Moving Target (19 page)

“Nothing,” Ali said. “B. and Stuart Ramey probably do.”

“That’s why I’m calling. Andrew seems to think that Lance’s invention, whatever it is, might be really valuable in the right hands. Mr. Jackson, the guy helping with the project, supposedly committed suicide, and now someone tried to murder Lance. That got me to thinking,” Sister Anselm continued. “I’d like someone from High Noon to look into Everett Jackson’s alleged suicide.”

“Since you used the word ‘supposedly,’ I take it you don’t believe Jackson took his own life?”

“I’d like to know for sure if he did or didn’t. The people who frequent this dark Web sound rather dodgy to me—drug dealers and such. For all I know, my patient is as bad as they are, but if the dark Web is at the bottom of all this, maybe whoever targeted Lance targeted the teacher as well.”

“Targeted him and got away with it,” Ali said. “I’ll be glad to check into this, but I can’t right now. I’m on the road. The Internet on this side of the pond is currently having a major malfunction, so it may take
longer for me to reach either Stuart or B. As soon as I do or as soon as I find out anything, I’ll get back to you.” By then Ali was past Winchester and on the A34.

“Good enough,” Sister Anselm said. “I need to go now. Travel safe.”

Ali spent the rest of the trip mulling over everything Sister Anselm had told her. Ali herself had no idea what the dark Web was, but she had an idea that it was something with which both B. Simpson and Stuart Ramey would be well acquainted.

She made good time. An hour and forty minutes after leaving Bournemouth she arrived in Littlemore and located the Oxford Science Park and the parking lot for the Danby Building. The word “Oxford” had evoked images in Ali’s mind of gown-clad dons striding through a campus made up of ancient stone buildings. The buildings of the science park, however, looked more like modern multistory office structures, complete with walls that were more glass than anything else. The contemporary buildings plunked down in the middle of the English countryside made it all more than slightly jarring. Leaving the car downstairs, Ali took the lift up to the main lobby, where a directory sent her to Banshee Group’s space on the fourth floor. The firm’s light and airy reception area was dominated by large pieces of brightly colored modern art. Other than the presence of a staffed reception desk, the place might have been an art gallery, with a reception desk. Nowhere was there any clue about Banshee’s darker reality, the task of identifying war dead from atrocities all over the globe.

The young blond woman seated at the desk greeted Ali with a warm smile. “Ms. Benchley is expecting you, Ms. Reynolds. She’s just through there.” She gestured toward a door that led to an inner office.

Once inside Ali found herself facing a huge desk made of some exotic hardwood. Behind it sat a small green-eyed woman with a huge halo of wiry bright red hair. When Kate Benchley stood up, Ali realized that her hostess probably didn’t clear five feet. “Ms. Reynolds, I presume?” Kate said, holding out her hand.

Ali nodded.

“Welcome to our little corner of hell.” She gestured behind her. Through a floor-to-ceiling double-paned glass barrier Ali saw a well-lit laboratory space filled with banks of expensive-looking equipment, each with its own computer terminal. Six or seven white-coated technicians, all women and all wearing protective caps and latex gloves, bustled around the room.

“I’m sure Marjorie told you what we do here,” Kate resumed. “Unfortunately, no matter what the politicians promise, say, or do, we always have a ready supply of bodies in need of identification.”

“You bring them here?” Ali asked.

“No,” Kate answered. “We have a whole group of people who spend most of their time on the road, flying from one war zone’s mass grave sites to another—war zones in parts of the world most of us have never heard of. They go to the graves, collect tissue samples from the remains and from any possible relatives. They then see to it that the remains are stored in an organized fashion so they can be retrieved for reburial once an identification is made. After that the samples from the victims and the survivors are sent here for processing.”

“That’s what the lab is for?” Ali asked.

Kate nodded. “First we try to create a profile. If that’s possible, we hope to get a match. What breaks my heart is when we get a whole collection of samples, ones from a pile of bodies that contain both adults and children. It’s clear that they all match each other, but we’re unable to connect them to any other survivor. It means that a whole family has been wiped off the face of the earth.” She paused but only briefly. “Now tell me, would you care for some tea, or would you rather have coffee instead?”

“Coffee, please,” Ali said, taking a seat in one of two black leather guest chairs. “Black.”

There was a door to the right of the massive desk. Kate disappeared through that into what sounded like a galley kitchen. She emerged a few moments later, carrying two dainty bone-china cups and saucers. “When my uncle was alive, that was used more as a bar than a kitchen,”
she said. “He had a seemingly endless supply of Scotch in there. I’m more of a gin-and-tonic girl myself, but not until much later in the day. So tell me about your cold case. It must be something if Madge is willing to lift evidence from an evidence room and hand it over. You must have made quite an impression on her.”

“I think what she did has more to do with being annoyed with her coworkers than it was with being impressed by me.” Ali set her cup on the desk and retrieved two items from her purse—Margaret Elkins’s envelope and the cup she had lifted from the hotel dining room. “This is from the evidence locker,” she said, pushing the envelope across the desk. “And the cup contains what I hope will turn out to be comparison DNA. The murder victim, Jonah Brooks, died in the fifties. The victim’s vehicle was stolen. Investigators assumed it was a robbery gone bad, and the car thief was never found. Investigators stopped working the case years ago.”

Kate slit open the envelope and lifted out two see-through envelopes, each containing a small swatch of white material covered with brown stains. “What you’re seeing are pieces of material cut from the victim’s shirt, both the collar and the cuffs,” Ali explained. “The blood may belong solely to the victim, but since there were defensive wounds on the victim’s body, we’re hoping some of the killer’s might be there, too.”

“Are you thinking that whoever stole the car may have gone on to be a career criminal and that his DNA will be found in the criminal database?”

