Decker gave her a brief smile, his eyes drifting over to the hospital bed. Vega noticed the subtle shift in his attention.
“Detective Marge will be all right?”
“I hope so.” A pause. “I think so.”
“She is your friend?”
“Yes, Vega, she is my friend.”
“Maybe when she gets better, she can be my friend, too.”
“Vega, she already is your friend.”
The teen’s face brightened. “How do you know?”
“She spoke highly of you the first time she met you. Why do you think she went into that tunnel and risked her life? It was because she cared about you.”
Vega appeared to think about his words. Then she cleared her throat. “She said I should be an astronaut. I think I will listen to her.”
“A fine idea.”
“I would like to explore space,” Vega said. “Ideally, it would be wonderful to fly without a ship—like the Little Prince. But that is fantasy. So I shall be an astronaut and fly in a spacecraft. It is second-best, but we are bound by the rules of physics.”
“You will make a fine astronaut, Vega.”
“Thank you,” Vega said. “And maybe one day, if I am fortunate, I will see the Little Prince.”
Decker smiled. “In space?”
“No, Lieutenant Decker, he does not exist in space,” Vega said gravely. “Perhaps one day, I will meet him in my dreams.”
“You’re looking better.”
Decker pivoted around to the door. It was Dr. Little—the esteemed coroner in the flesh. He winced at his own mental pun. “Hey, Judy.”
“They’ve determined you’re fit for human consumption?”
“Something like that.” He stopped packing up. “I’m feeling pretty damn consumed.”
“I’m sure.” She sat on Rina’s cot. “They put you through the usual battery of tests, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, they did, and all of them were a pain in the ass.” He threw his shaver into a small photographer’s bag and perched on the side of his bed. “They gave me lots of those hand-eye tests. You know, stand on one foot and touch your nose while closing both eyes. Something designed by a sadistic neurologist who takes great glee in making you feel uncoordinated.”
Judy smiled. “I take it the results were okay?”
“If there’s brain damage, it was there long before the Order ever existed.”
“When are you leaving, Pete?”
Decker checked his watch. “My wife and kids should be here in a half hour. The welcoming committee. I’m surprised they didn’t hire a band. You’ve met my big girl, Judy?”
“Don’t believe so.”
“She’s a cop.”
“You jest.”
“It’s the truth. I wasn’t happy about her decision, but she’s happy. That’s all that counts.” He smiled to himself. “She’s a great kid. All my kids are great.”
“Not too proud, huh?”
“Everyone’s entitled to some obnoxious crowing.”
Little asked, “They have hospital clearance passes, right?”
“I believe so. Why?”
“Security’s very tight. Much stricter here than at the crash site.”
“The Order’s children are here.”
“That’s right. Everyone wants a peek at the kids. What are they expecting to see? Little robots?”
“Probably.”
“The guards have been fending off newspeople left and right.” Little gave him a small smile. “When they’re not posing for pictures.”
Decker laughed. “Uh, snap my good side.”
“Just about. Took me over a half hour to get in.”
“Hope it’s a lot shorter to get out.” He zipped his bag up. “I hate hospitals. I’ll be thrilled to say good-bye to this place.” He thought about Marge. “At least, as a patient.”
Little had a pained expression on her face. “How’s your head?”
“It booms, it hoots, it rings, it whistles. Got a friggin’ percussion section inside my brain. They keep saying it’ll take time to heal, so what choice do I have? Captain Strapp’s told me to take a week off…more if I need it. As you know, the department has excellent disability.”
“I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
“Let’s hope that goes double for Margie.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Marge…” He sighed out the name. “Well, according to the pros, she’s well-oriented…knows her name and the current president. Her cognition…like that word?”
“Pretty damn fancy for a cop.”
“I know much more than I let on.” A pause. “I think Marge knows a lot more than she can communicate.”
“Is she talking?”
“Yep, and that’s a very good sign, although she speaks in very short sentences. She recognizes everyone, knew me and Scott and the guys instantly.”
