“Maybe up to now Josephson has just been Bedford’s practitioner, on reserve to do illegal resets when the time came. Then again, some of Josephson’s research is suspicious as well. Borderline illegal.”
“Goody, we’re at the molebiol stuff. Now I really am going to get a headache,” Livvy said, taking another swallow of beer. “But keep going. Suspicious how? I wasn’t there when you talked to that tech.”
“I’m not ready to speculate on that, other than he seemed to be working on ways to fool the tests for biol age,” Chris said, but his eyes, resting on Livvy’s face, were hooded.
“Okay,” Livvy said. “We can wait on pure speculation and stick to our guts for now. Let me follow through on LLE’s involvement, though, pretending that we know Bedford is Josephson’s patron. Once Josephson’s unexplained absence was noticed, and LLE got involved, Bedford could count on us, or I should say LLE, going to see Isabella.”
“True, and he had Maas waiting.”
“Wait, back up. How did Bedford know yesterday morning that LLE knows about Josephson, again?”
“Josephson confessed to Bedford that he was careless in his communication with the clinic staff or, knowing him, Bedford assumed he was careless, or…” Chris hesitated.
“Ah, yes, the good news. Bedford may have a rat planted in LLE somewhere,” Livvy said. “Back to that. So LLE was set up at Isabella’s and if Maas hadn’t taken a nap, we’d be dead. Well… maybe an overstatement. Maas, after all.”
“What?” Chris said.
“Never mind. Anything else I should know while I’m trying to put all the pieces together?”
“I took an LLE car back here last night after searching Josephson’s mansion. Louie wouldn’t let me get into it this morning and I found a bomb attached to the undercarriage. It was pretty crude, but it could scarcely be random. It was an attack focused on me, so I suspect Bedford knows who to target in LLE.”
“Slick, McGregor,” Livvy said, annoyed. “Does the Chief know? Were you even going to tell me? Why is he being this aggressive, anyway? What does it buy him?”
“LLE personnel are used to it. Like I said, we’ve been targets for the worst of the radicals for years. The bomb is at Forensics now, but I don’t expect to learn anything from it. Bedford can’t know anyone has connected him to Josephson already; you’re the only one who’s heard any of this. All he wants to do is slow down the investigation into Josephson’s disappearance before it leads to him – if it ever does.”
“You’ve been even busier than I thought. I repeat, were you even going to tell me? About the bomb?”
“Livvy,” Chris said, “of course I was going to tell you. Even if it’s aimed mainly at me, it puts you at risk. I just wanted to talk about Josephson and Bedford first, so that you could get a sense of the whole picture as I see it. Do you see now what you’ve gotten yourself into?”
Livvy looked a little puzzled, but shook her head as though to clear it.
“Back up. If Bedford has us killed, the Chief would just put more people on it, and get Homicide involved, and it would draw way more attention to the case,” Livvy said carefully. “Wouldn’t it?”
“Not the way LLE handles things. The Chief would put another team on Josephson, and they’d become targets as well, but it would definitely slow things down. Remember, so far all of these attempts can be considered random attacks on LLE detectives, unless someone else thinks about the fact that Maas beat us to Isabella’s. New detectives on Josephson would buy Bedford time, probably enough time for him to do what he wants to do,” Chris said. “LLE does their own homicide investigations on LLE officers.”
“You don’t say? I know in San Francisco we lost a few, but I always figured some other Homicide team was on it.”
Now that the worst was over, Chris went into the kitchenette to warm up some of the pizza. Livvy was being unusually quiet, and wasn’t eating, although she was still attacking her beer.
“In fact, these kinds of attempts play well for someone like Bedford,” Chris called from the kitchenette as he set the flash warmer, “since they smack of amateurism, which is what you typically get from the radical groups. If he’s the instigator, he’s hoping to get lucky and hoping it looks like luck. If anything looks too professional, it arouses suspicions.”
Chris came back to the table and sat down again. Livvy stared at him with her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand. Her expression revealed nothing.
“McGregor,” she finally said, “has anyone ever told you that you sure know how to muffle a party?”
“I have a knack,” Chris said.
“All right,” Livvy said, leaning back in her chair. “Let’s check and see if I’ve followed you on the essentials. The complicated part you mentioned. We are going up against a sociopathic megalomaniac with unlimited resources and an evil mad scientist on retainer. Since he’s a tricky bastard who has achieved influence with several… wacky… homicidally inclined terri… terrorist groups that actually should hate him, we may have to deal with them simultaneously. That’s so unfair, by the way. So far, he doesn’t know we’ve connected him to his pet quack, but he’s happy enough to kill us just to delay LLE making the connection, since they’d have to start all over from our notes, and that might take them a few days – or at least until they got over being inconsolable, that is – and meanwhile, he can get on with… whatever his dried up little walnut of a heart desires.
“We suspect that that is something repulsive that he has been planning for over 50 years – about which we are so far clueless – and we want to try to dwar… to thwart him. Sound about right?’
Chris shrugged, but his eyes were glinting. “You’ve nailed the basics. I guess I might have saved a lot of time if I’d summarized like that to begin with, and skipped the details that might count as, well, actual evidence.”
“That’s okay. I have a few knacks, too,” Livvy said, reaching for her beer again and taking another long swallow. “Where is the Chief in all this? You know, the man who answers to “sir” and occasionally tries to tell you which way to get froggy?”
“I haven’t told him or anyone else at work that I suspect a connection between Josephson and Bedford. We’ll fill the Chief in as soon as we have something more than a series of coincidences to put Bedford solidly in the picture. The only thing concrete is my copies of the appointment records, and a missing doctor.”
“It’s pretty thin,” Livvy said.
“I want you to seriously consider going back to San Francisco until this is all over. Before now, Bedford has just been targeting us casually, to slow us down on Josephson. After tomorrow, he’ll know we’ve found the connection to him, and it will get… dicey. With a good family excuse, you could leave tomorrow.”
This seemed to sober Livvy again, although she had finished her fourth beer, keeping up with Chris respectably. She looked at the bottle in her hand like she was starting to regret it, maybe because it precluded something stronger.
“Were you even listening to me before? I’ve already made a commitment to myself to go back to San Francisco for Thanksgiving to pay for getting in here,” she said. She looked up at Chris quizzically. “But surely you know me a little better than that already. I’d be insulted except that I’m aware that acquiring a partner wasn’t your idea.”
“I had to offer, or it was going to nag at my conscience. You haven’t even had time to adjust to being a regular target for the fanatical amateurs, and soon we’re going to have pros after us,” Chris said.
“Okay. Understood. Apology accepted. Can we move on to where you think we should go from here? It’s all still just gut work, after all. Even the fifty-year-old connection to Josephson, if it came out, would prove nothing.”