The Price of Innocence

by Lisa Black

  Body bags were constructed to carry up to four hundred pounds without complaint, so slicing through its interconnected fibers made tough work even for a sharp knife. At least half a minute gone already.

  Now she had two halves of a body bag, still connected at the foot area. She took one half, held it in one hand like a ranchero, and began to twirl. Being careful, of course, not to let even the lightweight plastic brush the tops of the stacked bricks lest it disturb the crystalline structure of its molecules, just enough to blow her to bits. Then she let go, thrusting the bulky plastic toward the ceiling.

  It went up nicely, but came straight back down, prompting a frantic grabbing collection to keep any of it from landing on top of the crystals. She needed it to go up and over, but didn’t have a lot of room for footwork.

  She gathered it up, began to twirl again, trying not to think about how much time had already elapsed. Threw it.

  The loose end sailed over the oily beam at least. But it was like trying to throw a ribbon – it didn’t sail far enough, and the anchor side wasn’t stiff enough to push it further. So she wiggled it, hoping to snake the free end down to her upstretched hand.

  9:17.

  She wiggled too hard, and the whole bag slid back down on top of her. Another frantic grab to keep it from striking the tiny molecules of the crystals. She prepared for another throw, acutely aware that if she could not do this, and immediately, she would be vaporized, leaving her child motherless and her own mother grieving.

  She threw, all the desperation in her body traveling through her arms and into the lifeless plastic.

  It went over the beam but not far enough. Reason failed her and she began to jump for it. Leo and Lambert had put the crystals in place somehow, surely they could stand a little vibration. On her third try her fingers brushed the dangling end and on the fourth, she grasped it.

  The next step required some thought. She had to pull on both ends equally or one end would slide over. She could twist them together – but then they’d simply untwist as she climbed. Wasn’t the rope-climbing thing in gym class what all boys feared? Though she’d never seen a rope in her high school gymnasium … if she could slice a third strip, she could braid it.

  9:18.

  She opened her knife again and made horizontal cuts in the white plastic, first on one side and then further up on the other. Another two stretching as far as she could reach, then she carefully stowed the knife in her front pocket where it could not fall out. The small but heavy object would certainly set off the nitrogen triiodide. Then, grasping her makeshift ropes with one in each hand, she slid one foot into her first makeshift rung.

  Finding the second was considerably more difficult, but once she did she could distribute her weight equally, stabilizing the structure just enough for her to slide her hands up to a higher point, grasp, and move her feet to their next toeholds. She did all this with the sinking sensation that she would never get away from the crystals in time. Any split second now the entire room was going to erupt in a fireball of her own personal hell. Would she even know it when it happened? Or would she already be dead?

  Remarkably, the last toehold brought her in reach of the crane’s beam. She strained upward to reach around the track but this left her feet, which were at uneven levels, to balance the two sides of her snowy rope, and it shifted rapidly. A quick grasp with both hands arrested it, leaving her swaying above the explosive crystals.

  She reached again, caution using up seconds she did not have. She should be dead already. Surely by now Leo and Lambert were in their cars and exiting the parking lot? Her boss would not have left extra time on the detonator. Leo did not take chances.

  Her fingers met over the greasy beam and intertwined. She then swung both legs up and around it and somehow managed to climb on top, a surprisingly painful effort. The beam was not solid, more like two flat sides that bit into her palms with a chain track running inside the hollow center. On top of that neither foot would slide easily out of her makeshift rungs so arms, legs and torn body bag wound up wrapped around the beam in a mess. At least it kept the bag from falling on to the crystals.

  As soon as she was on top of the beam instead of dangling below it she began to slide, using hands and knees like a child straddling a log. Her tangled feet weren’t much help and the thin sides of the beam felt like they were slicing her palms. Water could set off NI3. Could blood?

  She couldn’t help but catch sight of her watch face out of the corner of one eye. 9:19.

  When she cleared the crystal pile by two precious feet, she threw herself flat on the track and slid both feet off one side of it. The last thing she wanted was to end dangling from the beam in the shreds of a body bag, or have it catch at least one foot so that she landed on her head. The rest of her body followed without hesitation and it felt a lot further than nine or ten feet. At last she landed back on the linoleum, knees bending to absorb the shock.

  One foot had managed to free itself but she had to waste another precious moment yanking the other loose from the white bundle, not wanting to drag it alongside the crystal bricks. Then she could finally approach the small metal box.

  Unlike detonators on television, this one had no handy digital read-out showing how many seconds of life she had left. In fact, it had nothing at all, just a smooth, plain, unadorned metal face with a thin wire protruding from either side. This wire, she could now see, circled and entered the ring of white crystal bricks. Flat grommets occurred every six inches along the wire.

