as she switched on the exhaust fan. Inside the basement door was a rack that held brooms and mops, garbage bags and Clorox. I set to work with a grim will. After a moment of staring at me like a tragedy queen, Alison gave her head a shake, dislodging the baseball cap and her shiny chestnut hair, and joined me.

  “Martin’s room is downstairs,” I said softly. “I think he has blackout curtains, so we ought to be able to clean in there more easily.”

  Alison volunteered to take care of that while I finished the kitchen and Kitty’s bedroom. I helped her down the stairs with the flash, warning her there would be dried blood on the floor. The disarray in Martin’s suite wasn’t as horrible as the kitchen because he’d left so few belongings behind. Alison looked less miserable as she started to explore the space her sometime lover had grown up in.