The Price of Innocence Read online

  ‘Won’t say another word,’ his partner assured him.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Leo did not receive Theresa’s theory with nearly the same equanimity. ‘Bruce Lambert?’

  ‘I know it’s a leap.’

  ‘It’s not a leap. It’s jumping the Snake River Canyon!’

  ‘The man fits a lot of facts. He attended Cleveland State at the same time as the others. Ken Bilicki said DaVinci left after their sophomore year, which Lambert did. He switched to MIT. He studied chemistry.’

  ‘Bruce Lambert.’

  ‘Bilicki kept referring to DaVinci as a genius, first, simply for recognizing the potential of an abandoned commercial-grade kitchen, then for making chemically perfect meth and running the business side of it as well. Lambert’s more than proven himself in both fields. Assuming DaVinci is behind the Bingham explosion—’

  ‘That’s one big damn assumption, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not really. We have the same explosive, quite uncommon in large quantities, turning up at both sites. He may have learned how to stabilize the nitrogen triiodide, something no one’s ever been able to do, from the meth lab explosion twenty-five years ago.’ She didn’t mention Oliver’s input to this theory, as the two men did not care for each other and she would have a hard enough time selling this story to her boss. She had a hard time selling it to herself. ‘Then he found a way to approach Marty Davis silently and, almost silently, shoot him twice. Then he tinkered with methamphetamines to turn them into poison. Then he got a bomb into Terry Beltran’s apartment to make him a perfect and conveniently dead fall guy. He got into my house silently and left yet another perfectly designed form of meth to take care of me. The killer is a freakin’ genius, and as far as I know there’s only one in town.’

  ‘Putting an unsubstantiated accusation in flattering terms will not help. He’ll still sue us down to our toenails. But do go on. Why do you think someone other than the budding boyfriend poisoned your drink?’

  ‘Because the budding boyfriend is on an operating table right now, fighting for his life.’ The words hesitated in her throat, but for once did not stick. ‘David had proven more difficult to approach than the others. David probably didn’t make any connection to the Bingham explosion, but Marty’s murder put his antennae up. David and Marty were liabilities to Lambert. With his IPO coming up, what would it do to his potential millions if America’s heroic genius had been the head of a meth ring in college, one that ended with a boy burning to death? He couldn’t afford that. Lily and Ken, chronic drug users, would be ignored even if they did talk, but Marty and David were professional men. Not perfect – Marty’s career was not particularly distinguished and David has that embarrassing wife – but potentially convincing in the hands of some gung-ho prosecutor out to see his name in the papers. They had to be removed or at least neutralized. But David and Marty also had reasons to keep quiet – Marty had his job and David, his custody case. When I ran into him at the Lambert factory, he stayed tucked in the back and then left early. At the time I thought he wanted to be alone with me, but I think he wanted a way to show Lambert that he would not approach him, not call attention to him. That he could be trusted to keep the secret. But Lambert doesn’t trust anyone.’

  Leo pulled on his lab coat. The lab air had chilled in the late evening hours. ‘This freakin’ genius, as you put it, seems to have left a lot to chance. What if your new squeeze drank your water instead of you?’

  ‘That would have worked, too. Whether David is shown to be a killer or a drug user, Lambert still achieves his purpose. No one’s going to listen to any tale he spins about Cleveland’s resident Renaissance man and a meth ring from their college days. Neutralized.’

  ‘This still sounds like a lot of hot air.’

  ‘Not air. Chemistry. This entire case has revolved around chemistry, truly brilliant chemistry, carefully formed to serve the purposes of one particular individual. The meth had been altered for no productive reason such as stretching the product or making it more addictive, only to kill Lily Simpson. He changed it up again to kill Ken Bilecki, dispatching them both in ways that would seem consistent with the rest of their lives, ways that no one would question. Because he knew them.’

  ‘Knew them twenty-five years ago, according to your theory. Lambert’s got a better class of friends these days.’

  ‘But he keeps in touch with his roots. That’s why everyone likes him, because he’s a former poor guy from the hood who surrounds himself with his childhood friends, giving them jobs, giving their families jobs. He has people who will protect him and who might possess the necessary roughness to do any task he assigns, including selling poisonous meth to his former partners.’

