Foundation (3 page)

They set foot in a neat, silent world that didn’t belong to them. They lowered their voices in respect for the dead, then went on exploring the bunker.

“I thought I was off,” commented Trumaine, acrid.

“I know, I know. You’ll get back to what’s left of your vacation as soon as this thing is over,” said Firrell.

“What about your other guys?”

“Ah, cut me slack, Chris, will you? Guys are fine and all, but sometimes they just don’t get it,” he admitted.

“I’m flattered that you always think of me, Grant. You might as well ask me out for a date,” grumbled Trumaine, sourly.

Firrell rolled his eyes. He better change the subject.

“How’s Shanna doing?” he asked.

“I haven’t heard from her.”

“You promised you would call her,” reminded him Firrell.

“I haven’t, that’s all. Should I feel sorry? Because I don’t,” replied Trumaine with a glower.

“All right, all right. Forget it. Let’s just focus on this mess, huh?”

Even if the bunker had an unusual circular layout, it was just another unpretending apartment, a neat and tidy place for people who had very little needs.

A corridor went from the plate shutter straight into the round living room at the center of the apartment. The few other rooms fanned out like the eyes on a peacock’s tail: a small kitchen, a master bedroom, a bathroom and a small studio. Arranging the furniture must have been a major issue, thought Trumaine, since the only two straight walls in each room converged toward the center of the apartment. However, the owners had succeeded with little effort and a good result.

“The bunker sits twenty feet under the ocean,” Firrell went on. “Walls are two-foot-thick, salt-resistant, reinforced concrete.” He stopped and knocked at a thick partition wall, producing a dull sound. “Would you believe it? As if the concrete walls weren’t protection enough, the nutters had them lined with lead. My great-grandfather had something like this, when everybody was scared shitless of nuclear wars. But nowadays? What could a man worry about?”

“What about privacy?” tutted Trumaine.

“Well, ain’t that true,” grunted Firrell.

He pointed his thick thumb at the various rooms as they passed them. “You can see for yourself the bunker is designed to look like a real house. There’s a kitchen, a pantry, a bathroom, a master bedroom ... and the living room, of course.”

They entered the first room to the right. In the kitchen, the table, the chairs, all it contained was aligned and carefully laid out in a preordained position. Trumaine opened the kitchen countertop drawer. The cutlery was piled up neatly with the same manic precision.

After dinner, the Jarvas didn’t just put their chairs under the table, the dishes in the cupboard and the silverware in the drawer where it belonged, as everybody did. They would pigeonhole every single object in some abstract region of their mind labeled “kitchen.”

Under that master label, more labels would be found, reading “table centerpiece,” “tablecloth,” “napkins,” “coasters,” “fruit tray” and so on, to which precise spatial coordinates were assigned. If the Jarvas had lived in another house, they would lay all those objects in the very same spatial relationship they had here. Certain people were born that way, thought Trumaine. Their mind was as powerful, as inquisitive and as helplessly pedantic as the central processing unit of a mainframe computer. He couldn’t tell if it was a gift, or a curse. It certainly was the mark of genius.

“They’re over there,” said Firrell with a tragic sigh.

Samuel Diggs was already at work. He was a large man with a wide, peaceful face and small eyes. His body might have looked slow, but his fingers certainly weren’t. Despite being the size of sausages, they shifted around the bodies with a veteran typist’s speed: prodding, pinching, pulling, stirring and feeling.

They reached out for an infrared thermometer and aimed it at the various sections of the bodies, patiently waiting for the tool to adjust. When it gave its response, the fingers jotted it down in an electronic pad at their side.

Diggs rubbed his brow, then glanced up at Trumaine and Firrell, who had just entered.

“There. Ain’t it a nice, pretty way to snuff it?” said Firrell, motioning at the two bodies sprawled on the floor in front of him.

“Tru? I thought you were off,” commented Diggs.

“Yeah, me too,” said Trumaine flatly. He looked down at the dead couple and asked, “When did it happen?”

