by Jamie Metzl
“You really are a pain in the ass, Azadian. This isn’t about you. It’s about the nature of the story.”
“I’m not giving it up.”
“You’ll do what I tell you to do.” She stares at me harshly but then I see her eyes softening in spite of herself. She shakes her head slightly. “The two of you can work on it together.”
23
I know I’m being petty, but I don’t see Sierra in the office, so I bend down and make my way as stealthily as possible toward my cubicle.
Arriving, I find the small, iconic turquoise box on my desk and know intuitively who has secured me a new u.D. I can be rough on him sometimes, even ungrateful, but where would I be without Joseph?
I file the minimal update to my story and sneak out the back door of the newsroom without sending Sierra a message. I’m not exactly feeling like taking the first step in reaching out.
I swing by Toni’s after stopping at the Brookside Barkery for a leash and some dog food. I’m in a foul mood, angry with Martina and unfairly annoyed at the poor, innocent dog, but as I enter the kitchen Sebastian isn’t there.
“Where are you, you little fucker?” I call out. “Dog.” I look around the house. I don’t hear an answer. “Sebastian.”
I find him curled up in a ball in Toni’s closet laundry basket. He is shaking.
I can’t help but feel compassion. “It’s okay, dog,” I say, rubbing his head. “It’s okay, Sebastian.”
Sebastian seems to calm in my presence, which somehow surprises me.
“All right,” I say, “how about we go for a little walk? You can do your thing, I’ll give you some food and some water, then we’re all good.”
He looks up at me, not buying it. It’s hard not to be a little touched.
“Okay,” I say, this time meaning it, “let’s talk. Tell me about your relationship vith your mother.”
I sit down on the floor in Toni’s closet next to the basket. Sebastian jumps into my lap. “Whoa,” I say.
As he burrows into my chest, I put a hand on top of his head and another on his stomach. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. Good doggie. Good Sebastian,” I say, feeling like a bit of an idiot.
After fifteen minutes of this, Sebastian is sufficiently calmed to go for our walk. He lets me put on the new leash and collar and we head out. He does his business on the neighbors’ lawn. I hold my breath and scoop it up with the Price Chopper bag, which I place in another bag and then another. I feed him and give him water then don’t have the heart to put him back in the barricade.
Maybe we should have him stay with Dreyfus at Toni’s mom’s place, I think, as I finally get hold of Maurice from my car after four attempts.
“It’s a damn crime scene,” Maurice snaps, “I don’t know why you’re calling me.”
“He’s one of the top life sciences experts in Kansas City,” I argue. “At least he can give us a better read on what was happening at Heller’s lab. He knows how to understand the calibrations of the equipment. He says he can sequence the DNA of the cells being read in Heller’s machines to tell us exactly what Heller was working on. Heller had to have been killed in some connection with his work. How else are you going to get that kind of specialized information? An expert who won’t cost the department a dime. Come on, Maurice.”
“We’ve got science people at KCPD.”
“At his level?”
“You can’t just waltz in to a crime scene.”
“Which is why I’m calling you.”
The silence lingers.
“Dammit, Rich,” Maurice says exasperatedly. “When?”
“Thirty minutes?”
“Make it twenty,” Maurice says. “I need to be back in less than an hour. This is going to be quick.”
“Yes, sir.”
Annoyance defines Maurice’s face as he taps out.
As I pull into the parking lot of UMKC Life Sciences, I instruct my new u.D to deliver a message to Sierra in an hour. Martina wants us to work together on my story. When can you meet? Sometimes I can’t help myself.
“How was class?” I ask as Chou opens the door to my car and gets in. He’s carrying a silver container that looks like an overgrown lunchbox.
“Nice car,” he says, ignoring my question.
I feel a little embarrassed.
“I’ve been thinking about your disappearing scientists,” he says as the Tesla turns itself down Paseo.
I look over at him. “Yes?”
“It’s obviously strange they disappeared and that the iris scanners picked up both of them around the same time, but I’m a scientist and I tend to not go for the fantastical when simpler options can do the trick.”
“Occam’s razor?”
“Something like that,” Chou says. “Based on everything I know, the only way two old guys with terminal cancer could show up thousands of miles away looking a lot better than they did before is for two things to have happened.”
“And they are?”
“First,” he says, “their cancer needs to have been cured.”
“Second?”
“They need to have seen an excellent plastic surgeon.”
It’s the first that catches my attention. “And if someone had come up with a cure for cancer that worked that well …”
“Exactly,” Chou says as we merge onto I-35 North. “You don’t need to overcome mortality to be a hero. Curing cancer would be an absolute game-changer.”
“So let’s just say they were cured. Why would someone want to whisk them away? Why not just highlight that they’d been saved?”
“I don’t know.” Chou ponders as we circle back under the bridge and turn left onto East Levee. “Maybe they—”
My car levitates as a blast screams through our ears.
