“Deal,” she said, extending her hand.
I studied her eyes for a moment. I saw toughness, integrity, and maybe some weariness as we shook.
“The Bureau appreciates your help, Dr. Brockton.”
“It’s an honor to be asked, Special Agent Price. Even if I’m not thrilled about what you’re asking me to do.”
Suddenly someone rapped at the door. It opened before I had a chance to say, “Yes?”
“Dr. B.?” Miranda’s head leaned around the edge. When she saw the FBI agents, she appeared startled. “Oops, sorry to interrupt. I’ll come back later.”
“You’re not interrupting,” said Price. “We were just leaving.”
Miranda looked a question at me. “Please, come on in,” I said. “I need to talk to you about something.”
She stepped into the office, which now felt crowded and awkward. Her keen eyes swiftly sized up my two visitors: business suits, tidy haircuts, intelligent eyes, and the sort of physical confidence exuded by ex-marines and gifted athletes and skilled marksmen and FBI agents.
“This is my graduate assistant, Miranda Lovelady,” I said. “She’s the real brains of the outfit. Miranda, this is Special Agent Angela Price and Special Agent Ben Rankin.”
She swapped quick handshakes with them, and then all three of them turned to me expectantly.
“Agent Price and Agent Rankin stopped by to ask me for some help.” I sensed Price and Rankin tense up as I struggled for what to say next. “If they can get approval from headquarters, could we squeeze a few Knoxville field agents into the Evidence Recovery training?”
“No problem,” she said.
Something in her eyes shifted ever so slightly, like the merest flicker in a steady candle flame, and I realized that lying to Miranda might prove to be the steepest challenge and the highest cost of the deal I’d just made with the FBI.
CHAPTER 11
The voice in my ear sounded friendly, but it hit me like a fist.
“Hi, Doc, it’s Jim Emert at ORPD.”
Emert was the Oak Ridge detective who’d investigated the Novak murder. I hadn’t spoken with Emert in weeks, not since shortly after Isabella had disappeared into the rushing maze of storm sewers beneath the city. That last conversation, two days after she vanished, had been brief. The detective had brought in a cadaver dog to search the tunnels, and the dog, Emert told me, had come up empty-handed, or, more precisely, empty-nosed. I knew the dog’s track record at finding corpses, and it was impressive, so if he’d failed to detect death in the sewer, I felt pretty sure Isabella had escaped. What I felt unsure about was whether to be dismayed or relieved.
Part of me — the part that held fairly old-fashioned notions of right and wrong, of law and order — was frustrated and disappointed that the woman who had killed Leonard Novak and maimed Eddie Garcia appeared to be getting away. But another part of me — the part that felt compassion for the way her family’s lives had been shattered by the dropping of the atomic bomb during World War II — figured she’d already suffered for years and would continue to suffer as long as she lived. She’d expressed anguish at the injury she caused to Garcia’s hands, and she herself had sustained radiation burns to her own hands as well, though hers were less severe than Eddie’s. Finally, although I was reluctant to admit it even to myself, my judgment was clouded by the fact that Isabella and I had made love once.
“Hey, Jim, what’s up?” I hoped I sounded more casual than I felt. I had never told Emert — nor anyone else, for that matter — that I’d slept with Isabella. “Am I about to read headlines about a high-profile arrest in a bizarre Oak Ridge murder?”
“Not unless our friends at the FBI have made a breakthrough they haven’t told me about,” he said. “But there is something I think you should know. We’ve found something really interesting.”
“Tell me.”
“I’d rather show you,” he said. “It’s short notice, I know, but is there any chance you could head over this direction on the spur of the moment?”
“I’m on my way,” I answered, scrambling to my feet. “I’ll be in Oak Ridge in half an hour. Should I meet you at the police department?”
“No. Meet me at the Alexander Inn.” The words sent a chill through me.
Thirty minutes later I turned in to the driveway of the boarded-up, run-down Alexander Inn, feeling as if I’d come eerily full circle. The inn was where the Novak case had begun, when I’d cut the elderly physicist’s body from the scummy ice of a long-neglected swimming pool. Now, two months later, the pool was drained, its cracking walls and floor coated with slime in shades of black and green and brown. The building itself seemed to have aged by decades during the past two months. Sixty-five years earlier, the stately hotel, with its broad veranda and homey rocking chairs, had played host to the leading scientists of the Manhattan Project. Physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the Bomb, had stayed at the Alexander during his wartime visits to Oak Ridge; so had Enrico Fermi, whose primitive atomic reactor under the stadium at the University of Chicago had produced the world’s first controlled chain reaction. Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron — harnessed to separate uranium fuel for the Hiroshima bomb — had likewise stayed at the Alexander.
Now, six and a half decades after Hiroshima, the historic hotel was crumbling virtually before my eyes. Glancing up at the white-columned façade, I noticed that several letters of the hotel’s name had dropped off the building since I’d last seen it. ALEXANDER INN had now been reduced to ALE AND I. It was still possible to read the sign, because the blasted and blistered paint on the façade was less blasted and less blistered where it had been protected, until recently, by the missing letters. But the entire structure was one burning match away from irreversible destruction.
Surprisingly, I didn’t see any ORPD vehicles parked in front of the hotel or beside the swimming pool. Then, glancing behind the dilapidated structure, I spotted several police cars, a crime-lab van, and an armored truck labeled SWAT TEAM parked near the back of the property. As I rumbled across fissured asphalt toward the vehicles, my eyes beheld a ghastly sight: the head of Detective Jim Emert rested, neck down, on a platter on the ground.
That at least was how it looked for a moment. Drawing nearer, I saw that a slight rise in the ground had played a trick on my eyes: What appeared to be a platter was in fact the rim of a manhole, seen edge-on. As I parked and got out of the truck, Emert climbed from the opening and walked toward me.
I reached out to shake the detective’s hand, but he shook his head instead. As he did, a yellow-and-black headlamp on his forehead swiveled back and forth. “You really don’t want to shake hands with me right now,” he said, holding up his palms for me to inspect. He was right, I didn’t: The purple gloves he wore were virtually black with sewer grime.
Half a dozen SWAT-team officers, in black fatigues and Kevlar vests, clustered near the armored vehicle. On the ground to one side lay helmets and what I took to be night-vision goggles. The men looked relaxed, though several of them held automatic rifles dangling from one hand, as casually as I might hold a hip bone or a laser pointer. With their combat-grade weaponry and uniforms, they resembled soldiers more than police officers. “Looks like you came loaded for bear,” I said to Emert, “but it also looks like maybe you called off the hunt.”
“We got a call from the guy who lives up there on the hill.” He pointed. “He saw a woman climbing into the sewer, and he wondered if it might be our gal Isabella. I called our friends here for backup, and at the very moment these guys were pointing M16s at the manhole, out popped this skinny twelve-year-old boy with long hair. The kid let out a scream, which could’ve gotten him blown away. Lucky for him the guys with the guns don’t have the hair-trigger problem that I have.” Emert shook his head as he contemplated the near tragedy. “The kid peed his pants, but all things considered, he got off mighty lucky.”