The Price of Innocence

by Lisa Black

  ‘Don’t you worry about people stealing your ideas, if they can stand here and watch you work?’

  ‘Nah. The lobby is only open to the public three times per week, and even then it’s mostly school groups. Industrial spies don’t usually collaborate with fourth-graders. At least I hope not. Electronic transmissions are monitored, and there’s no cell service past the lobby. The entire building is one giant Faraday cage.’ At her look, he said, ‘A Faraday cage is—’

  ‘A container that shields all electronic signals, yes. We use the bags for seized cell phones so no one can delete information by remote. But I received a call standing in your workroom.’

  ‘That was because someone had just blown a big hole in the wall, so the bag had a leak. Check it now.’

  She did. No bars.

  He went on, ‘If someone wants to steal my plans, they get a job here. That’s happened four times in the past two years.’

  ‘Could one of them have left that bomb in your supply closet?’

  ‘No.’

  She didn’t ask how he could be sure of that, knew that he would have his ways. Bruce Lambert presented himself to the world as a curious little boy, the geek that made good. But there was nothing geek-like about the tightly coiled body under that T-shirt and no one built such a financial powerhouse without both shrewdness and cunning. If the bomb had been an inside job, it had been left by a new threat, and obviously Lambert would be much better placed to figure that out that she could hope to be. Perhaps he would let the Feds help him, perhaps not. People at his level made up their own procedures for justice and resolution. The rich are different.

  That said, at the moment he just looked tired. ‘You should get some rest.’

  He chuckled and slumped against the window. ‘I’ve been out at Leroy’s house. Two kids and one more on the way. I have no idea what they’re going to do if he dies. Leroy had to grow up without a father, said that’s the one thing he would never do to his own. And in the end he may not get a choice about it.’

  There was nothing she could say to that, nothing anyone could say.

  Then he added, ‘I never asked what you thought of the tour.’

  ‘I think I should buy some stock in Lambert Industries.’

  He chuckled again. ‘You’ll get your chance next week. The IPO comes up first thing Monday morning.’

  ‘I heard.’ This would be a significant change for him. People who knew business and industry only wondered why he had waited so long. ‘Going public’, or offering stock in the company for public sale, meant the owner could shed the liability while increasing personal profits – provided the stock remained popular, and this stock would. Bruce Lambert, surmised the business section of the Plain Dealer, would move from being the fourth richest man in the country to the richest man in the world by Monday’s closing bell.

  No wonder he couldn’t sleep.

  ‘So how does your sand crystal engine work?’ she asked.

  His grin widened. ‘You would know if you hadn’t been chatting up that guy instead of listening.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘The crystals are nitrogen triiodide?’

  He looked surprised, then intrigued, then amused in rapid succession. ‘Interesting idea, but impractical. Too unstable.’

  ‘So what are they?’

  ‘Remember what I said about science not rewarding the unobservant?’

  She raised her eyebrows, waiting.

  ‘It doesn’t reward the inattentive, either. And now I have to go, but it was a pleasure talking with you.’

  ‘You too,’ she said, and watched him walk away, wondering how to categorize his brush-off: clever or petulant? She decided on petulant, though couldn’t really begrudge him a bit of rancor for a woman who would find David Madison more fascinating than a gas-free internal combustion engine which might revolutionize the globe, alter foreign policy and make Cleveland the center of the country once again.

  But then, he hadn’t met David Madison.

  She carted three cups of coffee back to the wreck of the Bingham, puzzling over both her sudden attraction to the unusually situated David Madison and the equally sudden significance of nitrogen to her life. Was the nitrogen triiodide that destroyed the Bingham building a bad batch from Lambert’s prototype? But why store it next door? Why store it at all? Lambert disassembled his failures, didn’t waste space on them. Had Kadam somehow stolen the compounds from Lambert? Perhaps he’d been one of those four former employees. But how, and why store them next door? None of it made sense.

  She sighed, making her careful way down the metal staircase. If an answer existed, her brain was too fried to find it.

