The University of West Haven is an unpretentious collection of ugly concrete buildings scattered across the top of a hill with no view. We got directions to the Business Administration Center, where Cetio the guard insisted we would find Dr. Kees, and parked in front of a gray and largely windowless five-story cube that was still very much under construction.
We got out and stared at it. There were other cars in the lot but not many. In fact, the entire campus had a forlorn, empty look to it.
“What do you think?” Murphy asked.
“Well, Hillstrom’s office is over a dentist. Maybe this guy likes abandoned buildings.”
He gestured to the back seat. “Should we take the stuff?”
“Might as well. I don’t want to lose it now.”
The red-and-white cooler, free of its brown bag, did indeed have Caution-Human Remains taped on one side. On the other was a happy penguin and the words Chilly Willy.
We picked our way over the construction-site debris that lay scattered across the frozen mud and entered a doorless front lobby. The buttons for the elevator hadn’t been installed yet. Nor, for all we knew, had the elevator. We began to climb the stairs, the clatter of our footsteps echoing off the bare concrete walls.
On the fifth floor, we found a door and behind it a wall of warm air. We walked down the unfinished, uncarpeted hallway, looking through doorways as we went, vaguely following the sound of a radio. We found it, and the young woman in cowboy boots listening to it, about halfway down. She was standing at an equipment-jammed counter, dropping blood from a pipette into a row of tiny saucers in perfect rhythm with the music.
She finished and smiled brightly at us. “Hi. Can I help you?”
Murphy and I looked at each other. “Does Dr. Robert Kees work here?”
“Sure does.”
She clomped out of the room and down the hall, leaving us surrounded by a truly impressive hodgepodge of gleaming, metallic, totally mysterious machines. The radio sounded tinny and cowed by its competition.
She returned in a couple of minutes, followed by an athletic middle-aged man with thick, swept-back black hair. He smiled broadly and stuck out his hand. “Hi. I’m Bob Kees.”
We introduced ourselves and he looked at the cooler. “Is that your friend?”
“Both of them. Maybe all three of them. Actually, that’s why we’re here; we don’t know how many are involved.”
“Beverly tells me you want all your information in twenty minutes or so, is that right?”
Murphy’s face brightened. “Is that all it takes?”
Kees laughed. “Not a chance. Assuming I was sitting around here dying for something to do, it might take me sixty to seventy-two hours, if I was lucky. The way things are, I could get to you in three weeks to a month.”
“A month?” Murphy burst out.
“How much did Dr. Hillstrom tell you about this?”
“She said it had something to do with reopening a case-that you might have put the wrong guy in the slammer.”
“This is going to sound a little corny, but we think an innocent man died because of what’s in this cooler.”
Kees pursed his lips and motioned us into the hallway. “Jeannie, let me know what you get from these as soon as you’re finished, okay? And hold off on the Spiegelmann stuff until I tell you.”
“Okay.”
He led us down the corridor and through a maze of overstuffed offices bulging with furniture and strange machinery. “In case you didn’t notice, we haven’t quite moved in. The university, in its wisdom, contracted for the destruction of our old quarters before the new ones were built. Then the workers went on strike.”
“What about the students?”
“You mean the lack of them? They went out on strike too-in sympathy with the workers and just in time to extend their Christmas leave. Protest isn’t what it used to be.”
We ended up in a pretty nice office, complete with rug on the floor and pictures on the walls. Half of it was piled high with junk too, but the other half looked neater and more pleasant than anything we had back home. Kees sat behind an old and unpretentious turn-of-the-century desk and locked his fingers behind his head. To his right, on a separate table, two glowing computers hummed softly to themselves.
“So, tell me your tale.”
The stereotype of the self-proclaimed “busy” man is a guy who spends half his time telling you he’s got none to spare. With one assistant and the rest out on strike, combined with what Beverly Hillstrom had told me about his popularity, Robert Kees struck me as having his life under control. He let us bumble through our story without one glance at his watch or a single sigh of impatience. When we finished, he got up, plucked the cooler from my lap, said, “Okay,” and left the room.
Frank raised his eyebrows. “What did that mean?”
“I guess he’s either doing it right now, or he just threw it out the window.”
“Were we supposed to follow him?”
“Not unless you know how to work any of that stuff.” We sat there for over an hour, staring out the window, staring at the floor, staring at each other, until he finally returned. “That’s quite the collection.”
“How do you mean?” He parked himself with his hands behind his head again. “It’s filled with goodies. A standard batch of samples, even from Beverly, has a few slides, a few swabs, maybe some tissue, and that’s about it. She threw in everything but the kitchen sink-she must have had some serious reservations when she did the autopsy.”
“That’s what she told me.”
“Then why the hell didn’t she tell us at the time?” Murphy muttered. “It sure would have saved us a lot of wear and tear, not to mention an extra body in the morgue.”
Kees smiled. “Ah, buted. we that’s not the game, is it? You demand, we supply. Nobody wants to ask us about our doubts-that’s for the defense. If we find something odd, the prosecution doesn’t want to know about it, not unless we can guarantee where it’ll lead them. Besides, according to the paperwork she enclosed, you’ve got the right man in jail.”
Frank passed his hand across his mouth. “Then what are we doing here?”
“I can dig deeper than she can. I think that’s why she kept as much as she did-just in case. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but you’ve got yourself a very good medical examiner up there.”
“So what happens now?” I asked.
“You wait. I work. Most of the stuff is in an incubator right now. It’ll stay there overnight. There are a couple of things I can do in the meantime but not much, except make a few phone calls and rearrange everyone else’s schedule.”
“We do appreciate this-a lot.”
“It’s okay. Why don’t you come back in about three days? We’ll see what we’ve got.”
I got up, but Frank didn’t move. “You wouldn’t have a corner we could bunk in, would you?”
Kees’s eyes widened. “You mean stay here?”
“Yup.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because we don’t know for sure what’s going on. We think Ski Mask is just pushing to reopen the case. We think he’s bumped off some guy just to get our interest. We think he and us are the only people involved in this thing, and I’d lay bets he followed us here. But we don’t know any of that for sure. There’s an equally strong possibility that there’s a separate bunch just as hell-bent on keeping a lid on this, to the point that they almost killed my partner here, and that they too are hot on our tail. That cooler is the only thing so far that isn’t pure invention, and I’m not about to leave it behind in a half-demolished building and spend two days going to the movies. Is that all right with you guys?”
Kees shrugged. “We’ve got the room and the furniture… God knows we’re not too crowded. Be my guests. Just don’t get underfoot, okay?”
Murphy stood up and nodded. “You got it.”
I followed him out the door, closing it behind me. “You really going to do this?”
“You bet your butt. You get a star witness that can bust a case wide open, what do you do with him? You sit on him until they need him. That cooler’s our witness.”