Critical Mass (33 page)

“Yes, I’m V. I. Warshawski. Who are you?”

“Alison Breen. I was hoping to see you.” Her voice was even more doubtful: a detective who rolls under the boxwood when she’s startled must not seem very stable.

“I thought you were in Mexico, Ms. Breen, setting up a tech lab for local high schools.”

“I am, but—but—I wanted to see you, I need to talk to you.”

This was getting to be an annoying routine, strangers arriving late at night to talk to me. At least she was asking, instead of breaking into my apartment.

“Right. Let’s go inside where we can speak with a bit of privacy.” I unlocked the outer door and held out an arm, gesturing her to enter.

As we came into the entryway, Mr. Contreras was opening his door. Mitch and Peppy, barking and whining, ran out to greet me and to inspect the newcomer.

“They heard you talking out on the front walk, doll, and wouldn’t
give me no peace until I opened the door.” Mr. Contreras lied shamelessly. “This young lady was here earlier, looking for you. I tried to call you, but you wasn’t answering your phone.”

Seen under the foyer light, Alison was plainly a child of affluence. Her clear tanned skin, even white teeth, the glossy brown hair pulled away from her face and clipped to the top of her head with some kind of Mexican pin, but above all, the confidence with which she bent to pet the dogs, and to offer a hand to Mr. Contreras—all these added up to someone secure in her place near the front of the line.

“Alison Breen, Salvatore Contreras. Can we come into your place to talk?” I asked my neighbor. “I’m not sure whether Homeland Security is bugging my apartment.”

The old man’s eyes brightened: he’s pined for someone young and energetic—and female—since Petra joined the Peace Corps. “It ain’t much to look at,” he warned Alison, “but it’s clean enough and we’ll take good care of you, the dogs and Vic and me, so you come on in, rest yourself. You want tea or coffee or something? I have beer and grappa, too.”

“Stay away from the grappa,” I warned Alison. “Mr. Contreras makes it himself and it has been known to topple strong men.”

She smiled politely, but said water would be fine. She dropped her backpack on the floor and perched on the edge of the old man’s sagging armchair.

I sat on the couch, facing her. “Do your folks know you’re here?”

“I—no one knows I’m here. My plane got in at four; I’ve been waiting here off and on since five. Mr. Contreras came to the door when I rang; he said you were in town and should be back soon, so I’ve kept returning every hour or so.”

“I doubt very much you made your way out of Mexico City with no one the wiser. You’re not the invisible woman, you know, you’re an heiress; your father has someone in Mexico City reporting back to him on what you’re doing. And he told me he was going to get the FBI—”

“Someone on the tech lab staff is watching me?” she cried. “Oh, how—how horrible! How could he do that? When am I ever going to be able to do something on my own, without him breathing down my neck? I hoped—it’s Ramona, isn’t it? I wondered when I found her in my room, but she said she was looking for a candle—oh, how can I trust anyone when I don’t know whether they’re spying on me?”

I couldn’t summon even a perfunctory response. I leaned back in the couch. The springs shifted and one poked me in the butt. That might be the only reason I didn’t go to sleep on the spot.

“How come you’re here?” I said, keeping my eyes open with an effort. “How did you get my name?”

“From my dad,” Alison said. “First he called up with all this insane stuff about Martin. He asked was Martin with me, and I said, of course not, I hadn’t heard from him since the end of the summer. I said we’d all gotten this e-mail from Jari—all of us who were Breen fellows this summer, I mean—asking if we knew where Martin was, which was how I knew he’d disappeared. My dad didn’t believe me; he thought I was shielding Martin, which got us off totally on the wrong foot. And then he said you were looking for Martin, and I was to tell him at once if I heard from you.”

“And that made you leap on a plane for a six-hour flight without even knowing if I was in town.”

She flushed. “I saw the news about Martin’s grandmother. How someone killed her, I mean, and attacked his mom. I thought you would know if he showed up.”

Mr. Contreras came back with a glass of water. He’d arranged a plate with mixed nuts and apples cut into quarters. “You eat something, young lady. You’re worried and you’ve been on a plane all day. You’ll feel better with something inside you.”

Alison flashed a smile and a few exclamations of how kind he was, how beautiful the food looked. She’d spent her life with avuncular friends of her parents fussing over her; she knew how to respond.

