Superposition (24 page)

“So it was an accident,” I said.

“No! I mean, yes, I shot him, but it didn't hurt him,” Lily said. “It worked, just like he said it would. The bullet went right through.”

“So how did he die?”

“Isn't it obvious? He must have been playing around with it and shot himself, or maybe he got his new girlfriend to do it, only this time it didn't work, and he blew his brains out. Serves her right. I hope she saw it happen. I hope his brains splattered all over her.”

“New girlfriend? Who was this, specifically?”

“I don't know her name. There was always a new girl, and never the same one for long.” She wiped her eyes and sniffed. “Can you believe I actually thought he was going to marry me?”

“Why didn't the police discover all this?” Alex asked.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Your sister overlooked the fact that you were a recent lover of the victim, and thus a natural suspect.”

“No, she interviewed me,” she said. “She knew I was a suspect. But I had an alibi. I was with my brother and his wife that night. She
knew
it wasn't me.”

“So what are you hiding?”

“I'm not hiding anything,” she said, but she glanced at the doors as if contemplating her escape.

“The viewfeed,” I said. “Can we see it?”

“No. Who are you, anyway? I don't have to show you anything.”

“Please. It might help us find them,” I said.

Lily gasped. She pointed at my face. “Oh my gosh!” she said. “You're the guy! You're the one who killed Brian!”

“I didn't kill him,” I said. “You just said yourself that you thought it was an accident.”

“You're supposed to be in jail!”

“Time to go,” I said. We headed for the door.

“Mr. Egorov, quick! Call the police!”

We pushed out through the double doors. “Ridiculous woman,” I said.

“She's upset,” Alex said.

“She might know where they are, but she won't show us,” I said. “I'm not inclined to be generous.”

We jumped into the car. I tried to reach Terry on the phone, but all I got was a voice mail message saying that he was in trial proceedings and would return my call as soon as he was able.

“Hopefully, the police will think she's crazy when she calls,” I said. “Since I'm obviously on trial right now, not driving around New Jersey.”

The phone rang. “Terry?” I said.

“No, this is Nick Massey,” said an angry voice on the other end. “I'm looking for my wife.”

It took me a moment to switch gears. “Wait, what? Who is this?”

“Nick Massey.” He stressed each syllable as if I were an imbecile.

“You're looking for Jean?”

“That's what I said.”

“I haven't seen her.”

“Listen up, asshole,” Nick said. “I don't have to catch you in bed together to know what's going on. She's barely been home for weeks, and now she's not even answering my phone calls. If she's leaving me, fine, but I need to know the score, and we need to settle up in court. If she doesn't want me or Chance, she could at least have the decency to tell us to our faces.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it again, not sure how to respond. This was completely out of the blue, and I didn't need any more problems. “You've got this wrong,” I said. “I'm not sleeping with Jean. She's helping me with my court case. She's an expert witness.”

“Put her on the phone.”

“She's not here. I've seen her, but not today. I don't know where she is, but my guess would be the Philadelphia courthouse.”

“A husband knows, Mr. Kelley. She's not just busy with some court case. She's been emotionally checked out for months, and now I know why. She's sleeping with you, and she's left me and Chance behind.”

“Look, I'm sorry for that, really, but I had no idea,” I said. “If I see her, I'll tell her you called.”

“Do that. And think about whether a woman who abandons her child is really somebody you want to be involved with.”

“I'm not sleeping with her, Nick.”

“Well, if that's the truth, I apologize. But I'm pretty sure somebody is.”

The second I hung up, the phone rang again in my hand. This time it was Terry. “Jacob, where are you? We're putting you on the stand this afternoon.”

“What? Today?”

“Of course! Listen, if you're not here in less than an hour, you're going to miss your chance. This whole thing hangs on you being here.”

“We have new evidence,” I said, and explained to him what we'd discovered. “We have a witness, one of Brian's old girlfriends, who says that Brian was using the gun to perform dangerous experiments on himself. He convinced her to fire it at him, and maybe other people as well.”

“It's not very much,” Terry said.

“What do you mean? It's an alternate theory if I ever heard one.”

“We already have an alternate theory. It's too late to switch gears. Besides, the judge is going to be very suspicious of any new information materializing this late in the trial. Will your witness testify?”

“Uh, no, probably not. Not willingly, anyway.”

“It won't work. Too many desperate lawyers try to throw up smokescreens at the end of a trial. Opposing counsel would scream foul, and the judge would agree.”

“And they're not going to scream foul about me?”

“Of course, they are. But that's our ace in the hole, and I don't think there's going to be anything they can do about it. It's worth the risk.”

“This woman's a more credible suspect than I am. She should at least provide some reasonable doubt.”

“If we had her a month ago, maybe. Today, we have to stick with what we have. Get back here in an hour, or we won't have anything.”

CHAPTER 26

DOWN-SPIN

Terry stood and announced the next and final witness. Me. I felt the eyes of everyone in the courtroom on me as I walked to the stand. The room looked different from this perspective. I felt the jurors watching me, and I met their eyes with as honest an expression as I could muster, just like Terry had coached me. He said jurors always liked when a defendant testified. It gave them a chance to hear the defendant's side of the story, something that seemed strangely missing in most trials. Despite the appeal to the jury, defendants almost never testified, and for a very good reason. It gave the prosecution the chance to ask tough questions and bring things into the court record that might otherwise be kept out, like a criminal past or incriminating statements previously made. It also meant a guilty client would have to lie, straight-faced, to the court and make the lie stick. Not many lawyers were willing to take the risk.