  ‘Everything come out OK?’ Don asked, raising his voice over the noise of the generator.

  ‘Why do men think that’s so freakin’ funny?’

  ‘Because it is. OK, clothes are done. That leaves us all this boxed-up stuff piled against the wall. What is it?’ Don asked. He had not had the pleasure of removing items to storage quite as often as Theresa and her overdeveloped sense of order had.

  ‘Just that. Stuff. Quite a variety of stuff. Take this, for instance.’ She hefted a rectangular cardboard box, still in fairly good shape as it had been tucked up against the outer wall. ‘Remember our window washer who fell thirty-eight floors?’

  ‘Distinctly.’

  ‘Well, after OSHA had finished inspecting the harness, I called them to see if I could get an OK to destroy it. The guy there said they had completed their work with it, but there might be other interested parties, so to err on the side of caution I asked him to send me a list. His letter included seven, from the victim’s family to the harness manufacturer down to his union. I said forget it, put the thing in a box and sealed it up.’

  ‘Your campaign against clutter had hit a wall.’

  ‘You could say that.’ She tucked the box with the harness into one of the new boxes and followed it with other items, including an unwrapped axe with a faded yellow tag and a bicycle wheel, the only residue of a mob boss who went missing in the early seventies during his daily ride.

  Dr Banachek abandoned his X-rays for a while and came by to chat. He rested himself on a folding chair which someone had left in the storage room long before and had survived the explosion with only minor mangling. It listed slightly when he settled on it, but did not fall over. ‘Remind me again why we had to do this in the middle of the night.’

  ‘I would if I could,’ Don grumbled. ‘Law enforcement agencies seem to be addicted to the wee hours.’

  ‘Aw, man,’ Theresa exclaimed in disappointment, holding up a shattered glass case which held a human skull, its surface chalky white with areas of brown. ‘It broke.’

  ‘Is that real?’ Dr Banachek asked.

  ‘It’s a real skull but not the result of homicide. A supposed satanic cult bought it or stole it from a medical school or some such thing.’ She removed the gaping shards of glass from the frame, setting them on top of the crushed fencing.

  ‘Don’t cut yourself,’ Don said. ‘I suppose we should have stored it in something sturdier.’

  ‘Well, we couldn’t have known the ceiling was going to fall in. Besides, it’s not evidence of any crime. Leo hung on to it for sentimental reasons.’

  ‘Only a forensic lab would hang on to a skull for sentimental reasons,’ Dr Banachek said.

  Theresa picked up yet another box, this one from a crime scene on Payne Avenue, and pivoted to place it with the others.

  Wait.

  Where had she heard the name of that street lately? Not that such a mention would be unusual – Payne Avenue stretched through a mile and a half of downtown Cleveland.

  Ken Bilecki. He said he, Lily and Marty had lived in a ‘pit on Payne’ when attending the university. The label said 2401, which would have been only a block from the school. She checked the date – spring, 1985. If they had been in the class of ’88 …

  The label also noted ‘e
xplosion’.

  ‘What’s that?’ Don asked, no doubt wondering why she had become as still as Lot’s wife.

  ‘It’s from an explosion on Payne Avenue over twenty years ago. I didn’t know Cleveland was such a volatile city.’

  ‘Aside from the East Ohio Gas disaster, I didn’t either.’ He moved past her to brush gravel off another container, prodding gently. ‘I would like to be out of here before breakfast.’

  ‘Sorry. It’s just that this guy Frank questioned about the suicide last night mentioned living on Payne when he went to Cleveland State, and—’

  Dr Banachek stirred, producing creaks from the deformed chair. ‘Oh. The chemistry students.’

  Theresa stared. ‘You know this case?’

  Don sighed.

  The portly doctor sighed too. ‘I couldn’t forget it – the first time I saw a body burned beyond recognition. Unfortunately, not the last. Only a week later they brought in a family of four from a house fire, an old Berea duplex, the upper floor fell on to the lower. The couple in the upstairs—’

  ‘But what about the students?’

