Cause of Death

  "But he could have been Dwain Shapiro's killer," I said.

  "That could be why he had the bible."

  Mant did not know. "When I realized we had a naval case in our morgue," he said, "I had Danny transport the body to Portsmouth. Clearly, the poor man's effects should have gone with him."

  "But Danny kept the book," I said.

  "I'm afraid so." He leaned forward and crushed out the cigarette in an ashtray on the coffee table.

  "Why would he do that?"

  " I happened to walk into his office and spotted it, and I asked him why in the world he had it. His explanation was that since the book had another individual's name on it, he wondered if it hadn't been accidentally picked up at the scene. That perhaps the satchel belonged to someone else, as well." He paused. "You see, he was still rather new and I think he'd simply made an honest mistake."

  "Tell me something," I said, "were any reporters calling the office or coming around at this time? For example, might anyone have inquired about the man crushed to death in the shipyard?"

  "Oh yes, Mr. Eddings showed up. I remember that because he was rather keen on finding out every detail, which puzzled me a bit. To my knowledge, he never wrote anything about it."

  "Might Danny have talked to Eddings?"

  Mant stared off in thought. "It seems I did see the two of them talking some. But young Danny certainly knew better than to give him a quote."

  "Might he have given Eddings the Book, assuming that Eddings was doing a story on the New Zionists?"

  "Actually, I wouldn't know. I never saw the Book again and assumed Danny had returned it to the Navy. I miss the lad. How is he, by the way? How is his knee'! I called him Hop-Along, you know." He laughed.

  But I did not answer his question or even smile. "Tell me what happened after that. What made you afraid?"

  "Strange things. Hang-ups. I felt I was being followed.

  My morgue supervisor, as you recall, abruptly quit with no good explanation. And one day when I went out to the parking lot, there was blood all over the windshield of my car. I actually had it tested in the lab, and it was type butcher shop. From a cow, in other words."

  "I presume you have met Detective Roche," I said.

  "Unfortunately. I don't fancy him at all."

  "Did he ever try to get information from you?"

  "He would drop by. Not for postmortems, of course. He doesn't have the stomach for them."

  "What did he want to know?"

  "Well, the Navy death we talked about. He had questions about that."

  "Did he ask about his personal effects? The satchel that inadvertently came into the morgue along with the body?"

  Mant was trying to remember. "Well, now that you're prodding this rather pathetic memory of mine, it seems I do recall him asking about the satchel. And I referred him to Danny, I believe."

  "Well, Danny obviously never gave it to him," I said.

  "Or at least not the Book, because that has turned up since."

  I did not tell him how because I did not want to upset him.

  "That bloody Book must be terribly important to someone," he mused.

  I paused as he smoked again. Then I said, "Why didn't you tell me'? Why did you just run and never say a word?"

  "Frankly, I didn't want you dragged into it as well. And it all sounded rather fantastic." He paused, and I could tell by his face he sensed other bad events had occurred since he had left Virginia. "Dr. Scarpetta, I'm not a young man.

  I only want to peacefully do my job a little while longer before I retire."

  I did not want to criticize him further because I understood what he had done. I frankly could not blame him and was glad he had fled, for he probably had saved his own life. Ironically, there had been nothing important he knew, and had he been murdered, it would have been for no cause, as Danny's murder was for no cause.

  Then I told the truth as I pushed back images of a knee brace as bright red as blood spilled, and leaves and trash clinging to gory hair. I remembered Danny's brilliant smile and would never forget the small white bag he had carried out of the cafe on a hill, where a dog had barked half the night. In my mind, I would always see the sadness and fear in his eyes when he helped me with the murdered Ted Eddings, whom I now realized he had known. Together, the two young men had inadvertently led each other a step closer to their eventual violent deaths.

  "Dear Lord. The poor boy," was all Mant could say.

  He covered his eyes with a handkerchief, and when I left him, he was still crying.

  WESLEY AND I FLEW BACK TO NEW YORK THAT NIGHT, and arrived early because tail winds were more than a hundred knots. We went through customs and got our bags, then the same shuttle met us at the curb and returned us to the private airport where the Learjet was waiting.

  The weather had suddenly warmed and was threatening rain, and we flew between colossal black thunderheads lighting up with violent thoughts. The storm loudly cracked and flashed as we sped through what seemed the middle of a feud. I had been briefed a little as to the current state of affairs, and it had come as no surprise that the Bureau had established an outpost along with others set up by police and rescue crews.

  Lucy, I was relieved to hear, had been brought in from the field, and was working again in the Engineering Re search Facility, or ERF, where she was safe. What Wesley did not tell me until we reached the Academy was that she had been deployed along with the rest of HRT and would not be at Quantico long.

