by Jamie Metzl
The images are a bit grainy and taken from ceiling cameras obviously some distance from the targets. The background is entirely nondescript; just the floor behind them. But neither of the figures looks like the old men I’d seen in their recent photos. Occam be damned—my mind begins to race.
“Hart was in his eighties and Wolfson in his late seventies, yes?” Maurice says.
I nod but am drawn closer and closer to the photographs. I frantically sort through my conversation with Dr. Heller earlier today, see the majestic jellyfish morphing. “This isn’t strange enough to inspire you guys to do more?”
Maurice looks at me apologetically. “I’m not saying there isn’t something here, only that our overburdened department doesn’t have the resources to follow up on every strange occurrence. That’s why I’m here, Rich. You asked me to help, and I’ve helped. I’m telling you what I’ve found.”
“That’s it? Case closed?”
“Of course not. But we’re not sending inspectors to the south Atlantic. We’re having a hard enough time staying on top of things here at home.”
“Can you transfer those photographs to me?”
Maurice looks agitated. “I’m not even supposed to be showing you the damned things.”
I widen my eyes.
He shakes his head before dictating the transfer from his u.D to mine. It’s probably as close to intimacy as Maurice gets.
“One more thing, Maurice,” I say.
“Dammit, Rich—”
“If there’s anything you can do to get the Tobago police to look into this a little bit more …”
Maurice stares at me. It’s clearly time for me to go back to my car. I’m burning to speak to Heller again, but there’s something I need to do beforehand.
18
I feel jittery waiting for Katherine Hart to come to her door. I’d called to tell her I was on my way and still don’t know exactly how I’m going to play this as she ushers me in.
“How are you doing, Dr. Hart?” I ask, not wanting to rush to the purpose of my visit as much as my pounding heart demands.
“I’m still here,” she says somberly, “and this is the last time I’m going to tell you. It’s Katherine.”
Her entreaty is so warm it somehow startles me for a moment.
“Have you found anything?” she asks quietly.
I feel the sweat pooling on my palms. “Do you mind if I show you a photograph?”
Her body stiffens as I tap my u.D.
As I transfer to her screen, a look of wonder crosses Katherine Hart’s face.
“Do you recognize the photo?”
“Not the photo. I’ve never seen it before. It must be very old. Where did you find this?”
I feel a strong urge to tell her about Tobago and Noam Heller but hold myself back. I have a few theories in my head and most of them could only be described as insane. Science has been advancing exponentially for decades, but people are still not jellyfish. The thought of violating her peace with so little information seems unforgivably cruel. “I came across it in my poking around. Do you recognize the person?”
She looks at me like I’m a fool. “Of course I do.” A distant smile momentarily surfaces through her grief. “Ben must have been about forty then. Somehow getting a little piece of him like this helps keep him alive for me.”
I look at her, forcing myself to stay composed. Blood surges through my veins as I promise Katherine Hart I’ll keep looking. I excuse myself, feeling guilty that I’m withholding from her. But I know to my core I’d need a lot more information before jumping to implausible conclusions that could turn Katherine Hart’s world upside down.
I crave answers and there’s only one person I can think of who may be able to shed some light.
I take the Tesla off of autodrive so I can speed the old-fashioned way toward Heller Labs, calling Joel Glass and sending him a copy of the photo along the way. He calls me back ten minutes later. Mrs. Wolfson, not surprisingly, recognized the person in the photo but didn’t remember seeing it before.
The Heller Labs warehouse still looks abandoned as I pull up to its front door, but this time I know better. I honk my horn loudly three times then walk around the building, bang on the back door, and wait.
Nothing.
I do another loop, slapping my palms on the metal grates covering the windows.
Nothing.
I go back to the front door and bang again. The cold metal is thick and imposing. Placing my ear to the door, I can almost perceive the faint sounds of growling and barking.
I bang harder. “Sebastian,” I yell. The volume of the barking goes up a notch. I don’t know much about dogs, but this seems like a more agitated Sebastian than I’d been with earlier today.
But barking, I remind myself, channeling my inner Occam, is what a dog does. What if Heller just doesn’t want to see me? Or maybe he’s just gone out for a walk or, for all I know, a taxi’s come to take him somewhere else. I hardly ever leave this place, Heller had said. I walk toward the river and scan the horizon. No Heller.
I calm myself, get back in my car, and settle in to wait.
As the sun slowly settles over the bending Missouri River, I start to get nervous. Yes, I reason, Dr. Heller might just be taking the afternoon off or he might be at a conference or doctor’s appointment, but somehow I had the feeling when we left the lab early this morning that he was going to stay there for a very long time doing his work. And doesn’t he eventually need to walk Sebastian?
I wait an hour more and still nothing.
I bang on the door again and still hear Sebastian’s faint barking and growling. Is he responding to my banging or is something else going on? I have no idea, but something doesn’t feel right. Shards of our earlier conversation begin bubbling up in my mind. Revolutionary science can transform the world but it often brings danger. … We all live on borrowed time. … If something should ever happen to me. …
I know I’m being histrionic, but with all the strange occurrences of the past couple of days, I’m already on edge. I keep imagining I’ll see Heller coming back from the river after a long walk. I picture myself approaching him like I did yesterday evening. Dr. Livingstone, I presume?
