Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (20 page)

Had Tommy waited another ten minutes in the lobby of the Peter Keeler Inn, he would have run into Quinn McKellen, who came down to wait for Dani. Quinn was in a hurry, running late as usual, but when he searched the lobby and then the parking lot, he discovered that this time Dani was the one who was late.

She’d been getting ready to go when she saw a long black Lincoln town
car with tinted windows rolling down the driveway toward her house. She watched as a man in a black coat got out of the front passenger seat, while the man behind the wheel stayed put. The man in the black coat opened the rear door and stood aside as an older gentleman in a camel cashmere coat got out of the backseat and looked up at the house. Judging from the body language, it appeared that he told the man holding the door to stay with the car, and the man in the black suit was arguing with him. The older man glanced at a piece of paper in his hand and then approached the house.

Dani opened the door to meet him.

“Dr. Danielle Harris?” he said.

“Yes?”

He smiled warmly.

“I’m Ed Stanley. Your Grandpa Howard’s friend. You left a message on my answering machine. Do you mind if I come in?”

Inside, he declined her offer of coffee but accepted her invitation to take his coat off and join her in the living room. He was shorter than she’d imagined, slightly stooped over, with a soft voice and a gentle bearing. He was wearing dark khaki pants and a corduroy jacket over a plaid shirt, but Dani could tell these casual clothes were nevertheless well tailored and expensive. Stanley, who’d worked in Moscow for the State Department for over twenty years, had been enormously helpful when she’d had questions about the Moscow orphanage Amos Kasden had lived in before coming to the United States.

He went straight to a family portrait on the table by the window, a picture of Dani; her sister, Beth; their parents; Grandfather Howard, who was still alive and living in Montana; and Grandmother Ellen, who had passed.

“How’s my grandpa?” Dani said.

“He’s well,” Stanley said as he sat down on her couch. “He’s got a porcupine that’s been eating holes in his shed, but other than that, he’s good.”

“When I called you, I thought you were still in Montana,” she said. “I didn’t expect a visit.”

“Well, I was in Montana,” he said, “but I flew out this morning. Or actually last night, because I had to go regional to catch the redeye from Seattle.”

Dani drew a sharp breath. Why had he made such a long trip so suddenly?

“Are you staying?” she said, hoping the Keeler Inn wasn’t booked up.

“No, no,” he said. “But I had to talk to you. In person.”

He began by qualifying that the story he was about to tell her had to remain confidential. It was something he hadn’t even told her grandfather. He told Dani that he hadn’t really worked for the State Department— he’d been a career CIA officer, rising to the level of station chief before retiring.

“When I heard you mention the name Peter Guryakin,” Stanley said, “I knew I had to come as soon as I could. What do you know about him?”

“Very little, really,” Dani said. “I met him at an art opening the other night at St. Adrian’s Academy.”

“He was
here
?” Stanley said, poking the coffee table with his finger. “In this country?”

“Yes. He told me he was in marketing.”

“But your message said you’d heard he’d worked in a weapons program for the KGB,” Stanley said. “May I ask where you heard that?”

“From a friend,” Dani said, reluctant to say more. “Someone who had a job offer from Linz Pharmazeutika. Guryakin works for them, apparently.” She wondered if Ed Stanley already had Quinn’s name and decided he probably did.

“I’m a friend too, Dani,” Stanley said. “That’s why I’ve come. I needed to tell you in person that Dr. Peter Guryakin is not the sort of person you should be dealing with. He’s a
very
dangerous individual. If we’d known he was in this country, we might have . . . wanted to talk to him.”

“So he did work for the KGB?”

Ed Stanley nodded. “We’ve been watching him for some time. Until he
dropped off the map. No one knew why. One theory was that he’d been the victim of a lab accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“He was developing nerve agents. Not the organic kind, which they were also stockpiling, like weaponized smallpox or ricin or anthrax, but synthetics that targeted the central nervous system. I can’t be any more specific than that, except to say we believe his research met with some success. He dropped out of view a few years ago, but when I got your voice message . . . You think he’s gone home?”

“I don’t know,” Dani said. “He didn’t act like he was hiding.”

“He may not know we’re aware of him,” Stanley said. “We have reason to believe he could be acting as a kind of biochemical arms dealer. I understand that you may not know why he was at the—what was it? An art exhibit?”

“At St. Adrian’s Academy. It’s a private boys’ school. I was wondering if he might have been connected to the death of a woman in a nursing home who died the night of the exhibition.”

“How did she die?” Stanley said.

“Nobody’s sure.” She was reluctant to tell him what she knew, afraid that he wouldn’t believe her or would think she was delusional.

Stanley leaned forward and lowered his voice to let her know he did not mean to sound aggressive, but he was serious all the same. “Dani, I’ve interrogated a lot of people in my life, and I have a pretty good sense of when somebody isn’t telling me everything.”

She blushed and looked into his eyes for a long moment, gathering herself. “You’re right,” she said. “The medical examiner has the body, and—”

Before she could say more, Otto lumbered into the room. He paused for a second and then walked straight to the old man and laid his head in his lap. Ed Stanley scratched him behind the ears.

“That’s Otto.”

“He’s beautiful. How long have you had him?”

“Not too long,” she said. She changed her mind—if Stanley knew about Quinn, he would probably have known Quinn owned a bloodhound. “I’m keeping him for a friend. Do you know what kind of nerve agents this man was working on?”

