“Hello, Miss Torres,” said Fitzgerald. “And Mr. Peterson. Did you have a good walk?”
Chan stepped inside to wedge the elevator lever in its down position so no one could call it back up to the concourse.
“Fine,” Vivian said.
“Let’s go see your master.” Andres unclipped Edison’s leash.
The dog trotted off toward Tesla’s crazy underground house. She’d initially liked the Victorian house and had loved its new garden, but she’d gotten heartily sick of it in the past few days. She didn’t know how Tesla could stand it cooped up down here. Because he had to, her mother’s voice said. People do what they have to do.
She and Andres followed the dog. Once they got to the red front door, they knocked, as per protocol. Parker let them in. He must have sensed something was up, because he tensed.
“Weird but no immediate danger,” she told Parker.
“Another ordinary day,” Parker said.
Andres went into the house, marched down the hall, and entered Tesla’s billiard room. Soon after he moved in, Tesla had built a Faraday cage in there. The cage was made of a fine mesh and covered the walls, floor, and ceiling, designed to keep out electronic signals, not that there were many down here in the middle of nowhere. She’d always thought it a paranoid indulgence, but maybe she’d been too hasty.
“Mr. Tesla!” Andres called.
Tesla came down the stairs with Edison. At least he’d showered since she’d left. Hopefully, he’d even eaten. He looked distracted.
Andres set the handkerchief in the middle of the table. “Your fine dog snatched this off Miss Torres’s arm and broke it.”
Tesla was already bent over the collection of parts.
The officers had crowded into the room, but they didn’t say anything.
“What is it?” Vivian couldn’t take it anymore.
“A spy robot, I think,” Andres said. “But I’ve never seen one this small before.”
Tesla pointed at the mishmash of metal and dog slobber. “It has a stinger that leads to a small compartment. It doesn’t look like it was broken open. Was anyone stung?”
Andres went pale. He’d picked it up and carried it like it was nothing.
“Poison?” Vivian asked. “It might have poison in it?”
“Might.” Tesla reached down and petted Edison. He checked the dog’s eyes and mouth and put his head against the dog’s chest as if to listen to his breathing or heartbeat. “Edison seems fine.”
Tesla took pictures from several angles, then lifted the object and put it in a mini-Faraday bag he sometimes used for his phone. He must be worried the object was still transmitting, but hard to imagine that after the dog had smashed it.
“So, was anyone stung?” Tesla repeated.
“It landed on my cast. But not my skin. Edison got it pretty quickly.”
“How did the dog know it was dangerous?” asked Parker.
Tesla examined the dog. Edison looked healthy as ever, but Vivian worried. “Maybe he smelled the poison. After my poisoning a few months ago, he and I have worked on training him to respond when something smells off.”
Tesla and Andres examined her cast. Tesla even retrieved an antique magnifying glass with a silver handle from one of his bookshelves, and they passed the lens back and forth.
“There’s no hole. It didn’t sting you,” Andres finally said, sounding as relieved as she felt.
Tesla wiped her cast off thoroughly with a wet washcloth, bagged the cloth, and added it to the Faraday bag.
She ran her fingers over her cast. Nothing there.
“I’ll need an analysis of this.” Tesla handed the Faraday bag to Fitzgerald. The guy took it in one freckled hand, but he looked thoroughly confused. “Have them check the stinger for poison, and be very careful with it.”
When no one was looking, she touched her cast where the creature had landed. Maybe Maeve was right. Maybe Tesla was a danger magnet.
Fitzgerald broke into her musings. “I’ll take the bag up. We’ve called for a new officer to replace me. Officer Khan.”
“I’ll come up with you,” Vivian said. “I want to check something.”
Back into the old elevator they went. Fitzgerald looked nervously at the chandelier suspended from the ceiling. “I always wonder if this thing is going to stop working and I’ll be trapped here until someone digs down to retrieve my desiccated corpse.”
A bucket of joy, this guy. “It might be better than whatever poison is in that bug in your hand.”
He started and looked down at the bag. It really wasn’t nice to tease him. Her mother wouldn’t have approved.
“Do you think there are more of these little buggers?” he asked.
“I do.” She wasn’t really sure, but the prudent thing to do was to act like there were, which was why she was in the elevator.
They reached the top, climbed the stairs, and came out into the information booth.
Evaline blocked their way out with her round form. “A minute, if you please, Miss Torres.”
“Just the woman I want to see,” Vivian said.
Fitzgerald’s light blue eyes stared into the concourse like it was full of killer bugs. Maybe.
“I don’t know exactly what happened out there with you and the dog.” Someone came up to Evaline’s counter, and she held up one finger to tell them to wait.
Vivian had never seen her do something like that. Evaline never let anyone wait a second longer than necessary. This was going to be good.
“Don’t look,” Evaline said. “But at my three o’clock is a man really focused on his phone.”
She saw the guy out of the corner of her eye. Officer Fitzgerald looked down at the bag in his hand.
“He’s been in the concourse off and on for the past few days, always just staring at his phone, but he never goes down to take a train,” Evaline continued. “I notice things like that. It keeps my job interesting.”
“And?” Officer Fitzgerald said.
“Just before Edison knocked you over, Miss Torres, he looked right at you. Then, during the confusion when you looked like you were going to shoot someone, he was the only person who didn’t seem surprised.”
“Maybe he just likes his phone games,” Officer Fitzgerald said.
“Maybe,” Evaline said. “But he’s still there, and you’ve been down there awhile. And every so often, he takes a look around above everyone’s heads, like he’s looking for someone really tall.”
Or something that flew.
“Thank you,” Vivian said. “We’ll look into it.”
Fitzgerald dropped the Faraday bag into his inside jacket pocket. “You’re a civilian.”
“Right. So you can’t tell me what to do.”
“I’ll handle it,” he said. “No need for you to get involved.”
“This guy might be staking out Tesla, and he might have tried to kill me. I’m involved.”
“OK,” Fitzgerald said. “The important thing is we get him.”
“We split up when we leave the booth. I’ll break left, you go right.”
“Keep your firearm holstered,” he said. “Grant me that much.”
In answer, she gave Evaline a quick smile and headed for the door.
“Good-bye!” she called over her shoulder to make onlookers assume she and Fitzgerald were just splitting up to go their different ways. Then she shut the door quickly in case a bug robot was trying to get in. She wasn’t going to put Evaline in danger.
She hadn’t looked directly at Evaline’s guy yet. Oblique glances told her he looked like the Avenger of Blood. Tesla had said, in describing him, He’s what we in facial recognition call an exceedingly ordinary-looking man — medium height, straight black hair, brown eyes, no distinguishing characteristics. He has the kind of face people forget.