“I’m not Luke, Hu Chang. Stop playing with me.”
“I would never play with either you or Luke. I just wish you both to stretch to meet your full potential.”
She shook her head in exasperation. “Those equations logically indicate Montez was doing some sort of medical or chemical experiments, considering his education and training. So I asked myself what kind of experiments would Santos be interested in that would make him kill someone to keep Montez under his thumb?”
“And what did you answer?”
“That it wasn’t Santos, it was Delores who was interested in what Montez was doing. It was Delores who had Santos set up Montez for a special duty. She was so intent on recruiting him that she went with Santos to see Montez when they visited Buenos Aires.”
“Recruit him for what? And why? Montez had no remarkable medical credentials. He was trained as a general practitioner.”
“For a reason. Everything he did was secret and strictly undercover. He was working on a very special project. He worked with his uncle in a lab in the hills and consulted with experts on his results only when he needed help. The Montez family was very careful after what happened to them during the Peron era.”
“Uncle?”
“Kelly was intrigued by the amount of time Eduardo spent with his Uncle Francisco in the hills. It was one of her ‘dots.’ She was having Venable check on him. But after I found out about Maggi-Peron, I called Venable myself. I’d just got off the phone when I came down to talk to you.”
“And the uncle was a doctor, too?”
“A pathologist. Brilliant and well respected in the small town where he served as coroner. But very little social contact, no published papers. He was said to be devoted to his nephew and was teaching him the family business.”
“And that was?”
“He also had the only funeral home in town.” She paused. “A business that had been in the family for almost a hundred years. It was a nice little funeral home, and he was very competent. So were his father and grandfather and great-grandfather, but, of course, their reputations couldn’t compete with that of their distant cousin in Buenos Aires. Everyone knew that Dr. Pedro Ara was a pathologist without peer.” She nodded at Eva Peron’s photo. “He was the one chosen to embalm Evita Peron, the spiritual soul of Argentina.”
“And I understand he did a fantastic job with very unusual methods for the time.”
“Alcohol in the heel and neck. He and his assistant worked all night for perfect preservation. Which didn’t please Peron’s political foes. They would just as soon have tossed her in a ditch. They couldn’t touch Dr. Ara, but there was a certain amount of persecution leveled at those close to him, including the Montez branch of the family. Particularly in less civilized towns in the hills. Deaths. Beatings. That’s why the Montez clan made sure they never were exposed to the limelight again. They’d learned their lessons.”
“But not enough to close up shop and stop embalming their clients evidently.”
“Tradition … and the desire to prove they were as good or better than Dr. Pedro Ara and his world-famous embalming of Eva Peron.” She grimaced. “And then Uncle Francisco found that Eduardo was an even more brilliant doctor than Ara. He set out to train him to develop even more innovative procedures and show everyone that the Montez branch outshone Ara in every way. When the family saw that Eduardo Montez had potential, I think they coached him, educated him, then helped him experiment and have his discussions with experts in the field. But you can’t do that in complete privacy. Someone must have talked when Santos was asking questions.” She added, “Or when Delores asked questions.”
“On what subject?”
“Delores was vain. She was incredibly beautiful and did everything possible with makeup, clothes, and minor surgery to make sure that she stayed that way. I think that she had a horror of being ugly even in death. Heaven knows she’d seen and caused enough deaths to know what that looked like.”
“Are you guessing?”
“Yes, but some of the places she visited might have been a search. She spent a lot of time in the tombs of Ancient Egypt and the Kremlin. Egypt might have been the first culture to work on preservation. Lenin is still wonderfully preserved in Moscow. It probably impressed her. What if she heard that Montez had developed an embalming procedure that was better than the one Dr. Ara used on Eva Peron?”
“Then, if she thought of herself as great a leader as Eva believed herself to be, she would have done anything to make sure she would have an even greater chance for many years of preservation.” He nodded. “She was truly that vain?”
“From what I know of her, from what Kelly has found out, I’d say that she would have stolen Lenin’s coffin if she thought she could have gotten away with it.”
“Instead, she went after Montez.”
“And he suddenly came into a lot of money and moved his entire family to Guatemala shortly after he met with Santos and Delores.”
“They paid him for what? I believe Delores was in fine health until you shot her.”
“Future insurance? Eva Peron had her entire funeral planned, down to having her hairdresser come in and bleach her hair after her death.” She saw his brows rise, and she said in exasperation, “I don’t know. How could I? It is guesswork.” Her hands clenched. “But I’m close, Hu Chang. I know I’m close.”
“I know you are, too,” he said quietly. “And I do enjoy watching you move toward your goals. It gives me great pleasure to—”
“I’m not trying to entertain you, dammit.” She leaned forward. “I came down here for help. Now I’ve told you what I know and—”
“Guess,” Hu Chang corrected.
“Guess. Now you tell me what you know, you arrogant bastard.”
“Well, I wouldn’t actually say ‘know,’ although my calculated surmises are much more scientifically based than any you’ve—” He held up his hand as she opened her lips. “I’m getting there. And I admit that your insight has filled in several holes in my theory of what Montez was working on.” He looked back at the photo of Eva Peron. “Poor woman, she was born a little too soon. Delores was much more fortunate.”
“Hu Chang.”
“Well, until you killed her. But even then she was planning on not letting that defeat her.”
“You mean those equations are for an advanced procedure for embalming and preservation?”
“Yes and no. Think about the degrees that Montez earned and how they could apply.”
“Medical, chemical, mechanical engineering, theology,” she said impatiently. “And I don’t want to think. Tell me. Yes and no. What’s the yes?”
“Yes, there are chemical formulas in his book that are brilliant and innovative and probably concern an amazingly noninvasive form of embalming fluid.”
“So I was right.”
He smiled.
“Okay, what’s the no?”
“He wasn’t satisfied with just going a few giant steps further than Dr. Ara did with Peron. He decided that he could do much more.” He paused. “Hence the degree in mechanical engineering. He wanted to address not only cosmetic preservation but something more permanent. Or not. Considering your beliefs. I found formulas using liquid nitrogen and a glycerol-based chemical protectant mixture. I’m almost sure that they were to be used as a cryoprotectant.”
“Cryoprotectant?”
“Human antifreeze,” he said bluntly.
Then she understood. “Cryonics,” she said. “Delores planned on being frozen after death in hopes of being resurrected later, when medicine could take care of whatever had killed her.”
“That’s usually the purpose of people’s choosing to be kept in cryogenic-storage facilities. There are many arguments about whether there would be too much damage to the body from the freezing or the chemicals injected. It appears that Montez may have been able to solve those issues.”
“He did? How do you know?”
“I studied cryonics at one time. Preservation of life always interested me.” He shrugged. “But then I gave it up and went another direction. Too sedentary for me. I prefer to extend the life of the living, not the dead.”