“Sorry.”
LaTour shrugged again. “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 just downloaded from the Journal of Advanced Astrophysics’ website:
The Infinite Journey of Light:
A New Approach to Measuring
Distant Stellar Radiation
By Prof. Mary Stemple, Ph.D.
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 four 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.”
Tal considered the invitation but his eyes were drawn back to the picture, the stars, the moon, the infinity signs. “Thanks but think I’ll pass. I’m going back to the office for a while. All that evidence we took out of the Foundation? I wanta look over the data a little more.”
“Suit yourself, Einstein,” the homicide cop said. He started back into the house but paused and turned back. “Data plural,” he said, pointing a huge finger at Tal’s chest.
“Data plural,” Tal agreed.
LaTour vanished inside, the screen door swinging shut behind him with a bang.
About the Author
A former journalist, folksinger and attorney, Jeffery Deaver is an international number-one best-selling author. His novels have appeared on best-seller lists around the world, including the New York Times, the Times of London, Italy’s Corriere della Sera, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Los Angeles Times. His books are sold in 150 countries and translated into twenty-five languages.
The author of thirty-two novels, two collections of short stories and a nonfiction law book, he’s received or been shortlisted for a number of awards around the world. His The Bodies Left Behind was named Novel of the Year by the International Thriller Writers. And his Lincoln Rhyme thriller The Broken Window and a stand-alone thriller, Edge, were also nominated for that prize. He has been awarded the Steel Dagger and the Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association and the Nero Wolfe Award, and he is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year and a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award. The Cold Moon was recently named the Book of the Year by the Mystery Writers Association of Japan, as well as by Kono Mystery Wa Sugoi magazine. In addition, the Japanese Adventure Fiction Association awarded the book their annual Grand Prix award; Deaver’s Carte Blanche also received that honor.
Deaver has been nominated for seven Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, a Shamus award, an Anthony Award and a Gumshoe Award. He was recently shortlisted for the ITV3 Crime Thriller Award for Best International Author.
His latest novels are The October List, a reverse-time thriller, the Lincoln Rhyme novel The Kill Room, XO, featuring Kathryn Dance, and Carte Blanche, the latest James Bond continuation thriller.
His book A Maiden’s Grave was made into an HBO movie starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, and his novel The Bone Collector was a feature release from Universal Pictures, starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. And, yes, the rumors are true; he did appear as a corrupt reporter on his favorite soap opera, As the World Turns.
He was born outside Chicago and has a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Missouri and a law degree from Fordham University.
Readers can visit his website at www.jefferydeaver.com.