Red Herring

by Archer Mayor

“Understood,” Marine agreed, adding, “Which brings up another route I’m hoping to follow. We have a synchrotron light source at BNL, capable of extraordinary things, and with the additional advantage that it doesn’t alter or destroy samples. So, once we’re done, and you find reason to either preserve the evidence or use it for more tests, it’ll be available. The same’s not true for the drops of blood, though. You do understand that?”

  “Yes,” Hawke told him, “but it doesn’t matter. The three samples are large enough that you’ll have plenty to test and have some left over. We can live with that.”

  “I hate to sound stupid here,” Joe volunteered, “which was bound to happen sooner than later, but what is a synchrotron?”

  Marine laughed. “Good question. Not stupid at all. Let me explain it this way: If you’re about to read something small, and the failing daylight isn’t quite enough, you turn on a lamp and put on your reading glasses. Not only does the page brighten up, but the words seem to jump out at you.”

  “Okay,” Joe encouraged him.

  “Well, the synchrotron is a pinpoint light source,” Marine continued. “But of a brightness to rival the sun’s, and we use it to produce X-rays, ultraviolet light, and infrared rays to study things at their atomic level in all sorts of different ways. It’s the ultimate reading lamp for objects down to a billionth of a meter small. As a result, it can allow us to see all the various components that constitute a sample. That’s where the reading light metaphor falls apart, naturally, since now we’re talking about characteristics unique to a specific sample, which is more like a fingerprint, no?”

  He looked at Joe happily, content that his explanation had been like the light itself. But David knew to add a bit more.

  “Remember Beverly’s idea that something might have come off the knife and been deposited along the edges of the cut in Doreen’s nightgown?” he asked. “That’s way beyond what I can do here at the lab, but the synchrotron would be like a flashlight in a dark cave, as Eric was saying. It could give us trace evidence at the atomic level, if there is any, which might help us identify what environment that knife had been exposed to earlier. Plus,” he added, “if he runs the electrical cord through the light source before he runs any DNA tests, the fact that the synchrotron leaves everything intact means we virtually get a free sweatprint test thrown in.”

  Marine picked up on Hawke’s educational tone. “Sweatprints are a perfect application of the light source, since they represent the minerals and other compounds that adhere microscopically to a person’s skin, and are often left behind when something is touched. That’s in addition to any DNA that might be there, too—what we were calling touch-DNA—even in the absence of an actual fingerprint.”

  “And you have access to this light source?” Joe asked.

  Marine gave him a wink. “That’s the beauty of how we do things down there. It’s more like a college than a lab. That can mean jealousies and rivalries and cliques, of course. We’ve earned seven Nobels, after all; the stakes are high. But by the same token, there is the kind of collegiality, collaboration, and friendship that overrides all that, and allows for much work that often stays off the radar. Of course, it depends on the device—there’s not much leeway using the ion collider, for example; people are on that to discover the source of the universe. Best not to mess with them. But the light source has some sixty-eight beams to work from, and more researchers using it than anything else on campus. People slip in quick projects all the time with a wink and a nod. Besides, one of our missions is improved national security. This kind of fits that bill, not to mention that forensic applications are begging to be better explored with the synchrotron—it’s a journal article in the making, easy. I can make this work all sorts of ways. Don’t give it a thought.”

  In the ensuing moment of silence, Joe and David glanced at each other.

  “Sounds good to me,” Joe said.

  David nodded and addressed Eric. “You got a deal, assuming the SA approves. I’ll wrap everything up, including my control samples, and sign them over to Joe or whoever he designates, and we’ll see you in a few days. Is that timing okay?”

  Marine was all smiles. “From what I understand, gentlemen, we have a murderer to catch. Of course it’s okay.”

  . . .

  “A synchoron?” Willy spat out. “Sounds perfect for something stupid.”

  “Synchrotron,” Sam corrected him. “And you’re just pissed because a machine might do something better than we can.”

