Spiral (9 page)

7

FOR JAKE, THE NEXT FOUR HOURS WERE A LONG, SLOW WALK
underwater. The first stop was Barton Hall, home of the Cornell police department. A lieutenant named Ed Becraft had led Jake to a dingy little room with plastic chairs and a white table. He looked to be in his late forties, with a wrinkled brown suit and tired blue eyes. He had a soft, high voice, incongruous, given his bulk and his job. When he told Jake the video camera on the bridge had caught Liam jumping, Jake was stunned.

Becraft showed Jake a picture of the woman who’d been with Liam on the bridge. “You recognize her?”

Jake shook his head.

Becraft nodded, then stood. “I need a minute,” he said. He gave Jake a voluntary statement form and asked him to fill it out, then left him alone.

Jake tried to get his head around it, but the whole episode didn’t register as real. Like a string of words said over and over until they lost their meaning and became just a stretch of sound:
Liam Connor is dead
.

He picked up bits of conversations in the hallway. Rumors were spreading, speculation about what could have made Liam kill himself. The leading theories revolved around an incurable disease, cancer or incipient Alzheimer’s, affecting either his health or his judgment. It was all noise, Jake knew—the desperate attempt of people’s brains to adjust to a suddenly shifted reality. Whenever something big happened, there was always a great deal of
Sturm und Drang
. Jake was trying to see through it. To pick the signal out of the noise. To understand why one of the greatest biologists of the twentieth century, a man surrounded by family and friends, all of whom adored him, chose to kill himself. And why would he do it in such a sudden, dramatic, out-of-character way, with absolutely no explanation?

When Jake was done filling out the form, he poked his head into the hallway. Becraft saw him and came back, a mug in hand. “You okay? You want coffee?”

“No, thanks. I’m fine.”

“Tea?”

“I’m fine,” Jake said.

“Let me just say again, I’m sorry for your loss.”

Becraft settled into his chair, picked up a pen. He made a couple of notes on a pad before looking up. When he did, it was all business, the questions coming fast. “Any reason you know of why Connor would want to end his life?”

“No.”

“Was he depressed?”

“No.”

“Was he sick?”

“No.”

“Any unusual behavior?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Was he tired? Slowing down?”

“You have to be kidding. He worked twelve-hour days. Nights and weekends, he’d be there, fiddling in the gardens.”

“Gardens?”

Jake gave him a quick rundown on Liam’s fungal research, the granite-topped tables in the Physical Sciences Complex. Becraft took copious notes. The interview went on for another ten minutes, but the only thing that Becraft reacted to was the information about Liam’s labs. He’d grabbed his superior, a police chief named Stacker, and they dispatched a team to seal it off.

Then they’d asked Jake to wait.

He drifted up to the main part of Barton Hall, a cavernous space so big you could park a 747 in it. In addition to housing the Cornell police, Barton was also the home of the ROTC, as well as an indoor running track. It had been an airplane hangar in World War I, an armory during World War II. At the time, it was the largest freestanding enclosed space in the world. Now undergraduates took final exams there en masse, row upon row toiling under the watchful eyes of TAs and professors. When Jake taught Physics 1112, this is where they took their final.

Jake stared out over the hall, imagining Liam running the track, eight times around for a mile. Liam had been a dedicated runner when he was younger, a good one. He’d gotten within fifteen seconds of the world record for the mile in the early fifties. Jake ran a bit himself, but he was more of a lifter. He liked the clarity of weights. The steel went up or it didn’t. Success or failure. With running, you were never done. You could keep going forever.

Jake tried to get inside the old man’s skin. How many times had Liam stood in this hall over the years? The
New York Times
did a survey, asking where the greatest Grateful Dead show ever was. The answer was Barton Hall, 1977. Liam would have been what? In his fifties then?

Liam listened almost exclusively to old Irish folk tunes, sad, sonorous ballads about lost love and delayed revenge, but he and Jake had once talked about the music of the sixties and early seventies. Jake had been surprised by Liam’s encyclopedic knowledge of everything from Bob Dylan and the Greenwich Village folk scene through the Byrds, the Beatles, and the Grateful Dead. Jake had said it was a revolutionary time, but Liam had a different take. He said it wasn’t a revolutionary period in music at all. Rather, it was a reactionary one—a throwback to when the popular art of a society was a dialogue about the issues of the day, not simply bread and circuses.

Liam’s take on things always made you think, whether you agreed with him or not. Jake rarely emerged from their wideranging discussions with his initial perspective intact.

Jake was going to miss him like hell.

A voice behind him: “Professor Sterling? You ready?”

BECRAFT LED THE WAY AS THEY WALKED DOWN EAST AVENUE
toward Liam’s laboratory in the Physical Sciences Complex. The air was crisp and cold, carrying the scent of autumn leaves. The sun was out, normally a cause for celebration in perennially cloudy upstate New York, but today it seemed garish.

