No pets.
“This woman is boring,” Lowen said, out loud but to herself. The courier coughed noncommittally.
An hour later the courier had left, file in hand, and Lowen was left with nothing but a feeling of unsatisfied irritation. She thought perhaps a drink might fix that, but a check of her fridge informed her that the only thing in that appliance was the dregs of some iced tea that she couldn’t recall making. Lowen grimaced at the fact that she was coming up with a blank concerning when she had made the tea, then grabbed the pitcher and poured it out into the sink. Then she left her Alexandria condo and walked the two blocks to the nearest well-lit suburban chain theme restaurant, sat at its central bar and ordered something large and fruity for no other reason than to counteract the taste of boring that Luiza Carvalho had left in her mouth.
“That’s a big drink,” someone said to her a few minutes later. She looked up from her drink to see a generically handsome-looking man standing a few feet from her at the bar.
“The irony is that this is the small size,” Lowen said. “The large margarita here comes in a glass the size of a hot tub. It’s for when you’ve decided that alcohol poisoning is a way of life.”
The blandly handsome man smiled at this and then cocked his head. “You look familiar,” he said.
“Tell me you have better pickup lines than that,” Lowen said.
“I do,” the man said, “but I wasn’t trying to pick you up. You just look familiar.” He looked at her more closely and then snapped his fingers. “That’s it,” he said. “You look like that doctor at the Brazilian consulate bombing.”
“I get that a lot,” Lowen said.
“I’m sure you do,” the man said. “But it couldn’t be you, could it. You’re here in D.C. and the consulate was in New York.”
“Sound logic,” Lowen said.
“Do you have an identical twin?” the man asked, and then gestured at the bar stool next to Lowen. “Do you mind?”
Lowen shrugged and made a whatever hand movement. The man sat. “I don’t have an identical twin, no,” she said. “No fraternal twin, either. I have one brother. I pray to God we don’t look the same.”
“Then you could be that woman’s professional double,” the man said. “You could hire out for parties.”
“I don’t think she’s that famous,” Lowen said.
“Hey, she got a call from the president,” the man said. “When was the last time that happened to you?”
“You’d be surprised,” Lowen said.
“Cuba libre,” the man said to the bartender as she came up. He looked over to Lowen. “I’d offer to buy you a drink, but…”
“Oh, Lord, no,” Lowen said. “I’ll have to hire a taxi to get home after this thing, and I only live a couple of blocks away.”
“Cuba libre,” the man repeated, and then turned his attention to Lowen again. He extended his hand. “John Berger,” he said.
Lowen took it. “Danielle Lowen,” she said.
Berger looked momentarily confused and then smiled. “You are that doctor from the Brazilian consulate,” he said. “And you work for the State Department. Which is how you could be here and have been in New York yesterday. I’m sorry, let me introduce myself again.” Berger held out his hand once more. “Hello, I’m a moron.”
Lowen laughed and took his hand a second time. “Hello,” she said. “Don’t feel bad. I wasn’t exactly being forthcoming.”
“Well, after all the attention you got the last couple of days, I can see why you might want to lay low,” Berger said. He motioned to Lowen’s drink. “Is that what the tub of margarita is about?”
“What? No,” Lowen said, and made a grimace. “Well, maybe. Not exactly.”
“The drink is working,” Berger said.
“It’s not about the attention, although that certainly could have driven me to drink,” Lowen said. “It’s about something else, related to my job.”
“And what is that, if you don’t mind me asking?” Berger said.
“What do you do, Mr. Berger?” Lowen asked.
“John,” Berger said. His Cuba libre arrived. He smiled his thanks to the bartender and took a drink. Then it was his turn to grimace. “This is not the best Cuba libre I’ve had,” he said.
Lowen flicked the edge of her margarita glass with her finger. “Next time, go with one of these tubs,” she said.
“Maybe I will,” Berger said, took another drink of his Cuba libre and then set it down. “I’m a salesman,” he said. “Pharmaceuticals.”
“I remember you guys,” Lowen said.
“I bet you do,” Berger said.
“Now it makes sense,” Lowen said. “Easy conversationalist, blandly attractive, not too quirky, looking for the sale.”
“You have me pegged,” Berger said.
“You’re not going to make the sale,” Lowen said. “I mean, no offense. But I plan on walking out of here alone tonight.”
“Fair enough,” Berger said. “Good conversation was my only goal, anyway.”
“Was it,” Lowen said, and drank some more of her margarita. “All right, John, a question for you. How do you make a boring person a killer?”
Berger was quiet for a moment. “Now I’m suddenly very glad I won’t be making that sale,” he said.
“I’m serious,” Lowen said. “Hypothetically, you have this person. She’s a normal person, right? She has normal parents, has a normal childhood, goes to a normal school, gets normal degrees and then goes and has a normal job. And then one day, for no particularly good reason that anyone could see, she goes and murders some guy. And not in a normal way-I mean, not with a gun or a knife or a bat. No, she does it in a complicated way. How does that happen?”
“Is the guy an ex-lover?” Berger asked. “Hypothetically, I mean.”
“Hypothetically, no,” Lowen said. “Hypothetically, the best way to describe their relationship would be work colleagues, and not particularly close ones at that.”
“And she’s not a spy, or a secret agent, or leading a double life as a crafty assassin,” Berger said.
“She’s completely normal, and completely boring,” Lowen said. “Doesn’t even have pets. Hypothetically.”
Berger took a drink from his Cuba libre. “Then I’m going to go with what I know,” he said. “Mental derangement caused by addiction to pharmaceuticals.”
“There are drugs that can turn you from a boring person into a methodical murderer, as opposed to turning them into someone who kills everything in the house in a rage, including the fish?” Lowen asked. “I don’t remember those being touted to me when I was working as a doctor.”
“Well, no, there’s nothing that will do something that specific,” Berger said. “But you know as well as I do that, one, sometimes drug interactions will do funny things-”
“Turn someone into a methodical murderer?” Lowen asked again, incredulously.
“-and two, there are lots of our products out there that will eat your brain if you overuse them, and if they eat your brain, then you’ll start doing uncharacteristic things. Like becoming a methodical murderer, maybe.”
“A reasonable hypothesis,” Lowen said. “But hypothetically this person was not regularly taking either legal or illegal pharmaceuticals. Next.”
“All right,” Berger said, and gave the appearance of thinking quickly. “A tumor.”
“A tumor,” Lowen said.
“Sure, a tumor,” Berger said. “A brain tumor starts growing, hypothetically, and starts pressing on a part of the brain that processes things like knowing what is socially appropriate behavior. As the thing grows, our boring person starts putting her mind to murder.”
“Interesting,” Lowen said. She sipped her drink again.
“I’ve read stories about such things, and not only because my company sells a pharmaceutical treatment for cutting off the blood supply to tumorous masses in the body,” Berger said.