The Price of Innocence Read online

  ‘At the back,’ Leo said. ‘So you’re positive Bruce Lambert was DaVinci?’

  ‘Positive. And I’ll prove it. The man came into my home while I was sleeping. He killed three people so far and did his best to kill both me and Frank. I’ll never let him go now.’ She reached the end of the aisle, stopping at the cold metal wall.

  ‘No,’ Leo said, ‘I don’t believe you will.’

  No box. She turned, to see Leonardo DiCiccio holding a 1.5-liter bottle of hydrochloric acid.

  Facts lined up with dizzying speed. Theresa had assumed that Lambert had contacts in the police department – he could certainly afford them – but maybe his contact had been much closer than that. Leo and Lambert were the same age, both attended CSU. How had Lambert known David would be coming to the Eastman garden? How would he know Theresa was pursuing Lily’s death and talking with David? How would he get into her house without leaving a trace? Simple. He hadn’t. Leo had brought her the tote bag and the water bottle yesterday, along with a sad look. As if saying goodbye.

  ‘Lambert wasn’t DaVinci,’ she said, her voice stupid with shock. ‘You were.’

  ‘I wish you could have left it alone, Theresa. I tried everything I could to deflect you.’

  ‘I see that now,’ she nodded. ‘You argued the idea that the explosive could be nitrogen triiodide. You tried to keep me from visiting Lambert’s factory and bowed yourself out of the alumni function, then told him to keep an eye on me. You told me to leave the explosion to the Feds. You told me to stay away from David Madison. You freaked when you saw the box from Payne Avenue. You poisoned me, then steered me toward blaming it on David. And since I didn’t die you used it as a reason to take away all the samples from all the cases. You told Lambert where David would be, to kill him before he could blurt out Lambert’s identity to me. Or yours.’

  ‘Not mine,’ Leo said. ‘Bean has no idea I work here. He never knew my real name.’

  Leo, always so careful to keep his picture out of the paper and off the newscasts. And she had thought it had something to do with a poor body image. ‘Lambert was Doc.’

  ‘Yep.’ He did not look away from her, the bottle precariously balanced in his gloved hand. They were the only two people on the premises – except for the deskmen, who were one thick floor up and at the other end of the building with the TV turned on. There were no cameras or other security in the basement. All that technology would be part of the new building, that promised land she wouldn’t live to see.

  ‘Then who was Joe McClurg?’

  ‘A guy from my organic chemistry class. We were training him to take over cooking the stuff, phasing ourselves out.’

  She needed time to think. ‘No nickname?’

  ‘We called him Red,’ Leo admitted. ‘But Ken Bilecki wouldn’t know that. We were phasing him out too.’

  ‘He’d become unreliable.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You weren’t concerned until I found the box from Payne Avenue, and brought back that lump of plastic from Lambert’s workshop.’

  He winced. ‘I had no idea if it would match anything from Marty Davis’ crime scene, but I couldn’t be sure. All Lambert’s stuff is most likely unique, and – you and that damn FTIR.’

  ‘And Lambert was already worried; I’d been turning up too often. That’s when you decided to drug me. If I did stumble on to anything, my abilities would be completely discredited.’

  ‘Not much of a plan, but time seemed of the essence.’

  ‘Are you going to kill me, Leo?’

  ‘I don’t have a choice, Theresa. We’re scientists, after all, experts in facts, reality. It’s you or me. That’s the reality. I can bury the Payne Avenue stuff, say it got lost in the move. I can alter the tox reports, keep your cousin off the trail. I can control it all – except you.’

  She would have given anything not to believe him. But she had worked with the man for ten years, and thought she knew him. She had seen him fire people, hire people, research attorneys before giving testimony, wield the media like a sword and evict his own son from his home. He had already killed, or helped to conceal the killing of, three former friends. As much as he could drive her to distraction, they had gotten along amiably enough and he liked her. But he did not love her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Theresa. I really am.’

