A Job to Kill For

by Janice Kaplan

  “Somebody must know!” I screamed.

  At 4 A.M., I bolted upright in bed, my silk Natori nightgown clinging to my sweaty back and the sheet tangled around my legs. I’d thrown one pillow to the floor and had another clutched against my chest.

  Dan turned over in bed and put a hand on my knee. “You okay?” he asked groggily.

  “I guess so.” I held the pillow tighter, trying to calm down.

  “You must have had a nightmare.”

  “Mmm,” I said, my mind still foggy. “Sorry I woke you.”

  “No problem. Let’s go back to sleep.” A moment later, Dan had done just that. After all those years as an intern and resident, working twenty-four-hour shifts in hospitals, he could return to REM sleep after any interruption.

  But not me. I lay back and tried to recall the images from my nightmare. I’d been running down a dark tunnel that had no exit. Leering skeletons dangled from the ceiling, laughing at me. Cassie suddenly appeared and held out her arms, begging me to help. But as I got near, she morphed into a two-headed creature and gave a blood-curdling scream as another skeleton swayed between us.

  Now I shuddered and reached down to retrieve the goose-down pillow. I tucked it under my head and straightened out the sheets around me. None of the horrors had happened, I reminded myself. Only the sweat was real.

  I closed my eyes, but the vision of a morphing Cassie wouldn’t go away. Back when she’d asked me to decorate her penthouse, I figured I had a handle on just who she was. I could sum her up simply: pretty girl who married the rich older guy. But the more I learned, the more complicated she seemed. Wasn’t that true with all of us? Peel back one layer and find another.

  So the nightmare had a kernel of truth. My subconscious had changed the complex Cassie into a morphing form. And the inscrutable people from her past became the dangerously dangling bags of bones. Skeletons of death. Skeletons in the closet. Thank you, Dr. Freud.

  Conundrum solved, I could get back to sleep.

  Only I didn’t. I lay staring at the ceiling, my eyes wide open. Too bad I hadn’t gone to medical school. I didn’t want to be a doctor, but I wouldn’t mind sleeping like one.

  As the first whispers of dawn crept around the curtains, I gave up any thoughts of sleep and tiptoed into my study. Might as well catch up on my e-mail. As usual, my inbox was crammed with shopping offers. My spam filter kept out most of the Viagra scams, but every vendor in America seemed to have something to sell me. I mindlessly followed some links and got engrossed by the sale at J. Crew. Pretty polo shirts on sale, two for forty-five dollars. Great colors. I picked bright sherbet and strawberry ice—both sounded yummy—and pressed PURCHASE. Oh gosh, snookered again. Did I really need more tops? Not a surprise that the Internet economy was growing. So was insomnia.

  Exhausted, I leaned back in my chair and stared out the window, letting my thoughts circle back to Cassie. What had I screamed as I woke up? Somebody must know. Well, true enough. Maybe I should listen to my unconscious for once. Freshman year in college, away from home and upset by Derek’s death, Cassie must have shared her fears with a friend. Paige had been far away, but girls typically needed a soul mate. I thought of Ashley, whose friendships waxed and waned over the years, but who always found a current BF—best friend—to share secret thoughts.

  At 7:30, I picked up the phone and dialed Lydia Taylor.

  “It’s Lacy Fields. I hope I’m not waking you up,” I said when she answered.

  “Not at all. I don’t sleep much lately.” Her voice sounded weary, but not from the hour.

  “Listen, I just wondered if you knew Cassie’s freshman-year roommate.”

  If it seemed an abrupt question for before breakfast, she didn’t balk. Nothing could be shocking to her anymore.

  “She had two roommates,” Lydia said evenly, “but she only stayed close to one of them. Judi Murphy. Lovely girl. She flew in for the memorial service. And she’s called me several times. It helps so much to hear from Cassie’s friends.”

  I could imagine what a call like that would mean. A young voice, a connection to her daughter.

  “Maybe Judi knows something about an incident from freshman year.” I hesitated. “I could call her. But she might be more comfortable talking to you.”

  “I’d be delighted,” Lydia said quickly. She seemed grateful for something to do, a way to fill the morning that didn’t involve sad thoughts.

