That night, that argument, was lividly burned into Calder’s memory, every corrosive word. Calder wasn’t going to let his father take the keys, would have died before he’d allowed it—just lain down in front of a steamroller if that had been the only alternative. So when his father had taken off his belt something inside Calder snapped.
He’d almost beaten his father to death that night. And then he ran—never saw the old man again. Years later, Capt. John Farris II had died and there had been one less prick in the world. End of story. Except for some reason Mark Avery’s death had made those memories come rising to the top like a bloated corpse in a lake. Fuck if he knew why. Calder had gotten over his old man years ago.
And as soon as he discovered the Next Big Thing and got promoted to major, he would have bested John Farris II at the only thing he ever cared about—the military—and exorcised the jerk-off completely.
There was a knock on the window—it was Troy. Calder rolled it down an inch.
“Lieutenant Farris, you’d better come inside.”
Inside the house, the sergeant motioned toward the stairs. Calder took them two at a time. He found Hinkle in the master bedroom, standing over a figure on the bed. It was Ansel—a very dead Ansel.
“Suicide.” Hinkle held up a prescription bottle. “No label. Not sure what it was.”
Calder put his hands on his hips. The feel of the gun holstered beneath his jacket gave him a sense of command he badly needed at the moment. “How long ago?”
Hinkle had gloves on and he tried turning Ansel’s head—it was stiff with rigor mortis. He picked up an arm, which was stiff, but not very. “Anywhere from two to six hours.”
Calder had seen him alive at three. “Goddamn it!”
It was as much emotional expression as he would permit himself. He took a few deep breaths. “Get everything out of the study. We’ll go over to the university tonight. His office—”
Hinkle was looking at him with a tight-lipped expression. The words died in Calder’s throat. He ran downstairs. He knew where the study was. He’d been inside it once, before Ansel learned he was military and threw him out. He burst into it now to find Troy standing with a black plastic sack, looking around uncertainly. Owen was bent over the fireplace.
The file cabinets stood open and empty. Ansel’s desk was clear. In the fireplace was a smoldering log—and a lot of ashes.
The demon towered up inside Calder like a roaring savage. For a moment he was in danger of losing it. He wanted to punch the wall, the door, something. But the Army had taught him discipline and Owen and Troy were watching.
“Bag the ashes,” Calder ordered, with a voice like curdled milk. He turned on his heel and left the room.
In the foyer he paced from wall to wall, driven by strangled fury, trying to get clear enough to think. He breathed deeply, counted to ten, counted a dozen more.
They would go over to the university, but if Ansel had gone to this much trouble over his home files, he’d probably already trashed his office. Calder had been too slow or too lenient. He had missed the signals that his target was going south. He should have…
Fuck that. He had to focus on what he could salvage.
Mark Avery’s file had been full of Henry Ansel. There were clippings of the old man’s obscure articles and lecture notes as well as Avery’s own thoughts on the possible uses of Ansel’s ideas. Calder had begun to see what had interested his ex-partner. He’d gotten a hard-on for it himself.
But when he’d approached Ansel, the man had been vague—purposefully vague. It wasn’t the hedging of a clueless geek who was full of shit (Calder had plenty of experience with that type). No, it was the hedging of a liberal geek who was scared of what Big Bad Mr. Government might do with what he knew. If Calder had needed confirmation of that, it lay up there in the bedroom. But the fact that he’d been right about Ansel, that he did, indeed, have something he thought was dangerous enough to die for, was of little comfort to Calder Farris and none to the US of A.
Salvage? How? What? The professor’s brain would not reveal its secrets under the knife. And there was no one besides Ansel who could talk. There were no children, his wife had been dead for years, and Ansel had worked alone. He had worked alone for a very long time.
5.2. Jill Talcott
Jill Talcott checked her E-mail and pulled some overhead slides from a filing cabinet. She’d hoped to spend the entire summer in the lab she and Nate had set up in the basement of Smith Hall. But she’d been playing her cards so close to her chest that Dick Chalmers, thinking she had nothing better to do, had given her not one, but two summer sessions, the worm. Meanwhile, Nate had gotten a job as a waiter on Capitol Hill working the dinner rush and could spend all morning and afternoon in the lab while she lectured to sleepy window-watching students. Double worm.
She was contemplating her revenge, which, as usual, had to do with her imminent success and glory, when a knock startled her. The slides spilled onto the floor. Red trajectory arcs and blue equations suggested themselves over dirty linoleum. The knock came again.
“Damn it, come in!” Jill bent to the scattered sheaves.
She was not in the mood to see anyone this morning, but of all the people she was not in the mood to see, Chuck Grover topped the list. He shut the door deliberately behind him and looked at her with a calculated challenge in his eye. “I wanted to chat, Jill.” He loped over to Nate’s chair, swung it closer to her desk, and sat in it backward.
“I have a class in ten minutes, Chuck. But if you can make it quick…” She plopped the slides on her desk and began to shuffle through them to avoid looking at him.
Grover’s appearance was even more horrifyingly Californian than usual, thanks to the July weather. His open sandals displayed hoary feet, and a baggy pair of shorts provided even more unwelcomed information as he sat, legs spread. The neck of Nate’s office chair was uncharitably thin, and Jill, who had not seen that portion of the male anatomy by choice for some years, was not happy to be subjected to it now, at ten in the morning in this claustrophobic office.
“I wanted to touch base about our agreement.”
“What agreement is that, Chuck?” Her small fingers tapped at the salvaged file.
“The agreement we made when you came crawling to me six months ago for time on Quey, time I did not by any means have to give you.”
He kept his tone light, but Jill was shocked at his blatant choice of words. Apparently, he was through pretending theirs was a civil relationship. She answered equally lightly.
“Believe me, I haven’t forgotten that day. Nor will I.”
“Good. Then perhaps you’ll take a few minutes to bring your partner up-to-date.”
Chuck leaned forward in the chair, folding his arms over the top. Despite the Coppertone pose, his eyes were angry. It was true Jill had brushed him off in the hallways more than once in the past months. But she wondered when, exactly, Grover had decided she had something worth bothering over.
“Certainly!” she said brightly. “I was fortunate enough to get data on a carbon atom from the accelerator at CERN…” She told him, in more detail than he obviously wanted to know, how they had set up the original experiment. It was all true, as far as it went.
Grover’s eyes narrowed, not trusting her sudden forthcomingness.
“So we crunched through it all using Quey—which was really remarkably fast—you must be congratulated.”
“Thank you.”
“And then we compared the two sets of data…” She sighed, trying to look discouraged. It was hard. “And found out that they were off from one another by over thirty percent. I’m afraid my equation was a failure.”