Murder Suicide (21 page)

"Well, I worked with Snow for over a year.  I put my career on the line for him.  I was more than his surgeon.  I was his confessor.  And I was the one who ran his code in the ER.  I was the one who put my hand inside his chest and pumped his heart."

Clevenger stared into Heller’s eyes, searching for deceit.  But he looked sincere, like he had lost a brother, or a son.  "Whatever I ultimately find out, you won’t have to read it in a newspaper," he told him.  "I’ll let you in on it as soon as I possibly can.  You have my word."

"I’ll trust you on that," Heller said.  "And please remember by offer:  If you need more money to dig deeper, just let me know.  I’d be willing to put up a reward, too, if you think that would help."

"I’ll keep that in mind."

He threw back the rest of his scotch.  "Third one’s a charm," he said.  "What do you say?  Ready to head out?"

"You all right to drive?" Clevenger asked.

Heller got up, stood on one foot, then the other.  He ran the ball of his right foot up his calf, without wobbling a bit.  "I’ll be fine.  I hate to admit how many three scotch nights I’ve had in the past six months.  I lived and breathed John’s case."

Heller was talking a lot like an alcoholic.  "The case is over," Clevenger said, standing up.

"No," Heller said.  "You get whoever got Snow.  Then it’s over."

*            *            *

Clevenger got back to the loft a few minutes after midnight.  No light seeped from under Billy’s door.  Apparently,
Brain and Spinal Structures
had put him to sleep.

He walked over to his computer, saw that the display was still glowing, with the code or gibberish from the last VTK file he had looked at still splashed across the screen.  That was odd; the computer was set to default to screen saver after five minutes.  He reached down and touched the seat of his desk chair.  Warm.

He felt angry and disappointed.  Billy had gone through his files.  He looked at the door to his room, again.  Maybe a bedtime chat about respecting each other’s privacy was in order.  Maybe grounding him would drive the lesson home.  But another feeling unexpectedly eclipsed the rest.  He felt victorious — over Jet Heller, over Abraham Kader, over neurosurgery itself.  Because while Heller and he were at the Alpine, Billy probably hadn’t been reading about the nervous system.  He’d been at the computer, trying to get closer to Clevenger and his work.  And while Clevenger did fear losing him to the darkness of murder cases, he couldn’t deny that his son’s curiosity felt good.

He didn’t knock on Billy’s door or yell for him to come out.  He sat down in the desk chair and closed his eyes — knowing Billy had been there just moments before.

The Four Seasons

A Summer Day, Five Months Before

6:00 P.M.

Grace Baxter knocked on the door to their suite, uncertain whether he would be there.  They had scheduled their meeting a week before, but she had not heard from him since, despite phoning him a dozen times.  She knocked on the door again, waited ten, fifteen seconds, then turned to leave.

He opened the door.

She turned back to him and was shocked at what she saw.  He was unshaven, his eyes bloodshot, dark circles beneath them.  His white shirt was wrinkled and stained with sweat.  She stepped inside, closed the door behind her.  "John, what’s wrong?" she asked.

He shook his head, gazed at the floor.  "I’m sorry."  He looked back at her.  She was luminous in a fitted, black shift and high-heeled, black sandals.  "I haven’t been..."  He rubbed his eyes.

"She took his hand and led him to a velvet love seat.

"I didn’t want you to see me this way," he said.

"We agreed never to hide from one another."

He looked through her.  "Things haven’t been good."

"What things?"

He shook his head.  "Just..."

"What things?  Please, John, tell me."

"My mind," he said, barely focusing on her.  "My work.  I’m at a dead end."

She leaned toward him.  "You said it helps when we see each other more.  I’ll see you every day, if you want me to."

He closed his eyes.

She moved his hand to the inside of her thigh, until the tips of his fingers touched the lace of her thong.  "Something’s in your way, again.  That’s all.  You’re blocked.  We can get through it."

He could feel her warmth, her wetness.  And part of him wanted to move inside her, to tap the energy that had helped him clear so many creative hurdles in the last six months, bringing Vortek closer and closer to reality.  But the last time they had been together had left him no stronger, no less barren.  He was convinced that even she could not fuel his imagination any longer.  He was empty of ideas.  And for John Snow, that was no better than being dead.

