From then on, she is circumspect about what she chooses to include. She avoids mentioning Zach, except to say Thaddy and her son spent time together when Zach was a boy. Only when she needs to tell Shauntz about the package in which springy snakes and talcum powder simulated the bomb that otherwise might have killed her does she feel compelled to explain why Thaddy wanted her to assume her son sent the box. Why Thaddy might be angry at Zach. Why he might feel betrayed by Zach’s refusal to run away with him. Why, instead of heading to a cabin in Montana with his former friend, Zach quit his job and took off with his pregnant girlfriend to spend seven months in the family’s cabin in northern Michigan.
When she explains about Professor Hertz, Burdock no longer is able to maintain his calm façade. “Hertz! Your son’s teacher at MIT was Gordon Hertz?”
Shauntz leans forward even farther, pounding his trousered knees. “When?” he says. “When can we talk to your son?”
Her son, Maxine explains, is driving down from the Upper Peninsula. He will come in the following morning and tell them everything he knows.
“Tomorrow?” Shauntz says. “No. Not tomorrow. We would very much like to speak with him right away. He’s on the road? You live in Ann Arbor? That’s where your son and his girlfriend are heading? We’ll have our agents there to meet him. Just to talk to him. At this point. And search his room.”
The thought of FBI agents snooping around her house, inspecting the books on the shelves, the posters on the walls, especially in Zach’s bedroom (where, she hopes, they will find nothing more incriminating than Zach’s old drawings of his favorite Pokémon characters) makes her so anxious she insists on the original plan. Zach will be too tired tonight, she says. His fiancée is pregnant and needs her rest. What she doesn’t say is she won’t allow her son to talk to the FBI without a lawyer. That might make the agents suspect Zach is more involved than she made him out to be. They haven’t caught on that if she had come in earlier she might have prevented the most recent bombing. But these men aren’t stupid. They will put the timeline together. She will need to speak to a lawyer, too.
“Sorry, professor,” Shauntz says. “We have an active serial killer out there threatening to blow people up unless we meet his demands. We’ll need a list of the other students who took your seminar. Anything, no matter how seemingly irrelevant. Although for now, I’m going to ask that you sit tight while we make arrangements.”
Arrangements? She didn’t think she could feel sicker than she has felt for the past few days. “Can’t I leave?”
Shauntz rubs his forehead. “The answer to that is yes. But we would much prefer if you wouldn’t. We appreciate your coming in. We do. But you can understand the exigencies here. You can call a lawyer, but no one else. And now, I’m very sorry, but you will need to excuse us. Please don’t leave the room.”
He and Burdock go out. Maxine picks up the landline on the desk, but she can’t get a dial tone. If she still had her phone she would call Rosa and ask if Mick has found a lawyer for Zach. But she is too exhausted and upset to think clearly about whether she needs a lawyer of her own. Why would she? She can’t be held responsible for Thaddy’s actions. She is a citizen who has come forward to provide evidence to solve a crime.
She lays her head on her arms, the way she used to do at naptime in elementary school. When the door opens, she startles awake to find that Burdock has come in with an agent in a yellow tie. They don’t shine a light in her eyes, don’t beat her with a rubber hose. But they ask their questions brusquely. Is she certain she hasn’t seen Thaddeus Rapaczynski since, when was it, December 2002? Not once in the past nine and a half years? Not since the end of the semester in which she taught him? Even though he remained in town another year? Yet she retained in her possession the essays he wrote for her class? Isn’t that unusual? That a professor of her status would keep a paper written by a student who took a single class with her nearly a decade earlier? How does she know so much about this former student’s mental and emotional state? How many times did they meet? Only in her office? Nowhere else?
She reminds herself to remain calm. The good cop, Shauntz, must be waiting in another room while these bad cops give her a going over. Then Shauntz will return to regain her confidence.
The agent with the yellow tie confiscates whatever papers she brought, the fragments of the exploding package, the felt-covered snakes. She thinks of asking for copies of Thaddy’s essays, wonders if this will annoy the agents, decides she doesn’t care and asks. Burdock ignores her request.
