by B. V. Lawson
The door opened, and a tall brunette older than a college student breezed in along with a cloud of sandalwood perfume. “Sorry, dear, I don’t want to interrupt.”
“Your timing is excellent. We were just discussing the cancer center.”
“Really? I don’t recall seeing these gentlemen at the planning meetings, but new blood is always welcome.”
“This is Agent Mark Sargosian with the FBI, and this is consultant Scott Drayco. They’re here about Cailan.”
“Oh, I see.” Adele Gilbow pulled out a chair and sat down. “Murder seems so much worse when it hits young people. And Cailan … ” She paused and swallowed. “Cailan was such a lovely, vibrant girl. We miss her.”
Drayco said, “Were you and Cailan close, Mrs. Gilbow?”
“Please, call me Adele. Mrs. Gilbow makes me sound like a dowager.” She smiled briefly. “I guess I was a surrogate mother figure. No one could replace her own Mom.”
“So you don’t know anyone who’d want revenge on her? An anonymous letter she was sent prior to her death, a music code, spelled out ‘Cailan Avenge.’”
Her eyes widened. “She didn’t mention it at all. Avenge? Whatever can that mean? Cailan was well liked with plenty of friends.” She thought about it for a moment. “I suppose it may have been that rival of hers, Shannon. Music is a cut-throat business, as bad as beauty pageants.”
Judging by Adele’s sprayed hair, artful makeup, and the way she walked as she came in, she had first-hand knowledge of pageants. And from the adoring look Gilbow was giving her, it worked for him.
“Are you ready to go to lunch, dear?” Gilbow grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair and put it on. His dismissal of the other two men was clear.
“It was lovely meeting you both,” Adele said, with a parting wave.
Before they disappeared from view, Gilbow called out over his shoulder. “The Bureau is paying me for my services. Do call if you need help. I charge by the hour.”
It was a lot more than Drayco would be compensated, a point Gilbow probably knew. If grad student Reed Upperman were like his mentor, Drayco would be earning every penny.
“I’m still wondering why Onweller neglected to tell us Cailan was Gilbow’s goddaughter.” Sarg tugged on his earlobe.
“A test, perhaps.”
“Of who, you or me?”
Drayco stopped in front of a small wall fountain with dancing lights. It shimmered like the Ravel piece he’d played this morning. “You don’t have to worry, as far as Onweller is concerned. I made sure of that when I left the Bureau, didn’t I?”
Sarg sucked in a deep breath through his teeth. “You took the fall for me, yes. As if I’m ever going to forget that. Or learn how to live with it.”
Drayco sighed and ran his hand under the water, enjoying the coldness on his skin. Unlike so much else at Parkhurst, this felt real, almost alive. “Let’s go find out about this mystery project Cailan was involved with. It’s quite possibly the last thing she did before her death.”
13
Sarg and Drayco took the stairs—they’d shared a loathing for technology-trap elevators ever since being stuck in one for hours—and headed up toward Reed Upperman’s domain. A security camera near the corridor ceiling pointed toward a door that said “Rodent Room.”
Mini-skyscraper racks filled with their doomed dwellers lined the walls, tended by two students in white lab coats. The cages were claustrophobically small. Maybe Drayco could sneak back in later and liberate a few white Wistar rats? Probably wouldn’t go over well. Despite the ventilation system, whiffs of musky ammonia from rat urine followed Drayco past the room.
He poked Sarg in the arm. “So what did you think of Gilbow?”
“People pay him big bucks? I’m in the wrong business.” Sarg stopped as they came to a lab with 313 above it, and looked through the glass window. “Think that’s our guy?” Sarg opened the door, and they walked in.
The man who sat hunched over a computer monitor looked to be more Drayco’s age than a typical grad student, with short, curly hair harboring a few strands of gray. His days-old stubble and wrinkled shirt, combined with a wastebasket full of food wrappers, made it look like he lived there.
He had on loose-fitting leather pants that didn’t match the rest of the image until Drayco spied a bicycle partially hidden in a corner of the room. On the desk next to the computer lay a bowl of slippery white things that looked like eyeballs alongside some shriveled brown bundles. Lychee nuts and dates. An odd combination.
