My strength was no match for his, but Shuman replaced the receiver of the phone, his eyes dropping once or twice to the cash on the desk and then returning to meet my own. Finally, he reached backward and righted his chair to sit down again.
“Dr. Stone, I know who you are. I have read about you and your husband several times over the past few years. Your biotechnology company, founded on the very science that earned Dr. Wilson the Nobel Prize, is among the most successful in the history of the industry—”
“And today,” I interrupted, “I became its sole surviving founder, and one of the wealthiest individuals in California.
“Mr. Shuman, the murder weapon is my own gun. The only prints on it are certain to be mine. The murderer walked into our home through an unlocked front door. And if the police are called, they will quickly discover the same thing that I myself have recently discovered…”
My voice cracked, and I paused and looked down at my lap for a moment before continuing. “I have reason to believe that Jeff might have been having an affair.
“I don’t know with whom, but I believe that if I can find that person I might be able to identify Jeff’s killer. I’m not asking you to cover this up indefinitely, only to allow me a brief sliver of time to come to terms with the loss of my husband. And to find some answers.”
“Absolutely not,” Shuman said, reaching again for the telephone on his desk. “At best, I would be interfering with a criminal investigation. At worst, I would be aiding and abetting a murderer.” He began dialing.
“One million!” I shouted. Shuman hesitated and looked up. I reiterated, this time calmly, “One million dollars. With proper preservation of the body and no cause for suspicion after your examination, that sliver of time will make no difference to you whatsoever. Except, of course, that you’ll be a million dollars richer.”
Shuman replaced the receiver once again. He glanced around the dingy office as if regarding it for the first time. He looked back down at the money lying on his desk, and then he met my gaze again.
“And what if I personally doubt your innocence, especially given that you are now attempting to bribe an undertaker?”
“You say you know who I am. If you should doubt me for even a moment, then, by all means, turn me in.”
Shuman shook his head. He looked weary and sad. “Dr. Stone, I don’t believe you are behaving rationally, which is completely understandable under the circumstances. I may know who you are, but you don’t know anything about me. You have no idea what I might do. Why would you deliberately put yourself at this kind of risk? Your reputation? Your career? Your very freedom?” He rubbed his face with his hands and sighed. “Please, just follow the rules. Report your husband’s murder.”
“Mr. Shuman, if you know my history as you claim to, then you should already understand why that is something I cannot do.”
I next saw Larry Shuman at two o’clock in the morning. We met that very night on Fiesta Island, a small stretch of barren coastline within San Diego’s Mission Bay. I pulled Teresa as close to the shore as I could, and Shuman collected my husband’s body.
I had covered Jeff with a blanket, and I was grateful that I did not have to view him again in that condition. I turned away as the chubby middle-aged man grunted while hoisting Jeff’s body onto a gurney. He then heaved the gurney through knee-high waves and onto the shore.
“You have two weeks,” he said, and, not waiting for my response, he returned to his hearse.
Without looking back, I turned Teresa and sailed out beyond the edge of the bay, where I cast the silencer overboard.
I will not remain quiet.
It was seven days ago that I placed my trust and my husband’s corpse, only weakly insured by a million dollar bribe, in the hands of a total stranger. Now, as I feel myself slipping beneath the surface, my two weeks have been cut short. I am out of time to find Jeff’s killer because the authorities have just found his body.
Caesar married Calpurnia, the daughter of Piso, and got Piso made consul for the year following.
-Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
Plutarch (ca. 46–120 CE)
He had seen him favoured by the woman whom he imagined he loved, and whose possession he had been promised by the secret science of the Egyptians, whose power to unveil the mysteries of the future he firmly believed.
-Cleopatra
Georg Ebers (1837–1898)
Chapter Two
There are hundreds of them, thousands. Agonized, nameless faces and ransacked bodies writhing in desperation on white mattresses. An IV drips into one arm of each.
The beds are clean, the facilities immaculate. The glaring lights upon the brilliant white beds only accent the appalling conditions of the patients. They are crammed together, side by side and end to end. Thousands of adjacent hospital beds.
A phone is ringing. I ignore it and walk like a zombie down the rows of beds; my eyes cast from one face to the next. Beside me, a feeble plea comes forth from a teenaged voice.
“Please…”
I jerked awake. The familiar dream began to fade. I could feel a rocking motion beneath me, and I rolled over onto my back. Directly above me was the underside of our bedroom terrace. I slowly became aware that I was on my own yacht, lying in the center of the pool of dried blood that was now all that remained of Jeff. I could not remember how I got there.
My left hand hurt, and I realized my fist was tightly clenched. As I opened it, four tiny trickles of blood seeped from indentations in my palm as my husband’s wedding ring fell from my hand. The boat rocked again, and a subtle rattling broke the early morning silence as the small gold circle rolled across the smooth wood of the yacht’s deck.
