“Yeah, it got here okay. I’m sorry. There’s no sign of superconductivity at room temperature. Not even at zero Celsius. I can check it out at cryogenic temperatures, but that’ll take some time. The magnetic susceptometer is scheduled by some guys from P Division, and I don’t have much pull with them.”
Parris wanted to grind his teeth. “Are you absolutely certain? I mean it looks exactly like the stuff the university is hyping.”
Proctor seemed to be taking the results with his usual upbeat attitude. “Maybe the university’s stuff is junk, too. Or maybe…”
“Maybe what?”
“New superconductors,” Proctor said, “are like delicate new blossoms. They’re fragile, easily bruised. That’s because we don’t yet know the best way to put them together. Get them wet, expose them to a bit of acid, like the fluids in the esophagus, and whammo, they’re dead. But there’s still hope.”
“Tell me about it before I fall into a deep depression.”
“I tested the entire sample, as a bulk unit. What I didn’t do was break it open, find an internal grain that may not have been exposed to gastric juices. When I do, who knows what I’ll find?”
Parris was unconsciously twisting the telephone cord around his fingers. “I’m not sure I can authorize you to break the thing. It’s evidence and…”
Proctor ignored this negative comment. “And maybe the best part of all, even if the disk is completely dead, we can still analyze its chemistry, find out what the ingredients were for the Song girl’s recipe. Give me a few days, I’ll know exactly what it’s made of.”
“It’s not only a matter of evidence. The thing belongs to Priscilla’s estate, and she left everything to the Thorpe kid.”
“Relax. I promise to take good care of it.”
Clara Tavishuts dropped a note on his desk. “Hold on, Proctor, I’ve got another call.” He pressed the HOLD, then the 7 button. “Parris here. That you, Thorpe?”
“It’s me. Been trying to get in touch with you since breakfast. I heard about the news conference at RMP. Who is this guy … the one who won’t go public about his superconductor discovery?”
“I can’t help you on that one.”
“It’s got to be Priscilla’s adviser,” Buster said, “it’s that guy Thomson.”
“Whoever it is, I expect he’ll make an announcement when it suits his purposes. Could happen any day now.”
“Remember the ring Pris sent for my birthday?”
“I remember. Real nice. Turquoise, wasn’t it?”
“I think it may be important.”
Without warning, something stirred deep in Parris’s subconscious. A ring? A dream. Priscilla Song, wearing a yellow dress. Also wearing a ring too big for her small finger, a ring on her thumb. A man’s ring? “So,” Parris urged, “what about this ring? Why do you think it’s important?”
“Well, when I saw a picture of the superconductor-thingamajig in a news magazine, I thought it looked kinda familiar. Then I remembered. The ring Pris sent has the turquoise set in some kind of black rock.”
“A black rock?” Parris could feel his pulse racing.
“It’s a funny-looking stone, sort of dark gray, with lots of little holes like Swiss cheese. I thought it was some kind of lava stone. Wondered why Pris would have the jeweler use something in the ring that was … well, kind of ugly. Wasn’t like her. Thing is, it’s a dead ringer for that superconductor rock in the magazine picture.”
“How soon can you get the ring to my office?”
“See you in the morning, if the creek don’t rise.”
“Ford the damn creek—just bring it here,” Parris said. He got Proctor back on the line. “This,” he said, “you won’t believe.”
* * *
The cowboy eased his muddy pickup into a No Parking zone directly in front of the Granite Creek Police Station and glared darkly at the motorcycle cop, who started to say something and thought better of it. Buster Thorpe was in no mood for nonsense; the policeman sensed this and roared away in search of less belligerent prey.
Thorpe was ushered into Parris’s office, where he greeted Anne Foster shyly and was introduced to Otto Proctor. “I brought something else,” Buster said. “Came in the mail after I talked to you yesterday. It’s postmarked the day she died.” Parris accepted the package and unwrapped a bound notebook. “Why did it take so long to get to you?”
Buster grinned. “Pris was careful with money. She sent it book rate.”
