The Price of Innocence

by Lisa Black

  ‘Yep. That’s why we don’t often do iodine fuming for fingerprints any more except in a fume hood or a very well-ventilated area. It works great, but it just might kill you.’

  ‘I’m surprised OSHA doesn’t object to our being here.’

  ‘We’re government employees.’ She mashed the sets of clothing into the bottom of the box in order to fit as many items in as possible. It would all have to be sorted out later; the objective now was to move as much as they could as fast as they could. ‘OSHA doesn’t apply to us.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘I am not. Government employees are exempt. Always have been. We’re covered by the Ohio Department of Health, which –’ she panted a bit while hefting another thick set of bloodied clothing into the box – ‘subscribes to all OSHA guidelines, except they don’t do surprise inspections.’

  ‘So they instruct all government offices to take care of us, but never actually check to see if they do.’

  ‘We’re civil service. It’s another word for expendable.’ She pushed on the stack of clothing inside its cardboard walls with all her weight, but it would not budge. It had taken all it would take. Don held the flaps closed while she taped them with red tamper-proof evidence tape, then added her initials over this seal with a Sharpie pen. Then they motioned to the two deskmen, who now had the unenviable task of maneuvering the very full box up the temporary staircase and out to the moving truck. When the truck filled, either she or Don would have to ride back to the M.E.’s office with it. The garage had been emptied of vehicles and all available basement space had been pressed into service as temporary storage.

  ‘Not that I’m complaining,’ she went on. ‘Because you can have all the rules and guidelines you want, but when it comes down to something like this, one fact always wins out.’

  ‘You gotta do what you gotta do,’ Don supplied.

  ‘Exactly.’

  They worked in silence for a while. Then Don said, ‘Not much of an explosive. It’s bad enough it has to destroy something, but make it smelly and possibly mutagenic too?’

  ‘It’s an extremely odd choice for an explosive. Oliver says it would have taken between one thousand and two thousand pounds of nitrogen triiodide to take down this building. That’s like a cubic yard. That’s like over five hundred gallons. That’s, like, a lot. They must have stockpiled it here, just like we stockpiled our old X-rays.’

  ‘Or they made it here. I wonder if the Feds found any equipment in the wreckage.’

  ‘If they did, they’re not going to tell us.’ Theresa picked up a small metal box designed to store glass slides, listening to the disheartening tinkle of the broken shards inside. ‘It might not have been that much, if there had been other explosives in the room, or potentially combustible compounds throughout the building, like metal shavings or pervasive organic materials. Sugar dust took out that company in Georgia a few years ago. The shock wave from the NI3 would have set off anything else. Though I can’t see a combustible dust problem in a residential building, and apparently the explosion generated from one point, that gaping black hole next to us.’

  ‘So we’re back to a big ol’ pile of NI3.’

  ‘Which Leo insists is the most impractical explosive ever; he says no one could have brought that much of it together without blowing themselves to tiny bits long ago. On top of that it tends to decompose, quickly, even if treated well and sealed up. The iodine would begin to subliminate and produce smelly, staining purple gas.’

  He helped her place the slide box into one of the fresh large boxes. ‘Do they still think it’s this Kadam guy? For any reason other than being of Middle Eastern descent?’

  ‘They have a few more reasons than that. Christine gave me a few more details. His employer supposedly rented the space here but his work address comes back to a vacant lot. Kadam’s own personal history fell off the charts three years ago. No address, no income tax return, no credit cards.’

  ‘How did Christine find that out?’

  ‘I didn’t ask.’

  She helped him seal up the box and maneuver it up the steps. ‘This should finish off the truck,’ Don said. ‘If I don’t return, I’m on my way to the office. Want anything?’

  ‘A cot and a sleeping bag would be nice.’

  ‘How about coffee?’

  ‘That, too.’