“What the—” I shout, my heart pounding. I jam my foot on the brake as the Tesla’s emergency protocol kicks in. The brakes lock in three quick pumps, skidding the car sideways to a long, screeching halt. Emergency warnings flash across the windshield. Every muscle in my body tenses. My hands dig into the steering wheel.
“You okay?” I yell at Chou.
“I think so,” he pants, his eyes darting down at his body and around our untouched car.
“Then what the fuck just happened?” My body twitches. As I begin to relax my death grip on the steering wheel, my eyes focus on the fireball rising a block away. Foreboding overcomes me. “Oh, shit.”
My body is shaking, overcome by a single thought. My mind frantically calculates the minutes as I slap the driver control icon and desperately jam the gas to full throttle, racing toward the smoke. The Tesla transforms into the rocket it was built to be. It’s been more than twenty minutes.
The Tesla screams to a stop in front of the building. Fire is raging. Debris sprinkles down from the choking air. Two empty police cars are parked out front, their sides charred from the blast.
My heart thumps, my body rocks, but only one thought fills my head.
Maurice.
24
I jump out of the car and run toward the flames, waving my hands trying to keep the smoke from my burning eyes. The smoldering heat feels like it’s about to peel the skin from my face. I race around the building hoping to find an opening in the spreading wall of flame. Nothing.
The remnants of the door are burned off its hinges. I kick it open. A wave of heat sears across me as I peer in. The vast mouse cart smashes to the floor. I gasp for air. Sparks fly from the machines. Burning debris is crashing. Ash floats everywhere. An overpowering wall of smoke fills the room and begins to enter my lungs. “Maurice,” I shriek. “Are you in there?” There’s no way my voice can penetrate the din of the roaring flame. “Maurice.”
There is only one option. If he is inside, I need to find him. I scan desperately for something to shield my body but find nothing.
Taking a deep breath to store oxygen, images of Toni and my mother, Maya and little Nayiri flow through my head. I take off my jacket and hold it ove
r my head. “I’m so sorry,” I say out loud, preparing to rush in.
“Stop.” Maurice’s shout reaches me the moment before he tackles me to the ground. “What the hell are you doing?”
I look over at him in wonder. “I thought you were—”
“I was late,” he gasps, “but I have two men in there.”
“Let’s get ’em,” I shout, the adrenaline still pumping through me.
Maurice’s face flows from defiance to resignation to dejection, displaying a range of emotion greater than I’ve ever seen before. “It doesn’t work that way, Rich. There’s no access point.”
“We can—”
The whir of sirens overwhelms my voice.
The three massive fire trucks pull to a stop. The battle-ready firefighters start pouring out.
“I have two men in there,” Maurice shouts, running toward them.
Within two minutes the firefighters are shooting water and chemical retardant on the flame. In eight, they’ve created enough of a corridor to send three men in. They return, choking, fifteen tense minutes later with nothing, and no one, in their arms. The incident commander looks at Maurice. He doesn’t need to say a word.
Maurice tilts his head forward and presses his eyes closed for a moment. He takes a deep breath. “Get your chief on the line. We need to set up a joint command.”
“Roger that,” the tall commander replies between barking out his orders.
Maurice begins the frenetic exchange on his radio, calling in the KCPD teams and coordinating with his chief.
With the firefighters battling the unyielding fire and the police arriving in force, I take a step back from the flames. Franklin Chou is still rattled but okay. I gaze into the fire, trying to pull together all I’ve seen, to understand what lies below the smoldering surface.
The vibration of my u.D pulls me out of my trance. I tap in the audio feed.
“Have you heard about the explosion in the West Bottoms?”
“I’m here now, Martina.”
“Oh, fuck,” she says. “The same place?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus. Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Azadian, I asked if you’re okay. Do you need anything?” Martina can be pretty tough most of the time, but her care generally breaks through when it really matters.
“I’m okay, Martina,” I say sincerely, “but it looks like two police officers were killed in the blast.”
“Shit. What’s happening now?”
“KCFD is fighting down the blaze, and PD is setting up a perimeter. It’s a bit chaotic.”
“What do you think?”
“Unless Heller somehow committed suicide and set a timer to blow up his lab the next day, I have to believe he’s been murdered. Whoever did it must have wanted his body to be completely devoured. Maybe they wanted to destroy all the potential evidence, not just about the murder but also the work Heller was doing.”
“We’ll need more. We’ve got to own this story. We’ve got to own it starting now. Have you connected with Halley?”
“Not yet.”
“Do it and get me the story of the blast, the death, and two policemen.”
“Yeah,” I mumble.
“You sure you’re okay?”
“Yes,” I say more firmly before tapping off.
25
The great Sir Isaac Newton realized toward the end of his life that were the universe not infinite, gravity would inevitably crash all the stars into each other. As I stand mesmerized before the tragic, majestic infinity of the billowing blaze, I feel my world unbound and pulling apart.
