“C
oyotes? In Revere?” Rose asked me, for once giving me the upper hand in local lore.
I decided to give her a taste of being on the receiving end of an avalanche of information.
“Absolutely. The Revere High Science Club is doing a project called ‘The Urban Coyote Field Study.’ I have the full report if you need it, with appendices on the current poor state of science education in the United States, how students seldom actually experience real-life science. Daniel Endicott’s students are also contributing to correcting the misperception of coyotes as dangerous predators that should be eliminated. They have a trap at a North Revere site, and they’ve captured a twenty-seven-pound female, which they named Cinnamon, for her color and spiciness. Her age can be determined from the wear on her teeth. They’re working with Tufts and BC and with local veterinarians.” I stopped for a breath, and started again. “Several students have been able to observe coyote pups raised in captivity—”
I took a deep breath, and a drink of water.
Rose laughed heartily and held up her hand. “You need water? You’re not as good as I am at holding your breath for an entire story. But, okay. I get it. Sometimes I go on too long.” She paused, her face reconfiguring into a serious expression. “I guess we shouldn’t be joking this way. MC is very, very upset, and I don’t want anyone to think that I’m glad in any way—”
“Rose, no one would think that. Not MC, not me. We’ll just have to give her a little time to adjust to this. It’s awful for everyone.”
“Thanks, Gloria. And you’ll find out who did it, you and Matt, I know.”
I hoped she was right. I’d never had such a case, barely able to follow one lead when another crisis turned up. Matt and I had been so excited about what the Houston transcript revealed. Berger had missed some connections, mostly because neither he nor anyone in the department was seriously working on the Nina Martin case. With Matt out a good part of the time, everyone’s load had increased, and for all they knew, they’d found the only killer—Rusty Forman might even have been Nina’s jealous boyfriend, coincidentally an ex-con.
I hated to admit, too, that Jean had a point—I knew that if MC were not involved, I would also have abandoned the case long ago, and focused completely on taking care of Matt.
We expected that Jake’s murder would reopen the entire investigation, however, and I felt optimistic that all the threads would come together soon.
As far as Matt knew, Rose had casually stopped by to see him. It was pure coincidence that she might hang around with him while his partner and I went to interview fifteen-year-old Jacqueline Peters, the RHS freshman who’d stumbled onto Jake Powers’s body. Matt, asleep at the moment, was doing well, but I still didn’t like the idea of his being left alone. What if he had a relapse and fainted again, this time without a dining room chair to support him? And what if Jean dropped in, found him unattended, and sued for custody? This was my next uncharitable thought.
“Why did they leave him alive, I wonder?” Rose asked, her ad hoc remarks often leaving me speechless for a moment.
She means Jake, not Matt,
I instructed my brain.
“Whoever shot him probably didn’t dream anyone would be crawling around the marsh late at night. But as I learned from Daniel, coyotes are nocturnal and—”
Rose rolled her eyes here. “No, no.”
I laughed. “I’m not going on with this, just to tell you that the class did the tracking during hours of darkness.”
“Interesting. That poor child.”
“Jacqueline Peters. Aren’t you going to tell me about her family?”
“Only because you ask. Her mother used to be married to Timmy Peters, who did some handiwork for us on Tuttle, but then ran off not long after Jacqueline’s little brother was born. Then the mother remarried.” She leaned in close. “To tell you the truth, I think the little one was the new husband’s, before the fact, if you know what I mean. Don’t you love these information sessions?”
I did.
“How is MC doing? This must be very hard for her.”
“She finally picked up the phone this morning. She sounds awful. I’m giving her another day, and then I’m going to force her to go shopping.”
She gave me a weak smile, one that said she knew this was not something a trip to Boston’s Copley Place, one of Rose’s favorite shopping venues, could fix.
“Is Frank going to take care of Jake’s body?”
Rose nodded. “Frank will prepare it for delivery to Texas. MC knows to keep away from the prep room.”
I heard Berger climb the steps to the porch and headed him off, opening the door before he could ring the bell and wake Matt up. I wasn’t really ready for an interview with a teenager. My brain felt crowded with information I hadn’t had time to process. It seemed every time I was ready to put two and two together, I was jerked away by another crisis. Stalkers, one murder after another, Matt’s illness, Jean’s hostility.
I knew that there were still more clues to be followed in MC’s email, in Lorna’s records, in Jake Powers’s bute reference, in the HPD transcript, maybe even in Wayne Gallen’s ramblings. Suddenly I felt as tired as Matt and wanted to sleep more than anything.