  If she had thought it would be lonely in the near-center of downtown in the middle of the night, she now learned the error of it. Cars came and went, with the Doppler principle affecting the sound as they moved up the street. At least once every half-hour a police car from the nearby police headquarters or a lone ambulance fired up the siren. Theresa wondered how the tenants who had lived in the Bingham’s trendy lofts ever got any sleep. The blast site, ringed with blinding light, teemed with not only the M.E. staff, but Homeland Security and FBI agents. Other people’s conversations formed a background hum like a radio played in the next office, only loud enough to catch a theme here or there but not the whole song.

  Theresa peeked over at the FBI’s storage area, well on the other side of the building. ‘It looks like a bunch of old paperwork,’ she told Don when he returned. ‘Nothing interesting, like our stuff.’

  ‘Should we loan them a few boxes of bloody clothes?’

  ‘It would be the neighborly thing to do.’

  Having passed her fortieth birthday the previous year, Theresa cared for few things less than pulling an all-nighter. But once resigned to the idea that she would not see her bed that night, it wasn’t that bad. Don made regular trips to the Lambert lobby for coffee, as much for the warmth as for the caffeine. The constant activity, though she would no doubt feel each muscle tomorrow, kept the time moving. And she had too much pride to falter in front of either the much younger Don or the much older Dr Banachek.

  She kept an eye on the portly pathologist. Occasionally he would ask Don for help in wrestling a mangled drawer from its file cabinet but then would become lost in its contents, reliving past cases through X-rays of the victim’s broken bones or gunshot wound. One of the histologists would have to prod him gently back into action.

  Around three a.m. Theresa sealed up the last container of clothing. ‘Time for a break before we start on the rest. I need a ladies’ room and some more coffee. Want a donut?’

  Don shook his head. ‘I’ve had enough sugar for one night.’

  ‘Silly boy. There’s no such thing as too much sugar.’ She took her water bottle to refill and climbed the metal steps, then followed the yellow tape path out to the sidewalk and turned to the south.

  This would be her second visit to the Lambert mansion/workshop/factory in less than twenty-four hours. Strange. Now the lights were subdued and the noise near church level. What appeared to be a giant plastic frame had been erected over the damaged Entrance Number Two.

  The lobby doors of frosted glass swung open with a mere whisper, ushering her in to a silent cavern. The room served as both museum and lobby, with marble floors and a vaulted ceiling. Glass cases ringed the area and huge diagrams and photographs hung on the walls. A long table with coffee urns, boxes of donuts and even a fruit plate waited for her on the left, but she turned away, in no hurry to rush back to work. Besides, she needed to find a bathroom first.

  The story of Bruce Lambert began there to the right, with a blown-up photo of his humble beginnings in a weathered house on Fulton Road. Smiling parents, a maintenance man and a jewelry design assistant, flanked three boys dressed for Halloween. One, a scrawny thing with big ears, wore a magician’s outfit. According to the display text they suspected their son’s potential when he won his third grade science fair. And every science fair he entered after that, the placard added.

  The glass cases did not follow the same chronological order, however, and the one nearest her held a blown-up model of a microchip that Lambert had developed when he – and Theresa – had been in their early thirties. The chip had earned Lambert his first million.

  The next w
all display jumped ahead to the college years, when Lambert took his undergraduate degree from Cleveland State and headed to MIT, which, the wording implied, only financial considerations had kept him from attending in the first place. Theresa hoped none of the alumni association staff noticed this placard, or Lambert might receive a sternly worded letter about loyalty and the lack thereof. He would have to put Ginny’s yearbook collection on display as a peace offering.

  No mention of sending brother Carl on his short trip to Columbia, or who the youngest boy might be.

  Next, a collage devoted to the rich man’s humanitarian efforts – providing Katrina victims with hyper-efficient generators and experimenting with a new kind of smart building by constructing an orphanage in Abkhazia, on the coast of the Black Sea. A footnote told how Carl fell in love with the country and its children and especially a teacher at the orphanage. They married and adopted two of the boys.

  The next few cases and displays explained each area in which Lambert had become interested in turn, always leaving behind a trail of better, faster, cheaper products for the American people to use. The most powerful processor, the cordless phone with the highest range, the cleanest diesel fuel. The latter led him to the gasoline crisis and the internal combustion engine.

