“Peachy,” she said in a tone that indicated she was anything but.
“Did someone visit the professor?” Frasier asked. “Wanting the hard drive?”
“I thought I was doing the right thing,” Simmons said. “The professor didn’t give it to him.”
“Not directly,” Frasier said. “We found the professor’s body last night. You might consider that a sabbatical.”
Simmons ran to the bathroom again, heaving again, but there was nothing coming up.
Frasier was standing in the door to the bathroom. “Was his face scarred?”
“Yes.”
“It’s strange,” Frasier said. “He could have made you give him the hard drive, couldn’t he?”
She could only nod.
“Instead,” Frasier continued, “he told you to move up the pickup.”
She nodded again.
“And he paid you to do that, correct?”
She started to shake her head, but Frasier reached out and grabbed her jaw. “Speak.” He let go of her. “I have to hear it.”
Simmons licked her lips, swallowed, trying to get some moisture in her mouth. “Yes.”
Frasier glanced over his shoulder at Gun Guy and she realized who was really in charge. Gun Guy cocked his head and looked at her and she got a cold chill and knew the gun wasn’t for show. He’d as soon shoot her as write a note in that pad.
“Go sit back down, please,” Frasier said.
She scooted past him, gripping the afghan tightly. She fell into the chair.
Frasier sat on the couch next to Gun Guy. “Strange that he did that,” he repeated. “There is always a purpose to things. He could have done things so much more directly and simply if he’d wanted the drive. But he wanted a reaction.”
Gun Guy finally spoke. “Your professor is dead. The Courier who picked up the drive is dead.”
“An eighteen-year-old girl was used as bait to kill the Courier,” Frasier added. He sighed. “Few people realize how serious life is. How our decisions, no matter how trivial, can have the greatest consequences. But you got very drunk last night because on some level, you know you did the wrong thing. You knew the professor wasn’t on sabbatical. Your dean was covering for her while she was missing. And all of that would be fine, except you ultimately did it because he paid you.”
Simmons felt as if she wasn’t breathing, there was no more air to take in.
“How much did he pay you?” Frasier asked.
Gun Guy flipped shut his notepad and slid it into his inside pocket, once more revealing the big gun.
“A hundred thousand dollars,” Simmons managed to get out. She looked out the window and saw a bluebird flitting among the branches of the tree. She envied that bird.
“I think I’m going to be sick again,” she said, but she didn’t get out of the chair. She felt that if she could stay exactly where she was, this would all pass.
Gun Guy put on his sunglasses, a not so subtle way of saying we’re done here. Frasier looked concerned, but not overly.
He stared at her a long time, then turned to Gun Guy as he put on his sunglasses. “Let’s go. Nothing more here.” Frasier paused at the door. “Sorry to have disturbed your morning.”
Then they were gone.
Ivar looked like he hadn’t shaved in days, which was odd because he rarely shaved. He was one of those guys, the ones who got a little scraggly here or there, but a full beard would be an impossibility. Today, though, the look was deeper than unshaven: disheveled, slightly crazed, perhaps even manic. He’d been giggling to himself at times, which he found disturbing at first but no longer noticed. Then there was the whistling. He’d never been a whistler, but it seemed that had changed along with a lot of other things.
There was no tune to the whistle, just noise. It would have sent anyone around him climbing the walls, except the only person around was Burns and he didn’t seem to care. He just sat in a chair looking at the monitor with his golden eyes, occasionally telling Ivar what to do.
Ivar sometimes stopped the whistling to look at what he was building. He wasn’t sure what it was. He’d been through every lab in the building pilfering what was needed. The place was empty at night, and during the day he stayed in this basement lair.
He liked that word: lair. Much better than lab.
He’d even taken apart other people’s projects to take what he needed. Probably ruined a few PhDs along the way, but this was big. Very big. Not big in a physical sense, although it did fill the center of the room, but he knew, on a very base level, that this was something very, very different, and that excited him.
Despite Burns, who’d put an explosive collar around his neck.
Despite the gun and the collar and the eyes, Burns was a lot easier to work for than Doctor Winslow. Which should have made Ivar wonder about the career path he’d chosen.
Ivar had felt this same drive as a kid when he’d decided to build the greatest fort ever in the dining room. He snuck into his sister’s room and pulled the comforter off her bed without waking her. He’d pulled down his mother’s new brocade drapes in the living room, something she still reminded him of in the mandatory weekly phone calls to maintain the illusion he had a family. If he talked to her now, he knew he could convince her that they had served a much better function being part of his fort than as curtains.
So the drive was familiar, even comforting because of that, but he wasn’t building a fort. He stopped whistling for a moment and fingered an angry pimple on his neck, a thing growing as fast as the contraption in the center of the room. He saw the beauty in the mass of wiring and tubes and vacuum cases and batteries.
Fortunately someone had left their Prius parked behind the building overnight so he’d been able to pilfer the batteries protected by an orange cover that warned against touching or trying to do maintenance on them, as if they were some magical thing. High voltage, indeed. Of course the voltage was recharged by the brakes, so he’d had to improvise. He had appropriated the bike of Professor Whatever the Hell His Name Was, Ivar couldn’t remember. The professor was known all over UNC for pedaling to and from campus every morning and evening in his spandex, his warning light flashing on the back of his helmet, and taking up his allotted three feet of space in the two-lane roads, causing massive backups behind him, lots of middle fingers and screams, and smiling all the way to and fro.
He’d miss the bike, and that made Ivar happy.
Of course the expensive bike had required some adjustments as suggested by Burns, who seemed to know exactly what Ivar was building, but wasn’t sharing. In that, he was like Doctor Winslow. Ivar had rigged it to pedal backward as he was ordered. He wasn’t quite sure why it needed to be that way, but he knew that there was no going forward anymore. The bike was cabled to the batteries, which were cabled to the mainframe, which was cabled to a huge glass incubator used for newly born rats that he’d had to go over to the psych labs to appropriate. They did some bad stuff in there to those rats, so taking the rats away from them made Ivar feel somewhat better. They used the pretty white ones that were sacrificed for science, not the ugly brown ones that were sacrificed by the exterminator.
The bike technically wasn’t powering the batteries, as it was somehow part of the entire device, in between the batteries and the rest of it, in some way Ivar didn’t comprehend.
At Burns’s order, Ivar had gone back and taken some of the rats, saving them from their fate on the end of needles from grad students studying the latest way to flatten out the brain, get rid of the sine curves, the lows, and the highs, too, because you can’t have one without the other.
He didn’t know why he’d been ordered to get the rats, but like his mother’s drapes, he knew they were essential and would fit in someplace because everything else Burns had told him to get was fitting someplace.