  ‘But—’ She began to protest that she had already told Frank, but before she could get the words out Leo smashed the bottle on the concrete just inside the door. Then he slammed that door shut.

  Theresa knew exactly what would happen now. The hydrochloric acid would turn to a toxic, corrosive gas that her lungs would know better than to breathe in. Her body would seize up until she choked and then suffocated. It would seem like a tragic accident – she hadn’t propped the door and then accidentally broke a jar. Leo’s fingerprints would not be on the jar or the latch, and even if they were he could explain it – he worked there. Unless one of the pathologists doing Sunday autopsies ran short of an item, no one would find her body until next week. She would have begun to decompose by then, not too badly, just her veins marbling under the skin, cells starting to ooze.

  She also knew what to do. She clapped the bottom of her T-shirt up over her lower face with her left hand, and put her right one on a large bottle of sodium bicarbonate. She needed an extremely exothermic reaction.

  The only way out of the room was to blow it up.

  While she was still inside.

  If she thought about this for even a split second she wouldn’t do it. She picked up the bottle and threw it, knowing it would probably kill her.

  Theresa didn’t wait to watch the bottle arc through the air, but dropped to the floor and huddled up against the cool metal wall, her face pressed to her knees, mouth open, arms over her head. This cure could well prove worse than the disease, even if the disease was death.

  The sodium bicarbonate would neutralize the hydrochloric acid and produce hot carbon dioxide as a by-product. The air in the room would suddenly need to expand and without any place to go, no vents, no windows, would exert its full force on the weakest point in the metal box – the door, on its old and if possible rusty hinges.

  Theoretically, anyway.

  The same force she hoped would blow open a four-inch-thick metal and wood door would press her against the metal wall at her side. This would not be pretty.

  Her life exploded into a ball of very loud, airless noise. A giant hand slapped her flat against the abruptly burning steel, pushing every molecule of air out of her lungs and giving her nothing to replace it except fire. Her body had abandoned her. She could not feel it, nor get too interested in what it might be doing.

  Then, nothing.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  She must be dead, since all was nothingness. A white nothingness. Peaceful and floating and unending, except it was a little too close to her burned face for comfort and she pushed at it. It came back at her and she batted with both hands and the budding panic of the claustrophobe. Not quite as peaceful as she’d imagined.

  Because the soft white nothingness was stiff white plastic with a black zipper running down its middle. She didn’t like it, wanted out. Right. Now.

  Luckily her body cottoned on to the situation long before the rest of her and ripped out with her hands, finding the zipper and pulling it apart. Cool air rushed in. Not that it did her much good – she still couldn’t get a decent breath with lungs singed with hydrochloric acid and then hot carbon dioxide. And she could barely open her eyes against the blinding light. Maybe this really was heaven.

  Though she was fairly sure that heaven would not have a ceiling paneled in acoustic tile. At least she hoped not.

  She was in Lambert’s laboratory, his very brightly lit, recently blown-up workroom. Once her pupils adjusted to the light she could see the high windows of the catwalk hallway, the desks, sections of automobile scattered here and there, the track for the crane that stretched from one end of the room to the other over her head, th
e freshly plastered section of fixed wall. The fishbowl room.

  Then she caught the odor, just a whiff through her damaged sinuses.

  ‘Don’t move,’ someone said. ‘You’ll blow yourself and everything around you into little tiny pieces. Including me.’

  She sat up slowly and shaded her eyes. Leo stood only five feet away, holding a cardboard box – her cardboard box. She herself had been surrounded by thirty blocks of whitish crystals, fanning out from her across the linoleum. She did not doubt what the crystals were.

  Nitrogen triiodide.

  She didn’t move.

  Lambert sat at one of the desks, his fingers hovering over a keyboard. He stared at her. ‘Shit. She’s not supposed to be alive.’

  ‘I forgot about the bicarb,’ Leo admitted. He seemed to have aged about twenty years in the past hour as he straightened up from where he had been adjusting a small metal box – probably the detonator. ‘Don’t shuffle around in there either. If you step on the tiniest crumb, the pressure will set it off. And you know what happens then.’