To their right was the Andrew Dickson White House, named after Cornell’s first president, followed by Rockefeller Hall, built in 1906 with $274,494 from John D. Rockefeller. To their left was the Arts Quad, a large open space overseen by a statue of Ezra Cornell. It was surrounded by a mix of old and new buildings, some dating back to the university’s founding in 1865.

Below the Arts Quad and past the library was the “Libe Slope,” a steep hill that ran from the edge of the library down to the West Campus dorms. This was the site of the traditional end-of-the-year blowout party that invariably filled the Gannett Health Services center with overindulgent undergrads. Beyond Libe Slope and the dorms was the eclectic mix of buildings and houses that made up downtown Ithaca, and beyond that the wide, flat expanse of Cayuga Lake.

They turned right, toward the stone-and-steel façade of the Physical Sciences Complex, tucked in between Baker, Clark, and Rockefeller halls. Five minutes later they arrived at Liam’s lab. A uniformed officer stood guard outside. Technically, B24F was one of Jake’s labs, but in practice it was Liam’s domain. Jake had arranged for the space, saving Liam the trouble and paperwork. Liam was never an empire builder, always preferring to keep a low profile. He’d never bought into the science-as-industry model, where progress came by having a swarm of students and post-docs toiling away, picking a field clean like locusts. Even at the height of his career, the world’s leading expert on fungi was a perennial outsider, always preferring to work with just one or two students, lost in the unknown, tracking the craziest, most interesting idea he could find. His was so different from Jake’s way. Liam threw the long ball. Jake ran it right up the middle, making a few yards each carry.

Becraft said, “Professor Sterling, is there anything in here that could be dangerous? Anything potentially explosive? Any chemicals we should be aware of?”

“No, nothing beyond the usual.”

“Usual?”

“Bottles of reagents, maybe some syringes, things like that.”

He nodded. “Okay, then go ahead. Open the door.”

Jake slid his ID through the reader, and the door clicked open. Becraft flipped the switch, illuminating the rectangular space, twenty feet wide and twice that deep. The room was orderly and deathly still. There was a laptop on the desk in the corner, the screen blank. The opposite wall was lined with three lab benches, the shelves packed with pipettes, flasks of reagents, and sample cuvettes. And in the center of it all, the three huge mandalas of the gardens of decay. Jake always thought they looked like a giant painting by Klee, a spellbinding tapestry of complex mixtures of greens and yellows tucked between the narrow passageways down which the Crawlers ran.

“That’s what you told me about?” Becraft asked. “The gardens of …”

“Decay. That’s them. Each square is a different kind of fungus. Genetically engineered to cause the decay of one kind of trash or another.”

“Incredible,” Becraft said. But then Jake saw his gaze change. “Professor Sterling, speed is important in a case like this. If there’s something to be found, we want it now instead of later. Understand?”

“Sure. Of course.”

“What I want you to do is this: Walk slowly through the lab and carefully examine every little thing. Is there anything out of the ordinary? Anything odd? I don’t care how small a detail it is. If it strikes you as wrong in any way, speak up.” He handed Jake a pair of powdered gloves. “But don’t touch anything without asking me first.”

Jake pulled the gloves on and circled the perimeter of the lab while Becraft went to work. Jake watched Becraft quizzically as he turned over the trash can and laid the contents out on a small white sheet he had brought with him in a translucent bag. “What are you looking for?”

“Draft of a suicide note. A paper cup with a good print. You never know. When I was with the Rochester PD, I once found the credit card receipt from the purchase of a murder weapon in a trash can not ten feet from the victim. The husband had dropped it there.”

Jake returned to his searching. The door to a metal cabinet was slightly ajar. He glanced inside: a half-empty bottle of whiskey sat on the shelf. Next to it were two tumblers, a trace of brown in the bottom of each. Liam marked every important event, good or bad, with a shot of whiskey.

A memory bubbled up from a few years back. Jake had returned from a morning run to find Liam sitting in the hallway of his apartment complex, cross-legged on the floor outside his door, a paper bag at his side. “Is that the human snail?” Liam had said.

“Snail?” Jake smiled. “You’re just jealous.”

Liam scanned Jake up and down, taking in his running shorts and sweatshirt, the sweat dripping. “Of you?”

“Of my knees.”

“That is, in fact, true,” Liam said. His knees had forced him to give up running almost two decades ago. “Which route this morning?”

“Cayuga trail. Up by the lake, then along Fall Creek to Route Thirteen.”

“Time?”

“Today? Hour forty-five.”

“When I was your age, I could have shaved thirty minutes off that.”

“When you were my age, the gorge was buried under an ice sheet.”

“You are funny. A human tortoise, but funny.”

Jake offered a hand. Liam took it, pulling himself up from the floor, a clinking sound coming from the paper bag in his other hand. He stood, all five and a half feet of him, head high. Jake was nearly a foot taller. It was an odd feeling, to be physically so much larger than this man Jake viewed as a giant.

Once inside, Liam pulled a bottle of Cooley whiskey and two tumblers out of the bag. He poured two fingers into each tumbler.

Jake said, “To what do I owe the visit?” Though he knew.