My body receives the message from somewhere inside a moment before my conscious mind. What had Heller said when I’d approached him? “So this is it?” I say aloud.
This is what? He had no idea who I was, but something about my sudden arrival frightened him. This is the beginning, the middle? I’m already tapping my u.D as I process the third possibility.
Maurice, staring at me on the monitor after I’ve made my case, is more cautious. “That’s a lot of conjecture, Rich,” he says. “If we had to investigate every fatalistic comment every old person made, this city would grind to a halt.”
“It feels like more than that,” I plead. “We should really have a look.”
“So the guy isn’t there, and the dog is barking. Do you know how many houses we’d be visiting if that’s what constituted probable cause? Do you know how many good explanations there could be that don’t require your dragging me from my family at eight thirty at night?”
“All I ask is that you just drop by here for a few minutes. Heller said he had a lot of work still to do, that he was living on borrowed time. And what else can ‘So this is it’ mean?”
Maurice eyes me suspiciously. “Lots of things.”
“Please. I have a strange feeling.”
“A strange feeling?”
The silence hangs.
“Dammit, Rich,” Maurice says, shaking his head in exasperation. “What’s the address?”
Maurice pulls up thirty minutes later, annoyance permeating his every pore.
I bang on the door for demonstration, then look at Maurice plaintively.
He reads my thought. “It doesn’t work that way. We have procedures. There is a thing called a warrant.”
“Even if you had reason to believe someone could be in danger inside? Wh
at if you knew an older person had fallen in the bathroom and couldn’t get up?”
Maurice knows exactly where I’m going and finally acquiesces to the favor he’s probably come here to do. “Are you telling me you fear the man living in this building has been harmed or that you have reason to believe he is ill and in need of assistance?” he asks without conviction.
I raise my right hand. “I have reason to believe Dr. Heller is ill and in need of assistance.”
Maurice glowers back. “You really are a pain in the ass,” he mutters.
He walks back to his car and takes a small metal box from his trunk. He approaches the door and starts working. It’s a complicated lock and won’t budge. Then he goes back to his car and pulls a crow bar and a large hammer from the trunk. “A damn hunch,” he grumbles as he sets the crow bar in the crack of the door and steadies the hammer.
The fourteenth whack sends the door flying open. I see a terrified Sebastian racing through the small door in the back of the lab as we enter.
Maurice seems as astounded at the sight of the glistening, light-bathed lab as Toni and I were early this morning, but everything is in order. It looks exactly as we left it. The lights are on, the mice are scurrying, the Bach eternal sonata is still playing.
“Hello, Dr. Heller,” I call. “Dr. Heller?”
No response.
“Are we done?” Maurice says, clearly still annoyed.
“Can we just look around a bit?”
“We’re not even supposed to …” Maurice glares. “Five minutes.”
I wander through the lab feeling guilty that I’m violating Dr. Heller’s private space. Even the mice seem to eye me suspiciously.
“What’s in there?” Maurice asks as I open the massive metal door in the back of the lab.
“It’s pretty incredible,” I say, leading him in.
As we pass the second door, my gut processes the sight a millisecond faster than my conscious mind.
Noam Heller’s half-eaten body floats in a penumbra of blue light in the dark, luminescent tank. The spaghetti of hydra tentacles wrap around him as the remnants of his body are slowly devoured.
19
I stand paralyzed before the horrific sight.
Maurice doesn’t have the same problem. He shines his flashlight around the wall until he finds the switch, then flips it, bathing the room in an antiseptic white light. The jellyfish startle subtly from the sudden change but their tentacles remain wrapped around the remnants of Dr. Heller.
“You are not going to eat the rest of this guy,” he orders in his deep bass.
My senses begin to awaken from their shock. Revulsion gurgles up from the depths of my gut.
“HQ, come in,” Maurice barks into his radio.
The radio is silent.
“Base, come in,” he repeats more sharply.
My face is frozen in shock but my recovering mind registers the problem. “This room is cut off from communications networks.”
Maurice pushes out the door. “Base, come in. This is Deputy Chief Henderson. I’m at 1836 Levee Road. I need a squad car and an investigation team here right now. We have a body. Repeat. We have a body.”
“Roger that, DC,” the radio operator responds. “Back up arriving in approximately seven minutes.”
My brain begins to race through the options. Suicide? Murder? I can’t know the answer right now, but my thoughts flip frantically through the growing list of strange occurrences and I feel the desperate need for more information. I push open the door back into the lab and race through.
“Where are you …” Maurice yells, his attention still focused on the body.
I hear the words coming from behind me but don’t stop. The police will be here and the place secured in a matter of minutes. After that, I won’t have access to anything here for weeks, maybe months, maybe forever. There are so many unanswered questions swirling in my head, so many questions pointing somehow at Dr. Heller, that I have to believe there are things to be learned in this vast complex in the few minutes I have.