“That’s good.”
“She even remembers working on the Ganz case—recalls bits and pieces of the chicken farm she visited right before she came down to the mess at the Order. She realizes she belongs in the hospital—she can’t breathe too well and she’s aware of the oxygen mask—but she doesn’t know how she got that way. She’s confused about the details, doesn’t know what happened to her. Everyone thinks that’s normal.”
“Her body underwent a massive shock. Sometimes the mind shuts down along with the body.”
“I know. I saw it all the time in ’Nam.”
“You were in Vietnam?”
Decker smiled. “Tell me I don’t look old enough.”
“You don’t look old enough.”
The smile turned into a grin. “You lie beautifully.”
“I believe the correct PC terminology is that I’m ‘honesty impaired.’”
Decker chuckled, though his heart held no levity. Abruptly, he turned sober. “Yeah, I saw just about everything in ’Nam. What happened at the Order…” A shrug. “It wasn’t all that different. War is war.” He rubbed his brow. “Hell of a lot shorter tour of duty, I’ll say that much.”
“At least, it’s over,” Little said.
“Still got a mound of paperwork to deal with. Plus, until Marge is back on her feet, it’s not over for me.”
A moment of stretched silence.
“She’s going to be fine,” Decker stated with bravado.
“I’m sure she’ll make a quick recovery,” Little agreed.
He asked, “How’s the graveyard going?”
“Gruesome,” Judy admitted. “Excavating thousands of body parts mixed with all the blood-stained rubble. It’s going to take months to fit all the pieces together.”
“So I guess you haven’t the faintest idea if Bob and/or Venus are among the dead?”
“Right now we’re picking out teeth for ID purposes. We’ve sent out for dental X rays. Now we have to play mix and match with not a whole lot of intact material. Meanwhile, we’ve got scores of grieving family members hanging on by a string. Some haven’t heard from their missing loved ones in years. They’re hoping that their relatives had left the Order before this all happened.” She threw up her hands. “If I were them, I’d be clinging to whatever I could hold.”
“Me, too. Did you call up Annie Hennon?”
“The tooth fairy?”
“I think her official title is forensic odontologist.”
“We phoned her, sure.” A sigh. “She’s down in the ruins with the best of us…sorting through the ashes. Nice of her to do it, too. She has a full-time private practice.”
Little stared up at the ceiling.
“I’ve seen hundreds of corpses, Lieutenant. I’ve done autopsies on thousands of bodies. Nothing prepares you for this kind of horror.” She stared at him. “Listen to me…moaning about my lot when you just went through the battle lines.”
“We all have our own private millstones around our necks.” Decker shrugged. “At least I’m going home.”
“That’s good.” Little plunked ou
t some notes from her jacket. “This is after the fact, but I found out the likely source of arsenic for King Jupiter.”
“Go on.”
“His vitamins,” Little continued.
Decker thought back to all those bottles he had initially tagged and bagged. He had taken a peek inside a few of the plastic containers. Most of the complexes had been in the hard, tablet form. He asked Judy about that.
“Lots were solid pills, but some were in capsules. Specifically, the herbal preparations like the gingkoba and ginseng. It appears that someone had mixed the preps with a couple of micrograms of arsenic powder, then stuffed it back into the capsules.”
“Not hard to do.”
“Not at all.”
“All the signs of a typical poisoner—nonconfrontational, cowardly, sneaky. Plus, you can stick around and watch while the recipient suffers.” Decker scratched his head. “Sounds exactly like Bob.”
“Bob was confrontational when he needed to be.”
“That was after Jupiter had died.”
“Ah.” But Judy still seemed disturbed. “Bob’s real last name was Russo, correct?”
“Yes, of course.” Decker looked at her. “Why do you ask?”
“Because someone said something about Bob changing his name from time to time.”
“Oh…that.” Decker nodded. “Europa, Jupiter’s daughter, mentioned that when she first met Bob, he told her that his name was Ross. Later, we found out it was Russo.”