“I’d better have a cup of coffee if you don’t mind rustling one up,” I said to my neighbor. “We probably have a long night in front of us.”

“Sure, doll, sure.” He bustled back to the kitchen.

“He’s very sweet,” Alison said.

“Solid gold, so don’t patronize him,” I said. “If you’re so worried about people reporting back to your dad, what makes you think I’m not working for him myself?”

“The way he talked about you,” she stammered. “This sounds rude, but he said you weren’t much of a detective, and that you’d be like a bull in a china shop because you didn’t know how to be subtle.”

“How clichéd,” I said, “although, really, he should have called me a cow in a china shop.”

Alison blinked at me, puzzled.

“Just because I don’t know how to be subtle doesn’t make me masculine,” I explained. “Moving on, why did the fact that your father thinks I’m useless make you believe you could trust me?”

Her lips quivered. “Please don’t make fun of me. I told you I knew it was rude, but I did look you up, I saw you’d solved some big cases. I saw you were willing to go head to head with the police or FBI or people like my dad if you needed to protect a client, and I didn’t know what else to do or who I could turn to.”

I sat up again, my back sore from the broken springs. “You’re right, Ms. Breen: I shouldn’t poke fun. I’ve had a long day and a hideous week trying to find out what Martin is up to, so I’m not at my empathic best. Tell me what happened after your dad called to accuse you of shielding Martin.”

Mr. Contreras arrived with coffee and milk, for me, a glass of grappa for himself. Through some mysterious dog mathematics, Mitch and Peppy distributed themselves so that both were equidistant from all three of us. I gave the old man a quick précis of what Alison had told me so far.

“Someone from the FBI came to my computer lab looking for
Martin,” Alison said. “Dad hadn’t warned me that he’d called them in, and when an agent of the U.S. government showed up, he got everyone at the lab totally terrified. Mexico kind of looks the other way if the FBI or DEA want to interrogate someone. But when I called my dad, to tell him he’d destroyed the trust the program people had in me, he started yelling at me about national security. He said Martin stole our software, Metargon’s software, I mean, and that the FBI is going to find him and I’d better stop being a bleeding heart if I’m ever going to be able to run the company.”

She picked at her cuticles, looking very young and vulnerable. “I couldn’t talk him out of it. I couldn’t make him see that Martin isn’t like that.”

“What is Martin like?” I asked. “I’ve never met him, and I can’t seem to talk to anyone who understands him as a person, except his high school physics instructor.”

“He’s a cactus,” Alison said. “Hard and prickly on the outside, sweet as honey on the inside.”

“Were you dating?” I asked. “Is that why you invited him to the barbecue at your folks’ place, even though he wasn’t in the summer program?”

She made an impatient gesture. “We slept together twice, but Martin backed away because I wouldn’t tell my parents. Martin said it was because I was ashamed of him, but it wasn’t that, it’s because my dad would have fired him on the spot. Martin belongs at Metargon in a way I never will. I’m a good computer engineer, but Martin, he’s special, he sees things in three-D that the rest of us only see linearly.”

“Kind of a hard secret to keep,” I said. “You sleeping together.”

“I see that now,” she said bitterly. “Someone who wanted to suck up to Dad gave him a hint. I hope it wasn’t Jari, he’s a good guy, but everyone at Metargon is so competitive, they’re always pushing each other out of the way even if they’re all on a project together! It could
have been one of the other kids in the summer program. This one girl from MIT, she had a thing for Martin.

“Anyway, someone told Dad, and he said he didn’t want some overambitious school dropout taking advantage of me. Which was also unfair. Martin wasn’t a dropout, he just didn’t go to college. He’s taking courses part-time at Illinois-Circle, but really, he’s so brainy—do you know he got a perfect score on his math SAT and the top score on the physics C exam?”

“People keep telling me that,” I said. “His high school physics teacher tried to get him to apply to Caltech or MIT when she saw his scores, but his family were set against college for him.”

“Well, there you have it. He has a chip on his shoulder about my family being so rich, and me being at Harvard, but once you knocked off the chip, he was such a sweetheart. Do you know what he did for my birthday? He remembered I told him when I was little I used to beg my dog to talk to me: I was lonely, my dog was my best friend. For my birthday he found this toy dog that looked just like Lulu, and he programmed a chip that he put into her where she sings happy birthday, and says, ‘Alison, you’re my best friend, no one comes closer to my heart than you.’ He even got her tail to wag. He’s pretty amazing.”