Reed Upperman jumped out of his chair when Sarg called his name. “I didn’t expect anybody today. Hoped I could get caught up.”
He adjusted the headlight-thick glasses on his nose. “Look, if you’re here to sell lab equipment, talk to the chairman, Dr. Gilbow. He’s the one who makes those decisions. But if you’re offering a new infrared eye-tracker, I’ll put in a good word for you.”
Sarg made the introductions while Drayco walked over to examine a chart on the board. It had rows and columns with shapes, colors, numbers, words and letters of the alphabet. Of the ten rows, one was half blank. Drayco pointed to the chart. “Is this what you’re working on?”
“Part of my dissertation. It’s on synesthesia.” He pronounced it sin-uhs-zee-zhuh, instead of thee-zhuh.
“Only ten subjects?”
“We’re a small college, Dr. Drayco. Since most synesthetes are female, I had a devil of a time finding subjects, let alone a couple of males. More subjects makes it easier to get time on the new fMRI scanner. Even post-docs come to blows over scheduling.”
“Any particular type of synesthesia? Grapheme-color? Odor-color?”
“Any type I can get. With sixty known forms and thirty different combinations of senses, I won’t be able to cover them all. How did you know? Are you a synesthete?”
Drayco drew his finger under one of the header rows on the chart. Reed stood and took a few limping steps to get a closer look. “Sound-color synesthesia. You a musician by any chance?”
“Of a sort.”
“We find sound-color synesthetes are drawn to music. Perhaps why several of my subjects are musicians. Like Cailan Jaffray.”
Drayco studied the chart. The subjects were identified by a number and not by name. “Which one is Cailan’s?”
“Third one down.”
Drayco moved closer to the chart. The data collecting started during the spring term, and Cailan’s was the partially blank row. The last set of data was taken the night she was killed. It was like a half-formed ghost reaching out to him, and he fought the urge to touch the chart. “She had grapheme-number synesthesia.”
Sarg held out both hands. “Can you summarize all this in a sentence or two? Without too much psychobabble?”
Reed peered over his glasses at Sarg. “Psychobabble is a derogatory term, Agent Sargosian. The equivalent of me calling you an agent of the Fumbling Bunch of Idiots. To answer your question, synesthesia is the crossing of two or more senses. People experience numbers, letters or sounds with colors, shapes or smells. In your partner’s case, he hears sounds and sees colors and shapes. Cailan had one of the more common types, seeing numbers and letters in color.”
Drayco remembered when he’d first discovered not everyone saw paintings in their minds when they heard sounds. He was sixteen, on tour in London, and it came as a complete shock to him. “Reed, how did you recruit students like Cailan to be in your project?”
“I posted a note on the bulletin boards around campus, on the psych website and had a notice in the school paper.”
“How was it worded?”
“As vaguely as possible. And not that they’d be paid. Didn’t want to bring in the riffraff who’d pretend, for the money. More than one research project’s been scrapped because of that. Cailan was my best subject.” He sighed. “Now I’ll have to try to recruit someone else.”
Reed looked up at Drayco, with a hopeful expression. “I don’t suppose—”
“Not really,�
� Drayco smiled. “Were the labs always held on Tuesday and Thursday night from eight to nine?”
“Not counting snow, ice, and the occasional power outage. After Cailan’s murder, I realized it happened not long after she’d left one of our sessions.”
“Do you remember her being anxious or afraid? Or meeting someone?”
“I’ve tried to recall that night many times. Cailan seemed happy, as I think she was up for some sort of award. She always left by herself, and I’m pretty sure she was going straight home.”
“That was two months ago. Are you sure your memory of that night is correct?”
“That same night I got a call from my own little girl after she sprained her ankle. She lives in Pennsylvania. I don’t get to see her much.”
Reed took off his glasses to rub them with a cloth from his pocket. “I do recall Cailan once mentioning this strange guy who followed her around. Said he was on the maintenance staff.”