She leaned closer, kissed him on the mouth.

He barely felt her lips.  He was beyond her reach and slipping farther away.  He felt suddenly lightheaded.

She kissed his neck.

He felt a crown of shivers ring his scalp.  His arms and legs felt stiff.  He looked at her, saw her sitting ten feet away on the love seat.  Yet he still felt the warmth of her lips.  How could that be? he wondered.

"I love you," she whispered in his ear.

He heard the words as a distant echo.  And then he knew what was about to happen.  The unspeakable, unthinkable treachery of his brain short-circuiting.  A loss of all control, all light, all love.  He felt himself pulling away from her.  Or was he falling away?

"John," she said.  "What’s happening?  My God."

He watched it happen like a third person in the room, his eyes rolling back in his head, his neck craning, his limbs shaking, the awful twisting in his back, like he was a rag being wrung dry.  He saw his grotesqueness reflected in the horror on Grace’s face.  And yet, even as his jaws clamped shut, even as he tasted blood streaming from his tongue, he saw her reaching for him, felt her holding him tight.

*            *            *

He awakened on the floor, in her arms.  She was crying, rocking him like a baby.  He looked up at her.

"John?" she said, running her hand over his cheek.  "It’s okay.  It’s going to be alright."

He tried to speak, but his mouth felt like it was full of razor blades.  His pants felt strange against his skin.  He had wet himself.

"Don’t," she said.  "You’ve bitten your tongue.  Don’t try to talk."

He lay quietly, still dazed, looking up at her.

She kept rocking him.  "You can’t do this to yourself," she said.  "Do you understand?  You have to let this project go.  Forget about it.  You can come back to it in a year, or five, or never.  It doesn’t matter."

He felt her tears on his face.

"It’s just an idea," she said.  "You can’t let it destroy you.  I won’t let you.  I love you."

It seemed strange to him that he would feel the real power of her devotion at his worst, rather than his best, odd that she would love him despite his collapse.  Yet another part of him knew he could never have received her gift in any other way.  Because he was utterly certain now that she loved
him
, not his brain.  John Snow.  The man, not the machine.  And in the way that pure and unconditional love truly can heal, truly can inspire, he knew in his heart that he wasn’t even close to giving up the fight to create what so many others insisted was just a fantasy.  Because in her arms at that moment — unshaven, bloodied, barely in control of his limbs — absolutely anything and everything seemed within reach.

Chapter 13

January 14, 2004

Clevenger made it up to Vania O’Connor’s house, a big colonial on a quiet Newburyport side street, just before 8:00
A.M.
   He parked, got out of his truck.  It was two degrees above zero.  With the wind chill it felt like twenty below.  The air sparkled with a dusting of shimmering snowflakes.

O’Connor’s wife, a pretty blond with a head for numbers, was backing out of the driveway.  She worked as the controller for a Boston-based hedge fund.  She lowered her window.  "Vania’s waiting for you," she called to Clevenger.  "He said you were bringing coffee."

Clevenger held up the cup.  "Large, cream, four sugars."

"He needs it.  He’s been up most of the night.  Could you please remind him...?"

"To bring snack to the Montessori.  I heard all about it."

She smiled, rolled up the window and drove off.

Clevenger walked the bluestone path that led to the bulkhead door at the side of the house.  He knocked, pulled it open.  "Vania?"

"I think so," O’Connor said.

Clevenger climbed down the narrow concrete steps to O’Connor’s lair, saw him hunched over a keyboard typing, the glare from the monitor in front of him the brightest light in the room.  Clevenger hadn’t been there in about a year, and the place had only gotten more crowded with computers, books and software, piled high on every surface.

Clevenger walked up behind O’Connor, looked at the computer screen, full of numbers, letters, asterisks, arrows, and ampersands.  He put the coffee cup down beside the keyboard.  "All that actually means something?" he asked.

"That’s the problem.  It doesn’t want to add up to much of anything."  He picked up the cup, flipped open the lid, took a sip.

"It’s going around."

O’Connor smiled up at him.  "You sound tired, man."  He held out his hand.