  Willy tilted his seat back and put his feet up on his desk. “I still think it’s a common link, like with McNaughton. Maybe we missed with Michele Starr, because she didn’t know if Doreen and Chuck knew each other at the academy. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t.”

  “What’re you thinking about?” Joe asked from his favorite spot on the windowsill.

  “It’s always sex or money,” Willy answered him. “No matter how you slice it. And for all we know, it’s both here, since McNaughton is no pauper and definitely no saint. I think Doreen knew something and I think that’s why she died. Maybe she and Mary Fish and young Chuck were all in the same place at the same time years ago by pure coincidence, but I’m not a big fan of coincidence—something happened back then.”

  “What about Bob Clarke?” Lester asked.

  “I don’t know,” Willy conceded. “Could be he’s there to throw us off. You know, the classic scam: Toss a bomb onto a bus because you’re really pissed at a single passenger. The cops can never figure it out—was it a terrorist? Were any of the victims connected? Blah, blah, blah. Bob’s a smoke screen.”

  The silence in the room stood in for the general skepticism.

  “Lester,” Joe asked, “you’ve been digging into Doreen’s background. What do you think?”

  “So far,” Spinney answered cautiously, “I think we have a woman with a nightmare childhood who cut her losses, made some life choices, and focused on living in a comfortable, sex-free, financially rewarding rut. She reminds me of a shell-shocked soldier, happy to spend the rest of the war with her head down in a trench.”

  “Yeah,” said Willy, “except how she ended up is exactly how she started—raped. That tells me her killer knew her better than you do.”

  “What else did the killer know?” Joe asked generally.

  “How Bob Clarke’s grandfather died,” Sammie suggested.

  “That’s interesting,” Joe said, thinking back. “Because it’s not clear that he knew much about Mary Fish. Elise told me that no one in Mary’s family had ever hanged themselves; it seemed like both of them came from pretty normal upbringings.”

  “Except that they were gay,” Willy pointed out, “and Dory was asexual. What was Bob’s orientation?”

  Joe shook his head. “Good question. I don’t know. That’s part of what we need to find out.”

  He slipped off his perch and stood before them. “Look, it’s just a matter of time before the story breaks on these three cases and we’re swamped with reporters and politicians cashing in. I have no clue if this synchrotron or Eric Marine’s high-end DNA work is going to produce anything usable, but Willy’s right in a way. We can’t abandon what we know how to do. Lester, are you pretty happy that you’ve dug deep enough into Doreen?”

  Lester looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know where else to look, boss, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t miss something.”

  “Fair enough. Still, you’re at a point where you can be interrupted. I want you with me when I escort Hawke’s samples down to Long Island. I have no idea how Brookhaven is laid out or how we’ll maintain custody of this stuff, so more’s the merrier, at least to begin. Sam and Willy? Bob Clarke’s the name of the game, first and foremost. He’s the latest case; we need to bring him up to snuff. One advantage we have is that whoever is killing these folks likes to show off. We never finished that line of thought, by the way, the one about what the killer knows.”

  “He can get hold of blood,” Willy volunteered. />
  “And it’s blood with anticoagulant,” Sam added.

  “What else?”

  “That implies a hospital or clinic or something involving medicine,” said Lester, whose wife was a nurse. “Any fool can get hold of a syringe and suck somebody’s vein, but only in a medical setting do you have vacuum tubes with anticoagulant. That’s how they store it before the lab gets it.”

  “Maybe a blood bank?” Willy suggested.

  “Maybe,” Joe agreed. “Find the person who knows all three victims, knows the histories of two out of three of them at least, and who works at or has access to a medical facility, which might also have a blood bank.”

  “And who lives in the southeast corner of the state,” Sam added. “That’s where the murders all happened.”

  “Okay,” Joe agreed. “Fine. I know we’re making presumptions, but we have to start somewhere. And by the way, while Lester and I are in the Land of the Geeks, for however long that takes, don’t be shy about pulling in extra manpower from the other units. We are not alone, and we shouldn’t act like it when there’s so much at stake.”