I sobbed endlessly as I scrubbed Jeff’s blood from our terrace floor and the wrought iron railing. While sopping up the blood on Teresa’s deck, twice I had to pause to vomit into the bucket I was using to clean. When I had finished erasing the evidence of my husband’s death, I began clawing through our home in search of clues to his life.
I rifled through the pockets of Jeff’s work attire in our walk-in closet. I yanked his weekend clothes from our dresser drawers and shoved the upper mattress from our bed to examine the space beneath it.
I began ransacking the entire house, pulling out every drawer, climbing shelves in every closet to access the highest nooks, shoving items haphazardly to the ground. I bored through dusty boxes in our garage and clambered over old furniture in our attic, using a flashlight to peer into every dark corner.
I scoured Jeff’s side of the ocean view office we shared. I had never looked anywhere in Jeff’s desk except the front center drawer where he kept a checkbook and some house money. This time, I frantically tore through his desk, his file cabinets, and his bookshelves. Nothing.
I began looking through the files on his computer desktop, and then I realized that his iPhone had been sitting on the desk the entire time. How stupid! Here was the true record of his most recent, most personal activities. My hands were shaking as I picked up the phone.
I had never previously suspected that Jeff was cheating. His behavior had never been that of a cheater. In recent weeks, he seemed distracted, but that was not unusual for a man so dedicated to his work that he retained his academic position even while leading a successful biotechnology company.
But even in those recent weeks, Jeff did not exhibit the sudden, complete detachment of someone who is straying, the obvious physical revulsion in the presence of a woman he used to love. I never would have considered my husband capable of infidelity. Until three days before his murder.
Three days before his murder, I was clearing our dinner dishes from the table when the phone rang. Jeff had just retired to the living room with a stack of paperwork, and I could hear the sounds of a football game coming from our large-screen TV. I put the plates I was holding into the sink and reached across the kitchen island for the telephone receiver.
“Well, hello, my lady,” said a familiar voice
. “And how are you doing this evening?”
“Hi, John. I’m great!” I said to my husband’s best friend. “You?”
“I’m fine… except… well… I have a lot of patients these days asking about the latest advancements in superheavy-isotope-based therapeutics. Especially the people that—you know—have, uh, failed other therapies and don’t have many options left. So I was really looking forward to Jeff’s presentation at the conference in Seattle last week.
“When Jeff didn’t speak, and then when I couldn’t find him anywhere, I went to the conference organizers to ask if his time slot had changed. They said he had not checked in…”
The cheers coming from the living room TV grew to a roar as a touchdown was scored. Two commentators began shouting over each other.
I, too, wanted to scream. The familiar background noises of our home, normally so comforting, had just become unrelenting cacophony.
I slid off the barstool at the kitchen island where I had sat down in a daze while listening to John. I felt sick to my stomach. I took a few deep breaths, but they did little to quiet my nerves.
I stepped out of the kitchen.
Jeff was in sweatpants, a T-shirt, and socks, reclining beneath a blanket on the living room sofa. In his lap was a stack of papers. His eyes moved up and down between his work and the football game on the TV mounted on the wall.
I took another deep breath. “That was John,” I said.
Jeff’s face paled, and he looked up from his papers. “What did he need?”
“He was calling about the conference in Seattle. He was wondering why you missed your lecture.”
Jeff’s eyes dropped back down to the pages in his lap, and he continued to shuffle through them. His complexion was now changing quickly from white to red. “I’ll be sure to call him back.”
I stood motionless.
“GO!” Jeff shouted suddenly at the TV, and the audience in the football stands began to cheer wildly. The redness on Jeff’s face deepened.
“So why did you miss your lecture?” I pressed, and he paused before answering.
“I decided my presentation wasn’t ready for prime time yet.”
“Since when are you unprepared to deliver a lecture, especially one scheduled months in advance to be given to several thousand people?”
Jeff tossed the papers onto the coffee table and sat up. “What is this, Katrina, the third degree?”
“Of course not. But why didn’t you tell me? I thought you were really looking forward to presenting. You love presenting! And it’s not like you to flake out without even extending the courtesy of canceling.”
“I’ve had a lot on my mind,” Jeff said with a shrug. “I guess I just forgot.”
“You just forgot?”
“Yes.”
“You just forgot that you skipped the entire conference?”
Jeff’s eyes flashed. “What the… this is unbelievable! You checked up on me?”
“I didn’t check up on you,” I found myself explaining. “John blurted it out. He said he started looking around for you when you didn’t speak and ultimately found out that you had never checked in at the registration desk. He obviously didn’t think you would have lied to me about your whereabouts. He was just worried about you. And now, so am I. Frankly, I’m also worried about the future of our relationship! What were you doing in Seattle all that time? Did you even go to Seattle? Did you even intend to go to Seattle?”
Jeff stood up from the sofa and switched off the TV. “Of course I intended to go to Seattle!”
It was the first time I had ever heard my husband shout in anger.
“I registered for the conference, Katrina. Do you want to see my receipt? Is that how it’s going to be now? I had every intention of going… it’s just that I… I…”
“Are you cheating on me?”