“Are you ready?” Berger asked.
“You bet,” I said.
Jacqueline Peters lived on the left side of a duplex with its unkempt front on Hutchins Street. The pale blue paint was chipped, the garden tools rusted, the chain-link fence lopsided and full of holes. George Berger and I climbed shaky steps to a tiny porch and rang the tiny metal doorbell, what I would have called “original equipment” in lab talk, meaning it had come with the house, probably built in the 1940s. I smiled as Berger pointed silently to drooping strings of Christmas lights around the edge of the Peters side of the porch—either two months early, or ten months overdue for dismantling.
“Mrs. Peters?” Berger asked, holding his badge against a dirty storm door, in the face of a wiry young woman.
“I’m Jacqueline’s mother. Mrs. Ramos,” she said in a voice so constricted I wondered if she had something to hide. Then I remembered how intimidating a police officer could be to someone who didn’t live with one.
Mrs. Ramos, in stocking feet and tight, black Capri pants, formerly known as pedal pushers, led us through an uncarpeted living room and dining room to a large kitchen area that smelled of unhealthy breakfast meat. We passed two small children and two television sets on the way. I had the feeling Mrs. Ramos had been watching at least one of the shows, neither of which was Sunday morning political commentary.
“Someone go get Jacqueline,” Mrs. Ramos yelled. Her loud voice caught me off guard, and I jumped. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. They never hear me over the TVs. Jacqueline’s upstairs. Don’t keep her too long, okay? This thing’s got her upset.”
Berger and I gave reassuring nods. “We have just a few questions,” he said. “This is Dr. Gloria Lamerino, our consultant. She’s very good with young people; she’s had a lot of experience with this kind of thing.”
Making me sound like a child psychologist, something Matt would never do. Berger had prepared me to take the lead, however, pleading incompetence with teenagers. “Besides there’s the woman
thing, you know,” he’d said, making curly motions with his index finger in the air next to his head.
I sighed.
This partnership is temporary,
I told myself, and Berger’s doing his best.
Jacqueline Peters, chubby enough to remind me of myself in high school, came down the stairs. She was a large-framed girl and I figured Timmy Peters, wherever he was, had contributed the body-shape gene, since the now–Mrs. Ramos was filament-wire thin. Jacqueline joined Berger and me at the Formica kitchen table while her mother, arms crossed in front of her, leaned against a stove piled high with sticky saucepans and a skillet.
“Am I supposed to leave?” Mrs. Ramos asked, tapping her foot on the linoleum.
Berger shrugged. “Sometimes when parents are around, kids tend to—”
“It would probably go much quicker if you were to wait in the other room,” I said with a smile.
“Right,” Berger said.
Mrs. Ramos pushed herself off the stove, went into the living room, and pulled an accordion door many shades of brown behind her, closing us in with Jacqueline and the heavy, greasy odor, but letting through the sounds of daytime television.
“Do you remember when I came to your classroom?” I asked Jacqueline. A blank look. “I brought some materials and we made a geodesic dome.” I pushed aside the reminder of the little Styrofoam balls rolling into the watery gutter, of Wayne Gallen in my car.
Jacqueline shrugged. “I guess.” Not flattering to a would-be teacher, or someone as good with children as Berger claimed I was, but then I didn’t especially remember her being there that day, either. Maybe she was absent, I thought, consoling myself.
“What you saw in the marsh—it must have been awful for you, Jacqueline.” I leaned across the shiny red table, trying to land my elbows between drips of milk and syrup.
Jacqueline nodded, lifting her eyebrows, widening her eyes, as if she were being surprised all over again by a dead body in the
marsh. The cheers of a game show audience rose up behind the accordion door.
“Is there anything I can do to make it easier for you to talk about what happened? Would you like to get yourself a glass of milk or some water?”
She shook her head, causing large amounts of dark, curly hair to swing back and forth. Jacqueline was the best-groomed person in the Peters-Ramos household, her black T-shirt looking clean and smoothed out, if not pressed. No food stains were visible on its rubbery neon cartoon picture of a music group I’d never heard of. I wondered if she’d dressed for this interview.
“Okay. What happened was, Cinnamon had some pups and we were trying to find them, ’cause they got separated from their mother, and we wanted to feed them. We had meat and stuff. And it was dark. We always go in the dark. Coyotes are nocturnal animals.” Jacqueline sounded like a bright student. I hoped her home environment was supportive of good study habits. “I went off on my own ’cause I saw a huge bird, maybe a vulture, although I’m not sure what they look like except for our science book, or even if there are any in Revere. Mr. Endicott gives us extra points for spotting something unusual, so I went to check.”