  A door slammed in the hallway outside as a lone toxicologist, the weekend’s skeleton staff, left for the day. Oliver had gone home hours before and the secretaries and clerks on the second floor departed by noon on weekends. ‘Seems like an uncertain method to kill someone.’

  ‘If it didn’t work, he could always try again. He experiments. Failures don’t stop him. And any drug use incident discredits the target, at the very least.’

  ‘OK, OK. It’s a very nice theory. But here’s the only real question: why? Why blow up the Bingham building? Why kill Marty Davis? Why?’

  She sighed. ‘Every indication says the Bingham explosion was accidental. He stockpiled an explosive he thought he had stabilized and something went wrong.’

  ‘OK, stop there. Why would Bruce Lambert be stockpiling explosives to begin with? You’re going to tell me he’s working with terrorists?’

  ‘He may have nothing to do with terrorists.’

  ‘At last, a note of reason.’

  ‘I think he uses it to power his car engines. He keeps referring to it as nitrogen “sand”, but it sounds exactly like nitrogen triiodide. Small and highly explosive – great for powering a reaction, but the safety organizations in this country would never allow it. Americans aren’t desperate enough to drive around with mini-bombs in their tanks. Rival car companies would exploit their fears. He needed to hide the formula until he could test his ability to stabilize large amounts of it. Of course he didn’t want to take the chance of blowing his own building sky high—’

  ‘So your genius suspect kept his pile of nitrogen triiodide next door?’

  ‘Conveniently close yet plausibly deniable. I’m sure he had it calculated down to the last joule of energy liberated. The basement of the Bingham could function as a bomb shelter. He knew it wouldn’t damage his own place other than to break a few windows, and that only made him look like a victim instead of a suspect.’

  ‘You’ve taken meth before today, haven’t you? Because it’s eroded your synapses. The man has more money than God. I’m sure he could have found a more appropriate space to do all this in if he wanted. He could probably buy a small city.’

  ‘He doesn’t want to. He likes everything tucked up around him. Look at the man – he stays in the town he grew up in. He surrounds himself with people he grew up with. As DaVinci, he lived only a few floors up from a commercial-grade meth lab capable of taking out the entire hotel.’ She leaned forward. ‘He’s a control freak.’

  Leo shook his head as if to clear his ears of some annoying blockage. ‘OK. Back to my first question. Why kill Marty Davis?’

  ‘Because Marty Davis pulled him over on a traffic stop the day before the building exploded. Though he had a reputation never to give breaks, he let Lambert off with a warning. The dispatcher assumed he had been wowed by Lambert’s star power. I think he did it because it was an old friend. Marty had great loyalty to his friends.’

  ‘So Lambert returns the favor by killing him?’

  ‘Lambert’s life has been pretty busy the last couple of years. I bet he had forgotten all about his college days and dead Joe McClurg. But when he ran into Davis, he realized how vulnerable his little empire really was. When you’re rich and famous, you attract enemies. Any chink in his armor, and they’d swarm in.
It would not be that difficult to prove his involvement in the meth lab and McClurg’s death, if anyone really tried. Who knows, maybe given this opening, Davis wanted to get together for a beer. Lambert wouldn’t say no, not with his common-man persona, plus he was trying to get out of a ticket, but he had to realize that Davis was a liability. His life wasn’t that great and he drank too much. Exactly the type of guy you don’t want knowing a secret that could destroy you.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Leo said, but the wideness of his eyes belied the heavy sarcasm in his voice. ‘But pure theory, meaning if you ever breathe a word of this outside this lab I will fire you in an instant. There is no way I’m bringing the wrath of the soon-to-be richest man in the world upon our staff, including yours truly.’

  She helped herself to another cup of coffee. ‘It’s more than theory. Remember how the plastic used for a silencer seemed too thick for the usual pop-bottle job, and I didn’t find any pieces of cloth? It’s polymethyl methacrylate. It’s what they make taillights out of. It’s what I found in Lambert’s workshop after the explosion.’

  Leo’s face darkened. ‘I took that glob from you. I took you off this case.’