Proctor wrenched the book from Parris and began examining the last few pages. “This is the icing on the cake,” he said. “It’s her lab notebook. Everything is here.”
Buster produced the ring from his jacket pocket and offered it to Proctor, who grabbed it as if he was after the gold ring off the carousel. The scientist twisted a magnifier into his eye socket and squinted at the dark stone under the turquoise. “Somebody have a pocketknife?”
Buster produced a wicked-looking stock knife from his pocket. Without asking anyone’s permission, Proctor pried the turquoise from its setting and dropped it unceremoniously on Parris’s desk. Compared to what he was interested in, turquoise might as well be gravel.
Proctor looked up at Anne. “I brought along a magnet, just in case, but your main squeeze here”—he gestured toward Parris—“insisted you should have the honors. You got the dog?”
This brought a puzzled expression from the cowboy. Anne removed a small black plastic Scottie from her purse and gave it to the scientist. It was mounted on a magnet. “I hope there’s a big story here,” she said. “I’ve had that puppy since I was a little girl.”
“That,” Proctor said with a sly wink, “could not have been so long ago. He used Buster’s pocketknife to cut the plastic dog from the inch-long bar magnet. “Give me the pliers.”
Parris handed the scientist a pair of heavy long-nose pliers. Proctor deftly snapped a small segment off the magnet, then crushed this into tiny fragments. He pushed the ring onto his finger. It was loose. Proctor rotated the ornament so the dark stone was on the palm side of his finger. It was a miniature tabletop of pockmarked ceramic.
He grasped a tiny fragment of the broken magnet with a pair of eyebrow tweezers and smiled as he observed his rapt audience. “Well, this is the acid test. Everybody ready? Don’t get your hopes up.”
His answer was a tense silence. Anne had her hands clasped prayerfully. Parris put his arm around her waist. Buster Thorpe pulled nervously at his mustache.
Proctor moved the tweezers to a location that positioned the tiny Inconel fragment directly over the setting in the ring. When it was dead center, he released the miniature magnet. It fell, wobbled, then floated over the dark ceramic as if suspended by an invisible thread. Parris remembered Daisy Perika’s vision. One of the black disks had floated over the water.
Otto Proctor breathed deeply. A tear rolled down his cheek. He waited until the tightness in his throat relaxed, until he was able to speak. “Behold,” he said reverently, “the Holy Grail.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Again, Julio trembled, but now he knew why. Though they were still far away, he could hear their voices. There was a low, mournful baying as the floppy-eared demons surged through the underbrush, following the scent of his blood. Julio counted the bullets he had left; it was not enough to face the dogs. He knew what must be done. The Mexican limped down a spruce-covered slope to the edge of a rocky cliff, then skirted its edge until he found precisely the right spot. Pacheco knelt, held one palm over his bleeding wound, and whispered his final prayers to God and to the saints. He offered his thanks for a life that had been good, a man’s life. He offered no apologies to the saints for his multitudinous sins, but he did mention his genuine appreciation that his life would not end in a Yanquí jail, or, even worse, as his body was torn apart by a pack of hounds. He removed his meager possessions from his pockets and placed them on the pine needles under the giant ponderosa that hung over the edge of the precipice. The dogs were now drawing close, and the excited pi
tch of their call revealed that they knew this.
Julio gathered his last reserve of strength. He stepped to the edge of the overhang, spread his arms, and hurled himself into space. As he lost all sense of gravity, he heard a terrified shriek. It was his own voice.
* * *
Leggett and a state police sergeant had followed the tireless man who owned the bloodhounds. Now they sat under a huge pine that spread its branches over the precipice and considered the neatly stacked assortment of artifacts of Julio Pacheco’s life: Slocum’s revolver, three .357 Magnum slugs, a red bandanna, a half-used package of mentholated cigarettes, and a wrinkled photograph of an aged woman they assumed was Pacheco’s mother. The animals were confused; the Mexican’s scent ended somewhere in the spruce thicket along the edge of the cliff over Badger Creek. The bloodhound man gathered his animals, fed them chunks of rank-smelling horse meat, and shook his frizzled gray head with wonder. “Damned if’ n I can tell you what happened, fellers. I expect we’ve been over every inch of the terrain from here to yonder an’ back agin. A bleedin’ man can’t hide his smell from my dogs, and he ain’t nowheres over that cliff. Looks like that Mexican bird just flapped his wings and flew away from here.”