The two agents exit. And sure enough, Shauntz comes back in. “What, those chuckleheads left you alone? Here you’ve done us the service of coming in with what appears to be highly significant evidence in one of our highest-priority unsolved cases … We don’t usually allow visitors access to the upper floors. But what say I take you up. I can offer you the chance to stretch your legs and enjoy a look behind the scenes.”
This is a strategy, Maxine knows. But what choice does she have? Shauntz leads her through another maze of halls. They pause at an amateur painting that celebrates the agent who was slain in the line of duty. “Not exactly a Rembrandt,” Shauntz admits. “But the guy who painted this was the agent’s partner. A lot of heart went into this portrait. Makes up for any deficiencies in talent.”
Shauntz pushes the button for the elevator. The sleek metallic box lets them out on one of the uppermost floors, where agents’ heads bob above a rats’ nest of cubicles, file drawers, and computers. In the front area, a rotund male agent is packing away paper snowflakes, candy canes, and red stockings—odd, Maxine thinks, that the FBI would be so inefficient in changing from one holiday to the next. Shauntz introduces Special Agent Ortega, who explains he is belatedly clearing away the remains of the agency’s winter toy-drive and getting ready to move on to the spring golf event, which will raise funds for the victims of violent crimes.
“You must be pretty important,” Ortega jokes. “Shauntz doesn’t bring just anyone up to meet us.” He smiles a smile so genuine Maxine understands why he has been chosen to hand out toys and kibitz with the participants at the annual golf fundraiser.
The female agent standing beside Ortega extends a manicured hand. “Don’t mind them. I’m Special Agent Markham. Jill.” A polished brunette, Special Agent Markham—Jill—wears a tailored suit whose skirt is shorter than Maxine imagined an FBI agent would be allowed to wear, an amethyst choker, and heels so high she would never be able to track down a fleeing criminal. Obviously, Shauntz called ahead and requested the services of these two agents to present the smiling, gender-diverse faces of the FBI. Still, Maxine can’t help but be charmed.
Special Agent Markham—Jill—unlocks a cabinet and shows Maxine the items the agency sells or gives away—jackets, hats, fake-leather briefcases imprinted with the agency’s logo, pens inscribed with the words I STOLE THIS PEN FROM THE FBI.
“Want something?” Ortega offers.
“Hard to choose,” Maxine says. “Which one’s your favorite?”
The agents exchange glances.
“Uh, no one who works for the agency would be seen with anything that identifies him or her as an employee,” Ortega explains. “Anyone who works for law enforcement is making himself enough of a target.”
“And we can’t let our kids wear any of this stuff,” Markham says bitterly.
“Hey,” Shauntz says. “You gotta take in the view from up here.” He leads her to the windows like a maître d’ ushering a customer to a table. Beyond the city’s desolate outskirts, the nation stretches west. Maxine squints into the setting sun and can almost see Thaddy in Montana, the same clean-shaven young man she used to teach, in a short-sleeve white shirt and ironed chinos. He stands beside a workbench. A set of tools—drills, drill bits, wires, hacksaws, wire cutters—lies beside a box, the way Maxine’s father kept his pliers, screwdrivers, and spools of soldering wire fanned
out beside whatever appliance he was working on. Could she wire a bomb? She would need to look up the procedure on the Internet. But she’s had the necessary skills since she was twelve. How satisfying to fashion a weapon from such innocent ingredients. Matches, she thinks. Wires. Batteries. Zinc, aluminum, lead, ammonium nitrate. To mail it off and read about the explosion in the national press. So much more satisfying than trying to persuade a human female to wrap you in her arms and say she loves you.
Once, Thaddy told Maxine about the time he took a young woman in his high school calculus class to a movie. He couldn’t find a parking space that didn’t require putting a coin in the meter every half an hour. Panicked at missing the film, he bought tickets and escorted his date to their seats. Then he excused himself and ran down the block, fed a quarter to the meter, and ran back, sweating. Naturally, his date thought he was strange, especially when he wouldn’t admit where he kept going. Humiliated, he took her home and never dared speak to her again. It occurs to Maxine that most parents do a terrible job preparing their children to live their lives. When Zach was four, his preschool teacher pointed out it was lovely he knew how to add, subtract, and multiply, but didn’t Maxine think it would be a good idea to teach him to tie his shoes? Even now, she can’t reconcile her feelings for Thaddy with all the carnage he inflicted. She still feels sorry for the guy.
