1 The Question of the Missing Head (16 page)

The one unexpected feature of the room was that there was no one in the bed.

I walked slowly around the bed and looked inside the bathroom. There was no one visible there. A quick look inside the shower unit confirmed the absence of anyone inside. A second door led to a small sauna, but there was no one inside that room, either.

The sauna was the darkest room in the suite, with no windows, so my eyes were especially well adjusted when I walked back into the bedroom itself. And that meant I could see something I had not noticed before. Specifically, I examined a black hole running through the comforter and the sheets beneath it. A hole that bore the smell of something burning.

A bullet hole.

Had an intruder come in and shot at the bed, incorrectly believing someone was sleeping there? That seemed unlikely, because the bullet hole was at the foot of the bed. A person trying to kill someone sleeping in a bed would probably not first take aim at the toes.

I considered the noise I’d heard on the stairs, almost a high-pitched whimper, and dropped to my knees. I looked under the bed. There was a woman under there.

A live woman.

“Mrs. Ackerman?” I asked. But the woman did not respond; she merely stared at me and whimpered again. “Are you Eleanor Ackerman?” That question solicited only a more pitiable moan. It had not occurred to me before, but suddenly I understood that Mrs. Ackerman would not know who I was, or whether I was there to attempt to harm her, as someone else had clearly done shortly before.

Downstairs, I heard the front and back doors open at the same time. “Police!” came a cry from below.

“Mrs. Ackerman, I am Samuel Hoenig,” I told the woman under the bed. “Your husband sent me here to see if you were all right. I mean you no harm, and I have no weapon. Are you injured?”

She shook her head; no, she was not injured.

There were footsteps on the level beneath us. It would be best to let the officers know we were not hostiles. “We’re up here, officers!” I shouted. “No one is injured! No one is in the room with us. I can’t be sure about any other rooms except the mudroom and the kitchen!”

“On our way up,” I heard Officer Sikowski say. “Identify yourselves, please.”

“Samuel Hoenig,” I called. I gestured to Mrs. Ackerman that she should do the same. It seemed to distract her enough to compose herself.

“Eleanor Ackerman,” she tried to shout, but she was lying on her stomach under the bed and could not generate much volume.

“What?” Sikowski called.

“Mrs. Ackerman is coming out from under the bed,” I said. “She’s all right.”

Sikowski appeared at the door, weapon drawn but held with the barrel to the floor, as I helped Mrs. Ackerman out from under the bed. She coughed twice as Sikowski, making sure we hadn’t been coerced by an unseen assailant, searched the room. He turned on the overhead track lighting when he was finished.

Eleanor Ackerman was a woman in her mid-forties, perhaps forty-six, standing five-foot-five. I did not estimate her weight, but she was neither underweight nor seriously overweight. Her disheveled hair was a light brown, and probably had been at least highlighted, if not dyed, professionally. She struggled to catch her breath. She was, clearly, terrified.

“I saw … a gun,” she said finally, heaving between breaths.

“It’s Officer Sikowski,” I assured her. “You are in no danger.”

Sikowski’s partner appeared at the door, and Sikowski turned to him. “The house is clear,” the other officer said, and Sikowski nodded.

“Wait for backup and watch the entrances, especially the back,” he told the other officer, whose nametag I could now see read
Patel
.

Officer Patel exited, and we could hear his footsteps on the stairs. They were muffled by the carpet and faded as he got farther away. Sikowski turned toward us again.

“I saw a gun,” Eleanor repeated.

Sikowski’s eyes narrowed. “You mean my weapon?” he asked.

Eleanor shook her head. “No. I mean when I was under the bed. I saw a gun in a hand. Then I heard the shot into the bed. It went right by my head.” Of course, Eleanor would have hidden under the bed facing the door, so she could see the person invading her home when he or she entered the bedroom.

“Did you hear the intruder break in?” I asked. Sikowski frowned; he was not comfortable with someone other than a police officer asking the questions, but he had probably been alerted to my involvement in the case by his superiors, and so gave me leniency he likely would not have allowed another civilian.

