He found both Warwick and the couple’s bungalow with no difficulty. The husband and wife, in their late twenties, were identically pudgy and rosy skinned. Uneasy too, until Tal explained that his mission there had nothing to do with any challenges to the adoption. It was merely a formality for a criminal case.
Like the other parents they provided good information that would be helpful in prosecuting Farley and Sheldon. For a half hour Tal jotted careful notes and then thanked them for their time. As he was leaving he walked past a small, cheery room decorated in a circus motif.
A little girl, about four, stood in the doorway. It was the youngster the couple had adopted from the foundation. She was adorable — blond, gray-eyed, with a heart-shaped face.
“This is Amy,” the mother said.
“Hello, Amy,” Tal offered.
She nodded shyly.
Amy was clutching a piece of paper and some crayons. “Did you draw that?” he asked.
“Uh-huh. I like to draw.”
“I can tell. You’ve got lots of pictures.” He nodded at the girl’s walls.
“Here,” she said, holding the sheet out. “You can have this. I just drew it.”
“For me?” Tal asked. He glanced at her mother, who nodded her approval. He studied the picture for a moment. “Thank you, Amy. I love it. I’ll put it up on my wall at work.”
The girl’s face broke into a beaming smile.
Tal said good-bye to her parents and ten minutes later he was cruising south on the parkway. When he came to the turnoff that would take him to his house and his Sunday retreat into the world of mathematics, though, Tal continued on. He drove instead to his office at the County Building.
A half hour later he was on the road again. En route to an address in Chesterton, a few miles away.
He pulled up in front of a split-level house surrounded by a small but immaculately trimmed yard. Two plastic tricycles and other assorted toys sat in the driveway.
But this wasn’t the right place, he concluded with irritation. Damn. He must’ve written the address down wrong.
The house he was looking for had to be nearby and Tal decided to ask the owner here where it was. Walking to the door, Tal pushed the bell then stood back.
A pretty blonde in her thirties greeted him with a cheerful, “Hi. Help you?”
“I’m looking for Greg LaTour’s house.”
“Well, you found it. Hi, I’m his wife, Joan.”
“He lives here?” Tal asked, glancing past her into a suburban home right out of a Hollywood sitcom. Thinking too: And he’s married?
She laughed. “Hold on. I’ll get him.”
A moment later Greg LaTour came to the door, wearing shorts, sandals, and a green Izod shirt. He blinked in surprise and looked back over his shoulder into the house. Then he stepped outside and pulled the door shut after him. “What’re you doing here?”
“Needed to tell you something about the case...” But Tal’s voice faded. He was staring at two cute blond girls, twins, about eight years old, who’d come around the side of the house and were looking at Tal curiously.
One said, “Daddy, the ball’s in the bushes. We can’t get it.”
“Honey, I’ve got to talk to my friend here,” he said in a singsong, fatherly voice. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Okay.” They disappeared.
“You’ve got two kids?”
“Four kids.”
“How long you been married?”
“Eighteen years.”
“But I thought you were single. You never mentioned family. You didn’t wear a ring. Your office, the biker posters, the bars after work...”
“That’s who I need to be to do my job,” LaTour said in a low voice. “That life—” He nodded vaguely in the direction of the Sheriff’s Department. “—and this life I keep separate. Completely.”
That’s something else...
Tal now understood the meaning of the phrase. It wasn’t about tragedies in his life, marital breakups, alienated children. And there was nothing LaTour was hiding from Tal. This was a life kept separate from everybody in the department.
“So you’re mad I’m here,” Tal said.
A shrug. “Just wish you’d called first.”
“Sorry.”
LaTour shrugged. “You go to church today?”
“I don’t go to church. Why?”
“Why’re you wearing a tie on Sunday?”
“I don’t know. I just do. Is it crooked?”
The big cop said, “No it’s not crooked. So. What’re you doing here?”
“Hold on a minute.”
Tal got his briefcase out of the car and returned to the porch. “I stopped by the office and checked up on the earlier suicides Sheldon and Farley arranged.”
“You mean from a few years ago?”
“Right. Well, one of them was a professor named Mary Stemple. I’d heard of her — she was a physicist at Princeton. I read some of her work a while ago. She was brilliant. She spent the last three years of her life working on this analysis of the luminosity of stars and measuring blackbody radiation—”
“I’ve got burgers about to go on the grill,” LaTour grumbled.
“Okay. Got it. Well, this was published just before she killed herself.” He handed LaTour what he’d downloaded from the Journal of Advanced Astrophysics Web site:
He flipped to the end of the article, which consisted of several pages of complicated formulae. They involved hundreds of numbers and Greek and English letters and mathematical symbols. The one that occurred most frequently was the sign for infinity: ∞
LaTour looked up. “There a punch line to all this?”
“Oh, you bet there is.” He explained about his drive to Warwick to interview the adoptive couple.
And then he held up the picture that their daughter, Amy, had given him. It was a drawing of the earth and the moon and a spaceship — and all around them, filling the sky, were infinity symbols, growing smaller and smaller as they receded into space.
Forever...
Tal added, “And this wasn’t the only one. Her walls were covered with pictures she’d done that had infinity signs in them. When I saw this I remembered Stemple’s work. I went back to the office and I looked up her paper.”
“What’re you saying?” LaTour frowned.
“Mary Stemple killed herself five years ago. The girl who drew this was conceived at the foundation’s clinic a month after she died.”
“Jesus...” The big cop stared at the picture. “You don’t think... Hell, it can’t be real, that cloning stuff. That doctor we talked to, he said it was impossible.”
Tal said nothing, continued to stare at the picture.
LaTour shook his head. “Naw, naw. You know what they did, Sheldon or that girl of his? Or Farley? They showed the kid pictures of that symbol. You know, so they could prove to other clients that the cloning worked. That’s all.”
“Sure,” Tal said. “That’s what happened... Probably.”
Still, they stood in silence for a long moment, this trained mathematician and this hardened cop, staring, captivated, at a clumsy, crayon picture drawn by a cute four-year-old.
“It can’t be,” LaTour muttered. “Germ’s ass, remember?”
“Yeah, it’s impossible,” Tal said, staring at the symbol. He repeated: “Probably.”
“Daddy!” Came a voice from the backyard.
LaTour called, “Be there in a minute, honey!” Then he looked up at Tal and said, “Hell, as long as you’re here, come on in. Have dinner. I make great burgers.”