McLaughlin shot a look at Huygens; the PR man shut up. “It was impossible to get Richard to see the staff psychologist,” McLaughlin continued in more patient tones. “When we made appointments for him, he’d find a way to avoid them. He was stubborn and, well …” He raised his hands in helplessness. “We just had to work with him and hope for the best.”
That was the first time my bullshit detector had gone off. Now, upon reflection, I knew why.
First, whatever purpose Payson-Smith had fulfilled in the Ruby Fulcrum team couldn’t have been so critical that Tiptree had been unable to replace him, even in a pinch. However brainy this man was, I hadn’t heard his name mentioned in the same breath as Robert Oppenheimer’s, and they had replaced him, too, way back when. Oppenheimer’s only mistake had been in openly expressing his objections to the atomic bomb, and that was after it was exploded over Japan. No one had ever claimed he was mentally ill, only that he was a suspected commie sympathizer.
If Huygens was telling me the truth, then Payson-Smith should have been canned immediately, for being mentally unhinged and opposed to Sentinel before it was even built, let alone made operational. But they wouldn’t have kept him on the project … and that, I now realized, was why the first alarm had rung.
At the same time this was going on, McLaughlin continued, certain spare parts and lab instruments had turned up missing from the company storerooms; they included various high-quality mirrors, lenses, Pyrex tubes, small carbon dioxide and water tanks, and a portable vacuum pump. The theft of the items had not been detected, it later turned out, because someone had managed to access the company’s computer inventory system and delete their removal from the records. The loss was discovered only when other scientists complained to the company comptroller that they couldn’t find items that had been there last week.
Then, almost exactly one week ago, Kim Po was found dead outside his condominium in Richmond Heights. He had apparently been coming home from a late night at the lab when he was shot just outside the condo’s front door … not by a conventional rifle, but by a laser weapon of some sort, one that had drilled a self-cauterizing hole straight through the back of his head from a parked car. As with John’s murder, no one had heard gunfire, nor had a bullet been recovered from either man’s body.
“We’ll cut to the chase,” Barris said. “Judging from the information Cale has given us and the near identical circumstances of both Dr. Kim and Mr. Tiernan’s murders, it seems as if a high-power laser had been used.”
McLaughlin coughed into his fist. “A CO2 laser rifle, to be exact,” he said. “Not like something you see in movies, of course. It would be extremely large and cumbersome … at least the size of a rocket launcher, in fact … but my people tell me it could produce a beam capable of burning through metal, wood, plastic, just about anything … and that includes flesh and bone.”
He shook his head. “It’s a nasty weapon, probably even more powerful than the one that kid in Chicago used a couple of years ago. Silent, invisible, absolute flat trajectory, almost infinite range. If you had a good infrared sight to go with it, you could fire it through a closed window, provided it was made of nonreflective glass, and hit a target several blocks away. No one would even know where the shot came from.”
“And you think someone from Tiptree concocted this thing?” I asked.
McLaughlin glanced hesitantly at both Barris and Huygens. He put the glass snowball down on the desk and leaned forward, his arms resting on his knees. “No, not just anyone,” he replied, looking embarrassed by the admission. “We think Richard’s the one. He had the training and the technical ability, plus access to the parts he needed.” He looked at Mike Farrentino. “Lieutenant? If you’ll continue …?”
For the first time since we had entered the colonel’s office, Farrentino spoke up. “After Mr. Huygens tipped us off,” he said quietly, “some of my people visited Payson-Smith’s home earlier this evening. He was missing, but they found a small workshop in his basement. Something had been built on a bench down there, all right, and there were pieces of burned-through metal that looked as if they might have been used for target practice.”
“But why would he …?”
“Why would he kill Dr. Kim and Mr. Tiernan?” Barris shrugged. He picked up the glass snowball and juggled it in his hands. “Who knows what goes on in a sick mind? Maybe he’s upset at the other members of his team for having built Sentinel … that’s our theory, at any rate. First he knocked off Dr. Kim, then he tracked down Dr. Hinckley when she was trying to tell Tiernan about Kim’s murder and tried to kill her, too. Unfortunately he nailed your friend instead.”
I started to ask another question, but Huygens beat me to it. “We did our best to keep Kim’s murder out of the press. There was only a small item in the next morning’s Post-Dispatch about it, but we managed to get their reporters to believe that Po had been killed during a robbery attempt … but Beryl obviously found out the truth and decided to go to your paper instead.”
“That’s another reason why we suspect Payson-Smith,” the colonel said. “He was one of the few people who could have learned of her plans to meet Tiernan at the bar tonight.”
McLaughlin raised a hand. “Before you ask why Payson-Smith didn’t kill them both when he had the chance … according to my people, this laser rifle apparently consumes a lot of power. It would have to be run off an independent current, so it takes about a minute for its battery to recharge before each shot.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “So Hinckley suspected that Payson-Smith was the guy behind Kim’s murder and went to John to tell him the story.”
Barris and McLaughlin both nodded their heads, and that was the second time my bullshit detector went off.
They didn’t know it, but I had seen Hinckley and Payson-Smith talking to each other during the reception. For a woman who suspected her boss of having gone psycho and killing one of her friends with a home-built laser, she had not appeared apprehensive about being in his company. Nor had Payson-Smith struck me as the homicidal maniac type. Yeah, maybe you never know for sure. When some nut with a machine gun goes on a rampage in a shopping mall, his neighbors invariably describe him as a nice, quiet person who always minded his own business. Yet my guts told me that Payson-Smith just seemed the wrong guy to be carrying this sort of rap.
And then there were other implausibilities. Even if Payson-Smith was the sociopathic killer these guys made him out to be, how could he have known where Hinckley would be tonight? After all, she had been the one who had told me to pass the message to John. I had not disclosed this to anyone else. So how could Payson-Smith have known where these two people would be meeting each other?
For that matter, why were these guys so certain it was Beryl Hinckley who had met Tiernan at Clancy’s? “Middle-aged black lady” was a description that could fit a few hundred thousand people in St. Louis, but that was how Farrentino had described Hinckley to me when I had been summoned to the murder scene.
And why, on the basis of such circumstantial evidence, were McLaughlin and Huygens here at all, putting the blame on one of Tiptree’s own scientists?
The bullshit detector was sounding five alarms now; fire engines were leaving the station, and the dalmatians were howling like mad. Yet I continued to play the dummy; I stretched back in my chair, resting my feet against the bottom of Barris’s desk. “Okay,” I said. “So you’ve got a mad scientist on the loose. Why are you telling me this?”
Barris didn’t like my boots touching his desk. He stared at me until I dropped them back to the floor, then he went on. “When you took Tiernan’s PT, there was the possibility that you might have found some evidence that could conclusively link Payson-Smith to Kim’s murder. We needed to get that back at all costs, and that’s why you were brought in.”