“No,” Eleanor answered. “After the two officers came and woke me, I was so nervous that I took an Ambien to get back to sleep. So I didn’t hear anything until there were footsteps on the stairs. I didn’t even have time to reach for the phone; I just dove under the bed.”

“It probably saved your life,” Sikowski observed. I had been thinking the same thing, but thought the suggestion might frighten Eleanor further and make her a less useful witness.

She did not seem upset, however. “I saw the feet, in black sneakers, you know, not like sports shoes, but the rubberized ones that make your steps quiet. And I saw a gun in the person’s right hand.”

“Was the intruder male or female?” Sikowski asked.

“I don’t know. The lights were completely out, and I could just see shapes, and only from the waist down. If they were holding the gun up in the air, I wouldn’t have seen it.”

Perhaps there was another way to determine the gender of the intruder. “Were the shoes large or small?” I asked.

Eleanor narrowed her eyes in thought. “I really couldn’t tell. They were dark and they were moving. Maybe smallish. Maybe not. I don’t know.”

“But they were not overly large,” I pressed on.

Again, she thought. “No. I would have noticed if they were really big or really small.”

“We’ve called your husband,” Sikowski assured her. “He’s on his way here.”

Eleanor showed no outward emotion, but she said, “Good.”

Sikowski spent the next eleven minutes questioning Eleanor about what she had seen and heard, and finding out not much more than we had already heard, but I understood the technique—the more you get the subject to think about the moment, the more they are likely to remember. Then, he spent three minutes examining the bullet hole in the mattress and the trajectory it had taken.

By that time, Marshall Ackerman had arrived, and his wife had gone into her master bathroom to change into exercise clothing. Ackerman burst through the door with a dramatic flair and shouted her name.

She walked to him and Ackerman embraced her, but Eleanor’s arms did not rise to hold her husband close. She still appeared to be in a state of stunted emotion brought on by the shock she had experienced. Or she might have been a person with Asperger’s Syndrome, although that seemed unlikely. Men are far more likely to be diagnosed with an autism spectrum “disorder.” While it is estimated that one in every eighty-eight people has some such “disorder,” males are diagnosed four times more often than females. So Mrs. Ackerman was probably just upset.

After being given a detailed report on the evening’s events, and having voiced absolute despair at the account—particularly once he saw the bullet hole in the mattress—Ackerman suggested we go downstairs, “away from this horror,” and continue the interview in the living room.

A crime scene team was arriving at the same time, so we retreated to another room off the living room, which Eleanor identified as the library. This was confusing, since I saw no books on any shelves in the room. But I did not voice my puzzlement, since I assumed it related to my perception as a person with Asperger’s Syndrome. Officer Sikowski did not comment on it, and I made a mental note to ask Ms. Washburn when I saw her again. That led to me to ask Sikowski where she might be, and he replied that she had stayed outside to avoid any danger in the house.

As he asked Ackerman the same questions I had been asking all day—who might have a grudge against him or the institute, and why Eleanor might be a target—I excused myself and went outside the house to find Ms. Washburn. She was sitting in her car with the engine running and the heater turned on. The sky was just beginning to show signs of light in the east.

She made no gesture toward me, so I was not sure if I should sit in the passenger seat again, but that had been my assigned seat all day. I decided, then, that it would not be a breach of social protocol to open the unlocked passenger door and sit next to her in the car.

“I’m sorry,” Ms. Washburn said before I could begin a conversa
tion.

That was not what I had been expecting to hear. Ms. Washburn’s face was unreadable; she had no expression, and her voice did not betray an emotional state. I had no data to process about her at the moment. “Why are you sorry?” I asked.

“I didn’t come in to help you,” she said. “The cops told me to stay out here, and I did. I left you inside alone.”

“That is what I expected you to do,” I told her. “There was danger inside. The police were here to handle it. You had no reason to place yourself in harm’s way.”

She shook her head. “I did have a reason. You went in there yourself. You’re not a police officer; you did it because you wanted to help Mrs. Ackerman.”

“But the officers instructed you to stay outside,” I reminded her.