“I really can’t say anything more,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

She could tell from his reaction that he knew, but she said, “I understand.”

“The old woman,” he said. “It wasn’t natural causes?”

“No. You can talk to the ME if you’d like.”

“I may,” he said, standing up. “I feel like I owe it to your grandfather to look after you. He’s a dear friend and a fine fishing companion, by the way. Be careful.” He handed her a card with a number on it. “If you spot Guryakin, or find
anything
, call this number. And don’t—well, don’t eat or drink anything you didn’t prepare yourself. Or open any envelopes from an address you don’t recognize.”

“Okay,” she said. She tried not to show how nervous his words were making her.

He picked up his coat. “Dani, you may be chasing questions here you don’t want to know the answers to.” He offered his hand to shake hers, but then impulsively, awkwardly, gave her a hug. “Be careful. I’ve got business in Washington. I’m not quite as retired as I may have led you to believe. I’ll be in touch.”

There was a time when Dani would have said she couldn’t imagine a question she didn’t wish to know the answer to, but that was no longer true.

Tommy pulled his Jeep into his garage and was crossing the cobblestone courtyard when he heard Carl’s motorcycle coming up the drive. He smiled and waved, then opened a text from Dani.

NEED TO TALK. ED STANLEY HERE THIS A.M. GURYAKIN INVLVD SOVIET
NERVE AGENT PROGRAM, POSS A CHEM ARMS DEALR. WILL CALL WHEN I CAN
.

He showed the message to Carl.

“Interesting,” Carl said, removing his helmet.

“You look terrible,” Tommy said.

Carl’s eyes were red and his face appeared to have lost color.

“Rough night. Didn’t sleep very well. How was your night?”

“I figured out another clue. We were right. Abbie was trying very hard to tell us something.
Don’t look back
meant
Look forward
. To the future. Which could mean just about anything, I suppose.”

“Let’s go inside,” Carl said. “You can fill me in.”

17.

“So this is where you put the bamboo splinters under their fingernails to pry the truth out of them,” Quinn said.

The only free room Dani could find at the DA’s office with a computer was Interview 2 in the basement, a windowless cubicle with acoustic tiles on the ceiling and the walls, a desk, and three chairs. The interrogator’s chair had wheels, which allowed him to roll forward or back to open or close the distance between himself and the person being interrogated, depending on how much pressure or space he felt was appropriate. The monitor was generally left off because it gave suspects a welcome distraction, but sometimes it was used to show them pictures or videos.

“We don’t need to put bamboo splinters under their fingernails,” Dani said, typing in her password to log into the system. “Mostly we just bore them until they can’t take it anymore and confess.” She looked at him. “You think I’m kidding.”

He held up his hands in surrender. “I wouldn’t last ten seconds. Do you do interrogations?”

“Rarely. I mostly observe,” she said, pointing to a video camera mounted at the ceiling in the corner of the room. “For most people, lying generates enormous stress loads. Generally the interrogator leaves the room after an hour or so, sometimes just for ten or fifteen minutes, so that
we can watch how the suspect responds to the relief of that pressure. I’ve seen people so exhausted from lying that they fall asleep in here.”

“You don’t use lie detectors?”

“Occasionally,” she said. “When the suspects don’t give themselves away. You do it in three parts. First you’re just friendly and nonjudgmental. You say, ‘Tell me what happened, in your own words.’ The second time, you get them to repeat the story point for point, almost like you forgot what they said the first time or you want to get it straight. Then you compare the two versions, and in the third interview you challenge them and say, ‘The first time you said the car was blue, but the second time you said the car was white.’ People who tell the truth tell the same story twice. The truth doesn’t change. People who lie can’t remember what they said the first time they lied. Or they start adding details they think will make the lie more believable.”

“And then they crack!”

“Usually,” Dani said. “You have to know where to apply the pressure. It’s the ones who believe their own lies or who feel nothing that are the scary ones. Which brings us to this guy, Amos Kasden.”

She brought up the photograph of the murderer. He was fair-haired and had a fair complexion, a long neck, a prominent Adam’s apple, thin lips, an aquiline nose bending slightly to the left, and blank blue eyes. She told Quinn what she knew of Amos’s childhood, the abuse at the hands of his alcoholic father, and how Amos had ruthlessly dealt with it. She’d diagnosed him as having a severe dissociative identity disorder, a boy who did not feel real. He could do brutal things to Julie Leonard because he didn’t think she was real either. Dani didn’t mention any of the supernatural elements that had led her to the conclusion she knew Quinn would never accept. She had pictures of the body taken at the crime scene, and she had Julie’s autopsy report, if he wanted to see it, but he didn’t.

“Well then, let’s get to the good part,” he said. “That’s why I’m here, right?”

She opened the file containing the proteomic workup Banerjee had ordered. Quinn studied it all quickly.

“No neuroimaging to go with this, I wouldn’t suppose?” he asked as he read.

“We have an MRI.”

“Oh goody,” Quinn said, reading from the report. “
Microtiter plate format
, good, like that.
Antiserum binding sites
. . . blah, blah, blah . . .
peroxidase conjugates
, excellent . . . so on and so forth. . . So we have just two tissue samples, one from the cerebellum and one from the forebrain?”

“This is it,” Dani said.

He read a moment. “And you say there was no cytomas?”

“No tumors,” Dani said.