  ‘Yeah – except I’d already taken a slice off … so I ran it anyway …’ Her voice trailed a bit as a rolling shade of puce passed under the skin on Leo’s face. ‘The major functional groups match. My point is, Lambert has a station for molding his own car lights. I saw it in his workroom.’

  ‘They make a lot of things out of PMMA, Theresa. It’s Plexiglas.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s still interesting. If you give me my samples back, oh wonderful broad-minded boss, I can talk Oliver into letting me use the mass spec for further testing on the silencer plastic versus that lump I took from the factory explosion. It’s probably different, but just in case …’ This suggestion did nothing to soften Leo’s expression, so she tried another tack. ‘Speaking of Lambert’s workshop, he also has stations for disassembling the prototype vehicles. He could have cruised up to Marty in a nearly silent car, shot him, gone home and had the car disassembled. It wouldn’t matter if he had been seen by witnesses, driving up the street or the driveway. The car would no longer exist for them to identify.’

  ‘Then if it can’t be proven, it doesn’t bear mentioning, does it?’

  ‘Then there’s this piece of foam I found in the driveway. I think it’s ethylene-vinyl acetate, or so I gather from the infrared spectrum. EVA foam, it’s called. It’s often used for the molded seat cushioning in electric cars.’

  ‘It’s also used for cushioning kid’s bike helmets and Crocs shoes. It’s used for a million things.’

  Sometimes Leo’s devil’s advocate role got a bit wearisome. ‘But I’m betting this type will be unique. It seems to have a few too many methyl groups on it. If it matches what Lambert has in his workshop, we have him.’

  ‘You’ll never know what’s in his workshop. That would require a search warrant, for which you have no sufficient probable cause. That much I’m sure of.’

  ‘Not so fast. That’s where the ring comes in.’

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The patient Dispatch supervisor sent Frank and Angela over to the equally patient Evidence supervisor, who kept watch, among other things, over all in-car videos. It took twenty minutes to locate the correct tape, but Frank, who remembered the prior system, didn’t think twenty minutes was all that bad.

  He and Angela watched Marty Davis move through the third-last morning of his life, passing out tickets, going into a ramshackle home to take a burglary report, watching a group of teenagers who might be up to no good. Finally he drove east on Lake Shore Boulevard and made his rambling way to West Ninth.

  After listening to the Dispatch tape, it felt almost anticlimactic to see Lambert’s Porsche through the windshield. Frank recognized Lambert as the driver, his unruly curls familiar to anyone who read the newspapers. His passenger did not turn, did not show any interest in the police officer or his car behind them, did not swivel his head toward Lambert. He even held his arm up across the passenger window, so that the side mirror reflected only a dark sleeve.

  Marty called it in, received the response they had already heard, and got out of the car. He approached the Porsche and had a short but apparently amiable conversation with the driver. Frank could almost read his lips. ‘Hey, Bruce! Long time no see! I haven’t seen you since sophomore year. You’ve done great for yourself, or so I read in the papers,’ Frank guessed. The cop went on, smiling, laughing, doing most of the talking, sealing his own death warrant with every word.

  The passenger never turned, not even when Marty ducked his head to get a better look at him.

  The cop’s amiable chatter lasted for two and a half minutes by Frank’s watch. Then Davis paused to listen. Maybe Lambert made a comment about the time and someplace he needed to be. Marty Davis seemed to stifle a frown, grinned instead and clapped his old schoolmate’s arm as he released the Porsche back to the open road. He grinned still as he returned to his own patrol car, glowing with the little rush that comes with running into an old friend. He disappeared from the camera’s angle, but Frank knew what had happened. After climbing back into his seat, Marty Davis had picked up the radio and closed out the call without hesitation.

  The driver’s side brake light on the Porsche went out and the car began to move forward. Only then did the passenger turn to glance back at the cop, desperate to know that they were truly free. For one moment before he snapped his head to the front again, with the interior of the Porsche illuminated by a particularly sunny spring day, Frank saw his face.

  Nairit Kadam.

  ‘I can’t wait to hear this,’ Leo said, with heavy sarcasm. He didn’t budge from his task chair, letting the lab grow dark and still around them.