“No,” Ali said. I suspect that car theft had nothing to do with it and that the killer was a lot closer to Mr. Brooks than anyone ever suspected.”

“Do you have someone in particular in mind?”

“The victim had three sons,” Ali explained. “Langston, Lawrence, and my friend Leland, who moved to the States shortly before his father’s death. He was out of the country and was never considered a suspect.”

“I take it the other two brothers were investigated and ruled out?”

“They may have been investigated,” Ali said, “but it sounds to me as though everyone accepted the robbery story at face value and let it go at that. I think it’s possible that either one or both brothers were involved.”

Kate slipped the evidence bags back into the envelope. “Where are the other brothers now?” she asked.

“Both of them are deceased.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“The third brother, Leland, is back in the UK for the first time in sixty years. He wants to get to the bottom of this. That cup is the one he used last night at dinner.”

“You and the third brother do realize that our findings won’t be admissible in a court of law?”

“We do.”

“What about the two who are deceased?” Kate asked. “Do the other brothers have surviving children?”

“Both do,” Ali answered. “Children and grandchildren.”

“What happens to them if after all this time one of their forebears is blamed in absentia for something that happened decades ago? Even if there’s no legal conviction, finding out that one’s father or grandfather was a cold-blooded killer might make things a bit dicey at the next holiday get-together.”

Kate’s warning was delivered with a smile, but with the specter of next summer’s Jeffrey Brooks’s family reunion hanging in the balance, Ali took the remark quite seriously.

“My obligation is to learn what I can and give the information to my friend. What he decides to do with it will be entirely up to him. I can tell you, however, that since he’s one of the kindest men I know, I don’t see him going around blowing up other people’s lives just for the fun of it.”

Kate nodded. “Very well,” she said. “We may be putting the cart before the horse anyway. Getting a profile from samples this old, especially ones that haven’t been stored properly, can be challenging. That’s why I invest in all the latest equipment. Samples that were totally useless
only a few years ago are yielding positive results.” She stood up. “If you don’t mind, I’d like one more cup of coffee before we head into the lab.”

Kate disappeared into the lab, taking both cups and saucers with her.

“How long have you been running this place?” Ali asked when she returned.

“Almost from the time I graduated from university,” Kate said. “My parents died in a car crash when I was little. We were living in the States then. They named my father’s brother, Arnold, as my guardian, and I came here to live. Uncle Arnold was a bachelor with no children of his own, so he had some rather outrageous ideas about child rearing. I was barely out of primary school when he took me to Bosnia to deal with mass graves. My father’s parents had a fit, but Uncle Arnold had more money and better lawyers. Eventually, the other grandparents gave up.

“Arnold Benchley was an Oxford man through and through. That’s where he wanted me to go, too, but they used some lame excuse to bar me from admission. Uncle Arnold shipped me off to UCLA to get my degree. Three years after I came back to Oxford, he died, leaving me in charge. Now I’m back in Oxford, running his company and living in his house. When it comes time for me to do some hiring, people from Oxford come crawling to me with their little hands out, begging for jobs. Sometimes I take them. Sometimes I don’t. When I don’t, I chalk it up to the jerks on that admissions board. All of whom were male, by the way.”

“Is that why all the people I see in the lab are women?”

Kate nodded, and smiled again. “Payback is a bitch,” she said.

“Have you ever met any of Marjorie’s fellow detectives?” Ali asked.

“No,” Kate said. “I’ve been lucky enough to avoid that, but I know enough about them from her that I don’t need to. And please don’t think we’re a pair of fire-breathing feminists. I have a perfectly wonderful husband at home. He’s an artist. And Marjorie’s husband, Phil, was
killed by a drunk driver when their son, Aiden, was eight. Phil was a good guy, too.” Kate nodded toward the diamond on Ali’s ring finger. “I take it you’ve found a good one, too?”

“We’re getting married over Christmas.”

“There you are, then,” Kate said. She polished off her coffee and stood up again. “No one’s allowed inside the lab in street clothes, so let’s get suited up and go deliver your cup and envelope to Donna Sparks. When it comes to degraded samples, she’s the best there is.”

With that, Kate swept up the envelope and Leland’s porcelain cup and headed back out to the reception area with Ali trailing along behind.

L
eAnne was startled awake at ten o’clock in the morning by a discreet tap on the door and someone saying, “Housekeeping.”

LeAnne had been determined to tell Lance about the extent of his injuries, including the loss of his leg, and Sister Anselm had understood. It was only after that difficult conversation, with Lance fading in and out of consciousness, that Sister Anselm had persuaded LeAnne to make use of the sister’s currently unoccupied hotel room.

LeAnne had walked the three blocks from the hospital to the hotel, carrying the grocery bag containing the rest of the clean clothes her mother had brought down from San Leandro. Once she undressed and switched off the light, she fell asleep the moment her head touched the pillow and had slept for a solid nine hours. That could have been attributed to sheer exhaustion, but it was probably also due to the fact that Lance now knew the truth about his situation. His mother was no longer bearing that terrible burden alone.

There was a coffeemaker in the room. After taking her second leisurely shower in as many days, LeAnne fixed a cup to take along back to the hospital. Sister Anselm met her in the ICU waiting room.

“How are things?” LeAnne asked.

“They’ve adjusted his meds. He’s sleeping again, really sleeping this time,” Sister Anselm added. “Have you had breakfast?”

“No.”

“Go to the cafeteria and eat something,” Sister Anselm urged. “Man does not live by coffee alone, and woman doesn’t, either.”

LeAnne made it into the cafeteria just under the wire before they switched over to lunch. She had finished eating her toast and rubbery scrambled eggs when her phone rang. “Hi, Mom,” she said. “How are things at home?”