“Told you it was a nice view,” Shauntz says. “Good thing my office doesn’t have a window or I would never get any work done.” He leads her along the far edge of the cubicles and opens the door to a small, spare room. Above his desk hangs a graduation portrait of a teenage girl. This has to be Shauntz’s daughter, but there is no photo of a woman who might be his wife. Tacked to a corkboard is a quotation printed on fanfold computer paper in huge dot-matrix font—ANYONE CAN BE COOL BUT AWESOME TAKES PRACTICE.
“I’ve been on this case almost from the beginning,” Shauntz tells her. “The first and third packages, they went to professors, one of them here on my home turf. To me, that was a clear indication the perpetrator had some connection to a university. To me, that meant you tried to find some disgruntled graduate student, some science genius who engaged in a tussle with his adviser and left without his degree. Or the guy was older and, for whatever reason, the department denied him tenure. Or his supervisor took the credit for some discovery, published the paper, patented it, made a fortune.
“Me and my team, we put together a comprehensive list of the possibilities. You would be surprised, at a university, how many students and employees feel disgruntled. The women, they usually give up quietly. Maybe they kill themselves. But the men? They get angry. They get even. If the higher-ups had given me a little more time. A few more resources. Your friend there, Rapaczynski? I just checked, and he was on my original list. But he didn’t sufficiently arouse our suspicions. He got his degree. He won an award for his dissertation.
“And the bomber, after that first incident at the university, he switched his targets. He sent packages to psychologists. Environmental polluters. Airline executives. Not only in Michigan, but in the Bay Area. Chicago. Colorado. Utah. Massachusetts. And he sent letters to his victims. Diatribes against medical science. The despoiling of the environment. Everyone at the Bureau, the DOJ, the ATF, everybody, they were sold on the theory he must be an ideologue. Some PETA extremist. Some environmental warrior. They moved the task force to San Francisco. I tried to stay on top of things. But the hard-liners never trust eggheads like me. Profilers. They think anything psychological is New Age voodoo. Girly stuff. ‘Intuition.’ But if you don’t pay due diligence to that type of thinking, there’s so much you might be missing. So much you can learn about the UNSUB—sorry, that’s the unknown suspect. You can learn a lot about his personality by studying crime-scene indicators. The construction of the bomb. Who he chooses as his victims.
“And nothing about this UNSUB’s profile is telling me he’s doing what he’s doing to promote some ideology. How do I know this? If it’s such a passionately held belief, how come he’s not willing to die for it? A jihadi, he puts on a suicide vest, he believes in what he’s dying for. But you’re sitting in your living room, reading about the effects of your brilliantly constructed explosive device, you’re in it for the kicks. Or you’re getting back at someone. Mommy and Daddy, who didn’t love you enough. Your teachers, who didn’t recognize what a genius you are. All those hot women who didn’t notice your inner beauty.
“So that was my guess. My professional assessment. The bomber would turn out to be some guy who hated science because he was a scientist. Not some crunchy environmental type who hates technology because it’s ruining the earth. He hates science from the inside. Because his parents made him do his physics homework when he would rather have been outside playing ball. Most of these guys, they end up as computer nuts. But this guy, he’s no lover of computers. He’s a scientist who hates computers. And other scientists. Especially behavioral types. Maybe he saw a therapist? And the therapist didn’t do anything to help him feel less alone? Or he hates professors who study how a human mind can be controlled. How misfits can be trained, conditioned to conform. Because that’s what scares him. The need to fit in. To be like everyone else. Of course, deep inside, he wants to be like everyone else. To have their confidence, their personality. But he also likes not fitting in. He feels inferior, and he feels superior. He knows he’s Superman, but everyone keeps treating him like Clark Kent.”