  She leaned her elbows on a glass display case and read the printing around small models of six-cylinder engines; the leaning eased some pressure in her lower back. Electric cars were too inconvenient and unlikely to be accepted by Americans in any real sense, the writing proclaimed. The internal combustion engine had functioned well for a hundred years. All that was needed was to find something besides compressed gas vapor to provide the small, controlled explosion that pushed away the piston. After many experiments, Lambert believed he had found the answer in nitrogen crystals.

  Did nitrogen come in crystals? And why did Theresa seem to find herself surrounded by nitrogen all of a sudden?

  No joke intended. It did comprise nearly eighty per cent of the atmosphere. Humans sucked in much more nitrogen with each breath than any other element.

  Could it be explosive? Not normally. She might know more if she had listened to Lambert’s tour instead of chatting up David Madison. Her weary brain needed a connection between all these events, the Bingham explosion, Marty Davis’ assassination, the Lambert factory explosion, Lily and her meth habit … Theresa formed the only link, and a completely random one. She rapped her knuckles on the display in frustration.

  A voice startled her. ‘Please don’t tap on the glass.’

  In the dim corner near the entrance to the rest of the building, behind a small podium, sat a black man in a nice suit, with the body type of a Buddha statue and the immobility to match.

  ‘S-sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  She approached him, gingerly, as if he were a new species of amphibian which might leap at any moment. His eyes were invisible behind tinted glasses. She couldn’t even tell if they were open. ‘What kind of crystals?’

  ‘I beg your pardon, ma’am?’

  ‘The new engine. The display says it uses nitrogen crystals, but pure nitrogen doesn’t come in crystals and they aren’t flammable at any rate.’

  He – or at least his glasses – regarded her for a while, no doubt wondering if she always sounded this incoherent in the wee hours. ‘I’m Mr Lambert’s chief of security. Not usually here at night but then these aren’t usual circumstances. So though I may be just a teensy bit slow from being up past my bedtime, can I help you?’

  ‘Um … it has to be some kind of compound, but what else is in the compound? If it’s going to fire a piston, there must be …’

  After another long minute, her Buddha took a deep breath and said, ‘Seeing that this is the answer to the gas crisis and a way to free America from dependence on the oil of those hostile to us, and that the first Lambert Industries IPO is scheduled to be offered next week, I suppose Mr Lambert didn’t care to post his formula in a glass box in a public lobby.’

  ‘Mmm, yes, well.’ There didn’t seem much to say to that. ‘How does it work, then? I mean, gas is a liquid and a vapor. How do you convert an internal combustion engine to working on—’

  ‘Sand,’ the security chief said.

  ‘Sand?’

  ‘It’s like sand. That’s how tiny the crystals are. They’re in a plastic ring. You ever have a cap gun when you were a kid?’

  ‘No. But I got one for a Halloween costume once.’

  ‘Yeah? What did you go as?’

  At this, the first spark of interest in the man’s voice, she didn’t have the heart to tell him she couldn’t remember. ‘A cowgirl.’

  ‘Ah.’ He paused, clearly trying to picture her in that outfit, and she squirmed. ‘Well, you know how caps for revolver type cap guns come in a preformed, plastic ring? Same thing here. Only instead of caps, the sections on the ring feed the sand into the cylinders one grain at a time.’ The wide face beamed, as proud as if he had invented it himself. ‘It fires like a gun, so there’s no spark plug to gum up. The engine oil dissolves any residue, so there’s little maintenance.’

  Theresa sorted out the idea in her head. ‘What happens when the ring runs out of sand?’

  ‘You take that ring out and put in another. They’re only a foot in diameter and weigh less than a pound, so it’s not like it’s hard. A warning light will tell you when you’re low, just like a gas tank, so you don’t wind up dibbser.’ At her frown, he added, ‘DBSR – dead by the side of the road.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Mr Lambert says dibbser is what Americans fear most of all, and no alternative engine will ever catch on unless we can assure them that will never, ever happen.’