Sarg said, “Medium height, on the skinny side, long beard?”
“Sounds like the man she described. She was more grossed out than frightened.”
“Do you have a list of the other students in the project?”
Reed pursed his lips and studied the computer screen. “I have to okay it with Dr. Gilbow and the college. Our subjects are covered under the HIPAA agreement through Health and Human Services.”
“We’ll take care of that.”
“Is there anything else?” Reed turned away from them as he scrolled through several screens and scribbled something on a pad beside him.
Dismissed again.
Outside the building, Sarg prodded Drayco about his synesthesia. “Yeah, yeah, you don’t like to discuss it. Must be neat, though, huh?”
“It is what it is. It doesn’t make me into some Super Detective.”
“So my voice has colors too?”
“Gold and green, shaped like a sine wave. The same colors as Reed’s jade dragon stone necklace.”
A female student walked by in jeans so tight they looked painted on, topped by a knitted sweater that allowed her bra to show through. Sarg grunted. “Elvis Loomis is right. All the girls dress like what we antiques used to call sluts.”
“You do know that’s—”
“Sexist. Natch.”
“You might appreciate it more, if you didn’t have a daughter that age.”
Sarg growled. “Better not catch Tara dressing like that.”
Drayco glanced back at the psych building. “Tara wasn’t in Reed’s project, was she?”
“Not that she told me. You bet I’m going to double-check.” Sarg sat down on a bench, surveying the campus scenery. “I’m inclined to agree with the MPD detectives. Avenge Cailan due to synesthesia? I’m putting my money on jealousy.”
The college carillon chimed in the distance, the chalky magenta setting Drayco’s teeth on edge. But at least it added some interest to the buttoned-up campus without a stray leaf in sight. Even a mud puddle or two would make it look more like a real college setting than an artist’s conception.
Sarg frowned at another girl walking past in knee-high black boots and a flaming purple miniskirt. “Onweller’s golfing buddy, the college president, called him this morning to ask how it was going. Like we’d swoop in and have it all figured out in two days.”
Drayco joined him on the bench. “Could happen.”
“If you were that Super Detective.”
Sarg’s gaze followed a young man walking by with his low-hanging pants exposing half his underwear. “At least we don’t have a U.S. Senator breathing down our necks like my ATF buddy. Nasty arson case, that.”
“Senator Bankton, right? Why does that name sound so familiar? Other than politically.” Drayco wracked his brain. “There was a TV evangelist named Bankton. Any relation?”
“Same guy. Made millions charming sweet little old ladies out of their bank accounts. Now he’s charming lobbyists out of theirs. Hell, I had an aunt who was a big fan. Loved the theater of it all. Bankton’s wife is a former pianist.”
Drayco scrolled through a mental list of all the pianists he could think of, coming up blank on a Bankton. “What’s her maiden or stage name?”
“Melanie Marsee.”
“Still not ringing a bell.”
“She played for Bankton’s services before they got married. She was real good, better than the crappy music on those other shows. She sure hit the jackpot. Bankton’s worth millions.”
To gold be the glory, amen. “Speaking of money, I double-checked Troy Jaffray’s finances. He and his deceased brother were both shrewd investors. They got in with one of those dot-coms early, then cashed out at its peak.”
“Well now. Maybe that Liam Futino guy Gary saw arguing with Cailan the day of her death was smitten with Cailan for her money. Not her music.”
Drayco watched a little enviously as a Campus Security officer glided past on a Segway. “I suspected Futino might be a musician, so I called around. He plays at a club called The Basement in Georgetown, off Wisconsin above the C&O. Starts around five for happy hour.”
Sarg looked at his watch. “Guess I’ll call Elaine and tell her I’ll be late.”
“Can you check with MPD to see if they viewed feeds from that security camera in the psych hall? It’s aimed at the Rodent Room—if the scan is wide enough, it should have captured Cailan coming and going the night of her murder.”
“Something else that wasn’t in the official report.”
“Might not matter, if the college doesn’t keep archived video feeds.”
