Murder Suicide (30 page)

"UPS?"

"Delivery."

The buzzer sounded.  He pulled open the door, took the stairs to the third floor.

Heller’s door was slightly ajar.  Clevenger used the large brass knocker, anyhow.  No answer.  He pushed the door open, walked in.

The windows were all shuttered, keeping the late morning sun down to a filtered, shadowy glow.  The place was architecturally stunning, with a towering stone fireplace, fluted columns, gleaming hardwood floors.  But it was nearly empty.  The only furniture in the great room out front was a black leather couch, a fifty-inch flat panel television mounted to the wall opposite it.  A Mark Rothko oil painting, probably worth $500,000 was propped against the chair rail of another wall.  A sculpture of twisted stainless steel sat atop the black granite center island in the kitchen.

"Jet?" Clevenger called out.

No answer.

He walked deeper into the apartment, closer to the stone fireplace, and thought he heard movement from down a hallway that looked like it would lead to the bedrooms.  "Jet?"

The sounds stopped.

He walked down the hall, passing one closed door, moving toward an open one about twenty feet away.  He was almost there when he heard footsteps behind him and swung around.

Heller stood in the hallway, dressed in jeans and a gray, Harvard sweatshirt, torn into a ‘V’ neck.  He had a gun in his hand.  He looked pale and exhausted.  He was unshaven.  "Frank?" he asked.  "What are you doing here?"  He leaned in Clevenger’s direction, brow furrowed, eyes bloodshot.  "This is my home," he said, sounding a little unsure even of that.

From fifteen feet away, Clevenger could smell the odor of scotch wafting off him.  He flexed his calf, felt the pistol strapped there.  "Place looks kind of empty," he said, forcing a smile.  "Moving out?"

"I just never moved much in," Heller said.  "I live at work."

Clevenger knew Heller was telling the truth.  He could afford a $5 million dollar penthouse apartment, but had no interest in furnishing it.  He lived and breathed neurosurgery.  "I went by your office.  Sascha’s been trying to get ahold of you.  She worried when you didn’t return her calls.  So I came over here."

"She likes you."

"She’s a very nice person."

"Very nice?  She’s an eleven on a scale of one to ten, Frank.  You should have been all over that."

Was Heller trying to distract him?  And why was he speaking of him in the past tense?  "You never know what the future might hold," Clevenger said.

Heller raised his gun.

Clevenger thought of going for his own gun, but Heller never took aim.  He held the gun in front of his chest, pointed sideways, staring at it like a wounded bird.

"Snow was shot point-blank in the heart," Heller said.  "Imagine the panic."  He shook his head, took a deep breath.  "I’ve seen a man shot, Frank.  It’s a horrible thing.  Truly."  He looked up at Clevenger.  "Have you?"

"Yes, I have."

"I’m sorry for that."

Clevenger wanted to move the discussion away from shooting people.  "Why didn’t you go into work?" he asked Heller.

"I am at work," Heller said.  "Just a different kind of work."  He nodded toward the open door beside him.  "Want to take a look?"

"Sure," Clevenger said.  He walked slowly toward Heller.  "Mind putting down that gun?  Accidents happen."

"No problem," Heller said.  He disappeared out of the corridor, into the room.

Clevenger reached to his calf, pulled his pistol out of its holster and shoved it into the waistband of his jeans, under his black turtleneck.  Then he walked toward the doorway.  Part of him wondered why he was still there at all.  He could get out, come back with Anderson or Coady.  But he didn’t think there was any chance he’d get anything out of Heller that way.  And there was nothing to arrest him for yet.

He stepped into the doorway of the room, and stopped, transfixed by what he saw.  Heller sat at a table made out of a door and two metal construction horses, studying a computer monitor that glowed with numbers and symbols and letters.  His gun lay next to the keyboard.  Every other square inch of the table, walls and floor were covered with sheets of paper and books.

"Don’t worry about stepping on things," Heller said, never looking away from the monitor.

Clevenger looked down, saw that the sheets of paper at his feet were pages of computer code.  The books were textbooks on physics and aeronautical engineering.  He stepped around those he could.  He looked more closely at the walls, saw that pages from John Snow’s journal were taped one next to the other.  Row after row after row.  "What are you doing?" Clevenger asked.