  He blinked, eyes big behind round lenses. ‘Oh yes. It was my first explosion case … actual explosions are rare, as opposed to fires … they’d been living in a building converted to student housing and a room on the ground floor blew up, burned the rest of the place pretty bad. His own fault, too.’

  ‘He started the fire?’

  ‘The police thought he’d been cooking methamphetamine – making his own chemistry. And it killed him. He had no hands or feet by the time he came to us.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘That was the early days of the meth epidemic. Bad stuff. Could easily be curtailed, you know. Pharmaceutical companies could make cold medicine with an optical isomer of pseudoephedrine that could not be made into meth.’

  ‘What’s stopping them?’ Don asked from behind a pile of boxes.

  ‘Their lobbyists. They get paid a lot of money to water down any bill that might inconvenience their bosses.’ He patted Theresa’s box. ‘But I could be mixing it up with another case, you know. They all blend together after a while.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  Don had filled the rest of the container, finishing with just enough space to fit the box she held. He went to take it out of her hands but she pulled it away. ‘Not this. I want to take a look at it later and that garage is going to be a Rubik’s cube by the end of the day.’ She set the box aside with her tote bag full of snacks and an extra pair of work gloves. Then she dutifully helped Don and the deskman maneuver the filled box to the truck. When she returned, Dr Banachek once again stood at the severely damaged file cabinets, removing X-rays to new file boxes.

  The trace evidence department enclosure had only one slide cabinet and approximately twenty cardboard boxes of various shapes remained. Don hefted one up, heavy for its size. ‘This is dense.’

  ‘It’s a solid block of index cards. That’s how we used to sign evidence in and out, before the printed voucher forms.’

  ‘Sounds cumbersome.’ Don had been weaned on a keyboard and hated writing anything longhand.

  ‘A little bit. But we never lost anything and you can pull out a card thirty years later and see what was submitted, what analyses were performed, the results and who picked it up. Nothing got lost in cyberspace.’

  ‘Only in real space. So what is so fascinating about a twenty-year-old meth lab?’

  Theresa explained how Marty Davis had lived on Payne Avenue during college with Lily Simpson and Ken Bilecki, and that Lily said Marty had been part of a meth cooking operation. ‘Cooking and selling, I mean.’

  ‘So you think this cop could have been killed in revenge for the death of a student in his meth lab twenty-odd years ago?’

  She carted another box of index cards, thinking. ‘I guess it is a silly idea when you put it like that. It’s bubbling in my mind because the few facts I know about Marty Davis keep coinciding. But those facts are such a small fraction of his life. There must be worlds more to it than what I know.’

  ‘Sure.’ Don picked up the red sealing tape.

  ‘All the same, it can’t hurt to look up the case.’

  ‘No, it can’t. Is there any more coffee?’

  ‘Come on, kid! I’ve got eleven years on you and I’m still going.’

  He laughed, and they moved the box to the truck, gingerly scooting past two FBI agents in the narrow walkway. Theresa recognized the female agent she had run into three times in as many days.

  The truck had filled again, and Don climbed into the passenger seat to escort their booty back to the office. Theresa stood in the chill of West Ninth Street and wondered at the rules they followed. Did anyone care enough about these ancient cases to steal into the rubble of a ruined building to find the evidence relevant to them? Why? If the evidence could incriminate them, it would have done so long ago. Plus they’d have to search through the piles of items to find the one they wanted, assuming they could interpret the archaic numbering system. It would require a determined and intrepid criminal, a cut well above the hapless, thoughtless murderers and violent types she usually dealt with.

  Perhaps it would make more sense just to dynamite the whole lot. Her thoughts moved to the cardboard box now tucked underneath her purse.