Fatigue and unshed tears turned her honey-colored eyes red. Mr. Contreras nodded approvingly. He thinks
Romeo and Juliet
is a great story except that Shakespeare got it wrong at the end; if he, Mr. Contreras, had been there, he would have stayed in the tomb with Juliet so that Romeo knew she was just sleeping. That monk was a fool, in his opinion. “You don’t leave a girl in a drugged sleep and expect some high-strung boy like Romeo won’t overreact,” is his verdict on the Bard.

“You tell Vic here what you need her to do and she’ll take care of it for you,” he told Alison. “You did the right thing, flying all this way.”

I grinned wryly at the tribute. “Sure thing. I can handle the FBI
with one hand behind my back, which is good, because Homeland Security is already tying it there.”

“Oh. I wasn’t really paying attention when you said they could be bugging your apartment. Why are they—is it because of my dad? Is it because of Martin?”

“It’s because of some papers I found in the house downstate where Martin’s mother had been living. I only found a few documents—I think there were others which Martin took. The ones I found were stolen from me before I could get them to a lab for analysis. Homeland Security doesn’t believe me. They think Martin and his mother had a file of nuclear secrets that I’m hiding. Do you know anything about this?”

“Be reasonable, cookie,” Mr. Contreras said. “How could she, when she don’t even know what you found.”

“It’s possible Martin confided in Ms. Breen,” I said. “He was a lonely guy; he had to talk to someone.”

Alison shook her head. “He never claimed he knew anything about weapons. And he didn’t talk to me about his mom, not like that, anyway.”

“But when he went to that party at your folks’ house, Martin saw something that rattled him. What?”

Alison’s face scrunched up in misery. “I don’t know. He was always pretty quiet, and even quieter when the rest of the group was around. All I can tell you is it’s something he saw when I took the group up to my granddad’s workshop.”

“What, your grandfather designed his computers in your house?”

“Granddad always had a workshop at home, even when he got to be famous. All the kids wanted to see it. They probably thought if they saw where Granddad came up with his brilliant ideas, some of his brains and his luck would rub off on them if they looked at the workshop. It’s on the third floor of our Lake Forest house. Even though he designed the core for Metargon-I in his first workshop, behind the
garage in his Hyde Park house, all his scale models and papers and stuff are in Lake Forest.”

I nodded. “So everyone went up there. Who suggested it first?”

“I honestly don’t think it was Martin,” she said defensively. “Not because I’m shielding him, like Dad says, but because, oh, the chip on his shoulder. He wasn’t going to admit he cared about something a rich and powerful man did. Anyway, everyone was playing with the scale-models, and admiring the letters—Granddad had framed letters from all these incredible people, Nobel laureates, President Eisenhower, you knew he’d done something special, just seeing who wrote him.”

“And one of those letters or papers or something upset Martin. Think! What was he looking at?” I demanded.

“I told you, I don’t know!” she cried. “Tad, that’s one of the guys in the summer group, he didn’t like Martin because Martin rewrote some of his code without consulting him. Anyway, he was standing next to me. Actually, he had an arm around me.”

Tears spilled over the edges of her eyes. “Martin came over to me. He said, ‘Something doesn’t add up. How much do you know about your grandfather’s work?’ I asked him what he meant, but Tad made this snide comment about how the human calculator was always right, and that if Martin said the Metargon-I didn’t add up it must have been an illusion that it worked so well all those years.”

She fished in her backpack for a tissue, but Mr. Contreras was ready with a napkin, dabbing her cheeks for her.

Alison thanked him with a watery smile. “So then Martin took off. I ran after him, but he said, ‘I need to think this through. I hope you haven’t been making a fool out of me.’

“I said, ‘What, you mean with Tad?’ and he said, ‘With Tad or any other way.’

“That was the last I heard from him. I tried calling him later and he didn’t answer, he wouldn’t answer my texts or my e-mails, so I wrote a pretty nasty message.”

“Oh?” I prompted.

“‘To hell with you, mister, my dad was right, you are just a blue-collar boy with a chip on your shoulder.’” She mumbled the words so quickly I barely made them out.