“If Jack is the one who murdered him, he should have realized the problem with the Glock when he first was called about the case on Sunday afternoon,” I reply. “Yet he waited until Monday morning to be concerned about a gun he knew could be traced to him?”
“To avoid suspicion. If he’d started asking the Cambridge police a lot of questions about the Glock prior to the body being transported to the CFC, or demanded that the gun be brought in immediately when the labs were closed, it would have come across as peculiar. Antennas would have gone up. Fielding slept on it and by Monday morning was probably beside himself and planning what he was going to do once the gun was brought in. He would take it and flee. Remember, he hasn’t been exactly rational. It’s important to keep in mind he’s been cognitively impaired by his substance abuse.”
I think about the chronology. I reconstruct Fielding’s steps yesterday morning, based on information from his desk drawer and the indented writing on his call-sheet pad. Shortly after seven a.m. it seems he talked to Julia Gabriel before she called me at Dover, and about a half-hour later he entered the cooler, and minutes after that he told Anne and Ollie the body from Norton’s Woods was inexplicably bloody. It seems more logical to consider it was at this point that Fielding recognized the dead man and realized the Glock he’d heard about from the police would be traced to him. If he didn’t recognize the dead man until Monday morning, then Fielding didn’t kill him, I say to Benton, who replies that Fielding had a motive I couldn’t possibly know about.
The dead man’s stepfather is Liam Saltz, Benton informs me. It was confirmed a little while ago when an FBI agent went to the Charles Hotel and talked to Dr. Saltz and showed him an ID photograph Marino took of the man from Norton’s Woods. He was Eli Goldman, age twenty-two, a graduate student at MIT and an employee at Otwahl Technologies, working on special micro-mechanical projects. The video clips from Eli’s headphones were traced to a webcam site on Otwahl’s server, Benton tells me, but he won’t elaborate on who did the tracing, if Lucy might have.
“He rigged up the headphones himself?” I ask as the elevator finally gets to us and the doors slide open.
“It appears likely. He loved to tinker.”
“And MORT? How did he get that? And what for? More tinkering?” I know I sound cynical.
I know when people have their damn minds made up, and I’m not ready for my mind to be made up. Not one damn thing should be decided this fast.
“A facsimile, a model he made as a boy,” Benton explains. “Based on photographs his stepfather had taken of the real thing when he was lobbying against it some eight or nine years ago when you and Dr. Saltz testified before the Senate subcommittee. Apparently, Eli was making models of robots and inventing things since he was practically in diapers.”
We slowly sink from floor to floor while I ask why Otwahl would hire the stepson of a detractor like Liam Saltz, and I want to know what Otwahl means, because Mrs. Donahue said the name meant something. “O. T. Wahl,” Benton replies. “A play on words, because the last name of the company’s founder is Wahl. On the Wall, as in a fly on the wall, and Eli’s last name isn’t Saltz,” Benton adds, as if I didn’t hear him when he told me it’s Goldman. Eli Goldman. But Otwahl would have done a background check on him, I point out. Certainly they would have known who his step-father is, even if their last names aren’t the same.
“MORT was a long time ago,” Benton says as the elevator doors open on the lower floor. “And I don’t know that Otwahl had a clue Eli and his stepdad were philosophically simpatico.”
“How long had Eli worked there?”
“Three years.”
“Maybe three years ago Otwahl wasn’t doing anything that Eli or his stepfather would have been concerned about,” I suggest as we walk along gray tile while Phil the security guard watches us from behind his glass partition. I don’t wave at him. I’m not friendly.
“Well, Eli was worried and had been for months,” Benton says. “He was about to give his stepfather a demonstration of technology that he wasn’t going to approve of at all, a fly that could be a fly on the wall and spy and detect explosives and deliver them or drugs or poisons or who knows what.”
Nanoexplosives or dangerous drugs delivered by something as small as a fly, I think, as we walk past staff I’ve not seen in months. I don’t stop to chat. I don’t wave or say hello or even have eye contact.
“He’s about to give his stepfather important information like that and conveniently dies,” I reply.
“Exactly. The motive I mentioned,” Benton says. “Drugs,” he says again, and then he tells me more, gives me details the FBI learned from Liam Saltz just a few hours earlier.
I feel sad and upset again as I envision what Benton is saying about a young man so enamored of his famous stepfather that whenever they were to see each other, Eli always set his watch to it, mirroring Dr. Saltz’s time zone in anticipation of their reunion, a quirk that has its roots in Eli’s poignant past of broken homes and parental figures missing in action and adored from afar. I remember what I watched on the video clips, Eli and Sock walking to Norton’s Woods, and then I imagine Dr. Saltz emerging from the building in the near dark after a wedding Eli wasn’t invited to. I imagine the Nobel laureate looking around and wondering where his stepson was, having no idea of the terrible truth. Dead. Zipped up inside a pouch and unidentified. A young man, barely more than a boy. Someone Lucy and I may have crossed paths with at an exhibit in London the summer of 2001.
“Who killed him, and what for?” I say as we pass through the empty bay, the CFC van-body truck gone. “I don’t see how what you’ve just said explains Eli being murdered by Jack.”
“It all points in the same direction. I’m sorry. But it does.”
“I just don’t see why and for what.” I open the door leading outside, and it is too beautiful and sunny to be so cold.
“I know this is hard,” Benton says.
“A pair of data gloves?” I say as we begin to pick our way over snow that is glazed and slick. “A micromechanical fly? Who would stab him with an injection knife, and why?”
“Drugs.” Benton goes back to that again. “Somehow Eli had the misfortune of getting involved with Jack or the other way around. Strength-enhancing, very dangerous drugs. Probably was using and selling, and Eli was the supplier, or someone at Otwahl was. We don’t know. But Eli being killed while he was out there with a flybot and about to meet his stepfather wasn’t a coincidence. It’s the motive, I mean.”
“Why would Jack be interested in a flybot or a meeting?” I ask as we move very slowly, one step at a time, my feet about to go out from under me. “A damn ice-skating rink,” I complain, because the parking lot wasn’t plowed and it needs to be sanded. Nobody has been running this place the way it ought to be run.
“I’m sorry, we’re way over here.” As we head slowly toward the back fence. “But that’s all there was. The drug connection,” Benton then says. “Not street drugs. This is about Otwahl. About a huge amount of money. About the war, about potential violence on an international and massive scale.”
“Then if what you’re saying is right, it would seem to imply Jack was spying on Eli. Rigged up the headphones with hidden recording devices and followed him to Norton’s Woods. That would make sense if the murder was to stop Eli from showing his stepfather the flybot or turning it over to him. How else would Jack know what Eli was about to do? He must have been spying on him, or someone was.”
“I doubt Jack had anything to do with the headphones.”
“My point exactly. Jack wouldn’t be interested in technology like that or capable of it, and he wouldn’t be interested in a place like Otwahl. You’re not talking about the Jack I know. He’s much too limbically driven, too impatient, too simple, to do what you’ve just described.” I almost say too primitive, because that has always been part of his charm. His physicality, his hedonism, his linear way of coping with things. “And the headphones don’t make sense,” I insist. “The headphones make me think someone else might be involved.”