  ‘That makes a lot of sense. So where do you buy these rings – oh, duh. Here.’

  ‘At first. It’s not a complicated design, and any chemist could break down the formula for the crystals, so Mr Lambert knows there will be knock-offs available almost immediately. If he can just keep the patent on the engine, he’ll be happy.’

  ‘What about the EPA?’

  ‘They love it. No harmful fumes. No lead, no benzene. Nothing to leak out of underground tanks or spill on the freeway. Well, the sand could spill, but it can be swept or vacuumed. Much better for human beings all around. You can store extra rings in your garage or your trunk. No more making a weekly stop at the gas station.’

  There had to be some drawback – there always was – but without knowing more Theresa could not guess what it might be and had no doubt that Lambert had found or would find a way around it. Trying to out-think Bruce Lambert was like trying to out-golf Tiger Woods or outsing Barbra Streisand.

  ‘Very interesting,’ she told him. ‘Have you been working with Mr Lambert a long time, to learn all this?’

  ‘Only a couple of years, since I got out of the service. But I’ve been a friend of his older brother since they lived in the hood.’

  ‘Cool,’ she said, and meant it.

  ‘A lot of the guys here are from when we were kids. Mr Lambert doesn’t forget his friends.’

  ‘I can respect that.’ The conversation lagged, and she asked for directions to the ladies’ room.

  ‘Right down here, ma’am,’ he pointed to a hallway behind him, ‘past the workrooms.’

  ‘Really.’ It didn’t make much sense to have the restrooms not in the public area, seemed to be a flaw in the security system.

  ‘It’s OK, ma’am.’ Buddha still smiled. ‘All entrances to the factory are closed. You can’t get lost.’

  ‘That’s a relief.’ She set off once again, feeling that it could not be good to wander into Bruce Lambert’s workspace. She might find herself pulverized by a robotic sentry with a ray gun. Or another bomb. She made a beeline for the ladies’ room, then found her way back along the corridor.

  She could still smell the faint odor of iodine, unless it was just her imagination. Either it or the healing scratches made her skin itch.

  She looked through the
window as she walked, seeing the room she had toured through only hours earlier. It still had a large hole in the wall, but most of the blackened, destroyed items had been removed and an effort made to clean the walls and floor. It wouldn’t surprise her to see it back in operation by tomorrow – things could get fixed quickly with all the money in the world – but the room on the left had not been badly damaged. She studied it, once again mesmerized by the chaos of invention. A lightly cushioned, molded seat had been brought in and sat on the floor next to the still ash-covered chassis. The engine block – which appeared to her to be a standard, six-piston engine block – sat on a table covered with tools. The entire car frame dangled, caught in the four prongs of a huge crane claw. No doubt this piece of the puzzle would be lowered on to the chassis at some point, but for now the car frame looked like a toy forgotten by a gargantuan child who had been called to dinner.

  Bruce Lambert had come a long way from his mother’s garage, but Theresa wondered if he truly found the slick, modern fishbowl more comfortable. ‘I couldn’t work like that,’ she said aloud.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ snorted a voice to her left. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking when I designed it.’

  SIXTEEN

  Theresa stared in surprise at her third encounter that day with Bruce Lambert, über-genius. She would have been both startled and self-conscious had she not been so completely exhausted.

  He had cleaned off the blood and plaster dust and changed into a plain T-shirt, a well-worn pair of jeans and a weary smile. ‘I wanted my place to be transparent, I guess. I’ve always loved clear stuff, glass, those telephones in the clear acrylic so you can see the mechanism, Wonder Woman’s invisible jet. But it came out more like—’ He glanced around at the windows, the room, the hallway suspended across the center of it, mouth working as if searching for the right word. ‘Like—’

  ‘Disney World?’

  He half turned, looked directly at her. ‘Exactly. I wanted the process to be visible, so people could distinguish it from magic. Invention doesn’t require magic. It doesn’t even require genius. All you need is time and persistence.’