  “It’s pretty vague,” I admitted. “But here’s the outline. Cassie dated a guy named Derek Howe in her freshman year. Doogie, the kids might have called him. He died unexpectedly from a cardiac arrhythmia.”

  Lydia waited. “You want to know more about his death?” she asked.

  “Or his life. He did physics research with a professor named Hal Bohr. And he’d been a member of a secret society called Delta ij.”

  “Delta,” Lydia said immediately, her voice breaking. She hadn’t forgotten Cassie’s last word. How could she?

  We hung up and I went back to the bedroom. Dan had gotten out of bed, and I knocked gently on the closed bathroom door.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Sure.” He swung open the door, and I smiled at the sight of my handsome husband, a navy Polo towel wrapped around his waist, his face covered in thickly lathered shaving cream.

  “You look good this way,” I said. I leaned in to kiss him and giggled as I came away with a white mustache. I wiped my face. “Smell good, too,” I said.

  “Art of Shaving. Sandalwood,” Dan said. “You bought it for me.”

  “Then I have very good taste. In shaving cream and men.”

  He finished lathering with the boar-bristle shaving brush, then picked up the ivory-handled razor I’d also bought him. Definitely better than the disposable Bic and can of Colgate he used to use.

  I sat down on the Carrara marble bench behind the flowered ceramic vessel sink. I’d redecorated the bathroom a couple of years ago, and it had turned into the best room in the house. As good a place as any to have a conversation.

  “Honey, how likely is it that a healthy college kid would die from a cardiac arrhythmia?” I asked, looking at Dan in the mirror as he shaved.

  “Not likely, but it happens,” he said. He didn’t ask why I wanted to know. “You hear about it with athletes from time to time. A football player collapses during a practice and dies for no obvious reason. The autopsy shows a thickening of the heart wall. Or only one vessel supplying the heart instead of three. Some kind of heart defect that had gone undetected, probably since birth.”

  I nodded. “So it’s a physical finding after death?”

  “Not always. Often it’s a diagnosis of exclusion. The heart stopped, so something must have been wrong with the heart. More specifically, the heart started beating so fast that it couldn’t refill between beats. No blood gets pumped to the brain or body, and death is pretty rapid.”

  Dan finished shaving the right side of his face, then switched the razor to his left hand to continue. As always, I felt a little thrill at watching my perfectly ambidextrous husband. Maybe he had a few flaws, but he had no weak side. Literally.

  “Is there a way you could kill someone and make it look like he’d died of an arrhythmia?”

  Dan’s razor-holding hand stopped in the middle of a down-stroke. Oops. I hoped he hadn’t cut himself. Maybe I should have waited until the splashing-on-aftershave portion of the ritual to ask.

  But he quickly recovered. “Have I mentioned that I’m a doctor? I don’t usually try to figure out how to kill people.”

  “Well, if you can save them, you can kill them,” I said cheerfully. “It’s just the inverse, right? Simple math. Like the numerator and denominator.”

  Despite himself, Dan laughed. He turned around and looked at me affectionately. “You’re the smartest woman I know, but you’re completely clueless about math, aren’t you.”

  “Guilty as charged.” I grinned. “Grant definitely didn’t get his science talent from me. I’m not s
ure I’m even the real mother.”

  “He got his good nature from somebody. That would be you.”

  We smiled at each other. I had the feeling we’d finally gotten over our minor blip. Somehow, both of us remembered again the endearing little things that had made us fall in love.

  Dan turned back to the mirror. “I don’t know how you’d mimic an arrhythmia,” Dan said. “But you can cause one. The most obvious way would be with a shot of potassium.”

  Interesting, but I didn’t want to show too much excitement. Oh, heck, why not? “Would the potassium be evident in an autopsy? I mean, could you ever prove it?”

  Dan shook his head. “No. It would just get absorbed into the body. The blood chemistry changes pretty dramatically after death. The cells break down and potassium is released. You couldn’t tell what had been there before.”

  An excellent way to kill someone. Easy and undetectable.

  “So you could put some extra potassium into the potato salad and nobody would be the wiser?” I asked.