“And I never so much as suggested otherwise,” Ms. Washburn replied. A tear escaped her right eye, the one I could see, as she was staring straight out through the windshield. “I let you go in there and face the danger with no help at all because I was afraid.”

Her position was not a sensible one. She had done the right thing by remaining out of the line of fire. It had eased some of the burden on my concentration not to have her in the house while I was searching for Eleanor. But no matter how many times I suggested these points to Ms. Washburn, she would not accept their validity.

“You were going in there alone, and I let you do it,” she said. “I was afraid, and I let you down.”

I thought she might begin to cry, and that made me anxious. I do not know how to react to emotional outbursts like that, so I try to defuse them before they can occur, and thereby prevent them from becoming something that will make me uncomfortable. It is not a technique I was taught in social skills training, where I was encouraged to embrace projections of emotion. I had developed this strategy on my own, particularly on those occasions when my mother would become upset over my father’s absence or because I was a more difficult child to raise than most.

“You did nothing wrong,” I assured Ms. Washburn. “You did exactly what I would have advised had I been here. Please don’t cry.”

Her head turned quickly, indicating that she might have been surprised. “I’m not crying,” she said.

“I thought you might start.”

Ms. Washburn smiled wanly. “It’s late and I’m tired,” she said. “I wasn’t going to burst into tears. Don’t worry, Samuel.”

I was, of course, relieved to hear that. “In that case, would you please drive us back to the institute?”

She looked surprised. “We’re going back?” she asked. “We’re not done for the night?”

Done for the night? “The questions remain unanswered,” I reminded her. “The remains of Ms. Masters-Powell are still in jeopardy, and there has been no progress in the investigation of Dr. Springer’s murder. Until there is no longer any urgency in those matters, we must remain at work.”

Ms. Washburn nodded slowly and started the engine.

We did not speak for the nineteen minutes it took to drive from Ackerman’s home to the Garden State Cryonics Institute. Ms. Washburn appeared preoccupied, to the extent that I had to point out the proper entrance onto US Highway 1 when it was looming. She nodded and made the turn but continued to present the appearance of a person thinking about something else, a circumstance that makes me anxious when riding with someone.

Still, we arrived at GSCI safely and without incident. Once there, I got out of the car, but Ms. Washburn did not turn off its engine. I waited next to the vehicle for forty-seven seconds, but there was no indication that she intended to exit immediately. So I walked to the driver’s side, and when she saw me, Ms. Washburn lowered her window.

Before I could speak, she said, “I’m not going in, Samuel. I’m going home.”

“I do not understand.”

She nodded. “I know you don’t,” she said. “But this whole day—and night—has exhausted me and frightened me. I’m worried that I’m doing you more harm than good. And I think it’s best for both of us that I leave now.”

We had already gone through this conversation, so it occurred to me that there were unspoken issues and motivations at work in her decision. “I understand that your husband is upset with the kind of work we do, but—”

“Let’s not make this about my marriage, okay, Samuel?” Ms. Washburn asked. “I’m very serious about what I’m saying. If I will abandon you at the most crucial moments, it’s best that you find someone else, or go on by yourself. You were doing fine as a one-man operation until this morning. Just continue on as if I’d never been here.”

That was difficult to imagine. “But you have been here,” I said. I was about to add,
and you have been an invaluable associate
. I was about to add that she was in fact referring to
yesterday
morning, but Ms. Washburn spoke before I could continue.

“I know, but I want you to pretend I wasn’t. Just go ahead and do what you do so well. Answer the questions. I’ll come by your office tomorrow, and you can tell me how it went. But please, Samuel, don’t ask me to go back into that building and talk to those people anymore. I think someone there killed Dr. Springer and tried to kill Mrs. Ackerman. And I don’t want either one of us to be the next target.”

I felt it was best not to mention that I agreed with her assessment and was starting to form a theory as to which of the people we had met today was involved in the murder. Ms. Washburn was already agitated. Confirming that we were probably less than fifty yards from a killer would not calm her nerves.

The knowledge certainly did very little to calm mine.