I push through the white door in the rear of the lab into what appears to be a small surgical ward. The hospital-style bed on rollers stands in the middle surrounded by what looks like some kind of transfusion system, a large helmet connected to a processor by a thick cord, and what seems like a body system regulatory unit of some kind. A well-stocked glass cabinet is filled to the brim with surgical supplies. I race around the room opening all the adjoining doors. One is filled with cleaning supplies. Two others reveal small, simple rooms with beds, IV stands, a couple of monitors, and not much more. I race on.
The fourth door opens into Heller’s living space. The large room looks like a good-sized studio apartment, an exposed kitchen on one side and carefully made bed on the other. One wall is covered with bookshelves. I walk through and open another door on the corner farthest away from the lab. The compact space behind it contains eight stacked processors and a wall transformed into a massive screen. A scroll of letters and numbers flows endlessly across. I can’t imagine I have much time.
“Come on, Jerry,” I say frantically, tapping my u.D to make the call. His voice streams through my earpiece. I have to believe whatever secrets Heller held might somehow be connected to data flowing through these systems.
“I don’t have time to explain,” I say heatedly. “I’m in a server room and I may only have one or two minutes to figure out what’s here. Tell me what I need to do.”
“Um,” Jerry stutters before his voice focuses, “turn on your video feed and give me a tour of the room.”
I tap my u.D and wave my wrist across the room.
“Good,” he says, sensing my nerves and praising me like a small child. “Now take your u.D off your wrist.”
I separate my universal.Device by pulling apart the two data sticks connecting its loop.
“Now look at the bottom left corner of the bottom processor in the stack. Do you see a small data port that matches the inversion plug on your u.D?”
“I do,” I say nervously.
“Plug your u.D in.”
I follow the instruction, my hand shaking.
“You need to leave your u.D plugged in for the next ten minutes or so,” Jerry continues steadily. “Now, do you see a code in front of you on the monitor?”
I look up and don’t see anything. I hear the noise of sirens coming closer. “Shit, Jerry. I don’t.”
“Are you sure?”
“No, I …” A small box pops up stopping me mid-sentence. “It’s here,” I say.
“Good. Read it to me.”
I begin frantically whispering the long stream of numbers and letters. “474bdcx23 …”
“Where the hell are you?” I hear Maurice yelling from Heller’s living quarters. Frantically pushing a chair in front of where my u.D is plugged in, I jump out of the server room to meet him.
“Sorry, Maurice,” I say, calming myself. “I was just looking for the dog.”
“This is a crime scene, dammit. You can’t just be wandering around.”
The sound of the sirens is now deafening.
“I know,” I say apologetically. “Sorry. He’s got to be around here somewhere.”
Maurice takes a step toward me as four police officers come rushing in through the operating room door, pistols drawn.
“Stand down,” Maurice shouts.
Their eyes dart around as they place their pistols back in their holsters.
Maurice takes command. “We need to secure the area and establish the entire building as a crime scene. I want the investigation team here now. The body is in the room with the silver door off of the lab. Get forensics here right away. And we need to find a way to stop those damn jellyfish.”
The officers fan out to secure the building as more police arrive.
“Now I need you to step outside, Rich,” Maurice orders.
I begin to leave Heller’s living quarters but then hear a whimper coming from under the bed. I walk over an
d get down on my hands and knees and see Sebastian, curled in a ball, shaking, and whimpering quietly.
“It’s his dog, Seb—”
“Out,” Maurice orders in a tone not to be questioned.
“But—”
“Out.”
I stand and walk grudgingly out the door, trying to calibrate how much time has lapsed since I left the server room. It’s been minutes, but with all the intense excitement it’s hard for me to calculate how many.
Outside, I circle the building looking for something, anything, that might tell me more as the KCPD arrives in force. My mind whirls with images of Heller from earlier today, interacting with Toni and the dogs beside the river, inviting us into his lab, standing with us before the immortal jellyfish. It doesn’t take my internal Occam to recognize the potential connection between his work, our visit, and his death. I feel the rot in my gut where the thought of Heller being devoured by the jellyfish still resides. Heller and Toni also seemed to have a special connection and I already know how deeply this news will hurt her.
Another police car pulls up. I watch the officer take an empty cage from the back seat and enter the building. I have a good idea what he’s here for and rush over as he exits the building a few minutes later.
“Hi there,” I say. “Can I speak with you a moment?”
I hear Sebastian’s frightened yelp from inside the cage.
“Who are you?” the officer replies.
“Can you tell me where you’re taking the dog?”
“We have a facility,” he replies, stepping past me toward the car.
“Wait.” The word projects more forcefully than I had intended.
It doesn’t stop the officer. “You still haven’t told me who you are, so if you’ll please excuse me …”
I jump over to stand between him and the car. “Before you do that, I just need you to call Deputy Chief Henderson to come out.”
“He’s the one who told me to do this. Now get out of my way, sir,” the officer asserts aggressively.
I don’t move. “Just call Henderson.” I try to project an authority I clearly don’t possess.