“But Russo is his real last name.”
Decker regarded her face. “What are you driving at, Judy?”
“The poisoned bottles had Bob’s name on the labels.”
Decker was confused. “You mean the bottles were prescription?”
“No, not at all. The supplements were OTC. I’m talking about the maker’s label. It said Russo Holistic Supplements. I looked up the company. It’s a legitimate enterprise. The company’s president is—”
“Robert Russo!” Decker completed the sentence. Then buried his face in his hand. “Good grief!”
“Not a coincidence?”
“The company’s president is Robert Russo, Sr.”
“Bob’s father.”
“Well, I’ve never done the DNA test on them, but I’d swear to it in court.” Decker stood and began to pace. “Bob Senior detested Emil Ganz. In a letter to the editor written a couple days after Ganz’s death, Big Bob accused him of perjury and adultery—probably adultery with his wife.”
“Little Bob’s mother?”
“Yep.”
“So Little Bob poisoned Jupiter to avenge his father’s honor by using Daddy’s supplies? Très Oedipal. Where’s the Greek chorus?”
Decker said, “From what I’ve seen and heard, Little Bob hated his real father. Little Bob told me that Emil Ganz was his hero and his spiritual father. I got the feeling that Little Bob even hooked up with Jupiter to spite his dad, certainly not to please him.”
“Then something must have changed Little Bob’s mind about Jupiter. Because there was definitely arsenic in those capsules.”
Decker was quiet.
“What’s wrong?” Little asked.
“The bottles that had the arsenic capsules. Did the lab people take test samples from unopened or opened containers?”
Little thought a moment. “I don’t know.”
“Does the lab have any unopened bottles of Russo Holistic Supplements?”
“I don’t know. You’d have to ask—” Little stopped talking. She chuckled with surprise. “Are you thinking that the arsenic came from Big Bob?”
“Big Bob really detested Ganz.”
“Pete, how would Big Bob know Ganz was taking his pills?”
“Judy, he owns the company. He knows who he ships to. He must have known that his company was shipping boxes to the Order—”
“Why would he know that? I’m sure his company ships out hundred of boxes a day.”
“You detest a guy with that much passion, so much that you carry a grudge for years, you pick up on things like that.”
Judy raised a skeptical brow.
Decker said, “It would be a snap for the manufacturer to slip a little arsenic in the capsules.”
“That’s not the point—”
“On the contrary, Judy, that is the point.”
She pocketed her notes. “Pete, even if Big Bob had been aware that there were pills being shipped to the Order, he still wouldn’t know that the preparations were meant for Jupiter specifically.”
“Maybe the boxes had Jupiter’s name on it.”
“Do you know if they did?”
“No. I’d have to check Big Bob’s inventory labels.” He paused. “Try getting a warrant to check that out.”
“Even if they were shipped to Jupiter, Big Bob takes the chance of poisoning people along with Jupiter.”
“So maybe that’s why there wasn’t a lethal dose in any one capsule. Or maybe Big Bob simply didn’t care.” Decker stopped ambling. “This is a question with a simple solution. If the lab has unopened bottles, we’ll test the samples for arsenic contents. If they do have arsenic, then we’ll know that the poison came from the manufacturing side.”
“That doesn’t pin it on Big Bob.”
“With poison in the unopened bottles, I could pull a warrant to comb Big Bob’s outfit. Then I could check the inventory number labels and see if they match the tainted bottles. With enough evidence, I could possibly arrest Big Bob for attempted murder.”
“But the arsenic didn’t kill Jupiter.”
“Big Bob doesn’t know that,” Decker said.
“But a jury will.”
“We’ll worry about that later.”
“And if the lab doesn’t have any unopened bottles?”
“Then maybe we’ll be extremely lucky and find some unopened, untampered bottles lying in the rubble. Most likely, the bottles are now dust and ashes. In that case, we’ll never know which Bob did it.”