  She had no idea what it was or how it worked. All she knew was she had to get rid of it if she wanted to take another breath.

  Theresa whirled around to the desks about her. This room was full of tools – there had to be one here somewhere. She ran to one, then the next, looking among the printouts, Post-it notes and leftover lunch scraps. She opened a drawer or two. To have gotten this far just to go up in a ball of flame – maybe she should run, just run, but she’d never make it. Don’t think about Rachael.

  She found possible salvation on the desk with the fluorescent Post-Its and the four-foot-long pipe cutter. A pair of wire cutters sat next to the blotter.

  She returned to the detonator and opened the cutters over the thin wire protruding from its side, fully aware that her action might set it off instead of disabling it. But she didn’t have time to ponder … everything she knew about Leo and Lambert told her that they were careful not to over-think things. Speed was more important than durability here. They wouldn’t have had time to install fail-safes, only to make the explosion occur as quickly as they could clear the area.

  She squeezed the handles.

  Click.

  She encircled the wire from the other side. Click.

  Still alive, she didn’t waste time breathing a sigh of relief but picked up the metal box and carried it away. She didn’t know what it would do and didn’t intend to take the chance. Halfway to the nearest desk, it clicked and shuddered in her hands.

  9:20.

  She breathed, staring transfixed at the little device. Had she really come that close? Or had it been clicking and shuddering all this time? Would it really have worked at all?

  Yes.

  She had cheated death with about one second to spare, and the knowledge made her knees buckle. So she pushed it away and resolved not to think about it. Not now. Not ever.

  Instead she set the box down next to Stitch and picked up the pipe cutter, which felt like her thirty-pound barbell. She moved to the door, took up a position to the right of its opening.

  And waited.

  Exactly three minutes later, Leo stepped inside. She swung the metal object as hard as she could.

  Cell phone use might have been impossible, but the landlines on each desk worked just fine. She called her cousin and told him that Lambert was in the wind, but she had Leo.

  ‘Your boss? What the hell is he doing there?’

  ‘Long story.’

  ‘You sound grim. Is he alive?’

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nbsp; ‘I don’t know,’ she told him. ‘And right at the moment, I don’t much care.’

  FORTY

  Theresa placed the Cavs sweatshirt worn by an unlucky convenience-store clerk face downward on a sheet of treated photographic paper, so that the bullet hole just beneath the team’s logo sat in the center of the paper’s rectangle. Then she placed a piece of gauze, soaked in a different set of chemicals, on the fuzzy inside surface of the shirt and applied a steam iron to it. The chemicals in the gauze and the paper reacted with the gunpowder left on the victim’s shirt to form a new compound, one that would turn bright orange against the white paper.

  Everything was chemistry.

  Chemicals had nearly killed her in the basement of the M.E.’s office, and then they had saved her. Chemicals still coated one side of her face and both her hands as the mild burns there healed. Chemicals had kept David Madison alive during his time in the ICU.

  What were humans, really, but electrons and protons and neutrons, whirling in constant motion, more empty space than anything else? Atoms stuck together because each had a gap in its orbit of electrons, a gap it could fill by sharing the electrons of another. Each completing the other to become something new, something bigger, something stronger.

  And sometimes it wasn’t even that definite a bond, not a covalent bond, only an ionic one. Just mutual attraction.

  She and David Madison could have continued in their own orbits, but mutual attraction had brought them together. It should have made them both stronger, giving her a life outside her job and worrying about her daughter, helping him to feel like a man again, able to stare the world down when it brought up his ex-wife.

  Instead he had lied to her about knowing Lily and Ken, and pretended not to recognize the Payne Street address. He might have saved Ken’s life if he had spoken up after Lily died. He had to know then it was Lambert, that no one else would have the ability or the resources, but he said nothing lest he implicate himself. He truly hadn’t known that Leo was her boss, or made any connection between Lambert and the Bingham explosion. But still, Marty, Lily and Ken, once his friends, all dead. And he kept his silence.

  Then he invented the media frenzy regarding his wife in order to get his kids out of town and fled to Theresa’s house, with Lambert out to erase his past and the people in it. David didn’t want to endanger his children – admirable – but qualms about her or her child or her family? Not so much.

  The bond had begun to weaken, her own electrons drawing back to their own orbits.

  Theresa had showed up at the alumni tour of Lambert’s factory and then during the Bingham excavation, asking about nitrogen triiodide, and suddenly Lambert had a problem just as pressing as his old college gang. He called his old friend and business partner.