  “Not that simple. You’d have to inject it.” Finished shaving, Dan cupped water into his hands and rinsed off the last traces of lather. “But an injection site would be pretty easy to miss.”

  “You always know everything,” I said.

  Dan dried his face with the fluffy towel. “I’m better at killing people than I realized,” he joked. “Don’t let anybody at the hospital know, okay?” He leaned over and kissed me gently on the lips. No shaving cream this time—just affection.

  Lydia called me back at noon, her voice more energetic now. “I reached Judi,” she said. “She’s an associate at an advertising agency in Chicago, but she left a client meeting to talk to me.” She sounded surprised—her life was so diminished she could hardly believe anyone would cut short a pitch to take her call.

  “Did she know what you were talking about?” I asked.

  “More or less. She’d heard of Delta ij, but didn’t know anything about it. Apparently, it’s one of those big-deal mysteries on campus, like Skull and Bones at Yale. A lot of myths, but nobody ever admits to being a member. Part of the mystique.”

  “How about Derek?” I asked.

  “They liked each other,” Lydia reported. “Derek spent a lot of late hours in his lab, and Cassie would come by with oatmeal cookies or Reese’s peanut butter cups.”

  “Probably the healthiest food he ate,” I joked.

  “I loved that Judi remembered it,” Lydia said softly. Now she had another image to hold on to: her sweet daughter bearing sweets. I heard her voice fill briefly with emotion, then she cleared her throat. “Anyway, they ran into a problem with that professor you mentioned, Hal Bohr.”

  I hazarded a guess. “Allergic to peanuts?” I ventured. “Didn’t want any more Reese’s in his lab?”

  Lydia gave a little laugh. “No, he liked having Cassie come by. She started bringing him little treats, too. Only he took it wrong.” She took a deep breath. “According to Judi, the professor got—well, obsessed with Cassie. Asked her out a few times. Followed her home when she left the lab. One Saturday night, he showed up at their dorm room. When Judi told him Cassie and Derek had gone to a party, he started screaming that he had a date with her and she’d promised not to see Derek anymore.”

  “All fantasy?” I asked.

  “A hundred percent. According to Judi, Cassie tried not to be cruel but made her position very clear. Not interested.”

  “Made even more awkward because her boyfriend worked in his lab.”

  “I guess.”

  “Did she report Hal to anyone?” I asked.

  “Cassie thought it would just make him worse. She thought he was crazy. Judi talked to one of the deans, who took it very seriously. But then Derek died, and Professor Bohr was away the next semester. When he came back in Cassie’s sophomore year, it all seemed to have blown over.”

  We both fell silent. Not the report I’d expected.

  “I hope that’s helpful,” Lydia said finally.

  “Definitely,” I said firmly. Though right now, I didn’t have a clue what it might mean.

  As soon as we hung up, I went online and Googled Hal Bohr. I got to his personal home page, which then linked to various physics journals. Several reprinted his papers and praised his brilliant research. One offered an analysis of his apparently famous twenty-page mathematical proof. Oh, great. Anything in English?

  I tried Wikipedia, which was somewhat more understandable. “Despite the coincidence of name and fame, Hal Bohr isn’t related to Niels Bohr, who won the Nobel Prize in 1922,” the entry concluded. “But they will forever be linked as two of the world’s most eminent physicists.” I paused for a moment, wondering who had submitted the information. Anybody could have written it. Maybe Hal himself.

  Curious, I went to the entry on Niels Bohr and scanned through the discussion of his great contributions. The electron’s orbital angular momentum is quantized as L = nh. Hmm. Who knew. Maybe I could drop that in conversation with Grant sometime and impress him.

  I kept reading. Actually, old Niels sounded pretty interesting. Cared about truth and philosophy. Said clever things like “Never talk faster than you think.” Escaped from Denmark during World War II and eventually came to Los Alamos to advise on the atomic bomb. While there, used the pseudonym Nicholas Baker.

  I suddenly gasped.

  Nicholas Baker?

  The name reverberated from the clipping in Cassie’s secret cache. I didn’t have it in hand anymore, but every word I’d read had been burned in my brain. A married couple named Sandy and Jerry Baker had died in a Connecticut fire. They’d left behind a son named Nicholas.