Jacqueline sniffed and rubbed her eyes. I stole a look at Berger. He sat back far enough from the table that he could keep his notebook hidden on his lap. I dug out a packet of tissues and put it in front of Jacqueline. The televisions blared on.
“Take your time. You’re doing really fine.”
Another loud sniff. “Okay. I was sneaking up on this bird that was maybe a vulture, but I made a noise on a loose rock or something and the bird flew away. Then I saw something right under where it was. This, like, bright blue jacket—I thought it was empty, I mean, you know, just the jacket. And when I got close it started moving, and I went over and it was—this man, really bleeding and moaning. I was going to do some CPR but we just learned it last week, and I was afraid I’d hurt him even more. And … and …”
Jacqueline broke into tears, quite out of proportion to the situation.
It’s not as if she’d known Jake, I thought. Then I guessed the problem. I patted her hand.
“I’ll bet you were nervous about putting your mouth on his, too?”
She raised her shoulders and shivered. “Uh-huh. So I probably killed him.”
I glanced at the accordion door, expecting her mother to come and rescue her, but realized the television sounds would mask Jacqueline’s breakdown. I felt so sorry for the child, imagining the burden of guilt she’d been carrying, that I came up with a lie. Berger’s influence, I thought.
“Jacqueline, the doctors said the man had been so badly hurt, nothing you could have done would have helped.”
Sniff.
“Really?”
“Really. This might be a lesson for you, though, to get some more training, in case you need it again.” Jacqueline gave me an
I don’t think so
look. “But not for a long, long time,” I said.
A smile, finally. “We’re almost through, Jacqueline. Just one or two more questions.”
“Okay.”
“Did you see anyone in the marsh? Anyone besides Mr. Endicott and your classmates?”
She shook her head.
“Did the man say anything before—did you hear anything from the man before you called for Mr. Endicott?”
“He was moaning a lot and he said something like ‘Sarta’s dead’ or ‘Satan’s dead,’ maybe, I don’t know. It was hard to tell.”
“Could it have been ‘Spartan’s dead’?” I asked.
Jacqueline shrugged. “I guess. Yeah, it could have been Spartan.”
Spartan Q. Jake’s horse.
Another dead horse?
M
att and I followed the hospital’s faded blue dots to the waiting room for radiation therapy. This would be our route five days a week for six weeks. We’d re-read all the literature, which predicted no ill effects until well into the treatment, if at all. We’d stocked up on bouillon and cranberry juice. No citrus or food with small seeds. Matt had circled in red an item on controlling fatigue:
Let others cook for you and eat six or seven small meals a day
.
“Do you really think two cannoli are what they mean by a meal?” I’d asked.
We’d both finally finished the transcript from Houston, the RPD was investigating Jake Powers’s murder, and the problem of locating his horse, dead or alive, was also theirs, I decided. I could focus on Matt. And MC, in her grief over Jake Powers’s death. And the microchip problem that had brought Nina Martin to Revere. Not too bad a workload.
I thought how different our conversation probably sounded, compared to that of other couples—normal couples, I meant—on their way to X-ray.
“It’s just like a regular microchip, with an integrated circuit coil,” I explained, as we turned corner after corner, avoiding the yellow triangles and green squares that would have sent us off to obstetrics or orthopedics. “The only difference is that the IC—the integrated circuit—for an identification implant would be in a container that’s biofriendly.”
“Is that a real word, ‘biofriendly’?”
“I don’t think so. I made it up just for you.”
“I’m flattered. I thought I’d been reading about this for years, though. Don’t they monitor railroad cars with the same kind of device in the track?”
“You’re right. Remote sensing of passive identification isn’t new.”
“Is that what I said? I’m smarter than I think.”
I loved Matt’s jovial mood, his normal self. I loved thinking the time he’d spend under an X-ray machine would be a tiny blip in his day, not affecting his positive outlook and his sense of humor.
I smiled and nodded. “What’s different is the miniaturization that’s possible with new materials, and also the fact that we now have sealants like biocompatible glass to encase the device. I’ll know more after I talk to Dr. Schofield.”
I’d managed to convince Berger that I was the best one to talk to Dr. Schofield since he wasn’t officially a suspect in anything—his name had come up only in the parallel constructions Matt and I had made from the horse/vet/buckyball equation we derived from the Houston transcript. I also shaded the truth a bit by letting Berger think “Scho”—the nickname Daniel Endicott used for him—and I were buddies.