  “Do we get to pick who we play with?” Willy pointedly asked.

  Sammie groaned from her corner of the room.

  Joe laughed. “You get to suggest. I get to pick.”

  “No fun, Dad,” Willy complained.

  Joe grimaced. “Don’t even go there.”

  “Long Island?” Lyn said, her eyebrows arched. “That’s where they have all the mansions.”

  “You’re thinking of Rhode Island,” Joe told her.

  “The hell I am. The North Shore? The Gold Coast? Playground of the Vanderbilts? Orson Welles used one of those palaces in Citizen Kane.”

  Joe leaned back to study her more closely. They were in bed, comfortably entangled, with the TV on mute on the dresser across the room.

  “How do you know that?” he asked her.

  She pressed the back of her hand theatrically across her forehead. “I am but a cipher. He clearly cares not. Perhaps I shall return to Tara.”

  He poked her in the armpit, making her quickly ball up in self-defense.

  “I was a movie nut growing up,” she admitted from under the sheet.

  He ducked under the covers to see her face, now curtained with a hank of long hair. “I had no idea,” he said. “You never said. We should rent some.”

  “Oh, yeah—I was just too busy setting up the business until now,” she said. “So where is this place?”

  “I looked it up. It’s actually pretty neat. It was an army base in both world wars, converted to a lab in the forties. It’s kind of a science camp on steroids—thousands of lab rats, billions of dollars worth of equipment. It’s got its own zip code, it’s so big—in Upton, New York. People visit it from everywhere to study all sorts of things: how to make a better mammogram, what space dust is made of, what the AIDS virus looks like.”

  She swept the hair away from her eyes. “And you’re going there why?”

  “We’re hoping they can run some tests our crime lab can’t,” he said simply.

  “How long’s that going to take?”

  “Honestly? I don’t know. The scientist helping us seemed to think pretty fast, but I’m bringing Lester with me just in case something goes wrong or I have to leave early.”

  She slid up closer to him and laid her hand on his bare chest. “You’re talking days.”

  He kissed her. “No doubt. I wish I could bring you with me.”

  She smiled. “Is this where I tell you I’ll do something unspeakable so you won’t forget me?”

  “Sure,” he said hopefully.

  She held the smile a few seconds and then killed it. “Well, forget about it.”

  He tried to read her expression. “Really?”

  She slid her hand lower and laughed. “Naah.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Willy paused on the third-floor landing of the building’s wooden fire escape, watching and listening for any movement besides his own. He was on South Main Street, in Brattleboro. It was both late and frigid enough for even the night’s oddest denizens to be falling asleep. And he was about to break and enter.

  He was poised outside Susan Allgood’s dark and quiet apartment, paying little attention to the cold biting into his exposed skin. There were a few lights on behind a window here or there, a couple of otherworldly glows from television sets, but no shadows moving, and no sounds aside from the distant rumble of an unseen vehicle, or the occasional clang that punctuates every urban setting like a fitful heartbeat.

  He knew where Sue was, or had been fifteen minutes earlier, when he’d monitored her inebriation at the local bar. She’d been alone then, and he doubted she would have picked anyone up in the meantime.

  Plus, he knew that she valued her relationship with Chuck McNaughton enough not to mess it up with a one-night stand. And while she may have been a little buzzed right now, she wasn’t drunk. Willy was confident of all this. He’d been watching her for several days, studying her as a zoologist might a collectible specimen.

  He reached under his parka and extracted the switchblade he always kept clipped to his waistband. It had a long, thin, nasty-looking blade that he honed regularly on a strop at home. He rationalized carrying it—and a backup gun and another knife and a set of brass knuckles his boss knew nothing about—on the basis that a one-armed man had to compensate to stay even with the pack. But long before he’d lost the use of his arm to a bullet, back during his days with the Brattleboro PD, he’d carried the same hardware—along with the paranoia demanding it.