Terry thought this was one of the rare times that the benefits outweighed the risks. My story was so bizarre that presenting it in any other way but through my voice would be laughable. Jean had laid the scientific groundwork, and Marek had given his first-hand account; now I just had to tell them the story from my perspective. We expected Haviland to make my claims sound ridiculous, but we had set a trap for him which might just turn the trial around, if it worked.

Terry had coached me on how to behave. Don't smile. Don't fold your arms across your chest. Keep your hands away from your mouth. Never say, “To the best of my knowledge.” Don't mumble. Speak confidently. Sit up straight. I was so busy trying to remember all these tips, I barely had time to worry about what I was going to say. Maybe that was part of the idea.

At the lectern, Terry shuffled his papers and took his time. I guessed he was trying to raise the suspense, to heighten the sense that whatever had gone before, this was the part of the trial that really mattered. I hoped he was right.

“Mr. Kelley,” he said. “Did you kill Brian Vanderhall?”

I waited a beat, just like he taught me, then leaned forward into the microphone. “I did not.”

“Did you cause his death in any way?”

“No, I did not.”

“When was the last time you saw Brian Vanderhall alive?”

“On the afternoon of December third.”

Terry paused to let that sink in. “Other witnesses have testified that Brian's dead body was found, by you, on the morning of December third.”

“Yes, that's true,” I said, enunciating clearly. “I found Brian's dead body in the bunker in the morning. I also saw him alive that afternoon.”

Even though Marek had said essentially the same thing, the courtroom erupted in a buzz of noise. The camera flies whizzed around my face. Haviland actually laughed and clapped his hands together, apparently thinking his case was as good as won. I kept my face solemn, neither smiling nor acknowledging the reaction.

Judge Roswell pounded her gavel—I wondered how often she actually got a chance to do that—and the room quieted.

Terry pretended to be astonished by my claim. “Are you suggesting Brian Vanderhall rose from the dead? Or is it time travel, perhaps? Or does he have an identical twin who was hidden away by his parents at birth?”

“None of those,” I said. “This admittedly unusual event was a direct result of Brian's research into quantum fields.”

Terry stepped me through it, point by point. We could have taken a different tack, tried to frame my story in completely normal terms, leaving Brian out of it, or else not told my story at all. But I had told the police the truth when they interrogated me, which meant the whole story was on record. If I left out the unbelievable parts, Haviland could just trot them out and use them to make me look ridiculous anyway.

It was better to come out with it and treat it seriously, in hopes that the jury would do the same. Jean had already laid the scientific groundwork for Brian temporarily being in two places at once. I reiterated Marek's testimony about how the note Brian had left led me to the CATHIE bunker. I described the pair of resonators I found there, and what they meant in terms of the macroscopic realization of quantum effects. I said nothing about the spinning objects in the room, or the man with no eyes, or of Marek being pulled into pieces. Instead, I skipped ahead to when we found Brian in the back of his car.

Here, Terry stopped the narrative. “Are you certain it was Brian Vanderhall?”

“Completely.”

“How could you tell?”

“I've known Brian for more than a decade. It was his face, his hair, his voice, his mannerisms and style of speech. He talked to me about the resonators, which practically no one knows about, much less understands. There's no question it was him.”

“What happened to him? Where is he now?”

“The quantum waveform resolved.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the two Brians—the one who was dead on the bunker floor and the one who was sleeping in the back of his car—combined to become one again. There was just as much chance that the resolved version would be the living Brian, but unfortunately for him, it turned out to be the dead one.”

“So ultimately, it's still true that Brian was killed by the gun in the underground bunker?”

“Yes. It's just that a shadow version of himself—another possible Brian, if you will—persisted for a short time afterward.”

“Could the shadow version of Brian have killed the first version in a bizarre form of suicide?”

“As Dr. Massey testified, it's scientifically possible. My professional opinion agrees with her analysis.”

“Do you know who killed Mr. Vanderhall?” Terry asked.

“No.”

“Were you there when he died?” Terry asked.

“No, I was still at home in bed.”

“How well did you know Mr. Vanderhall?”

“Quite well, for more than ten years, as I said. We attended college together and worked together. Before last December, I hadn't spoken to him in two years, however. Not since I left the NJSC.”

“Were you good friends before that?”

“Yes. Best friends, I would say. He was the best man at my wedding.”

“And now you've been accused of killing him. Had you ever been convicted of a crime before this?”

“Nothing more than a speeding ticket.”

“No felonies? No driving under the influence?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell us, how has this accusation of murder impacted your life?”

Terry persisted on that topic at some length, trying to paint a picture of me as an upstanding citizen and gain the jurors' sympathy for my wrongful imprisonment. It would have been easier if Elena and the kids were here, and he could show a tearful family. It all felt fake to me, though it was in fact true, and I understood it was necessary to gain a rapport with the jury. Finally, he covered the physical evidence and had me explain how I ended up in possession of the Glock and with Brian's blood on my shoes. As his last question, Terry asked me again, point-blank, whether I had killed Brian Vanderhall or in any way caused his death.

“No, I did not,” I said.

“Thank you, no more questions.” Terry sat down.

It was the best I could do. I had told my story, hopefully seeding some doubt in the minds of the jurors, and now I just had to survive cross-examination. Haviland stood to take the lectern. He was practically cackling with glee as he took the stand, rubbing his hands together and barely keeping back a smile. He obviously thought he was going to roast me alive.

“So let me get this straight,” he said. “You're claiming to have seen the victim, Brian Vanderhall, alive and walking around after he died.”

“Yes.”

“And you expect the court to believe that this is”—he made a show of holding a document out in front of him, as if reading from the official record—“‘scientifically possible.'”

“Yes.”

Terry had warned me not to rise to Haviland's jibes. He would try to bait me into an angry or defensive response, but I was supposed to remain calm. The trick was to answer the questions, not the tone.