“A good guess? Between twelve and twenty hours ago,” said Diggs, after the bushes that were his brows had consulted with each other.

“Who discovered the bodies?”

“The milkman,” said Firrell. “Nobody had picked up his last delivery. The vault was sealed when we arrived. The security technician tried an old passkey with the lock, but it didn’t work. It took the sappers two hours to break through the concrete wall.”

Trumaine sighed, then glanced around him. He picked up a bronze plaque lying on a low table. It read:

TO AARMO R. JARVA, IN RECOGNITION OF THE 2075 NOBEL PRIZE IN NEUROBIOLOGY PHYSICS FOR THE DISCOVERY OF THE HUMAN THALAMIC PISTOCENTRIC STEM CELL
.

“He’s
that
Jarva?” he wondered.

“Yep, he himself. The one and only,” said Firrell. “Jarva the scientist and the pioneer. The eminent scholar of the mind and the father of the modern-age space travel theory. Without him, we would still be mining the Moon for
Helium-3
. And that over there is—I mean was—his devoted wife.”

Trumaine could understand now why Firrell was on tenterhooks when he had called him, pleading him to come over. He had read something about Jarva, of course, but it was that kind of information that was passed along with the news. How on earth would someone kill such a man? Jarva was no ordinary man, he was an asset to mankind, a genius and a resource.

Trumaine shook his head, unable to understand.

“Any relatives?” he asked.

“No relatives,” said Firrell. “As far as we know, the closest person to being related to them is ... well, the milkman.”

“The milkman,” groaned Trumaine.

“According to him, they were a very shy couple,” said Firrell. “They weren’t disagreeable or anything. They just liked it that way. The milkman had been instructed to leave the cartons on the outside at exactly 7:00 in the morning. Every day, except on Sunday. He wasn’t even supposed to ring the doorbell. Jarva’s wife was going to pick up the milk later on. He told me he saw the husband only once, after a sandstorm had swept the bungalows and the bunker, completely burying their entryway. They looked so helpless he felt obliged to give them a hand and he shoveled the sand for them. At least, that’s what the milkman claims. Now the facts: the milkman made his last delivery on Saturday. It was a double carton for Sunday. This morning, when he made the usual round, he noticed that the cartons hadn’t been touched. He thought that even an old couple of solitary owls like the Jarvas would happen to be sick, from time to time. Maybe they needed help, so he rang the door. He rang and rang, but nobody opened it. Fearing the worst, he turned to us at last.”

“It looks plain enough to me,” said Trumaine. “The murderer only needed to wait for Jarva’s wife to open the door for the milk. He might have forced the woman inside and threatened to hurt or kill her if she didn’t open the door to the bunker’s keep. But she could have left the plate door open, coming out. Something like that wouldn’t take much thinking—even a bum could do it. Old, shy couples tend to manage their own money. Maybe he thought they kept their savings in here too. Say he didn’t want to hurt them, but they resisted him, things got out of hand and he killed them.” Trumaine shrugged, that was it for him.

“I wish it was that simple, Tru.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just interviewed the guy who sold the Jarvas the security installation. The lock of the plate door is connected to a separate central security system. If someone opens the plate shutter as little as a crack, a feedback is relayed to the central station and logged in their computers.” Firrell sighed. “Nobody has opened that door in ninety-six hours ...”

“But that’s impossible,” scoffed Trumaine.

“That’s exactly what I said in the first place,” said Firrell. “But the technician is positive. The bunker was shut when Jarva and his wife were being killed.”

“The murderer must’ve tinkered with the timer,” countered Trumaine.

“I thought that too. Guess what? The computer says no tampering ever occurred.”

“C’mon, Grant. Nobody can walk through a two-foot-thick concrete wall,” said Trumaine.

“Well. Apparently, someone did ...”

Trumaine groaned, when his attention was drawn to a round piece of furniture that had just moved. It was the back of a man kneeling on the floor, intent on searching for something. He stood and straightened out, revealing his features.

