The Sixth Idea (15 page)

M
ax sat in his SUV across the lake from Lydia Ascher's house, watching the police fan out across her property. The onslaught of emergency vehicles had been relentless—he was impressed by the rapid response and strong presence of this rural force. Lydia Ascher would be safe tonight.

A few hundred yards away, three ice fishermen were huddled in the openings of portable fish shacks, ignoring their lines as they gawked at the dramatic spectacle across the lake. They hadn't noticed his presence, but even if they had, this vehicle would disappear soon, and so would Max.

He put the SUV in gear and gently eased off the shoulder and onto the small stripe of snow-covered tar that encircled the lake, taking one last, wistful look at the fishermen. He hadn't thought about it in years and years, but as a young boy, during better times for his family, Max had spent a lot of time ice fishing on the Moskva River
with his father. They would sit outside on overturned buckets in the bitter cold, pulling carp and bream and pike out of the slushy holes in the ice. Sometimes they would roast them over scraps of wood right on the snowy riverbank while they drank tea from an old steel thermos and gnawed on black bread. If there was a surplus of fish, they'd bring them home for his mother and grandmother to pickle. He'd especially liked the pickled pike.

Good memories, he realized, and decided that once he settled in at his Montana ranch for good, he'd buy all the best gear and start ice fishing the two lakes on his property. Why hadn't he thought of that before?

L
ydia was dwelling in a strange limbo between numbness and panic and she couldn't still her mind, especially now that she was alone. Well, she wasn't alone exactly—the deputies were just outside and the Minneapolis detectives were downstairs—but without any immediate distraction, she was fixating on the man from the airport. It was no coincidence he'd been here in her house. That meant he'd followed her or hunted her down somehow, and why was that? The conclusion seemed obvious: he'd been following Chuck, had probably killed him, and Wally, too, and she was next. And what did they all have in common? They were all descendants of the men who'd worked on the hydrogen bomb. Otis had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The problem was, if you grew up in a great family, in a great town, with virtually no crime, in a great country where most everyone still
put their hands over their hearts when a flag was presented, you just weren't prepared for people you'd never met trying to kill you.

She remembered her mother's stories about the weekly drills in her grade school, when duck and cover was preached over and over again. Duck under your desk, cover the backs of your little heads so the big, bad atomic bombs won't hurt you. And then, after a successful drill, the little darlings were praised for their obedience and rewarded with a film show.

In the fourth grade, they showed us wonderful, child-appropriate films in the grade school's plush auditorium. Films like the
Green Grass of Wyoming
. It had horses and sweet families and cute young men. There was a wonderful new film every Thursday.

But when we moved up to junior high, they must have decided we were old enough to terrify because they only showed films in the classroom with clickety-click projectors on portable screens. It was the same film over and over. A blinding explosion, wooden structures blasted and disintegrated by a rush of fiery wind, trees bent to the ground, just like the buildings, just like the little goats tethered beside them. There one minute, gone the next.

“Duck and cover,” a stern narrator pronounced, and the film shifted to a classroom of youngsters under the fragile wooden desks, hands laced over the backs of their heads, perfectly safe.

Her mother had covered her eyes when she'd finished telling Lydia the story, and tears leaked through her fingers. She'd been in her fifties then, still quaking with the terror of a child who had been
taught that there were terrible people in the world who would heedlessly bomb ten-year-old girls fresh from recess.

Until now, she hadn't thought much about that tale of her mother's childhood, a childhood cut short by the atom bomb and the pervasive horror of the Cold War. How must it have felt to her mother, an innocent child, waiting for immolation? Perhaps just like she felt now, trying desperately to make sense of strangers willing to kill.

The last thing she needed was coffee, and yet here she was, walking to the kitchen to pour herself a cup. It didn't make any sense, but it was something to do, something to keep her mind and hands moving and occupied. Small tasks. Pour the coffee, add cream and sugar, stir vigorously. Wipe the counter while you're at it, and water the poinsettias . . .

She jumped a little when she heard footsteps on the basement stairs, and her mind started playing a black-and-white horror movie of zombies, slowly dragging themselves up the stairs to eat her flesh.