But three people are now dead and my mind veers toward a burning set of more finite interrogations. Who would do such a thing? Why? What connects the explosion to Heller’s death? Is something being covered up? What evidence is being destroyed? I shuffle and reshuffle the deck of my mind, searching for answers.
Nothing has come together twenty minutes later as I put Franklin Chou into a taxibot home. I know I need to reach Toni before she hears this news from anywhere else.
My call reaches her just as she’s stepping in to help intubate a newborn, so I give her the story as quickly and efficiently as possible. Explosion. Two police officers killed. I am fine.
“Oh my god, honey,” she says. “Where are you? I’m coming right now.”
“Sweetheart, you have to trust me that I’m okay. I need to be on this story now. I just wanted you to hear it from me first, to know I’m safe.”
I hear Toni breathe in deeply. “No more scaring me like this, Dikran Azadian,” she says. “Those poor souls.”
“I spent some QT with Sebastian this afternoon,” I say after a pause, trying to divert Toni’s attention.
“How’s he doing?”
“I think he’s still traumatized. It might be nice to have him spend some time with Dreyfus.”
“You were thinking that?”
“I’m not that bad, am I?”
“Do I have to answer that question?”
“Dinner at your place at around eight?”
“Bacheegs,” she says. “Please be safe.”
I smile fleetingly, but the lift I get from Toni melts as soon as I refocus on the scene before me. I catch the incident commander as he tours the perimeter of the receding fire. “Any idea what could have caused this?”
“We’ll issue a report.”
“I know you will, but can I ask if this looks like something that could happen accidentally?”
“Anything can happen accidentally.”
“Off the record, can you tell me, in your personal opinion, not for attribution, does this look like an accident?”
“Personally, off the record, I’m not speaking for the department and I’m not even speaking for me,” he says. “It looks like a combined electrical and gas systems overload, but we’d still have to do an investigation to find out.”
“How can you tell?”
“I can’t fully, but the initial sparks look like they came from two different places on two different lines.”
“And that means?”
“You’d have to ask the power company about that.”
He steps toward the building, signaling me not to follow.
“Hey.”
I hear the familiar voice and turn to face it. In dark denim and a form-fitted red sweater, Sierra looks as if she’s stepped out of the J. Crew catalog. In spite of all the politics with Martina, I’m happy to see her. “Hey.”
“It’s all right you bagged out on our coffee,” she says.
I smile for a fraction of a second until I remember that Sierra is my competition.
“So.” She pauses. “Martina filled me in on the background. I guess we’re working together.”
“Guess so.”
“And?”
I realize I need to take control of this conversation to keep the story in my hands. “I’m heading back to file, but I need you to start digging on which big health companies are competing to produce a miracle cure for cancer.”
Sierra seems to suspect what I’m up to. “That’s a pretty broad topic, don’t you think? I don’t mean to be in your knickers, but if you turn around you might see there’s a smoldering building behind you.”
“Thanks,” I say, deadpan, trying to maintain momentum. “I hadn’t noticed.”
Sierra stares at me.
“The link to the cancer treatments could be crucial to this story,” I continue. “There are four or five firms who are part of this race. Santique Health funded Heller and is one of them. I can focus on the explosion, but I need you to look at the companies. Can you do it?”
She nods suspiciously.
“Good,” I say, sealing the deal. “We should talk at least once a day starting tomorrow.”
I walk over to my car feeling somehow empowered that I’m approaching a Tesla XY instead of my old Hyundai clunker.
It’s almost six when I march into the newsroom and over to Joseph’s cubic
le. “Anything?” I ask.
He looks up at me with his thousand-year-old eyes. “Martina said you weren’t harmed in the blast.” Even through his reserve, it’s abundantly clear what he’s actually saying. We’ve worked together for almost three years and I have to hear that you haven’t been hurt from someone who acts most of the time like she doesn’t give a damn about either of us?
“I’m glad she told you. I’m fine, but I can’t say as much for the two officers who were inside.”
“How can I help?”
“I’m going to write the preliminary story now. Can you get some background on the two people who were killed?”
“Do we have their names?”
“See if you can figure it out.” Joseph is peerless when searching vast fields of data from his cubicle, but I need him to be a little more assertive using human contacts to help with this story. “Can you do it?”
He looks uneasy. “I can try.”
I turn to walk away.
“I did get information from the flight manifests in and out of Tobago,” he adds.
“And?”
“No record of anyone going by the names of Benjamin Hart or William Wolfson.”
I thank Joseph, then fall into my swivel chair to begin dictating my story. As the words splash on my cubicle wall, I massage them around with my hands until they feel right. My entire body still smells like smoke. I try to weave that sensory experience into the words.
But in the end it’s just a story about a death and an explosion and two police officers killed. And I have an uneasy sense I’m still missing the real story.
I tap in Maurice. His face appears on my wall.
“I just wanted to check in with you.”
“I appreciate that, Rich,” he says sincerely, “and I appreciate you were willing to run into a burning building to try to save me.”
“You’d have done the same for me.”