by Dom Testa
Get it together, I told myself. Focus.
“Mrs. Haas,” I started, and she said, “You can call me Stacey.” Which would be a challenge at first. As Mrs. Haas she was unknown to me; as Stacey she was a former lover. I decided to avoid names altogether.
“First, let me add my condolences to those you’ve already received. I know it’s not easy to sit and answer questions right now. I promise I’ll be brief.” She gave a small nod to go on. “You were not in Santa Fe on the day your husband died, is that correct?”
“You mean on the day my husband was murdered. No. I was in Albuquerque, meeting with a potential new legal attorney for the lab.” Her tone, although calm and professional, had plenty of bite to it.
“You were with another of the lab’s employees, David Torres.”
“That’s right. David was originally a chemistry student who worked with Leon, but he was better suited for the business side of things. We were transitioning him into something of a business manager, so it was important that he go with me. We left at nine that morning and got back late in the afternoon, about 4:30.”
“And it was David who discovered your husband and his two assistants.”
She took a breath. This was the worst part of my job. “Yes. When we got back to town I dropped him off at the lab and he ran inside. I thought Leon would be here at home, so I didn’t go in. We’d planned a dinner with friends. I’d only made it a few blocks from the lab when David called me. I thought . . .” She took another long breath. “I thought maybe he’d left something in my car. But he . . . he told me what he’d found.”
I gave her a moment, then said: “Again, I’m sorry. The reason I’m here is to ask you about your husband’s relationship with Steffan Parks.”
At the mention of the name she got up from her chair and stalked toward a sliding glass door opening onto a patio. Her back was to me, but I could tell she was shaking. “Steffan Parks is a despicable human being. He and my husband used to be friends, you know, until Leon turned up enough evidence to question a lot of the papers Steffan had published. When he confronted him, hoping to work through it and simply repair the mistakes, Steffan lost it. He practically shoved Leon to the floor.”
She turned back to face me. “My husband, Mr. Swan, could not have been more thoughtful and understanding about the whole situation. He gave Steffan multiple opportunities to correct his work, but instead that bastard flung charges at Leon that he was the fraud. Eventually it got to the point where Leon’s integrity was on the line. So he published the piece about the Nobel work, to set the record straight, mostly to protect his own legacy in science. And, well, that drove Steffan mad.” She crossed her arms. “He killed my husband for it.”
I paused again out of respect. Then: “I understand that Parks called your husband a few weeks ago. What can you tell me about that?”
She eyed me, once again sizing me up. “You’re not with the Santa Fe police or sheriff’s office. Who are you?”
I took another drink from my water and then told a small lie. “I’m with a special division of the FBI. We’re investigating Steffan Parks and his possible role in this.”
“Possible?” she cried.
“Until we have enough evidence to officially declare his involvement, yes. Don’t get me wrong, he’s Suspect Number One, and we’ll proceed with the investigation under that assumption. What about that call he made to your husband?”
Stacey Haas crossed her arms. “He threatened Leon.”
“In what way? Did he say anything specific?”
She shook her head. “No. Just the usual rambling rant many of us were used to from that monster. He’s quite fond of making grandiose speeches. Leon used to say that Steffan Parks could turn a coffee order into the Gettysburg Address.”
I held up a hand to interrupt. “You said many of us were used to. You’ve had personal contact with Parks?”
“Not professionally, but through my husband. I originally met Leon at the university, and since the two of them often got together to talk science I spoke with Steffan several times. Even back then he gave me the creeps.”
“Did your husband do anything about the threat? Did he contact the police?”
“No. He thought it was all just talk. Actually, the phrase he used was theatrical ravings of an overwrought ego.”
“What about you? At the time did you think his threat was genuine?”
She stood still for a long time, obviously thinking about her answer. Then she said, “On some level I was concerned. But I thought Steffan was more likely to sabotage Leon’s work than to physically harm him. So no, to answer your question. I didn’t think it was real in this way. Neither did Leon. And now look what’s happened.”
Through the fog of having to interview a former girlfriend as a total stranger, I tried building a picture of the disgraced Nobel Prize winner. Bold, prideful, or, as my grandmother would’ve said, full of puffery. And apparently dangerous when cornered. After rocketing to the top of his field he’d been not just embarrassed, but humiliated. And, from what I knew of the scientist clique, reputation was damned near everything. Once that was tainted it was nearly impossible to regain stature. Trust was difficult to rebuild.
I had to adjust my thinking. It’s too easy to imagine a scorned scientist getting revenge by whacking you with a slide rule. Not only was that an insulting trope, it was dead wrong. Literally. We were talking about a man who’d created a lethal toxin capable of killing entire populations — and then gone off the deep end. Steffan Parks, far from a sulking egghead with taped-up glasses, was more like a brainy specter of death.
A specter on the loose and perhaps not fully sated by his first kills. After all, the United States government had shunned him, too.
“We’re also interested in a woman named Jayanti Pradesh. Do you—”
“Yes,” she said. “I know Jay. She’s a bigger fraud than Steffan.”
“How so?”