  I got up and walked around the room, trying to get some perspective. How many Nicholas Bakers would there be in America? Hundreds? At least. Thousands? Maybe. Millions? No way. I shook my head, wishing I had a better grasp on math. On the other hand, it didn’t really matter. One way or another, “Nicholas Baker” was a common enough name that I couldn’t draw conclusions.

  Oh, for heaven’s sake, of course I could.

  I went into the kitchen and took a Greek yogurt from the refrigerator. Zero percent fat, but it would help me think. I sat down at the table and slowly stirred my spoon around in the creamy mixture. Almost as good as ice cream. Well, not really, but the Greeks definitely had a corner on the yummy-yogurt market.

  Okay, Nicholas Baker.

  Cassie must have had a reason to keep the article about the Connecticut fire with her important papers. The tragedy had occurred about a dozen years ago, which meant the orphaned Nicholas would be about the same age now as Hal Bohr. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to imagine the young scientist Nicholas Baker changing his name to Bohr. A reverse-name-change joke that only he would get, and a way of removing himself from the horror that had happened at home.

  I finished the yogurt, proud of my eighty-calorie lunch. Feeling virtuous, I opened the freezer and took a spoonful of Edy’s Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup time-limited special ice cream. One spoonful couldn’t hurt. Mmm, excellent. Maybe one more spoonful. And since I might never find the flavor again, a third.

  I managed to stop myself before I’d eaten the entire container—but not by much. I closed the freezer and went back to my study.

  Let’s say my guess was right and Nicholas Baker and Professor Hal Bohr were one and the same. So what? Nothing illegal about changing your name. The slightly crazy, self-absorbed Nicholas/Hal would have liked launching his career with the famous scientist’s name. It didn’t make him a murderer.

  I glanced at my watch, eager for a distraction. Jimmy should be home soon, and I’d drive him to his swimming lesson, then find someplace special to take him for his after-swimming snack. (Not ice cream, I thought guiltily.) An afternoon with my son might clear my head.

  Only Jimmy didn’t come home.

  I watched for him out the window for a while, then wandered outside into the cool but sunny day and mindlessly picked some weeds in the garden. I checked th
e time again. School ended early today, and our neighbor Carla Peters had carpool duty. She never ran late.

  Finally, I looked down the street and saw Carla walking toward me, her new puppy, a labradoodle (the chic cross between a Labrador and a poodle), running frantically around on its leash.

  “Lucky you!” Carla said, giving a cheerful wave when she saw me. “So now it turns out you officially have two genius children!”

  “What? What are you doing home?” I looked at her, confused.

  “Trying to teach this pup that the proper place to poo isn’t on my needlepoint carpet,” she said. She crouched next to him and patted him on the head. “Don’t let those puppy-dog eyes fool you. He’s a monster.”

  At the moment, I couldn’t work up any polite interest in animal etiquette. “Where’s Jimmy?” I asked anxiously. “I thought you picked him up. He’s not here.”

  “I know.” She stood up slowly. “That’s what I meant about another genius child. Jimmy went off to some special after-school program at UCLA, didn’t he?”

  I tried to quiet my pounding heart. “I don’t know anything about it.”

  Carla took a sharp breath and twisted the leash around her fingers. “The woman who picked him up had a note from you.”

  “I didn’t write it,” I said softly.

  “She’d given it to Ms. Berkeley,” Carla said, quickly transferring any fault to the first-grade teacher.

  “Did you see the woman? Or her car?”

  Carla shook her head. “Jimmy had already left with her. Ms. Berkeley seemed really proud that Jimmy had been invited to this gifted program. I planned to ask you about it. See if Aidan could get in.”

  The puppy nipped at my ankle, then raced around in a circle, twisting its leash into a hopeless tangle around my leg. These designer dogs promised the best traits of both breeds, but this one seemed to be the worst. Like when the mogul marries the model—and the kids end up with his looks and her brains.

  “Carla, you have to track down Ms. Berkeley and find out what else she knows,” I said urgently. “What the woman looked like. Anything. I’m going to drive over to UCLA.”