"Bringing my patient back to life," Clevenger asked.

"Okay..."  Had Heller gone mad?  "How long you been at it?"

Heller glanced at the shuttered windows.  "I don’t know."  He turned to Clevenger.  "What does a man have left when he dies?"

"What he’s done with his life.  Whatever he’s left behind."

"His legacy," Heller said.  "That’s all John Snow has left.  His work, for one.  And the answer to one question:  Was he or was he not a coward?  Did he or did he not let me down?"

"What’s your diagnosis, so far?" Clevenger asked, keeping an eye of how far Heller’s hand was from his gun.

"He was no quitter.  He was ready to go the distance."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because he was carrying his most treasured idea in that black travel bag they found with his body.  A man leaving the planet doesn’t take his work with him."

"I’m not sure I understand."

"Take a look."

Heller stood up, picked up his gun, moved aside.

Clevenger didn’t like the idea of sitting with his back to Heller.  Not with the gun in his hand.  "There you go with that gun," he said.

Heller put the gun on the table, but stayed within arm’s reach of it.  "I’m not even sure why I took it out of the safe.  I hate the thing.  I don’t know why I bought it, in the first place."

"You must have some idea."

"Maybe to prove I’ll never use it.  Kind of like an alcoholic keeps a bottle of scotch on the mantel for ten years to prove he can resist, that he’s not just sober, he’s beyond sober."

"Maybe you should try that trick, too.  Seems like you’ve been drinking around the clock."

"Don’t be blinded by your own disorder, Frank.  I’m no alcoholic.  I’m simply in pain.  It’s anesthesia to me.  Two, three, four days, I’ll be alright.  Then I won’t touch it."

"I’ll check in with you on day four," Clevenger said, walking to the table.  He sat down in Heller’s seat, leaned to look at the monitor.  Lines of numbers, letters and mathematical symbols filled the screen.  "What am I looking at?" he asked.

"Grace Baxter."

Clevenger looked up at Heller, who smiled a mysterious smile.  "Don’t speak in riddles," he said.  "I’m tired, too, for Christ’s sake."

Heller massaged Clevenger’s shoulder.  "I know you are, brother."  He nodded at the screen.  "I put together a computer model to analyze Snow’s final drawing of Grace in his journal — the one he made out of a collage of numbers and mathematical symbols.  I got some help from a friend at Cal Tech.  Hit
F1
while you hold down the
Control
and
Delete
buttons."

Clevenger did as Heller asked.  And then he sat back as the lines of code on the screen began moving, the numbers and letters and other symbols flowing into and around one another until they gradually reorganized themselves into a luminous version of the portrait Snow had drawn of Grace.

"She was in his head as deep as you can go," Heller said.  "Stretched out like a cat across the right and left sides of his brain.  Hit
F2, Control, Delete
."

Clevenger did as Heller suggested.  The portrait began disassembling itself back into the lines of code Clevenger had seen before.

"The portrait holds the solution to the rest of this," Heller said, waving at the pages taped to his walls.  He walked around the room, scanning them, touching some of them.  "How do you create a flying object with pure forward momentum, invisible to radar."

Clevenger kept starting at the computer screen, realizing Snow had finished his work on the invention that had eluded him for so long.  He reached to the keyboard again, pressed
F1, Control, Delete
.  And as he watched, the numbers, letters and symbols flowed into place again, recreating the portrait of Grace Baxter.

Snow’s passion for Grace and his creative genius had merged, yielding what Collin Coroway and George Reese wanted from him:  Vortek.

"Why did you really come here?" Heller asked.

Clevenger looked at him.

"You said you were worried about me.  That was a lie.  What’s the real reason?"

"Where did you get the discs and the journal?" Clevenger asked him.

Heller didn’t respond for a few seconds.  "I know people in the police department," Heller said.

That was an admirable lie, in one respect.  Heller wasn’t throwing Billy under the bus.  Was that because he cared about him, or because he thought he could keep on using him?  "You’re not to contact my son, again.  Do you understand?"

"You want to keep him away from what you do.  What’s the harm if he comes close?  He loves you."

"That’s none of your business.  Stay away from him."