When a nurse appeared and called Matt’s name, she seemed to be out of context. Weren’t we at home or in a car, at one of our usual tutorial sessions? Either from Matt to me about some new police protocol, or from me to him on one of the elements of the periodic table. I’d forgotten we were in a hospital waiting for Matt to climb into his custom-fit Styrofoam mold and be pummeled with high-energy electromagnetic radiation. Just as well.
Matt left me for what was billed as a fifteen-minute procedure, but was closer to forty minutes. I hoped the X-ray event itself took up only a small fraction of that time.
I’d left my own reading material in the car, so I flipped through out-of-date, sticky magazines. Fortunately, there was no story I cared about enough to miss the torn-out pages. I scanned a
women’s publication. Better than auto racing, fishing, professional sports. At least there were interesting recipes. I read the ten best fashion tips for the long-gone summer season, a reported coupling between celebrities that had probably been dissolved by now, a review of a movie that featured famous human voices coming out of animated animal bodies, and the progress of sextuplets that arrived courtesy of a fertility drug. I wondered who subscribed to this kind of periodical at home, when there was
Scientific American, Technology Review, Discover
.
“Done,” Matt said, re-entering the waiting room.
“Good. We’re on our way,” I said, meaning many things.
Dr. Schofield was most accommodating, agreeing to meet me on short notice on Monday afternoon. His office had fewer animal pictures than Lorna’s, I noticed. During the few minutes I had to wait, I availed myself of yet another stack of “foreign” waiting-room magazines.
Veterinary Forum, Veterinary Industry, DVM News,
and
Compendium—Continuing Education for the Practicing Veterinarian
.
I glanced at an article on a new technique for removing a horse’s ovaries and an ad for an analyzer of what were euphemistically termed “canine, feline, and equine veterinary samples.”
I’m going to have to start carrying around
Physics Today, I thought.
Dr. Schofield ushered me into his office. In his white lab coat, he could have been a spectroscopist, like me—not that he would be flattered by the comparison. What Dr. Schofield did not look like was a murderer, especially standing in front of a coffee grinder in his office, the mark of a gentleman. But I’d learned that even murderers might dress well, have nice smiles, and be fussy about their coffee.
We started on a friendly note, commending each other for our work with Revere High students, discussing how important it was to get young people interested in science. We’d both read an article about resources teachers could use to bring the science classroom to life.
“I’m interested in knowing more about your project with Daniel Endicott’s students,” I told him once we were settled with excellent espressos. “I’d like to see the microchips you use to track the coyotes.”
“I doubt it,” he said, with a satisfied grin.
“I, uh …” Caught. Clearly, Scho—he’d asked me to use his nickname—wasn’t one to waffle. I felt my face flush, and tried not to squirm to add to the pitiful sight.
He smiled, but not offensively, even though he’d exposed me as a poor excuse for a detective. “Lorna Frederick phoned me over the weekend and told me to expect you. It seems we’re both suspects in a murder.”
Two murders, maybe three, I noted. Dr. Schofield’s—I abandoned the notion of calling this imposing gentleman “Scho”—pleasant tone and demeanor said he wasn’t worried a bit. I wondered if Lorna was.
I stared past his bald head to an anatomy chart of a horse, noting with interest where the various organs lay. I wondered if I could stall by asking the resting pulse of, say, a thoroughbred.
I cleared my throat. “Well, you know what the police say—everyone’s a suspect until the killer is found.”
“Nicely put. Are you the police?”
I laughed. “Not quite, but I am a consultant, and since you brought up the most unfortunate subject of murder—did you know Nina Martin or Jake Powers?”
I watched for signs of guilt, as if I had an infallible list of symptoms. In any case, Dr. Schofield was calm, sure of himself.
“Not Nina Martin, I’m afraid, and Jake Powers was just a passing acquaintance. I met him once or twice through Lorna.”
“And Lorna knew him through equestrian activities.”
“That’s my understanding.”
“Did you by any chance implant a microchip into Jake Powers’s horse?”
“Hmm.” Dr. Schofield went into a modified
Thinker
posture,
elbow in hand, and seemed genuinely pondering the question. “If I did it would be in my records. I must admit often my technician does the actual insertion.”
“Can you check your files, if they’re handy?”
“Not a problem.” Dr. Schofield’s records were as well-kept on the inside as the outside, and he quickly pulled a printout from a folder in his desk drawer.
Listed were the horse’s name, the owner, an ID number for the chip, the location, the breed, and a column for comments.