  She still couldn’t wrap her head around Leo’s betrayal. Rumors were already circulating that she had somehow framed Leo for her near-murder, perhaps because she herself had fallen under Lambert’s sway. Or because she really wanted to be supervisor. Or because she and Leo had had an affair years ago and a new spat gave her motive for revenge. This did not occur because Leo had so many friends at the Medical Examiner’s Office; quite the contrary, he had none. But government employees thrive on gossip and nothing beats a good conspiracy theory. So while her fellow employees amused themselves, Theresa felt like crawling into a hole and staying there forever.

  Frank appeared in the doorway and stopped, held back by the acetic acid fumes. ‘The prosecutor’s working on the Lambert indictments,’ he said by way of greeting. ‘For all the good it will do him. He’s going for culpable negligence in the McClurg death and seven counts of first degree in the Bingham explosion, plus Marty Davis and Terry Beltran. He’s not even going to try for Lily and Ken, too hard to prove. Beltran is a weak one. We think Lambert got in disguised as an air-conditioning guy, but again, proof. But he has to go for it, otherwise Lambert could say Beltran was behind everything since he had the gun that killed Marty.’

  ‘How is that possible?’

  ‘I think Lambert planted the gun along with the bomb. As soon as Beltran opened that drawer and stumbled on them both, he’d be blown up and also implicated at the same time. Lambert didn’t know it would happen while I was coming up the steps, of course, that was just gravy. Beltran kept his contraband cell phone in that drawer and I think that’s what he was going for after he saw me and Angela. Hard to prove, though. Everything about this case is going to be hard to prove, even if we get a chance.’

  After Cleveland’s resident genius had left Theresa hovering over thirty cubic feet of explosive, he had not headed across the parking lot as she had calculated but went to the roof, where his helicopter and pilot waited. This had bought her the extra minute while the engine warmed. She wondered what he had thought, hovering above the city skyline, when East Sixth did not turn into a giant fireball. Unlike Leo, he resisted the urge to come back and try again. He had disappeared into a cloak of connections and bribery and no one in the world had yet admitted to catching even a glimpse of Lambert, his helicopter or his pilot. Theresa said, ‘He’s got to turn up somewhere. The IPO might have been a disappointment but Lambert’s still filthy rich, a genius and a sociopath. A man like that can’t hide for long. His ever-ballooning ego will float him to the surface.’

  ‘Let’s just hope it’s in a country that extradites.’

  She set the iron aside, removed the gauze and pulled the sweatshirt from the photographic paper. A cloud of orange mist and dots filled its center. The clerk had been shot at nearly point-blank range for whatever had been in the cash register. When it came to motive, size didn’t matter. ‘Has Leo said anything?’

  ‘Not a word. Admits nothing, denies nothing. Hard to believe that your boss knew Lambert all these years and never let on.’

  ‘Everyone had a reason to keep their college days hidden. And Leo never wanted fame like Lambert did. He just wanted complete rule in his one little corner of the world. This lab is his life. Was.’

  ‘It’s yours, too.’

  ‘No, I have a mother and a daughter and you, I have friends, I go on vacation. Leo had nothing. There are jobs where running a meth lab in your college years would not get you fired, could be brushed off as youthful indiscretions long outgrown. Directing a crime lab is not one of those jobs.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you actually understand him.’

  ‘Not a chance.’

  ‘Good. So after the Bingham explosion, Lambert must have asked Leo to look out for their mutual interests. Leo couldn’t do much at first with Homeland Security getting their noses in everything, but then you stumbled on the college meth lab explosion and his former classmates, Lily and Ken Bilecki.’

  ‘I got them killed,’ Theresa said, ‘and all because I had a crush on David Madison.’

  ‘No. They were killed because Lambert’s Porsche had a bad brake light. But hey, look at it this way.’

  She watched him, waited.

  ‘The supervisor slot just opened up.’

  NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I require his help for just about every book I write, but I definitely could not have written this one without the assistance of my former CSU chemistry teacher, Dr Andrew Wolfe. It’s a wonder that our emails have not come to the attention of appropriate government agencies. At least, not that I know of.

  That said, anyone who tried to actually concoct methamphetamine from the descriptions in this book is doomed to disappointment. I got all the original information via my great good friend Google – and then left a few things out.

  I’d also like to thank my equally brilliant cousin’s son Tommy, who tried to explain to me how electric cars work. My husband Russ is always available for a quick question or two or three.

  And of course my terrific agent Vicky Bijur, as well as everyone at Severn House. They are true professionals.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Reding, Nick. Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town. NY: Bloomsbury, 2009

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bsp; Lafave, Owen and Bill Simon. Gorgeous Disaster: The Tragic Story of Debra Lafave. LA: Phoenix Books, 2006