  "Out of the question," I said to him as if I were a mother refusing permission.

  "I'm afraid you don't have a say in this," he replied.

  He was helping me carry my bags through the Jefferson lobby, which was deserted this Saturday night. We waved to the young women at the registration desk as we continued arguing.

  "For God's sake," I went on, "she's brand-new. You can't just throw her into the middle of a nuclear crisis."

  "We're not throwing her into anything." He pushed open glass doors. "All we need are her technical skills.

  She's not going to be doing any sniper-shooting or jumping out of planes."

  "Where is she now?" I asked as we got on an elevator.

  "Hopefully in bed."

  "Oh." I looked at my watch. "I guess it is midnight. I thought it was tomorrow and I should be getting up."

  "I know. I'm screwed up, too."

  Our eyes met and I looked away. "I guess we're supposed to pretend nothing happened," I said with an edge to my voice, for there had been no discussion of what had gone on between us.

  We walked out into the hall and he pressed a code into a digitalized keypad. A lock released and he opened another glass door.

  "What good would it do to pretend?" he said, entering another code and opening another door.

  "Just tell me what you want to do," I said.

  We were inside the security suite where I usually stayed when work or danger kept me here overnight. He carried my bags into the bedroom as I drew draperies across the large window in the living room. The decor was comfortable but plain, and when Wesley did not respond, I remembered it probably was not safe to talk intimately in this place where I knew at the very least phones were monitored. I followed him back out into the hall and repeated my question.

  "Be patient," he said, and he looked sad, or maybe he was just weary. "Look, Kay, I've got to go home. First thing in the morning we've got to do a surveillance by air with Marcia Gradecki and Senator Lord."

  Gradecki was the United States attorney general, and Frank Lord was the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and an old friend.

  "I'd like you along since overall you seem to know more of what's been going on than anyone else. Maybe you can explain to them the importance of the bible these wackos believe. That they'll kill for it. They'll die for it."

  He sighed and rubbed his eyes. "And we need to talk about how we're going to-God forbid-handle the contaminated dead should these goddamn assholes decide to blow up the reactors." He looked at
me again. "All we can do is try," he said, and I knew he referred to more than the present crisis.

  "That's what I'm doing, Benton," I said, and I walked back inside my suite.

  I called the switchboard and asked them to ring Lucy's room, and when there was no answer, I knew what that meant. She was at ERF, and I could not call there because I did not know where in that building the size of a football field she might be. So I put on my coat and walked out of Jefferson because I could not steep until I saw my niece.

  ERF had its own guard gate not far from the one at the entrance of the Academy, and most of the FBI police, by now, knew me pretty well. The guard on duty looked surprised when I appeared, and he walked outside to see what I wanted.

  "I think my niece is working late," I began to explain.

  "Yes, ma'am. I did see her go in earlier."

  "is there any way you can contact her?"

  "Hmmm." He frowned. "Might you have any idea what area she'd likely be in?"

  "Maybe the computer room."

  He tried that to no avail, then looked at me. "This is important."

  "Yes, it is," I said with gratitude.

  He raised his radio to his mouth.

  "Unit forty-two to base," he said.

  "Forty-two, come in."

  "You ten-twenty-five me at ERF gate?"

  "Ten-four."

  We waited for the guard to arrive, and he occupied the booth while his partner let me inside the building. For a while we roamed long empty hallways, trying locked doors that led into machine shops and laboratories where my niece might be. After about fifteen minutes of this, we got lucky. He tried a door and it opened onto an expansive room that was a Santa's workshop of scientific activity.

  Central to this was Lucy, who was wearing a data glove and head-mounted display connected to long thick black cables snaking over the floor.

  "Will you be okay?" the guard asked me.

  "Yes," I said. "Thank you so much."

  Co-workers in lab coats and coveralls were busy with computers, interface devices and large video screens, and they all saw me walk in. But Lucy was blind. She really was not in this room but the one in the small CRTs covering her eyes as she conducted a virtual-reality walk through along a catwalk in what I suspected was the Old Point nuclear power plant.

  "I'm going to zoom in now," she was saying as she pressed a button on top of the glove.

  The area on the video screen suddenly got bigger as the figure that was Lucy stopped at steep grated stairs.

  "Shit, I'm zooming out," she said impatiently. "No way this is going to work."

  "I promise it can," said a young man monitoring a big black box. "But it's tricky."

  She paused and made some other adjustment. "I don't know, Jim, is this really high-res data or is the problem me?"

  "I think the problem's you."