We read down the list and stopped at a line near the bottom.
“Here it is,” Dr. Schofield said.
SPARTAN Q POWERS 87&541*27 MA APPALOOSA NONE
If he knew that Spartan Q was dead, he gave no indication. I didn’t know why I didn’t tell him my suspicions about the dead horse at that moment, except that I felt I’d get more information if I withheld that fact.
I wondered about the state of health of the other horses on the list, and whether one of them might be the horse whose death PI Nina Martin was investigating.
“May I have a copy of this list?” I asked, aiming my tone halfway between casual and authoritative.
If you don’t give it to me
, I tried to imply,
someone more official will be by later with a court order
.
Dr. Schofield’s confident, almost fatherly presence intimidated me, and strictly speaking I had no authorization to ask for an alibi or question him further about the murders. I’d told Berger I’d restrict myself to learning about microchip ID technology so we could understand better if Ms. Trumble in Houston had a case.
“I’ll bet Houston PD doesn’t have a consultant like you,” Berger had told me.
I bet they did, especially since nanotechnology was commonly thought to have been born in that city, but I’d accepted the compliment graciously.
Dr. Schofield weighed my request only a few seconds, then buzzed his secretary and asked her to have a copy for me before I left.
Too easy, I thought. It was time for a technology lesson from Dr. Schofield.
I gave him an open, honest smile. “I really do want to know about microchip ID technology. Unless Lorna has advised you not to talk about it?”
He laughed. “Or my attorney? No, I’d be happy to talk to you about the new chips. I’m afraid it might be boring, given your background.”
I shook my head and ran the fingers of my left hand over the back of my right hand. “My expertise ends at skin level. I’m out of my league with biological sciences.”
“Well, I’m sure you’re a quick study.” Dr. Schofield pulled a binder from a row of them lined up across the top of his fine oak bookcase. The dark blue binders were different sizes, but matched in color, with neatly typed labels, all in the same font. Not the eclectic mix of office supplies in my former labs. I figured it might be more necessary to give attention to décor when the public was paying directly for your expertise. My old lab, with constantly recycled, relabeled folders, wouldn’t have inspired confidence from outside visitors.
Dr. Schofield opened the binder to a page with a circuit diagram. A thing of beauty, compared to an anatomy chart. No messy blood flow, for one thing. No possibility of cancer, for another.
“We can skip the schematic, I’m sure,” he said, moving on to a specifications sheet for an EID, an electronic identification device. He followed the items down the page with his finger, summarizing the structure. “A tiny passive transponder, small enough to fit inside a hypodermic needle, is encapsulated in biocompatible glass. Each transponder is preprogrammed with a unique multidigit, unalterable alphanumeric code. Depending on the brand, there are billions or even trillions of possible combinations of strings, without duplication.”
Nothing new so far. Unlike a tracking circuit, which gave out a signal of its own, a passive circuit like the EID was closer to a bar code on a supermarket item, requiring a reader to scan it for the information.
“It’s like a bar code, only using radio frequency,” I said.
“Good analogy. When a reader is passed over the implantation site, a radio signal activates the transponder and the detector receives the ID, which the user sees as an LCD. With one phone call, the number can be traced back to the owner.”
“Very nice. Why doesn’t every horse owner do this? Is it very expensive?”
“No, not really. A lot of horse owners think their animals are in a secure location and don’t need one, or perhaps that their horses aren’t very valuable.”
“A little like the rationale for home security systems, isn’t it?” I said, thinking of the lack of an alarm in my Fernwood Avenue home.
He nodded. “Indeed. Also, there’s no standardization. Company A’s chips cannot be read by Company B’s equipment, so that’s a nuisance. What else is new, huh?”
I nodded and we chatted amiably about the drawbacks of the great American capitalist system with its lack of industry standardization—automobiles, computers, and even commercial nuclear power reactors.
I eased us back into the microchip industry.
“How do you implant the device?”
“With a simple hypodermic. The chips have a special coating so they don’t migrate through the animal’s body. We inject under the skin and very soon a layer of connective tissue forms around the chip and it stays there forever. It’s quick and painless. And of course we keep a record of which chip went into which horse, so it’s easy to track the horse’s medical history.”
I was ready for the big questions. The first one surprised even me. “Do you know Dr. Owen Evans in Houston?” The doctor who installed the chip into the Houston horse—it occurred to me that if there was some kind of scam going on, they’d all know each other. Scam Theory, by police consultant Gloria Lamerino. I was amazed I remembered the Texas doctor’s name.