But it was just Deputy Harmon. “Ms. Ascher, I have to go outside, but Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth will be up shortly. Will you be all right?”

Lydia nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”

Once the front door had closed behind him, she started pacing in tight circles, her eyes darting from corner to corner as if she would find answers there. Or maybe zombies.

“Ms. Ascher?”

Lydia spun around and saw Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth standing at the top of the stairs. “He was here to kill me, wasn't he?” she said.

Magozzi's thoughts started cycloning. Where the hell did you start? How did you tell someone they might be on some phantom's hit list? “We can't dismiss it as a possibility. We just saw the security footage from the Chatham Hotel the night Mr. Spencer was murdered. The man in your basement, the man from the airport, was caught on film, standing outside his hotel room door with a gun.”

She raised her eyes to his and as young as she was, he saw in that moment that she had grown up, and sadly, grown old. Perfect childhood, perfect life, perfect certainty that this world would always be that way, suddenly swirling down and out of her eyes like water following a drain.

He recognized what he saw in her empty stare as what he had felt at his first homicide scene years ago. A deadening shock as he'd looked down at a tiny child, dead by his mother's hand. That was the day the world had stopped making sense. And for Lydia Ascher, that day was now.

Lydia sank down into a chair at the kitchen table. “What's happening, Detectives? Tell me everything.”

And Magozzi and Gino did, because she deserved to know. And amazingly, things came out a lot smoother than Magozzi imagined they would, in part because she'd been in on it from the beginning and knew the backstory.

Unfortunately, all of it was too incredible to comprehend at this point, no matter how you told it, and as traumatized as she was by the nasty surprise she'd found in her basement, Lydia seemed to switch off halfway through the telling. Her eyes went blank and she looked down into her empty coffee cup, just shaking her head. But she came back to life when they started telling her about Ed Farrell's
murder in Cheeton, the other victims who were either murdered or missing, and the connection they all had to American Iron Foundry.

“American Iron Foundry is where my grandfather worked. And where Chuck's father worked, only not in Cheeton—they were both on the East Coast. New York and New Jersey. Maybe other places, too. From what I know from my mother, the government manufactured bomb components in plants scattered all over the country. So this is about the bomb after all?”

“Actually, we think it's all about the Sixth Idea.”

“So somebody wants me dead. The same people who probably killed Chuck and Wally and the man up in Cheeton. Because of something I know nothing about.”

“That's all speculation, but we're erring on the side of caution. For obvious reasons.”

“And you have no idea who wants me dead, or who killed the others?”

“We're working around the clock to find out. So are a lot of other people, both law enforcement and private individuals.”

She let out a weary sigh and started worrying a yarn snowman that was sitting on top of the table. “This is hopeless. Because
I don't know anything.
And neither did Chuck. Or Wally.”

Magozzi saw a single tear splash down onto the oak table and felt his heart squeeze. He and Gino were both as frustrated as she was. The only difference was, nobody was trying to kill them. At least not yet. “Ms. Ascher, this is overwhelming right now, but it's anything but hopeless. You have a lot of evidence in your basement that might help us . . .”

“Like what?”

“Ballistics, for one thing. And the man from the airport. If we can identify him, we're halfway there.”

“And what if you can't identify him? What if ballistics doesn't tell you anything?”

Gino clasped his hands together and leaned across the table, and Magozzi let him take over. He was the father of a teenage daughter, a blue-ribbon husband, and he was ultimately more qualified than he was to comfort a woman in distress. “There is an end to this, Ms. Ascher, you have our word. And we're going to keep you safe until we get to that end. In our line of work, you gather puzzle pieces until you can envision the finished picture, and now we have some more pieces to work with. Maybe it's the same with your drawing. Like you get the eyes right, but you can't figure out the mouth until you draw an ear or an eyebrow, and then the whole face comes together, just like that.”

Lydia cocked her head at Gino. “You have a unique perspective, Detective Rolseth.”