Clevenger shook it.  "You
look
tired."  That wasn’t true.  O’Connor looked full of energy, younger than he had a year ago.

"How’s Billy?"

"Fine."

"Remember, I can spot a faulty line of programming across a frigging room," he said, looking at him askance.  "What’s wrong?"

"Nothing’s wrong.  It’s a challenge.  That’s all."

"Was there any chance of you taking on a kid who wasn’t a challenge?"

Clevenger thought about that.  "No."

"Exactly.  You’d be wasted on a kid who was coasting."

O’Connor was right.  But Clevenger wondered why it had to be that way.  Why had surviving his own childhood traumas bound him so inextricably to other broken people?  "Coasting once in awhile might be nice."

"Trust me, you’d hate it.  You’re a full-time healer.  Like it or not."  He nodded at the discs in Clevenger’s hand.  "What kind of trouble are we in, partner?"

"These are the files I told you about.  They’re from John Snow’s laptop.  The inventor."

"The guy who was killed, or shot himself, or whatever."

"Yes."

"He’s half of what they talk about on the news."  He nodded at the discs.  "You’re not thinking he was killed because of what’s on those, are you?"

"I don’t know.  But I haven’t told a soul I’m giving them to you."  He saw O’Connor’s face lose some of its exuberance.  "You don’t have to do this."

O’Connor stared at the discs a few seconds.  "I already drank your coffee," he said.  "Tell me everything."

Clevenger told him about Vortek.

"So we’re talking about engineering, physics, force, momentum.  All that."

"All that."

"Let’s pop one in."

O’Connor slipped the floppy disk into his desktop and called up the directory.  He opened
VTK
1
.LNX
, stared at the field of numbers and letters silently for a minute or so.  "Right," he said finally.

"You understand that?"

"No.  But I can tell you why.  It’s highly encrypted C++, Visual Basic language."

"I’d hate to see what gets an
A
."

O’Connor laughed.

"Can you decode it?" Clevenger asked him.

"If I get lucky.  Even if I do, a hundred-and-fifty-seven files is gonna take some time."

"And money."

"That, too.  Enough to spread around a little.  I know a guy retired from NASA who lives on a farm in Rowley.  I may need his help with some of the calculations."

"Whatever it takes," Clevenger said.  "I wouldn’t show this guy all your cards, though.  Like I said, I don’t know if what’s in those files got Snow killed.  And I don’t know your friend — or who he knows."  He reached into his pocket, handed O’Connor twenty hundred-dollar bills.

"That’ll get us started," O’Connor said.  "I need more, though."

"I’m good for it.  That’s what I had on me."

"Not money," O’Connor said.  "Information.  Snow’s date of birth, social security number, dates his kids were born, his anniversary.  Some of these guys use that kind of info as keys to unlock encrypted data."

"I’ll get you everything I can,"

"I’d watch yourself here, Frank," O’Connor said, scrolling down the screen.  "Snow went to a lot of trouble to keep people from seeing whatever’s behind this code.  Maybe nobody knows I’ve got these discs, but you gotta believe they know that you do."

*            *            *

Clevenger started the drive back to Boston to meet with Kyle Snow at the Suffolk County Jail.  He saw that North Anderson had called his cell phone and dialed him back.

Anderson picked up.  "Hey, Frank."

"Anything new?" Clevenger asked.

"Coroway’s story checks out, on one level.  The parking attendant and the cashier in the cafeteria both remember him."

"How doesn’t it check out?"

"I talked to the driver of the
Boston Globe
delivery truck he hit.  Guy named Jim Murphy.  Thirty-something.  He says Coroway was beside himself, real shaken after what only amounted to a fender bender.  Coroway tried to pay him cash not to file a claim.  Five hundred."

"People do that," Clevenger said.  "And Coroway says he was in a rush.  He had that shuttle to catch."

"Sure.  But Murphy really felt leaned on.  He told him he couldn’t make the deal, it being a
Globe
truck and all, but Coroway wouldn’t take no for an answer.  He upped his offer to a grand, kept at him until Murphy finally called the police to take a report.  Coroway left the scene before the cruiser came."