  ‘You’re still here,’ she said to Leo. ‘Sounds almost worth it. Besides, blowing up the meth lab taught Bruce here how to stabilize nitrogen triiodide.’

  ‘Only from decomposition,’ Lambert said, not even looking up from his computer screen. ‘Not percussion. Just ask Nairit Kadam.’

  The image of Kadam’s incinerated body took her breath away for a moment.

  The bricks appeared to be three by four by two inches, perhaps. One cubic foot per block. Thirty cubic feet of NI3 – if it were TNT, there would be about a ton and a half. Enough to take out the building. Enough to take out the building and the city block it stood on.

  She looked around, up, willing someone to walk along the catwalk from the lobby and see them. ‘What about your security? Isn’t this all on camera?’

  ‘Hello. Whose factory is this? That’s right, it’s mine. That means I get to turn the cameras on and off when I like. I also get to send everyone home until the recent blast is investigated and their security can be assured.’

  She stood, carefully, her feet still swathed in the folds of the body bag. She took her cell phone out of her pocket and opened it. Just as promised, no signal, which explained why neither man objected or even seemed to notice.

  ‘So,’ she asked. ‘Is there a plan, here?’

  Lambert said, ‘Yes, but it’s not one you’re going to like.’

  All she had to do was get on to the other side of the spread of bricks. She hadn’t been restrained or tied and neither of the two men had a gun or any other type of weapon. Except that she had never been much of an athlete – hell, except for a loping jog she wasn’t any kind of athlete – and was pretty sure she couldn’t pull off a standing long jump of five or six feet. A millimeter less and she could land on a brick or even a loose crystal, enough to ignite one tiny, infinitesimal reaction as the beginning of a long and loud chain of others. Also, in the past few days she’d been blown up twice and poisoned once and really wasn’t feeling up to gymnastic feats.

  ‘Where did you get all this?’ she asked, looking at Lambert. ‘I thought your supply went up with the Bingham.’

  ‘Most of it,’ he admitted, still concentrating on his computer screen. ‘Damn idiot. We had enough material to power my engines for six months even if they sold like hot cakes, plus plenty of extra for side projects in those crappy little countries always looking for cheap weapons … gone in a split second.’

  Theresa said to Leo, ‘I guess I was wrong when I thought he had nothing to do with terrorism.’

  Leo winced as if in pain.

  ‘It was just a sideline,’ Lambert said. ‘An extra benefit. Airline cargo screening looks for nitrogen compounds – but if the material already is a nitrogen compound, then what are they gonna do?’

  Theresa had no idea how to get herself out of the room, but with luck, Frank and a search warrant might show up before Lambert finished whatever he was doing. ‘It was all good until Marty pulled you over. It meant nothing that Marty saw you with Kadam, until Kadam became the prime suspect in the explosion. The explosion could not be linked to you – no one would buy a fuel that could single-handedly destroy an entire building.’

  ‘And I’d never convince our brain-dead citizens that the amounts used in the engine couldn’t take out a small cardboard box.’

  ‘So Marty had to die. And Lily.’

  He gave what appeared to be a final tap to the board. ‘Lily wasn’t my fault.’

  Leo took up the narrative, perhaps defending his former partner, perhaps finding some weird solace in a complete confession. Perhaps distracting himself from the thirty or so cubic feet of explosive in the room with him. ‘He couldn’t be sure if Marty had told anyone, especially after the news outlets released Kadam’s picture. Marty had to be discredited as well as killed. He planted his latest experiment at Marty’s apartment, the supercharged meth. If the cops bothered to analyze it, the weird composition would keep them running in circles looking for Marty’s drug dealer and would explain any wild tales Marty told about an old college acquaintance. The cops never found the meth, but Lily did, stole it, used it and died.’

  ‘Two birds,’ Theresa said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Lambert said. ‘I’m always willing to accept my failures and move on, but this time, failure was not an option. After Monday’s IPO I’ll have more money than Buffett and Gates combined.’

