Luisa turns to page nine and reaches for her coffee. Her hand freezes.
Eminent British scientist Dr. Rufus Sixsmith was found dead Tuesday morning in his room at Buenas Yerbas International Airport’s Hotel Bon Voyage, having taken his own life. Dr. Sixsmith, former head of the Global Atomic Commission, had been employed as a consultant for Seaboard Corporation at the blue-chip utility’s Swannekke Island installation outside Buenas Yerbas City for ten months. He was known to have had a lifelong battle with clinical depression, and for the week prior to his death had been incommunicado. Ms. Fay Li, spokeswoman for Seaboard, said, “Dr. Sixsmith’s untimely death is a tragedy for the entire international scientific community. We at Seaboard Village on Swannekke Island feel we’ve lost not just a greatly respected colleague but a very dear friend. Our heartfelt condolences go to his own family and his many friends. He shall be greatly missed.” Dr. Sixsmith’s body, discovered with a single gunshot wound to the head by hotel maids, is being flown home for burial in his native England. A medical examiner at BYPD confirmed there are no suspicious circumstances surrounding the incident.
“So”—Jakes grins—“is your exposé of the century screwed up now?”
Luisa’s skin prickles and her eardrums hurt.
“Whoops.” Jakes lights up a cigarette. “Were you close?”
“He couldn’t”—Luisa fumbles her words—“wouldn’t have done it.”
Jakes approximates gentleness. “Kinda looks like he did, Luisa.”
“You don’t kill yourself if you have a mission.”
“You might if your mission makes you crazy.”
“He was murdered, Jakes.”
Jakes represses a here-we-go-again face. “Who by?”
“Seaboard Corporation. Of course.”
“Ah. His employer. Of course. Motive?”
Luisa forces herself to speak calmly and ignore Jakes’s mock conviction. “He’d written a report on a reactor type developed at Swannekke B, the HYDRA. Plans for Site C are waiting for Federal Power Commission approval. When it’s approved, Seaboard can license the design for the domestic and overseas market—the government contracts alone would mean a stream of revenue in the high tens of millions, annually. Sixsmith’s role was to give the project his imprimatur, but he hadn’t read the script and identified lethal design flaws. In response, Seaboard buried the report and denied its existence.”
“And your Dr. Sixsmith did what?”
“He was getting ready to go public.” Luisa slaps the newspaper. “This is what the truth cost him.”
Jakes pierces a wobbly dome of yolk with a toast soldier. “You, uh, know what Grelsch is going to say?”
“ ‘Hard evidence,’ ” says Luisa, like a doctor making a diagnosis. “Look, Jakes, will you tell Grelsch . . . just tell him I had to go somewhere.”
20
The manager at the Hotel Bon Voyage is having a bad day. “No, you may not see his room! The specialized carpet cleaner has removed all traces of the incident. Who, I add, we had to pay from our own pocket! What kind of ghoul are you, anyway? A reporter? A ghost hunter? A novelist?”
“I’m”—Luisa Rey buckles with sobs from nowhere—“his niece, Megan Sixsmith.”
A stony matriarch enfolds the weeping Luisa in her mountainous bust. Random bystanders shoot the manager foul looks. The manager goes pale and attempts damage control. “Please, come through to the back, I’ll get you a—”
“Glass of water!” snaps the matriarch, knocking the man’s hand away.
“Wendy! Water! Please, through here, why don’t you—”
“A chair, for goodness’ sake!” The matriarch supports Luisa into the shady side office.
“Wendy! A chair! This instant!”
Luisa’s ally clasps her hands. “Let it out, honey, let it out, I’m listening. I’m Janice from Esphigmenou, Utah, and here is my story. When I was your age, I was alone in my house, coming downstairs from my daughter’s nursery, and there on the halfway landing stood my mother. ‘Go check the baby, Janice,’ she said. I told my mother I’d checked her one minute ago, she was sleeping fine. My mother’s voice turned to ice. ‘Don’t argue with me, young lady, go check the baby, now!’ Sounds crazy, but only then I remembered my mother had died the Thanksgiving before. But I ran upstairs and found my daughter choking on the cord from the blind, wound around her neck. Thirty seconds, that would have been it. So you see?”
Luisa blinks tearfully.
“You see, honey? They pass over, but they ain’t gone.”
The chastened manager returns with a shoe box. “Your uncle’s room is occupied, I’m afraid, but the maid found these letters inside the Gideon’s Bible. His name is on the envelope. Naturally, I was going to have them forwarded to your family, but since you’re here . . .”
He hands her a sheaf of nine time-browned envelopes, each addressed to “Rufus Sixsmith, Esq. c/o Caius College, Cambridge, England.” One is stained by a very recent tea bag. All are badly crumpled and hastily smoothed out.
“Thank you,” says Luisa, vaguely, then more firmly. “Uncle Rufus valued his correspondence, and now it’s all I have left of him. I won’t take up any more of your time. I’m sorry I fell to pieces out there.”
The manager’s relief is palpable.
“You’re a very special person, Megan,” Janice from Esphigmenou, Utah, assures Luisa, as they part in the hotel lobby.
“You’re a very special person, Janice,” Luisa replies and returns to the parking level, passing within ten yards of locker number 909.
21
Luisa Rey has been back at Spyglass’s offices for under a minute when Dom Grelsch roars over the newsroom chatter, “Miss Rey!”
Jerry Nussbaum and Roland Jakes look up from their desks, at Luisa, at each other, and mouth, “Ouch!” Luisa puts the Frobisher letters into a drawer, locks it, and walks into Grelsch’s office. “Dom, sorry I couldn’t make the meeting, I—”
“Spare me the woman’s trouble excuse. Shut the door.”
“I’m not in the habit of making any excuses.”
“Are you in the habit of making meetings? You’re paid to be.”
“I’m also paid to follow up stories.”
“So you flew off to the crime scene. Did you find hard evidence missed by the cops? A message, in blood, on the tiles? ‘Alberto Grimaldi did it’?”
“Hard evidence isn’t hard evidence if you don’t break your back digging for it. An editor named Dom Grelsch told me that.”
Grelsch glares at her.
“I got a lead, Dom.”
“You got a lead.”
I can’t batter you, I can’t fool you, I can only hook your curiosity. “I phoned the precinct where Sixsmith’s case was processed.”
“There is no case! It was suicide! Unless we’re talking Marilyn Monroe, suicides don’t sell magazines. Too depressing.”
“Listen to me. Why did Sixsmith buy an airplane ticket if he was going to put a bullet through his head later that day?”
Grelsch extends his arms to show the size of his disbelief that he is even having this conversation. “A snap decision.”
“Then why would he have a typed suicide note—and no typewriter—ready and waiting for this snap decision?”
“I don’t know! I don’t care! I got a publication deadline Thursday night, a dispute with the printers, a delivery strike in the offing, and Ogilvy holding the Sword of What’s-’is-name over my head. Hold a séance and ask Sixsmith yourself! Sixsmith was a scientist. Scientists are unstable.”