Magozzi was watching in amazement. With a lame metaphor, Gino had calmed and engaged her. The man had lessons to teach. “Ms. Ascher, you mentioned you had some old papers and photographs that belonged to your grandfather that were similar to the material Charles Spencer showed you on the plane. Perhaps we could go through those with you and see if something grabs our attention.”

“Of course. It's in a box right behind your chairs, Detectives. But there's probably nothing there you haven't already seen in Chuck's paperwork.”

“We never found Mr. Spencer's paperwork. Almost all of his personal effects were stolen, except for a small suitcase in his hotel room.”

“Oh. I didn't realize. Let me get it for you.” She walked around
the table and froze, her gaze fixed on the floor. “It was right there,” she said, pointing to an empty corner.

“Maybe you moved it?”

Lydia shook her head slowly. “No. No, definitely not. It was there when I left the house today, I'm positive. Somebody stole it. And it obviously wasn't the man from the airport.” She abruptly leaned between them both and started frenetically shuffling things on the kitchen table, oblivious to the fact that she was inappropriately situated between two strangers, bumping and jostling them.

She calmed down when her hand found an old paperback. “This is all I have left,” she mumbled.

“One of your favorites?” Magozzi asked after a skeptical glance at what was clearly a dated pulp fiction romance. His very own aunt, ostensibly a prude of the highest order, had kept a treasure trove of these novels under her bed, which Magozzi had found as a precocious eleven-year-old, and received a sound beating with a flyswatter for his trouble. God, he had hated that woman . . .

“No,” Lydia interrupted his reverie. “This was in the box my grandfather left to my mother in his will. All those journals with formulas and equations and then this.” She held up the book. “A cheap paperback of nonsense. It's baffling.”

She told them what her grandfather had told her mother—to hide the book, to keep it from the eyes of all others, and then pass it on to her own children.

Magozzi closed his eyes, let his mind ramble wherever it wanted to go. “Someone took the box of journals.”

Lydia looked down at the table, watching her fingers move aimlessly across the wood-grained surface. “Apparently.”

“But they missed this.”

Lydia exhaled a long breath. “I was curious about it, so I took it out of the box.”

“So they saw the box filled with all the journals and never realized this book was part of it.” He wasn't making a case, just thinking out loud.

“Maybe.”

“It looks like a book you were reading—like a lot of books people read, then lay on a table or chair to pick up later.”

“This one is a little different.” And then Lydia told them about what her mother had said; about the five-and-dime, the real places her mother had known and lived in, and that she thought her father had written the book.

“Do you mind if we take this along? We have some friends who might be able to make sense of it.”

Lydia nodded. “Please. Take it.”

Gino looked out the window where Deputy Harmon and a few other officers were gathering around a squad car. “Ms. Ascher, we need to speak with Deputy Harmon for a few minutes. He's arranging a safe place for you tonight. Around-the-clock protection until we can figure this thing out.”

She let out a shuddering sigh of relief. “I never even thought about where I'd spend the night. All I knew for sure was that I couldn't stay here.”

“They'll do a good job. We'll make sure of it.”

“Yes. Thank you, Detectives.”

Lydia's yard was bordered with a dense woods shouldered with white pines which were soughing in the wind. It was a cold sound
with a brutal accompaniment of icy pellets smacking against any piece of exposed skin.

Deputy Harmon was getting out of his squad when Gino and Magozzi approached. His face was red from the cold and he kept shifting his weight from foot to foot. “The sheriff is getting everything set up at the motel, Detectives.”

“You mind if we take a look before we leave?”

“Hell no. You see something we missed, we welcome the input.”

They all turned when they heard a vehicle coming down the snowy drive.

“BCA,” Gino said. “Deputy Harmon, we'd like to stick around until we can get prints on the John Doe.”

“No problem.” He looked anxiously toward Lydia's house. “Is Ms. Ascher all right?”

“She's fine, but you might want to let her know BCA is about to take over her house.”

“You got it, Detectives.”

Gino smiled a little as he watched him jog up the front walk. “I think Deputy Harmon's smitten.”

“Nothing more powerful than the bond between a white knight and a damsel in distress,” Magozzi said and then cringed, because it had come out sounding a lot more cynical than he'd meant it.