  He worked the blade up under the window’s sash and made contact with the lock. Typically, it wasn’t even set, allowing him next to pry open the lower frame and open the window enough to where he could swing his leg inside.

  He’d been here once before—legitimately—when he’d first met Sue to ask about Chuck McNaughton. That conversation had actually begun in the same bar and continued here, where he’d finally let himself out after she’d fallen asleep on the couch in a drunken stupor.

  He might have sympathized, given his own alcoholic history, but compassion was not an overused tool in Willy’s box of instincts, and he’d merely left feeling contemptuous of her, McNaughton, and even of Chuck’s wife, who Sue was convinced knew all about them, but ignored it for the comforts of his healthy income.

  Breathing in the warmth of the dingy apartment, Willy quietly closed the window, opened his coat, and settled into an armchair facing the front door.

  No one knew he was here, including Sam. The two of them were supposed to be digging into young Bobby Clarke, figuring out how he tied into the other two bodies in this nonsensical mess, all while Saint Joe went bugging a bunch of nerds with a few blobs of blood. Ridiculous. McNaughton was the bad boy who’d employed Doreen, attended the school where Mary worked, was cheating on his wife, and was supposedly embezzling from his own company. Typical Gunther to get all mental and complicated about a straightforward murder.

  But rocket surgery this wasn’t. Or whatever. McNaughton was dirty, and Willy was going to prove it.

  It didn’t take long. The scratch of a key at the lock and a fumbled-with doorknob alerted him to her arrival; the quiet implied that she hadn’t gotten lucky at collecting a last-minute companion.

  She entered slowly, dragging her feet, and closed the door behind her without turning on the light. From the glow through the window behind him, Willy saw her cross to the kitchenette counter, dump her purse and gloves, and slip her coat off her shoulders, letting it collapse in a pile on the floor. She then perched on one of the stools by the counter and struggled to remove her high, patent-leather boots, sighing deeply as she did so.

  “Don’t keep going,” he cautioned her as she dropped the last boot and seemed about ready to lift her tight-fitting sweater up over her head.

  She screamed, straightened with a jerk, and tilted backward off the stool, barely catching herself on the counter’s edge.

&nb
sp; “Who the fuck’s there?” she demanded, fear thick in her throat.

  Willy turned on the dim lamp by his side, revealing himself.

  She shielded her eyes.

  “Hi,” he said. “Remember me?”

  The scowl answered first. “You fucking asshole. You almost gave me a heart attack. You can’t be in here. That’s not legal.”

  He smiled. “And yet, here I am.”

  She shook her head. “No, seriously. This isn’t right. It’s a crime. I could call the cops. The real ones.”

  “Cool,” he said. “We could compare my crime to yours; see who they find more interesting.”

  Her response was telling. “What do you know about me?”

  But he made a disapproving face. “That’s not how this works, Sue.” He pointed to a phone mounted on the wall near her. “There it is, if you want to call.”

  She straightened and smoothed the front of her sweater, hoping to regain some composure. “Why’re you here, anyway? I told you what I know last time.”

  “You told me about Oklahoma. That’s not why I came back.”

  She reached out for her purse, extracted a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, and lit up, pausing to inhale deeply. “So?”

  “So, I like you,” he lied. “I like your spirit. You’re a survivor, like me. Not too proud, but not a sucker, either. You know how to take care of number one.”

  She grimaced and waved a hand around the dingy apartment. “Yeah, a real success story. I have a nose for a bullshitter, too.”

  “That explain your attraction to Chuck?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I’m not your type,” he countered pleasantly. “I am here to help you out, though.”

  “I don’t need help from you.”

  His eyes widened. “Oh, I doubt the state’s attorney would agree.”

  Her expression darkened, the cigarette all but forgotten. “What the hell’s that mean?”

  “You brought it up,” he told her innocently. “When you told me about Chuck dipping into the company well. You know about guilt by association, right?”