“So one of the Bobs got away with poisoning Jupiter.”
“Neither Bob got away with anything. Presumably, Little Bob’s dead. That means Senior Bob lost his only son.” Decker thought a moment. “Actually Senior lost Junior to Jupiter a long time ago. And even if the father had exacted his judgment on Jupiter, in the end, the cult destroyed his boy. Midah k’neged midah. That’s a Hebrew term. The English law equivalent is measure for measure, but what it really means is what goes around, comes around. And that, my friend, is the whole damn story of life!”
37
He felt her eyes burning a hole in his back. He could hear her voice even before she spoke. She said, “You must have played high school football.”
His eyes still on the photographs, Decker answered, “Yep.”
Silence.
She said, “God, that was terrible of me.”
Decker’s eyes shifted focus, from the stark moonscape to Europa sitting behind her desk. She seemed smaller than he had remembered. It was probably her posture. Her shoulders were stooped, and her head jutted forward and downward.
“What was terrible?” he asked.
“My elite-snobbism bias. Summing you up based on physical appearances.”
He analyzed her physical appearance—pale skin bordering on wan. She wore a charcoal skirt suit with a white blouse. In just a few weeks, her short-cropped hair seemed to have sprouted tufts of gray.
She appeared depressed, and who could blame her? According to the news, her lunatic father—the fallen angel of astrophysics—had spawned a society of maniacs and devil worshipers. The rumors weren’t all that far from the truth. Europa had to feel angered by her father’s legacy, burdened by it as well. All the crap she had taken from colleagues when Ganz had become Jupiter. Once again, she was taking crap now that Ganz’s group had been annihilated. The newspapers tarring and feathering her father even though he had died days before the Order’s holocaust.
Decker said, “You made an educated guess based on my build, Doctor. I look like a
n ex-football player.”
“That’s not it. I said high school football instead of college football. Because you’re a cop, I assumed you didn’t go to college. Sorry.”
Decker smiled. “Now we’re playing true confessions?”
“I amaze myself,” she answered. “We say that the space taken up by a human body is finite, but I seem to have an infinite capacity for guilt.”
And didn’t that tell it all. Decker said, “I didn’t go to college actually…well, not until much later on. By then, I was too old to play football.”
“What did you study?”
“Poli sci. Then I trudged through three years of law school—night school. Actually all of my higher education was night school. Anyway, I graduated with honors and passed the bar. First try. Not bad for a cop, eh?”
She smiled weakly. “It’s good for anyone.”
“I worked with my ex-father-in-law,” Decker went on. “Estate law—wills and trusts. I lasted six months, deciding to go with my strengths.”
“Law’s loss is law enforcement’s gain.”
“Thank you. I think I’m good at what I do.” Decker took a seat opposite Europa. “Still, I keep wondering if I handled the Order properly. Specifically Bob.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe if I had been more skilled, I could have talked Bob down.”
“For what it’s worth, Lieutenant, I don’t think there was anything anyone could do. Bob was determined to make his own notorious place in history.”
Decker asked, “Why’d you ask me about football, Doctor?”
“I don’t really know why.” A pause. “Maybe because my father liked football.”
“Did he play?”
“I don’t know. Shows you how close we were.”
“But you know he liked the game.”
“He’d watch the big games—the Rose Bowl and the Super Bowl. When I was real little, I’d sit with him, although I never understood all the rules.”
Decker smiled. “No one does. We’re all faking it.”
Another weak, fleeting smile. Her eyes were tired and sad.
“So when you were little,” Decker said, “you watched the games with your dad?”
“The Rose Bowl mostly. It was a New Year’s Day tradition. Once, when my brothers were just babies, he took me down to his office at the university. Just me. I remember watching the parade from his vantage point on the sixth floor. That building is long gone since they put up the Space Sciences Center. But back then, we saw everything. The visibility was amazing. After the parade, we watched the game on TV.”
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