* * *
Fifteen hundred miles away in Tuxtepec, Prudencia Pacheco abruptly raised her face; the prayer book slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor. The woman was wiping tears away when she spoke to her husband. “It is Julio. I have just seen our son.”
“So you have seen him,” her husband answered acidly. “How is my prodigal son? Is he in trouble again? In jail?”
Prudencia’s hands trembled as she kissed her rosary. “He is in a tree. My little Julio hangs in the branches of a great tree.”
* * *
She had tried to call Parris, but he was not in and her calls were not returned. Anne couldn’t wait to publish. The information from her contacts on campus was compelling. First, Thomson had not been seen for days. Moreover, her contact in Public Relations confirmed the report that the announcement of the identity of the mystery scientist was being put off indefinitely. A news release was being prepared for the media, and the essence of this missive was read over the telephone in a whisper:
Unexpected complications regarding the contract between Rocky Mountain Polytechnic and the inventor of the new superconductor have placed the university in a position where absolutely no public statements will be made until further notice. We regret this course of action, but are compelled by legal necessity …
Anne’s antennae were up. The other journalists were not idiots. Some of them had been snooping around for weeks, asking embarrassing questions. Who knew what they, with their considerable resources, might have already uncovered on Thomson? If she didn’t file a story within hours, she could be scooped by the out-of-town crowd. Her once-in-a-lifetime chance would be gone. She called her editor, and he concurred. Only one guideline, he insisted—name no names. The Adviser was a small daily with insurance that would poop out if a judgment was over 2 million bucks; one successful slander lawsuit could put them out of business permanently. It would make the story more difficult, but she had no alternative. She could walk the tightrope. Anne would refer to Thomson as “an RMP professor acquainted with the murdered girl.”
The special edition of the Granite Creek Adviser appeared late on a Saturday afternoon. It was a sensation. The wire services picked up the story an hour before the paper would hit the streets. CBS News executives preempted three minutes of Charles Kuralt’s show “Sunday Morning,” squeezing the segment on a young jazz pianist from St. Louis. Kuralt protested this meddling until he read a synopsis on the piece from Granite Creek.
* * *
The physicist was using a friend’s cabin in the mountains. Following a light breakfast of toast and coffee, he switched on the television at precisely eight o’clock. “Sunday Morning” began in the usual fashion, with announcements of a string of interesting feature stories to follow the news. Charles Kuralt then announced, somewhat somberly, the physicist thought, that there would be a special presentation about a late-breaking story related to the “reported discovery of a room-temperature superconductor in Colorado.” But first the news.
The physicist drummed his fingers on the table while he watched the five-minute litany of new outrages in the Gaza Strip, continuing starvation in the Sudan, and the assassination of a Ukrainian parliamentarian. None of this was of the least interest to him.
Immediately after the postnews commercials, Kuralt was perched on a wooden stool in front of a large visual that asked: “Who is the Real Inventor?” The affable commentator turned to a thin, pale colleague. “Fred, what’s this we hear about a potential scandal in the unfolding story about the discovery of a room-temperature superconductor?”
The pale man looked as if he had been up all night. “Well, Charles, that’s exactly what seems to be happening. The story broke late yesterday evening, with a report on the wires from a newspaper journalist in Granite Creek, Colorado. You’ll remember that’s the picturesque village in the Rocky Mountains where the mystery scientist had been proclaimed to be the sole discoverer of a room-temperature superconductor that will revolutionize the way we live. The reporter who filed this startling story, Anne Foster, is standing by at our affiliate in Denver.”
The CBS journalists turned to view an oversized television screen that projected an image of Anne Foster. Kuralt smiled congenially. “Good morning, Ms. Foster, and thank you for getting up so early to appear on ‘Sunday Morning.’”