“No!” he shouted. “Absolutely not! Of course not!” His voice softened. “Honey, listen. Don’t you remember those nights? Don’t you remember talking to me every night like we always do when one of us is away? Sometimes we talked late, late into the night. Long conversations. Remember?”
I did. I also remembered that he had looked tired.
Jeff and I used video calls to keep in touch when one of us was away on business. At that moment, I distinctly remembered that when Jeff was allegedly in Seattle he looked exceptionally tired.
I remembered lying in bed one night, my bare breasts covered with our comforter, and watching him through my phone’s video screen. I remembered Jeff leaning his own iPhone against something so that he could speak to me while also rubbing his eyes, his shoulders, his temples. And behind him, I remembered that I could see the nightstand of his hotel room with a Marriott welcome package upon it.
I remembered him smiling, shaking his upper body as if shaking off a rough day, and asking me what was beneath the blanket…
“Come on, Katrina!” Jeff began shouting at me again in our living room. “Use logic. Ask yourself if I am behaving like a cheater.”
“You mean like disappearing for four days solid?”
Jeff swallowed and looked down. Then he approached me and put both hands on my shoulders. He looked into my eyes, and in his I thought I saw desperation for the first time since meeting him.
“I meant that a cheating man is not interested in the conversations we had while I was away,” he said quietly. “A cheating man is eager to get off the phone with his wife.”
“Sure,” I scoffed, “unless his lover knows he’s married! Maybe she’s also married and has something to lose. Maybe she would sit there and wait for you to talk to me. Maybe she was off somewhere talking to her own husband at the same time. You’re not stupid, Jeff! You would know exactly how not to get caught. God, I can’t believe we are actually having this conversation!”
But in my heart, I also could not believe Jeff would want that, any of that. It was not Jeff. Either I was wrong now, or I had been wrong about my husband all along.
“Where were you for four days, Jeff?”
He let out a sigh and sank back down onto the living room sofa. There were tears in his eyes.
“Sweetheart, listen,” he said quietly. “I can’t tell you. I am sorry for that, I really am. I have never lied to you before. I have never kept anything from you. I am sorry for lying to you about the conference. I hate myself for that. But I can’t tell you now, either. Please, you just have to trust me…”
Four days later, the silence of the empty house was maddening. Apart from my own ragged breathing and the steady, persistent ticking of our grandfather clock—a nagging reminder of the transience of time—there was only a void where a couple in love had lived.
I sat down heavily on the carpeted floor next to Jeff’s desk in our office. My eyes were burning from a morning of almost constant crying. My fingers were swollen and sore from scrubbing Jeff’s blood from our terrace and the yacht, and they trembled as I scrolled through the screens on Jeff’s cell phone.
In Jeff’s recent call history was an international phone number. I did not recognize the country code, and I might not have noticed the number at all—except for the fact that it appeared fifty-six times over five weeks.
The record began with an incoming call to Jeff. After that, both incoming and outgoing calls between Jeff’s cell phone and the international number occurred daily, sometimes several times per day, with the exception of a single four-day time span.
I recognized the dates immediately. They were the same four days as the conference in Seattle. This was the number of the person Jeff was with over those four days.
For a few long moments, I only stared at Jeff’s phone as if the number itself would suddenly speak, explaining to me the inexplicable. Finally, I dialed the number.
“Dr. Wilson!” a woman answered with an excessive enthusiasm that made me prickle. Her voice held a barely perceptible accent.
“Actually, this is Dr. Stone,” I said coolly. “Jeff Wilson’s wife. With whom am I speaking?
”
There was a long pause, and when the woman spoke again the enthusiasm was gone. “I’m sorry, Dr. Stone,” she said. “This is Alyssa Iacovani. I am an old classmate of your husband’s from UCLA.”
Jeff had done his undergraduate work at UCLA, and we kept in touch with several of his college buddies. None of them had ever mentioned an Alyssa Iacovani.
“I am the director of the Piso Project,” the woman went on. “This is an antiquities research project with Il Museo Archeologico Nazionale, the National Archeological Museum in Naples, Italy. I apologize for my sense of urgency, Dr. Stone, but I was expecting a call from your husband several hours ago, and he has not called. I was just about to phone him instead. I must see Jeff immediately.”
For a moment, I struggled to comprehend her audacity as well as her statements. Antiquities research? Italy? What could she possibly need to speak to Jeff about?
“I’m sorry,” I said finally. “My husband has been called away on family business and will be unavailable for at least the next couple of weeks.” Another lengthy pause ensued, and I began to wonder if she was still on the line.
“In that case,” the woman said at last, “Dr. Stone, I apologize again, but I must see you immediately.”
In one of these buildings there has been found an entire library, compos’d of volumes of the Egyptian Papyrus, of which there have been taken out about 250; and the place is not yet clear’d or emptied… Of these there are many in my custody.
The Vesuvius Isotope Page 2