  "Maybe I'm getting cyber sick," my niece then said as she moved around inside what looked like conveyor belts and huge turbines that I could see on the video screen.

  "I'll take a look at-the algorithm."

  "You know," she said, making her way down virtual stairs, "maybe we should just put it in C code and go from a delay of three-four to three hundred and four microseconds, et cetera, instead of whatever's in the software we got."

  "Yeah. The transfer sequences are off," said someone else. "We got to adjust the timing loops."

  "What we don't have is the luxury of massaging this too much," another opinion sounded. "And Lucy, your aunt's here."

  She briefly paused, then went on as if she had not heard what the person just said. "Look, I'll do the C code before morning. We gotta be sharp or Toto's going to end up stuck or failing down stairs. And then we're totally screwed."

  Toto, I could only conclude, was the odd bubble head with one video eye that was mounted on a boxy steel body no more than three feet high. Legs were cleated tracks, arms had grippers, and in general he reminded me of a small animated tank. Toto was parked to one side, not far from his master, who was taking off her helmet.

  "We got to change the bio-controllers on this glove," she said as she began carefully pulling it off. "I'm used to one finger meaning forward and two meaning back. Not the other way around. I can't afford a mix-up like that when we're in the field."

  "That's an easy one," said Jim, and he went to her and took the glove.

  Lucy looked keyed up to the point of being crazed when she met me near the door.

  "How'd you get in?" She wasn't the least bit friendly.

  "One of the guards."

  "Good thing they know you."

  "Benton told me they'd brought you back, that HRT needs you," I said.

  She watched her colleagues continue to work. "Most of the guys are already there."

  "At Old Point," I said.

  "We've got divers around the area, snipers set up nearby, choppers waiting. But nothing's going to do any good unless we can get at least one person in."

  "And obviously, that's not you," I said, knowing that if she claimed otherwise I would kill the FBI, the entire Bureau, all of them at once.

  "In a way it's me going in," my niece said. "I'll be the one working Toto. Hey, Jim," she called out. "While you're at it, let's add a fly command to the pad."

  "So Toto's gonna have wings," someone cracked.

  Good thing. We're gonna need a smart guardian angel."

  "Lucy, do you have any idea how dangerous these people are?" I could not help but say.

  She looked at me and sighed. "I mean, what do you think, Aunt Kay? Do you think I'm just a kid playing with Tinkertoys?"

  "I think that I can't help but feel very worried."

  "We should all be worried right now," she said, drained.

  "Look, I got to get back to work." She glanced at her watch and blew out a big breath. "You want a quick overview of my plan so you at least know what's going on?"

  "Please."

  "It starts with this." She sat on the floor and I got down beside her, our backs against the wall. "Normally, a robot like Toto would be controlled by radio, which would never work inside a facility with so much concrete and steel. So I've come up with what I think is a better way. Basically, he'll carry a spool of fiber optic cable that he'll leave behind like a snail's trail as he moves around."

  "And where is he going to move around?" I asked. "Inside the power plant?"

  "We're trying to determine that now," she said. "But a lot will depend on what happens. We could be covert, such as in information gathering. Or we could end up with an overt deployment on our hands, such as if the terrorists want a hostage phone, which we're banking on. Toto has to be ready to go anywhere instantly."

  "Except stairs."

  "He can do stairs. Some better than others."

  "The fiber optics cable will be your eyes?" I said.

  "It will hook right into my data gloves." She held up both hands. "And I will move as if it's me going in instead of Toto. Virtual reality will allow me to have a remote presence so I can react instantly to whatever his sensors pick up. And by the way, most of them are in that lovely shade of gray we made him," She pointed to her friend across the room. "His smart paint helps him not to bump into things," she added as if she might have feelings for him.

  "Did Janet come back with you?" I then asked.

  "She's finishing up in Charlottesville."

  "Finishing up?"

  "We know who's been breaking into CP&L's computer," she said. "A woman graduate assistant in nuclear physics. Surprise, surprise."

  "What's her name?"

  "Loren something." She rubbed her face with her hands.

  God, I should never have sat down. You know cyberspace really can make you dizzy if you stay in it too long. Lately, it's almost been making me sick. U.- She snapped her fingers several times. "McComb. Loren McComb."

  "And she's how old'?" I asked as I remembered Cleta saying that the name of Eddings' girlfriend was Loren.

  "Late twenties."

  "Whe
re is she from?"

  "England. But she's actually South African. She's black."

  "Thus explaining her poor character, according to Mrs. Eddings."

  "Huh?" Lucy looked bizarrely at me.

  "What about a connection with the New Zionists?" I asked.

  "Apparently she got associated with them over the net.