  Theresa explained about the caduceus ring from the meth lab explosion. ‘I assumed it belonged to the dead Joe McClurg, aka Doc, but it hadn’t been found on the body, only in the rubble. I don’t think it belonged to McClurg, at least not originally.’

  ‘More guesswork.’

  ‘Lambert’s mother was a jewelry design assistant and she wanted him to be a doctor. How much you want to bet she made him that ring, an individual, unique piece of metal?’

  ‘I’m not betting anything, because you can’t prove it.’

  ‘Not yet. But all we need is one ex-girlfriend who remembers it, or one old photo of him wearing it, and we will.’

  ‘Don’t give me this “we” stuff if you expect some teenage girl to recall a ring from half her lifetime ago.’

  ‘A woman,’ Theresa intoned, ‘never forgets a piece of jewelry.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Leo said. He seemed to be absorbing her framework with a great and heavy concern, most likely imagining the firestorm of belligerence a man with Bruce Lambert’s resources could and would bring to bear upon the trace evidence laboratory of the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office. The explosion at the Bingham would seem a petty inconvenience by comparison. The Spanish Inquisition would seem a petty inconvenience by comparison.

  ‘By the way, where did you put it?’ Theresa asked.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘My box from the Bingham? You said you put it back in the garage but I couldn’t find it. I assume you didn’t climb to the top of that pyramid and place it there.’

  ‘You assume correctly.’

  ‘So, where is it?’

  He gazed at her for a moment, his mind clearly on some more pressing subject such as the expected lifetime of his current employment, then shook it off with a sigh. ‘I didn’t care to approach that critical mass in the garage and dumped it in the basement supply room. Come on, I’ll show you where.’

  She snatched up her lab coat and used the elevator ride to propound her theory further. ‘I know it’s all circumstantial evidence, but every piece of it points to Lambert. We found olefin on Kadam’s body from the Bingham explosion, and Lambert wears those disposable Tyvek jumpsuits in his workroom. He built an orphanage in Abkhazia,
so he’d know about the Georgian splinter group when he needed a fall guy.’

  ‘You’re saying four people, each of whom were in pretty dire straits, had been living in Cleveland all this time with the knowledge to destroy a very rich man, and they never acted on that knowledge? How likely is that?’

  ‘They couldn’t implicate Bruce without indicting themselves. Ken and Lily were the weakest links, but no one would listen to them anyway. They already had enough trouble with the law without handing over another crime to charge them with. McClurg’s death could be prosecuted as murder, with no statute of limitations. David needed to appear as the perfect parent. Marty would have lost his job as a police officer, the only real thing he had in life. All four needed to keep the past buried every bit as much as Lambert did.’

  ‘Then why kill them?’

  ‘I’m assuming that if loyalty didn’t keep them silent, self-interest would. But after the explosion Lambert couldn’t afford to assume. He needed to be one hundred per cent sure.’

  ‘So he took the incredible risk of killing all his ex-friends just to be sure? Hardly seems worth it.’

  Theresa grasped her boss’s elbow, feeling the bony joint beneath a sheer coating of muscle. ‘Next week Bruce Lambert will become, at a minimum, the richest man in the country, not to mention hailed as the world’s energy savior. Yes. It’s worth it.’

  The elevator shuddered to a halt. The basement of the Medical Examiner’s Office was a warren of thick walls and storage rooms, where no one ventured unless necessary and certainly not on weekends. No one who worked at the M.E.’s office had a fear of ghosts, but everyone found the oppressive odors and even more oppressive silence unnerving.

  Leo stopped outside one of the many nine-by-nine storage rooms and Theresa yanked on the latch. The storage rooms used to be walk-in refrigerators, and still had the heavy doors and solid metal latches of an industrial cooler. Shelves of clear and brown glass bottles and plastic jugs appeared as the fluorescent lighting came to life. The aisle between them only allowed one person, and Theresa moved down it, searching for a brown cardboard box among the chemicals. Typical of Leo to be too lazy to get the garage key, go outside into the spring air, fiddle with the ancient door lock merely in order to put an item back where it belonged. Much simpler to drop it in a place he had to go anyway. ‘I don’t see it.’