“Just a spoiled rich girl who couldn’t live up to her family’s legacy so she glommed on to the work of others. Tried to establish an image by association.” Stacey gave a short, bitter laugh. “Only this time she hitched her wagon to the wrong horse.”
“I understand that. But what I’m most interested in are her qualifications. She is a competent scientist, no?”
Stacey shrugged. “Competence is relative. I mean, compared to who? But yes, she knows her way around a lab.”
“I guess what I’m getting at is—”
“Could she be intricately involved with the poison formula that Steffan created?” She nodded. “Yes. Jay knows enough to be involved.”
I was running out of questions where Stacey could reasonably help me move the investigation along, and yet I was reluctant to end the interview. Don’t misunderstand: this had nothing to do with any unresolved feelings or a surge of reminiscent romance. I’d more than moved on from my major college relationship, and I loved my wife.
This was, pure and simple, curiosity. Curiosity about a woman who’d once made it clear she had zero interest in getting married, who’d placed career and prestige above matrimony, and who’d subsequently walked down the aisle with a fellow faculty member, one who was her senior by almost 15 years. I mean, it could’ve been exactly the conclusion I’d reached all those years ago: She wasn’t necessarily opposed to marriage, just opposed to marrying me.
And I wasn’t even a globe-trotting, risk-taking, face-changing secret agent back then. I was relatively attractive, in great physical shape, an athlete with a sparkling personality, and . . .
Holy shit, what the hell was this? Self-obsessed much?
Who gave a rat’s ass why she’d made a sudden left turn? She’d found happiness in the arms of an academic and I’d taken a different journey. Not to mention I never would’ve found my own happiness with the sexy chef.
No matter how evolved we think we are, and no matter how content we may be with our lives, the magnetism of the great ‘what if’ is never really quen
ched. We’ll always wonder about the forks in the road we didn’t take, and puzzle over the reasons we didn’t take them.
I happen to be fascinated by the many-worlds theory, although I’ve personalized it. In my version I live in an infinite number of universes in which I’ve taken every path, made every choice, and lived every consequence. It just gets ridiculously complicated when you factor in all the bonus lives I’ve experienced and the multiple bodies I’ve occupied. I’m my own freaking multi-verse.
So yes, the strange coincidence of circling back and reconnecting with my original past, the one from my initial body/lifetime, was kinda blowing my mind and I didn’t want the show to end.
But now Stacey Haas was standing there, her arms still crossed in the universal defensive posture, and again staring at me like she was trying to place me. That weirded me out, too.
It was time to go. I stood up and thanked her for the information and observations, then offered my condolences a final time. She was ready for me to leave her house, but not until she made sure I understood the gravity of what I was fighting.
“The toxin that Parks has developed,” she said as we reached the front door. “Do you have any idea how it works?”
“I know it’s a powerful poison, and I know its origin,” I said. “Why don’t you paint a picture for me?”
“It’s more than just a standard poison. Once it enters the bloodstream it races to all of the major organs and begins to attack them from the inside. Almost like an acid. It takes less than three minutes from the time you ingest it until you go into shock and die. And in those three minutes you suffer the most gruesome pain imaginable, worse than any torture device that’s ever been used throughout history. Leon told me it unleashed a living hell on the victim. He said you’d scream in agony until your brain was overwhelmed.”
She looked out the open door into the cold, gray sky. “Six weeks after he described this to me he suffered through it. Those were his last moments on Earth.” Turning her face to once again look up into my eyes, she added: “Find this monster, Mr. Swan. And let me know as soon as you do. But find the monster.”
I walked to my car without looking back. Once buckled in I saw that Christina had tried calling. I dialed her back.
“How’s Santa Fe?” she asked.
“Charming as always, but cold. And very interesting. I just discovered that the victim’s wife is my old college girlfriend.”
“No shit,” Christina said. “Has she gotten fat?”
“No, if anything she’s in better shape now. Shed the freshman fifteen and never looked back, I guess.”
“Good for her. I’ll bet that was weird.”
“Babe, it goes into my top ten of weirdest days ever. And you know I’ve had a few of those. What about you? What’s the special tonight?”
That wasn’t a bullshit question just to pass the time. I was intrigued by her cooking and her processes, and she always obliged with answers, whether I understood them or not. After talking about the restaurant we made idle chit-chat until I got a call from Quanta. You don’t let those go to voicemail. I told Christina I’d call her back later.
“Yes, boss.”
“You need to contact the sheriff again. There’s been another incident.”
“Incident” I asked. “Another killing?”
“Yes. That other Marquart Labs employee. David Torres. He’s dead. Poison.”
Chapter Six
If you’ve seen any of the popular television crime shows you’re familiar with the routine when you encounter a victim. The funky jumpsuit, mask, gloves, the works. All of these precautions might look like they came straight out of The Andromeda Strain, but they serve their purpose. Anymore a crime scene is ripe for making mistakes, the kind that could lead to an acquittal on bullshit technicalities.
Not only that, but compromising a crime scene could destroy critical evidence, the kind prosecutors depend on.
In this case the precautions served a dual purpose. Not only did we want to prevent contamination of the evidence, we didn’t want the evidence to chew up our insides and turn us into screaming wraiths with blood oozing out of every opening.