The Metropolitan Police Department was one of the ten largest in the country, and not without its share of controversies through the years. Abuse of overtime, inadequate training, ethics probes. And it had lost a vast majority of arbitration cases.
Drayco knew some of the homicide detectives. They were honest, thorough, and frequently overworked. Most didn’t make enough salary to afford to live inside the District where they served. But the lapses on this particular homicide case were a little disturbing.
He got up and stretched his arms behind his head and then stretched out his legs. Being tall was a disadvantage, at times. Nothing fit right, including benches. “My caffeine quota is low. Why don’t we get a quad espresso at Café Renée?”
“Where Liam Futino and Cailan argued? Good idea.”
Two young men wearing backpacks sailed past them on skateboards. Drayco needed to try that some day. “Aren’t you going to tell me what you undoubtedly dug up on Futino after we talked to Gary yesterday?”
Sarg grinned. “It’s fun keeping you in suspense. Like all of our other players, nothing in ViCAP, nothing in local crime databases. On the surface, he appears clean.”
“So did Ted Bundy.” Drayco yawned. Maybe he’d make it a quintuple espresso.
“You think a place named Café Renée will have good pain au chocolate? Ever since I missed out yesterday, it’s all I can think about. What did you call it once? An ee-day fix-ay.”
Drayco tried to relax and enjoy a moment of companionship with Sarg, like the old days. It was hard, with the dream that started off his morning dogging him all day. After three years, the details of that day at the abandoned warehouse were as vivid and clear as one of the video recordings they hoped to get from the psych building. Sarg wounded, two men dead. And one career ended, thanks to Drayco’s fabricated report. Gilbow was right. People do lie every day.
14
The waitress sported the nametag “IQ,” which she told them stood for Irene Quillen. IQ blew out a huge bubble of gum as she studied the picture of Cailan that Sarg was holding. The bubble collapsed into a concave membrane of purple goo, which matched the color of her hair. Or at least half. The other half was a natural-looking red.
“That’s her. She came here a lot with this guy during my shifts. He was kinda cute, if you like older men and geeks.” She was answering Drayco, but kept looking at Sarg and smiling. “I like older men.”
“Describe t
he guy.” Sarg slipped the photo into his wallet.
“Like I said, kinda cute.” She scanned Drayco’s body. “Not near as tall as you.”
Sarg tried again. “Can you give us a few more details about Cute Guy?”
“Curly hair. Soulful face. Had a little mole on his cheek.” She blew another bubble. “Don’t think I’ve seen him on campus.”
They weren’t here to order anything except a drink, and Drayco handed back the menu she’d given him. “Are you a student at Parkhurst?”
“Sure am. Bowling Industry Management.”
Drayco tried to disguise his glance at Sarg, who mouthed the words silently, “Bowling Industry Management?”
“Do you remember the last time you saw them here, together?”
“Um, yeah. They were usually quiet, but that day, they argued. And he looked so sad, like someone kicked his puppy.”
“You didn’t happen to overhear what they were arguing over, did you?”
“It’s as loud as a rock concert in here after five. Can’t even hear myself think.”
It was a minor victory to verify Gary’s account of Liam Futino and Cailan. But what did it tell them? Only that Cailan had a blow-up the day she was murdered. There were millions of different reasons for arguments. Few led to murder. Still, why keep this man a secret, the “soulful” and much older Liam?
At the moment, IQ was staring soulfully at Sarg, and Drayco couldn’t help asking, “How did you get into Bowling Industry Management?”
IQ stopped chewing her gum. “My Dad’s idea. I’d changed my major four times. He told me I had to pick something and stick with it or he’d cut off my allowance.”
“Are there a lot of job opportunities in that field?”
“Beats me. I opened the catalog, closed my eyes and dropped my finger on the page. And there it was.” She chewed slowly. “I always thought astronomy would be kind of neat, ya know? My father said there was no money in it.”
Sarg raised his arm to wave at someone coming through the door. Tara came bounding over and kissed her father on the cheek before sliding in next to him. IQ frowned, took Tara’s drink order, and flounced toward the kitchen.