13
MORNING. THE MAN KNOWN as JIM PARK, whose name had been Jung Park before he legally changed it, was late for work. He had never been late, not in the six years he had worked for Sunstar Digital Service Laboratories. Damned subway. He would explain the situation to Walter Parasher, whose name before he legally changed it was Akram, which meant "most generous," which Jim sincerely hoped would be his guiding principle when Jim walked tardily into the office.
It would have helped if Jim were not considered to be the company comic. It would have helped if Jim's efforts at jokes were appreciated or understood by his Indian bosses, particularly Walter. It did help that Jim was brilliant, though he often feared that his skill was not enough to save him in a downsizing. What he did came easily to Jim and so he doubted his value and assumed others could easily do what he did. They could not.
Jim was an electrical engineer, a research engineer whose task was to use computer technology to chart patterns in the billions of stars around us, and to locate new stars and galaxies.
Jim never looked through a telescope. Remote scanning devices around the world fed data into the company's computer network and Jim, in his office in Manhattan, separated the noise and dirt of the universe from the objects of interest.
Jim was thirty-nine, recently married to an Irish American woman named Sioban, who was already pregnant.
Twenty minutes ago, he had stood on the platform in the damp for forty minutes, people jostling, coughing, bumping into him. Jim was a patient man, but he had to get to work.
In his hurry, when he got off the train at Union Square, Jim had stepped onto a piece of cardboard in the gutter. His foot had gone through the soaked cardboard and into six inches of filthy water that now clung to his socks and squished inside his shoe.
Inside the office building now, he recognized no one going for the elevator. None of the familiar faces. They must all have made it on time. How had they done it?
The elevator doors closed. Only two others in the car. They knew each other, and seemed to be in no hurry. One was a pretty woman in her forties in a black dress and a very broad belt. The other, a man in his fifties, stocky, well dressed, his shoes and feet not wet and reeking of filth. Did they smell the mess on his pants, socks, inside his shoe?
Jim was breathing hard. He had used his inhaler fifteen minutes after he got to the subway platform. It was a little too soon to use it again, but it was an emergency. He did not want to face Walter reeking and wheezing.
He reached into his pocket for the inhaler and his cell phone to check for messages and found something else, something hard, metallic, something that had not been there an hour ago.
Jim pulled the object out and held it before him, adjusting his glasses. There were brown spots on the otherwise gleaming metal. He looked at the other two people on the elevator to see if they were watching. Jim knew what he held. What he did not know and did not expect was that he had just touched something that flipped open the razor-sharp, blood-covered blade of the knife.
The pretty woman saw the knife in his hand. She let out a sound, not quite a scream, more like an inflated balloon whose mouthpiece had been pulled tight. The man noticed now. He had a briefcase. He reached into it, fumbled for something.
"No," said Jim, knife in hand.
The man took his hand out of the briefcase. He was holding a very small gun. The woman was behind the man.
"I don't- " Jim said.
The man with the briefcase shot him.
It wasn't a fatal wound or even a very bad one. The small bullet entered his left shoulder and stayed there.
Jim dropped the knife and slumped back against the elevator wall as the doors opened.
"Don't move," said the man, his voice quavering. And then to the woman. "Get help."
It was just a little after ten-fifteen and already the worst day of Jim's life.
For some reason, the meaning of his Korean name, Jung, came to mind. Righteous. His name meant righteous. He felt not the least bit righteous at the moment.
The silver and black metal box about the size of a small carry-on sat on the desk, its cover swung open. Lindsay plugged the black fiber-optic cable into the box. At the end of the cable was a switch and a 400-watt lamp. She set the dial in the box to one of the six wavelength settings. The wavelength she selected would reveal even minute fragments of glass when the light was on. Then she selected a pair of orange goggles.
They were seated in a conference room connecting to both the corridor and the headmaster's office at the Wallen School. Walnut table and twelve matching chairs. Portraits of Wallen's four previous headmasters and one previous headmistress on the walls.
Danny wasn't impressed, which would have been a minor disappointment to the board of Wallen, which had spent almost ninety thousand dollars to make the room look impressive and a little intimidating.
"And that will do what?" asked the headmaster, looking at the metal box on the table.
Headmaster Marvin Brightman looked as if he had beaten out at least ten contenders for the role of headmaster in a movie about prep schools. He was perfect, lean, tailored suit and tie with blue and white stripes, a cloud of white hair, an intense, handsome dark face.
"It'll help us in our investigation," said Danny.
"Can you be a little more specific?" Brightman asked. "They are going to ask."
"We'll give them an answer," said Danny.
"It wasn't easy to get permission from the parents," Brightman said.
"But you got it," said Danny, sitting.
"I told them, as you suggested, that it is in the best interest of Wallen, the students and the parents, to resolve this situation as soon as possible and eliminate their students of all suspicion."
"And they'll all be here?" asked Lindsay.
"They'll all be here," said Brightman.
"They believed you," said Danny.
"They thought that I was giving them a line of total bullshit," said Brightman. "These are not stupid people. But they didn't have much choice other than to refuse to cooperate, which would make their children look guilty."
"So they aren't happy with you right now?" asked Danny.
Brightman shook his head and smiled.
"Detective, you have a gift for understatement. The only people they are less happy with than me is the two of you. The difference is that you can live with their displeasure. I have to deal with it. My ass may well be on the line. Will you be done by eleven?"
"Yes," said Lindsay.
"Good, we have an assembly scheduled at that time to honor Alvin Havel's memory. It would be good if you had his killer in hand by then, not that I have any great expectations of that. I have a school full of frightened people."
"No guarantees," said Danny.
"I didn't think so."
"Let's get started," said Lindsay.
"Let's," said Brightman.
Danny and Lindsay had arrived at nine and met with Bill Hexton, the Wallen security officer in the empty school lunchroom over coffee.
"Who has access to the video room?" Danny had asked.
"Me, Joe Feragmi and Liz Henning, both half-time security," Hexton had said, shaking his head. "Joe's retired NYPD. Liz was a deputy in the sheriff's department in Westchester. She got married last year. Husband's an architect."
"And that's it?" asked Lindsay.
"No," said Hexton. "Joe and Liz can get in there with their pass key, but so can Mr. Brightman and whoever's on the night cleaning crew."
"Who else?" asked Danny.
"Everyone," said Hexton, adjusting his tie. "We don't lock the door during the day, just close it. A student, a teacher, a secretary could go in."
"So that narrows it down to everyone," said Danny.
"Yes," said Hexton. "Sorry. We've never had any reason to- "
"How long would they have?" asked Lindsay. "In the video room before someone saw them?"
"Not long," said Hexton. "Ten minutes max. Not enough time to doctor the tape and you couldn't be sure one of my people didn't show up, but…"