I couldn’t say for sure yet about the oozing blood part, but after Stacey Haas spelled out the grisly death dance my imagination added lots of garnish.
David Torres lived alone in a duplex about a mile from the lab. He was single, a meticulously-detailed science student-turned-administrator who’d worked with Leon Haas since graduating from the University of New Mexico, just down I-25 in Albuquerque. His half of the duplex was decorated in a traditional southwestern style that seemed to be required by law in New Mexico. I maneuvered into my jumpsuit, then stood aside in the entryway as a technician walked past carrying a cat in a pet carrier. The freaked out fur-baby was being taken to a specialized vet to get checked out.
There was a cluster of activity going on in the small kitchen, which is where I assumed the body had been found. I saw the bulky shape of Sheriff Tonkin talking with someone I assumed to be the coroner. All I saw were the sheriff’s eyes above his mask, and they were intense. The coroner was listening and nodding, then pointing down and saying something I couldn’t hear over the bustle. I waited until two other people left the kitchen before easing in.
Sure enough, curled up on the floor near the sink lay the body of a man in khaki pants and an untucked shirt. He was contorted in a manner that implied agony, and I did indeed see evidence of blood mixed with what had to be other bodily fluids that had escaped during the death throes. There was a sickly smell hovering over the scene and I forced back a gag reflex. I’d seen dozens of corpses in my work, including the many I’d personally dispatched to the morgue, yet I never acclimated to the scent of a crime scene.
Tonkin glanced up and took a moment to identify me as the unwanted Fed in town to complicate his life. He indicated with his head to follow, and we walked into the garage where we lowered our masks.
“I take it we’re dealing with the same toxin?” I asked.
“Looks like it. There was an opened bottled water on the floor next to him. It’s on the way to a lab for tests right now.” He shook his head. “Poor guy.”
I saw that beneath his gruff exterior Sheriff Tonkin really cared about the people under his watch.
“I was coming out here to talk with him at some point today,” I said.
“Then you could’ve died just as easily if he’d offered you something to drink.”
This was true. I’d accepted a glass of water from Stacey Haas; who’s to say I wouldn’t have happily sipped from a bottled water here?
“Two ways this could’ve gone down,” I said. “It’s possible all three of the employees at Marquart Labs were targeted from the beginning. It’s also possible that they initially only wanted Haas and your niece was unfortunately in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe now they felt like they had to eliminate Torres from talking about something he knew or saw. The trouble is, we don’t know for sure Torres brought this water home from the office where it was compromised, or if someone snuck in here and tampered with it when he wasn’t home.”
The lawman pursed his lips. “Sounds like we’re dealing with villains of a caliber that don’t often wander through Santa Fe.”
“If you knew the caliber we were talking about, Sheriff, it would cause you sleepless nights.” I looked back toward the door to the house. “Who found him?”
“The woman who lives in the adjoining place heard him through the wall. It wasn’t pleasant. She came over and banged on the door for a while then called us.”
I thought again about Stacey’s description of the poison’s effect. Her final words to me had been ‘Find the monster.’ Anyone who understood a body’s reaction to this toxin and could intentionally administer it to innocent people was beyond a monstrosity. They were pure evil. Sick, demented evil. Just the kind of people I found myself chasing after on a regular basis.
We reapplied our masks and went back into the hou
se. I looked around a bit but never expected to find any clue that would tie in Parks. If there’d been no whiff of him elsewhere in town then it was unlikely he’d left anything behind at this crime scene. Plus, it may not have been Steffan Parks at all, but rather his assistant and lover, Jayanti Pradesh.
I left the jumpsuit and other investigative gear with one of the deputies and walked back to my car. As I pulled away from the curb I saw a white Audi screech to a stop and a woman jump out. It was Stacey. She must’ve heard about the murder and raced to the scene. Just an emotional reaction, I’m sure. My heart went out to her, but I didn’t stop. As I drove off I watched her in my mirror, being held up by another deputy. I turned a corner and sped away.
Two minutes later I was back on the line with Quanta. I filled her in on the murder of Torres and my chat with Stacey Haas. I did not share details of my personal connection to the widow. No sense giving the boss any reason to think I was distracted.
“There’s no sign of Parks anywhere in town,” I said, “so all we have to go on is his hatred for Leon Haas and the threat reported by Haas’s wife. But we do have that mention of Jayanti Pradesh in Arizona.”
Quanta processed that for a moment. “Parks knows by now we’re on his trail. He wouldn’t be foolish enough to show up at a high-profile conference with his girlfriend. Still, unless you have loose ends in Santa Fe, you should probably go.”
It was about a 7-hour drive in good weather so I allowed for a little more. That would have me at my hotel in Scottsdale around 11:30 or midnight. Cruise control and a good playlist made the time pass quickly while allowing my mind to roam. I refused to dwell on my intersection with an old flame, especially one I’d probably never see again. Instead I tapped a finger on the steering wheel to a Beck song and mulled over the assignment as it had played out so far. Sheriff Tonkin had my number and would reach out if something else turned up.