Edward Boyle was thin and way too short, but he had large eyes and a long crooked nose that made up for that.

He had been bent over and busy swinging around his portable scanner, looking for fingerprints, ever since they had entered the room, that’s why Trumaine hadn’t seen him.

“What did they use for a weapon?” Trumaine asked him.

Boyle didn’t say anything. He stepped over to a set of black, open cases laying against the far wall. He took out a plastic sleeve containing something dark and heavy. He brought it forth for Trumaine to take.

Inside the envelope was the most peculiar object he had ever seen. It was a bloodied cast-iron Pinocchio toy doll, about one-half foot tall, painted in vivid colors—crimson red, green, pale wood and black. It sneered evilly from below its conical hat.

“They used this?”

“A most unusual weapon, isn’t it?” said Boyle with a soft hiss. “It was on the floor, next to the bodies. It’s some very solid, very old doll from the last century that would do well in a museum. It isn’t anything like the biomaterials today’s toys are made of. It’s metal. It’s one damn heavy fellow.”

Boyle retrieved the toy from Trumaine’s hands. He coiled his fingers around the legs of the doll and swung it around. The body and the long, sharp nose made for a terribly effective spiked-club.

“He caught the woman on the side of her head. She must have died almost instantly,” explained Boyle. “She fell on the wound, that’s why there’s little blood, her clothes sucked it up. The husband now: he was hit five times in the stomach and one in the head, but that didn’t kill him. The old man was tough, or maybe the killer was getting tired. Anyway, he left Jarva on the shag rug, where he bled to death.”

“The killer got tired?” asked Trumaine.

“I swung this thing around for a couple of minutes,” said Boyle. “When I finished, I was out of breath. Oh, that nose goes into the flesh easily enough, that’s true. But it’s a nasty thing to take out, it gets caught into things—the bone, the flesh and even into the clothes. You have to rip through all of that to pull it out, before you can hit again. It takes a lot of effort, Trumaine. Add however weak opposition from the victims and you’ll have a good idea of why the killer tired,” concluded Boyle.

“Why should they use that?” asked Trumaine. “There’s plenty of knives in the kitchen, I think I even saw a cleaver. It’s odd. What’s the point of using something this cumbersome?”

“You tell me, Detective.” Boyle handed over the doll to Trumaine, picked up his scanner and went back to his work.

Trumaine studied the toy in his hands. There was something puzzling about it. Its jester sneer, its brilliant colors, its old-fashioned appearance, everything clashed with the delicate, blue shaded interior of the room, as if the toy didn’t belong in here.

Trumaine glanced around, trying to find a place for the doll, but he couldn’t find any. The toy might as well as have fallen out of thin air.

“Did you find anything else?” asked Trumaine.

“Place is as clean as a whistle,” said Boyle.

“Any traces of foreign DNA? Anything at all?” insisted Trumaine.

Boyle flicked at his nose. “Only theirs.”

Trumaine kneeled next to Aarmo’s corpse. He inspected it, hoping to find even the smallest clue that would lead him closer to discovering anything about the murderer, but he found nothing.

A few paces away, Diggs typed away his medical deductions in his electronic pad. He was denied access with a buzz. He shook his head in disappointment, then tried again. He got another buzz.

“Damn!”

“What is it?” asked Trumaine.

“I’m issuing the death certificate for the woman,” explained Diggs. “Computer says she died five years ago.”

“How on earth could that be?”

“Clearly, it’s a mistaken entry,” said Diggs. “Sometimes, it happens. The entries are numerical; you punch in a wrong number and you wipe from the system someone who’s still kicking. I’m amazed she hadn’t a problem with the social security in five years, though. I’ll have to login to the mainframe, find the faulty entry and delete it. What bothers me more is that I can’t do it from here, I’ll have to go to the mainframe proper personally. I can say good-bye to lunch, damn computers.”

Trumaine groaned. This case was enough of a mess even without system tantrums.