"He needs something to occupy his mind and his heart.  He has darkness inside him.  I can see it.  Because I see it in myself."

"Stay away, or..."

"Or you’ll kill me?"  He chuckled to himself.  "Maybe we’re more alike than you imagine."

"We’re not the same," Clevenger said.  "You’re lost in this case.  I’m working it."

Heller’s eyes drifted back to the computer screen.  "John Snow was my patient.  His life was in my hands."

Clevenger thought of what Sascha Monroe had told him — that Heller fantasized about being reborn himself, without his guilty conscience, that setting Snow free from his past felt like setting himself free.  "The tragedy is you could have been a kind of role model for Billy," Clevenger said.  "You could have helped him get to a new place in his life — if you hadn’t used him."

"All of us get used from time to time, Frank.  Even when you’re doing God’s work, you’re just on loan."

Clevenger turned around and walked out.

Chapter 19

Clevenger knew that Whitney McCormick was staying in Boston until the end of the day, then heading back to Washington.  He dialed her cell phone.

"How’s my favorite patient?" she answered.

"Not cured yet."

"Good."

"Where are you?" he asked her.

"Making calls at the hotel."

"Meet me for coffee?"

"Why don’t I just call room service?"

Chestnut Street was one mile from the Four Seasons.  "I’m around the corner."

"Hurry up."

He knocked on her door ten minutes later.

She opened it.  She was wearing jeans worn to threads at one knee and an oversized white men’s-style shirt, and she looked every bit as beautiful as she had the night before.

Clevenger shook his head.  "You ever have a bad hair day, an occasional blemish, anything to give a guy a break?"

"We don’t see each other much.  Two good days in a row is unusual for me."

"Why don’t I believe that?"

He pulled her close.  They kissed.  He moved his lips to her neck.

She pushed the door shut, pulled him to the bed.

They made love slowly, looking into one another’s eyes as Clevenger moved inside her body, each of them reveling in release from their individual existences, in being swept away by a force greater than the simple sum of their energies.

They lay together, spent, enjoying those few minutes when lovers barely know which arm and which leg belongs to whom.

She turned her head toward him, her lips close to his ear.  "I like this place.  We should do this more often."

"We will."  He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, let it out.  He thought to himself how strange it was that Whitney and he were meeting at the Four Seasons, that they should plan to keep meeting there.  It was almost as if the two of them were lost in some sort of countertransference to the case, acting it out.  He opened his eyes.  "I have to ask you one more time..."

She smiled.  "You don’t have to ask."

"It’s about the case," he said, propping himself on his elbow.

"Okay.  What?"

"Those patents."

She looked at him, her eyes slowly losing their warmth, invaded by some terrible mixture of hurt, anger and a cold resignation to the reality of what they did for a living, that they had not met as lovers first, that they might never be that alone.  "What about them?" she asked.

He hesitated to say more, felt himself stumbling out of one role, into another.  But the pull of what he needed to know was an undertow.  "If Snow-Coroway filed patents for Vortek, I’d know for sure that Collin Coroway and George Reese got everything they needed to get from John Snow.  They got the invention they needed to take the company public.  That would make Snow dispensable."

"But I can’t get that information."

He could let it go at that, couldn’t let go of his profession, his calling — not even for her, even though he had been on a short road to loving her from the moment he had laid eyes on her.  "I don’t want to bring up your father again.  But as a former senator, having served on the Intelligence Subcommittee, he must still have his contacts..."  He saw he had gone too far.  "I’m not trying to imply in any way that this is some sort of choice between..."

"Then why would you feel the need to deny it?"  She got up, started gathering her clothes.  "I’m a psychiatrist, too, Frank."

He stood up.  "What I wanted to say..."

"I know what you want."

"Look," he sighed.  "I was wrong to bring it up."

"You can't help yourself.  Work is your shield.  It help you avoid everything else.  It always has.  It always will."

"Such as...?"

"A real relationship, for one thing."  She pulled on her jeans.  "Don’t you even get why you took this case in the first place, Frank?  Don’t you see just a little bit of John Snow when you look in the mirror? Addicted to solving puzzles?  Keeping everyone at a distance?  Avoiding true intimacy?  Sound familiar?"