Shauntz has been saying all this with his eyes trained on her face. Is he getting hotter? Colder? She can’t help but be impressed. Why did she think government agents couldn’t be this eloquent, this worldly, this perceptive? But something prevents her from complimenting Shauntz on the accuracy of his predictions. He thinks he knows Thaddy because he has figured out a few salient details about Thaddy’s character. But Shauntz is confusing an actual person with this “profile.” How could anyone know Thaddy unless Thaddy had sat in her office, crying? Thaddy has become a test for Shauntz’s skills. A challenge to his ego. Still, she admires his professionally honed clairvoyance, the way she admires Rosa’s ability to assess a person’s character based on her intuition and a pack of cards.
“Like I said, the Bureau moved the task force to San Francisco. But every few months, I would call and talk to the guys in charge. They were out there looking at all these ideologues. And yeah, maybe the UNSUB cared about the environment. Not in a political way. For more personal reasons. Maybe his old man took him camping. Makes sense the guy would be holed up in the woods. Where else could he carry out his experiments with the explosives and detonators he was developing?
“But I still thought the guy might be hiding in northern Michigan. If this investigation had been left to me, I would have ordered the team to visit every library north of Mackinac. Think about it. You’ve got this brainiac professor cooped up in a cabin. He’s going to be taking a shitload of books out of the town library. And not the typical potboilers and bodice rippers. The librarians up there, they’ll remember the guy. I did some of that legwork myself. On a vacation up north. But nothing turned up.”
He falls silent, staring at her, chin resting on his hand like a camera on a tripod. He knows she has been visiting her family’s cabin in the UP. Knows her son has been holed up there all winter. Knows that until recently she wasn’t sure where that son might be.
“I was planning on going back up there this coming summer. Then the UNSUB published that manifesto. The editors weren’t keen on printing it. But we told them to go ahead. We knew … we hoped … someone out there was going to read the bomber’s rantings and turn him in. A classmate. Maybe his own family.” Shauntz holds out his palms. “And here you are.”
Yes, she thinks, here I am.
“You’re not saying much. But I’m getting a vibe here. Don’t get me wrong, we are very, very grateful. This may be our man. But there’s something you’re not telling us. Maybe you still like the guy? A former studen
t, it’s understandable. He was young. He wasn’t who he became later. And you weren’t there when those bombs went off. You haven’t seen the pictures from the autopsies. I’ve met that guy, Schlechter. And, okay, he’s no one’s idea of fuzzy and warm. But what happened to Arnold Schlechter was pretty terrible. Your student, he hadn’t gotten his A-game together yet, but that explosive device did a pretty good job ripping Schlechter up. Then your man Rapaczynski improves his design. One of the victims he targeted? The blast blew a hole in the man’s chest—you could see all the way to his heart.”
He thinks she is withholding evidence. Maybe Thaddy is hiding up there in the UP. Maybe her son is involved. Didn’t she suspect this to be true herself? She is so, so very tired. Everything is bollixed in her mind. She didn’t know Thaddy was the bomber. Did she? All these years?
No. All she is guilty of is protecting her son. Zach might have corresponded with Thaddy. But Zach had no way of knowing Thaddy was a murderer. Did he? Then why does she feel so anxious? Maybe Zach is no longer lying, but he hasn’t yet told her the entire truth. And if the agents persuade him to confess …
Shauntz’s cell phone rings and he takes the call. Nods. Puts his hand over the mouthpiece and tells Maxine, “Your son and his girlfriend are on your property. As of this moment, they are still in your front yard. No one is in handcuffs. All we want is to talk with him. So, could you tell him it’s all right to go with our agents? We have an office in Ann Arbor. In the same building where you go to mail your mail. And while he’s there, we would very much like permission to search your house. We can get a warrant. But if you give us permission, we can get all this over a lot quicker. We can have your house and your office searched by tomorrow morning. Or I believe you said two offices? You must be pretty important to have two offices. Even so, we can get your house and both your offices searched in no time. Professor?” He holds out the phone. “Do you think you could do that for me? Advise your son to cooperate? Ask him to unlock your house? Then go with our agents to our offices in Ann Arbor?”
The Professor of Immortality Page 17