ANNE: “You’re quite welcome, Charles. I’m pleased to be here.”
KURALT: “Your report, which will appear in today’s newspapers, is quite a sensation. Could you tell us, briefly, what the facts are behind the story you filed?”
Anne was nervously twisting the rose-quartz pendant. “Certainly. Only a few weeks ago, Priscilla Song, a graduate student at Rocky Mountain Polytechnic, was brutally murdered. There is evidence that her scientific research may have been stolen following the murder.”
Anne’s face was briefly replaced by a black-and-white image of Priscilla.
KURALT: “And the subject of her research was…?”
ANNE: “Superconductivity.”
KURALT: “And was she successful in this research?”
ANNE: “She developed a room-temperature superconductor.”
KURALT: “That is … astounding. Are you certain?”
ANNE: “I’ve seen the samples myself. They have been tested and verified by an expert from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.”
KURALT: “This graduate student … tell us … what was her connection with the anonymous scientist, the person who the university represents as the sole discoverer of this remarkable new superconductor?”
ANNE: “This so-called mystery scientist was a close associate of Priscilla Song.”
Kuralt smiled at Anne’s image. “I believe you know the identity of this shy academic. Why don’t you share that information with us?”
Anne laughed and flashed her dazzling smile. “I’d love to, but not just yet. When the time is right, you’ll be the first to know.”
* * *
The physicist felt that he was barely connected to his body. As he watched the talking heads, he felt oddly distant, a mere observer of a catastrophe.
PALE MAN: “We understand that the mystery scientist has evidently applied for a patent.”
ANNE: “That patent application will undoubtedly be the subject of vigorous litigation.”
KURALT: “Apparently, a dispute will develop about who actually invented the superconductor, but it’s for the courts rather than journalists to decide on that issue. We’re interested in a more immediate question. The wire reports on your story suggest that the student’s death may have been related to her research. Will you comment on that?”
ANNE: “Understand that I’m making no charges of any kind, just reporting verifiable facts. Priscilla Song left two samples of the room-temperature s
uperconductor behind. She swallowed one; it was recently recovered from her body by the county medical examiner. The chief of police believes that the victim swallowed the sample to keep it from her murderer.” This brought raised eyebrows from Kuralt. “The second sample was sent to a close friend for safekeeping and has now been recovered.”
KURALT: “We’ll certainly be following this fast-breaking story. Thank you for being with us this morning.”
Kuralt turned on his stool to observe the pale man with a quizzical look. “What do you think, Fred? A tempest in a teapot, or is something serious brewing here?”
Fred smelled a great story. “Anne Foster isn’t that well known, but she has a reputation for being a solid, reliable journalist. CBS has used her reports before; she was instrumental in uncovering that big real estate scandal near Colorado Springs last summer. The newspaper that employs this reporter stands behind her story. I think we’ll hear a lot more about this before it’s finished.”
The scene broke to a commercial describing laptop computers.
* * *
Parris stopped at the Corner Drug Store and bought a copy of the Denver Post. He groaned audibly as he saw the headline:
RMP MYSTERY SCIENTIST IMPLICATED IN COED SLAYING?
It was Anne’s story. Several phrases jumped out:
… student gave boyfriend sample of superconductor … swallowed another sample during death-struggle …
… Los Alamos scientist verifies sample superconducts at room temperature …
… DA has no immediate comment …
… Ute woman assisted local police in investigation …
He had expected a conservative report, one that dealt with the issue of who had invented the room-temperature superconductor. He had not dreamed that Anne would reveal virtually everything she knew, or thought she knew, about Priscilla’s murder. He was grateful for one blessing. Anne had not mentioned Waldo Thomson’s name.
Parris drove to Anne’s home; he found a note taped to the front door:
Sorry, Scott. It’s 4:00 A.M., didn’t want to wake you. Called into Denver for CBS interview. If you see this in time, catch me chatting with Charles Kuralt at 8:00 A.M! Don’t worry about missing the show; I’ve set the VCR to tape it.
The Shaman Sings (Charlie Moon Mysteries) Page 18