  Ridiculous. The twenty-year-old fire had been quite forgotten. At least she assumed so – she would have to ask Frank. The investigation could have been reopened without either of them knowing. She opened her Nextel, saw the time and date and decided her question could wait until a more reasonable hour. He would not appreciate her input at four thirty a.m., no matter how ingrained the habit had become of telling each other every fact, insight or wild guess at the moment it occurred. She would not call a non-blood-relative homicide detective as continually. She never knew if being related to Frank made their working together more effective, or less. They communicated more freely because of the relationship, which should be a good thing. But perhaps they focused on each other’s well being more than the case at hand. What had Lambert said about inattention going unrewarded?

  ‘Excuse me.’

  Theresa looked up to see the two FBI agents, struggling with a bulky plastic container to load on their own moving truck. Instead of trying to go around them, Theresa simply backed up along the caution-taped walkway and made use of the serendipitous meeting. ‘How’s the investigation going? Do you guys know why this happened yet?’

  ‘No,’ the woman panted. The man, a different agent than the man who had been with her before, ignored Theresa entirely.

  ‘Can I help you with that?’

  ‘No, we got it.’

  Rules to be followed. Non-authorized personnel prohibited. Theresa continued, walking precariously backwards along the path. ‘The explosion seems to have started in one place, right? That’s obvious from the gaping hole in the center of the building. It’s not like he put charges at strategic points, wanting to take the whole building down.’

  ‘Did a pretty good job of it anyway,’ the woman said. She didn’t seem to be any happier with the wee hours than Don.

  ‘We used this place for storage.’ Theresa reached the sidewalk and nearly fell over it, but recovered and accompanied the agents to their truck. ‘I guess you guys did too.’

  They didn’t bother to answer, needing all their breath to heft their box into the waiting arms of two agents in the moving truck. Must be nice to have so much manpower at your disposal. At least they hadn’t worn suits and ties, just sweatshirts, jeans and jackets with FBI emblazoned on the back.

  When it had been settled to their satisfaction, Theresa walked with them back into the site, dogging the two like an unwanted kid brother. ‘Is Kadam still your main suspect?’

  ‘Yes,’ the woman said.

  ‘Ask Homeland Security,’ the man with her said.

  ‘Even though there’s absolutely no strategic significance to this building,’ the woman sighed. The man glared at her. The lateness of
the hour had lowered her defenses.

  ‘I don’t know what you had stored here,’ Theresa said, ‘but have you considered the possibility that the purpose of the explosion might have been to destroy your records?’

  The man made a sound, a cross between pfft and pah.

  The woman took a swig from a bottle of water which dangled from her belt. ‘I doubt it. How would he know a particular file was here and not in our offices, and these were all old, mostly closed. Why go after them now?’

  ‘I had the same thought. But—’

  ‘Besides, if he targeted a storage unit and didn’t simply blow himself up by accident, it would have been yours.’

  Theresa stopped, and looked down into the evacuated hole. Standing at street level she could see what the woman meant. The FBI’s section had been in the south-east corner, the M.E.’s unit in the north-west corner. And the worst, most blackened, most gaping part of sublevel one had been right across the hall.

  SEVENTEEN

  Friday

  Breakfast had come and gone by the time they finally finished, and driving back to the office in rush hour traffic made Theresa think perhaps working during the night had not been such a bane. It would have taken their little truck four times as long to make each trip back and forth during working hours. But then, she was running on the fumes of adrenalin and feeling a bit punchy. At least that was Don’s explanation.

  ‘Why not us?’ she explored aloud, gazing at the many empty storefronts on Euclid Avenue. The decline of the once-revolutionary industrial city was not just a punch line or the exaggerations of fund-seeking politicians. The city hurt, and its citizens felt helpless to do anything about it. ‘Why bomb a mostly empty building of trendy apartments? There are only two logical targets existing in that building, us and the FBI. And the epicenter of that particular quake occurred much closer to us than to them.’

  ‘Take out a whole building in order to conceal some moldy old evidence that everyone, including us, had forgotten about?’ Don uttered a mild curse as they failed to make the light at Fifty-Fifth.