No one paid attention to Piter, no one even seemed to notice him. At the doorway he crumpled up the telegram into a hard little ball and threw it into the waste-basket before he stumbled out into the hall.
Paige followed hesitantly, though she could see he didn’t want to talk to anyone. He shuffled aimlessly down the hall with his head low, his shoulders slumped. This wasn’t the self-confident man she had known for nearly a year, the handsome, sometimes abrasive, always quick-witted professor. A Nobel nominee.
This man looked defeated. A far cry for someone just achieving his lifelong dream.
Paige stopped to retrieve the paper, snatching it out of the trash, thinking it might be an important souvenir. But as she unfolded it and straightened the wrinkles, she glanced down at the text, reading the words there with widening eyes.
The elevator doors by the nurse’s station opened. Craig and Jackson tumbled out, headed directly for Dumenco’s room. Paige wondered as an afterthought if they had recovered the antimatter-but it all seemed insignificant now with Dumenco’s death.
Craig ran past Piter, his chestnut hair flying and his tie flipped over his shoulder. He skidded to a stop on the hospital’s old linoleum floor; Jackson pulled up beside him.
“We captured Nicholas Bretti,” Craig said. “He’s the one who shot Ben Goldfarb and stole the antimatter. It should only be a matter of time before he confesses to having killed Dumenco.” Then he recognized the Belgian’s stricken expression and looked up to see Paige also standing there stunned. “Are we too late-?” Craig hurried into the Ukrainian’s room.
Jackson remained in the hall, silent for a moment, then he turned back for the elevators. He opened and closed a sinewy fist, as if still trying to massage tension out of his muscles. “I’ll go check on Ben.”
Paige held up the telegram as Piter sat down dully in one of the visitor’s chairs. “Nels-you did it.”
The physicist didn’t respond. He looked down at the floor as if she was flouting the accusation. But she meant the telegram, not the lethal exposure.
“Nels, you let Dumenco think he had won. This telegram from the Stockholm committee congratulates you for winning the Nobel Prize. You’re a Nobel laureate, not Dumenco. You did that for him.” She felt exhausted, drained. “You let Dumenco die thinking it was him, validating all the black-program work he had done for the former Soviet Union.”
Piter looked up, stung. His eyes were red, his face drawn in long lines. “I always thought that winning the Nobel Prize would mean everything to me.” He shook his head. “But instead it means nothing.”
Paige frowned. “You gave a dying man his final wish. He died peacefully because of you-”
“He died because of me!” Piter wavered, then seemed to wither. “My research was shit. I tried to push the envelope farther than anyone else, and instead I built a crystal-lattice trap that had been invented years before, in a country that was falling apart!” Piter was almost sobbing.
Craig came back out of the hospital room, looking devastated and angry. “I should have shot Bretti when I had the excuse,” he said bitterly. “He never even came to see all the grief he caused.”
Paige stood next to Piter, who sat helplessly in a chair. “It wasn’t Bretti,” she said, looking at the lethargic Belgian, knowing he wasn’t up to repeating his confession. She explained everything Piter had said, while Craig listened in amazement.
Piter looked down at the floor and spoke in a whisper. “Who in his right mind would ever have thought it was possible to generate billions of times more p-bars than had ever been produced before? As long as it only needed to hold small amounts of antimatter, my crystal-lattice trap worked perfectly. But as soon as a threshold was reached, it became unstable. Dumenco knew about it all along. I should have discovered that flaw, but I was too blind, too confident-and now my life’s work was for naught.”
Craig stood tall, intimidating. He started to withdraw his handcuffs, prepared to make an arrest.
But Piter hadn’t finished talking. He looked up, and his voice took on a desperate edge. “It wasn’t my fault Dumenco was in the area! I didn’t know he was in there. He knew the beam dump was off-limits, but the new construction allowed people to circumvent the safety interlocks. He wanted to check out his detectors personally, because he knew the data were wrong. He knew he should have detected more p-bars.”
“Because Bretti stole them,” Craig said.
Shaking his head, Piter drew in a deep breath. “Dumenco knew a lot more than any of us.”
Craig said, “I’m going to have to arrest you, Dr. Piter.”
“I was only trying to delay his results until the Nobel committee made the selection. If Dumenco couldn’t show results that verified his underlying theories, the committee would choose me.” He looked down at the floor and whispered, “The greatest day of my life. And it doesn’t mean a thing.”
Paige looked at Craig and crossed her arms over her blouse. She was struck by the difference in the two men. Unlike Nels Piter, Craig was strong under pressure, silent, thoughtful, unassuming… yet extremely confident in his abilities.
The year that they had spent apart had validated her impressions of him, and now seeing Craig come through this stressful week unwavering only made her more certain of his character.
And her growing feelings for him.
She placed a hand on Craig’s shoulder. “Try to keep his arrest quiet until the Stockholm committee can be informed. If word leaks out that he’s won the Nobel, reporters are going to swarm over him like flies.”
Craig nodded, looking at her with an unreadable expression. “Okay, Paige. If that’ll help you out.”
Then he led the handcuffed Nobel laureate toward the side exit.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Friday, 5:47 p.m.
Fox RiverMedicalCenter
Craig stood by the hospital room door, waiting as Dumenco’s family paid their last respects. A single light on the dresser cast moody shadows throughout the room as the sun set over the oak-shaded Fox River. The medical equipment and diagnostics had been shut down, and for the first time since Craig had been there, the room seemed peaceful.
Dumenco’s wife Luba sat by her dead husband, gently stroking his hand. She moved her lips close to his head, silently whispering a prayer. His two daughters stood by the window, quietly comforting each other. Peter stared vacantly at his father, as if he could not fathom that the man was dead.
Craig waited patiently, not wanting to disturb the family in their grief. He would have time later to try and understand the remaining loose ends. He could see why Paige had avoided spending more time in the hospital room, not because she didn’t like Trish-he’d seen Paige take care of herself-but because of the memory of her own father’s death.
Now, though, with Bretti’s capture, Dumenco’s death, and Piter’s confession, things could finally return to normal for Fermilab.
Craig missed spending time with Paige, and it hadn’t struck him until now how much he really missed her. This was the third major case they had worked together, and each time he discovered more about the intelligent, exuberant Protocol officer. And he wondered how she viewed him.
Earlier, after he had taken Nels Piter into custody, she met him in the hospital lobby and ran a hand through her blond hair. “You’ve been through a lot today.”