  ‘You honestly think this is still going to work?’ Theresa said.

  Lambert ignored her and said to Leo: ‘Transferring to you now.’

  ‘Divided among the three accounts?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Theresa aimed her tiny cell phone camera at them and pressed the button to create a video. ‘What, he’s paying you off? Have you thought this through, Leo? He killed anyone who might be a threat to him, going back twenty years. Do you really think he’s going to let you walk out of this room?’

  Both men glanced at her, and her phone, with a terrifying lack of concern.

  ‘Yes, Theresa,’ Leo said. ‘We’ve thought it through. I very much have to stay alive, so that I can manage this crime scene. Your body will not be found here, not even as the macroscopic bits of flesh it will become once this goes up. Those bits will belong to some yet-to-be-named employee of Lambert Enterprises and I’ll have the DNA tests to prove it. You will simply disappear.’

  ‘But Don—’

  ‘I couldn’t ask him to do the analysis when he’s so upset over your unexplained absence. Same goes for your cousin. He’ll want to pry and he’ll have plenty of suspicions, but without any proof his superiors will give him a leave of absence to deal with his grief. And if he did succeed, if the police department can put together some sort of case against Doc here, then guess what, his remains will be found in the ruins of some new terrorist attack. Probably City Hall. It’s a convincing target.’

  She couldn’t quite breathe with that image in her mind, either.

  Her phone ran out of space and she closed it. She couldn’t send the video anyway, and the phone would wind up in the same shape as her body. In pieces.

  ‘It’s not as if I like any of this, Theresa. But I’ll do what I have to. I always have.’

  ‘What about your empire?’ she asked Lambert. ‘What about your IPO?’

  ‘It will dip a little,’ he said, quite seriously, ‘what with two explosions in my lab in the same week. But I’ll still end up with more money than God, and I can access my accounts from Bora Bora just as easily as I can here.’

  ‘You’d leave your home? Spend the rest of your life in exile?’

  Lambert closed his laptop, unplugged it and moved it closer to the nitrogen triiodide. Whatever was on its hard drive, he wanted it disintegrated along with Theresa. ‘Not saying I’m happy about it, but every failure is a new beginning. I’ll miss my homies, but America? I’ve been ready to shake off the dirt of this puritan, everybody-is-special wasteland of idiots for a long time.’


  He turned to his former, and current, partner. ‘Thanks, DaVinci. And if you’re ever in the south Pacific – don’t look me up.’

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ Leo said. The two men nodded at each other, and the soon-to-be richest man in the world left the room. He did not so much as glance at Theresa.

  Theresa’s boss returned to the small metal box and touched it. She heard something click. Then he looked at her. The sheen of bravado he’d kept up with his old friend now faded from his face. He seemed deeply concerned, and almost sad.

  Almost.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said. Then he walked out as well, moving briskly, leaving her behind.

  ‘Hell with that,’ she said.

  THIRTY-NINE

  She had to work quickly. All Lambert and Leo had to do was clear the building and get out to the street, which would take, what, four minutes at the most? No reason to set the detonator for any longer than that. She checked her Swatch. 9:15.

  She could not jump over the bricks. The two men had obviously moved them somehow but she didn’t know how and couldn’t risk it. She could see wires running underneath them as well – possibly a booby trap.

  The only way out was straight up.

  The ceiling of the workroom stretched far above, but the suspended track for the crane had been built to help workers move large car panels on and off the working chassis. The beam passed only three or four feet above her head. She could not reach it but with luck she could lasso it.

  Leo hadn’t even bothered to empty her pockets, leaving her not only the useless cell phone but her set of keys. The mini Swiss Army knife was too short to be considered a weapon, but still sharp enough to function as a knife. She held up the body bag with her left hand and sliced down the middle of its back, anchoring the bottom with one foot so that the loose ends didn’t flop on to any of the explosive bricks. There might be tiny crystals around her feet, but she didn’t have time to be that careful.