The Price of Innocence (11 page)

They followed the other alumni back into the hallway, pausing outside a set of windows as the plastic smell receded. The windows turned out to be an observation spot, looking down on a two-story-high room about thirty by fifty feet, as brilliantly lit as an operating room even without the skylight windows in the opposite wall. A suspended track bisected the length, and Theresa saw the shell of an automobile dangling from its pulley. In the center of the room, mobile robots surrounded another frame, also resembling a small vehicle, with all its parts scattered about it on the floor like an unmade jigsaw puzzle: wheels, seats, axle, engine.

Rimmed with workbenches, cabinets, the walls and floors of the fishbowl-like room were white but everything else stood out in color: books, models, drawing boards with sketches, phones, even a leftover bowl of popcorn. One desk held both a collection of fluorescent Post-it notes and a four-foot-long pipe cutter that looked too heavy to lift, much less use. Abandoned Tyvek jumpsuits had been thrown over chairs and desks like shed skins. It reminded her of an amusement park tour ride. It only needed a caption: ‘Genius at work’.

They watched the slightly hypnotic process as a crane on a suspended track ushered the shell across the room to be lowered on to a waiting chassis, tended by the waiting robots. Lambert explained that the process could be reversed as well; anything that didn’t work would be disassembled down to the problem, or down to its bolts if necessary. A man in the audience asked if he’d be opening any future assembly plants in Cleveland. Lambert’s reply was lost to her as Madison leaned down to speak quietly in her ear, ‘Look, the reason I’m dumping all this on you is … I wanted to explain …’

‘Why you hide from the crowd?’

‘Yeah, well. I don’t hide, exactly, more like avoid. But I also wanted to be straight about it, in case we … run into each other again.’

‘I’d love to run into you again.’ She choked, coughed, and added, ‘Wait – did I say that out loud?’

He laughed.

‘Really, this isn’t like me.’ It would be impossible to describe just how
unlike
her it was. She hadn’t chased a man since she’d been, well, a student at CSU, and then made the mistake of catching him. She’d been interested in her late fiancé from the moment they met, but hadn’t let on for months. How did this particular man get past her defenses, and in such record time?

This was dangerous.

She stared at the robots.

‘I’d like that,’ Madison said. ‘Right now, though, I have to go pick up Jake. His judo class will be over in ten minutes. The lobby’s right here, so I’m going to take this opportunity to slip out.’

‘Oh. Well, OK, then. It was nice talking to you.’ Inane! She made herself look at him, and hoped her cheeks were not flushing.

‘Yeah, I have such pleasant conversation.’ He put a hand on her upper arm, nearly encircling it with his fingers, making her ever so glad she
had
worn the too-tight shirt. ‘Thanks for listening.’

She bit her tongue to keep from saying ‘Anytime’, and settled for smiling, curving up her warm cheeks. He skulked away down the catwalk without looking back. She made herself gaze at the workroom and stare at the nearly completed electric car without seeing it.

Then she took in a deeply contented sigh.

Ridiculous.

Bruce Lambert caught her gaze again and she blushed anew, a sure confession that she hadn’t heard a word he’d said about robotic assembly.

The crowd moved on. She followed.

You do not like that man. This is a silly flash of infatuation because you’re bored and lonely and you drank wine on an empty stomach. And he’s probably only trying to prove that he can still be found attractive by women who don’t prefer little boys.

The group wound up back in the conference room. Some collapsed into chairs, as if that had been the longest walk they’d taken in months. Theresa headed for the wine box, ignoring the baby carrots entirely this time. Bruce Lambert moved on to the subject of fuel cells and how they lasted ten times longer than batteries but still ran out too soon and were too difficult to replenish. She wondered if he had agreed to speak to the board to help the school reduce its carbon footprint or to drum up new investors.

Her eye fell on the yearbooks. Ginny had stacked them in groups of five, sitting alternately on their sides and on their ends, with the tail stacks fanned slightly. The Vice Chairman would slap Theresa’s fingers if she disturbed them.

She’d have to be careful. To disguise her errand, even from herself, she first located her own year and photograph, noting with a sigh how firm her skin had been. Then she moved four years back and found David Madison’s. He hadn’t changed his hairstyle much; the flecks of gray made it look lighter these twenty-three years later. Schoolgirl behavior, gathering information on her secret crush and squirreling it away. Next she’d be leaving notes in his locker.

Bruce Lambert wrapped up the discussion of thermoset composites and took some questions. Yes, he expected the car to be on sale within the next year, possibly the next six months. Yes, he had helped create the full-body scanning station for schools and no, he didn’t feel they were an invasion of privacy. No, he had not proposed to his current girlfriend, that was a rumor. No, his brother Carl had not gone to CSU until his sophomore year; like the Kennedys, his father had planned for his eldest child to bring in riches and scraped and saved to send Carl to Columbia, from which he was promptly expelled for a schoolboy prank that remained a more closely guarded secret than Bruce’s new fuel crystals, ha ha. Yes, the new cars would be available in an array of colors, including lemon yellow and something called electric poppy.

She turned another page, and once again David Madison’s face jumped out at her. In a candid shot under the heading ‘Campus Life’, his younger incarnation hoisted a brew in the tradition of all college students since the beginning of time. He grinned for the camera with a bit more mischief than he had for the head shot. The caption read, ‘The chemistry club confers in the Rathskeller.’

Chemistry? He majored in accounting. No doubt the yearbook writers meant it as some sort of joke, since the phrase had not been capitalized. Or perhaps he’d been there as a guest?

At the front of the room, Cleveland’s resident genius explained how his version of the internal combustion engine was fueled by sand-like crystals. Theresa realized that everyone else had taken a seat, and sat down at the end of the last row so that her complete inattention would not be so obvious. She flipped to the index of the yearbook. The Chemistry Club had a nicely framed group picture, which did not include David Madison or anyone else from the Rathskeller photo. The caption had referred only to the chemical compounds of hops and barley.

The young man next to David seemed familiar. Perhaps she’d shared a class with him; if he had been an underclassman in the photo, he might still have been there when she attended. He had a round face and a little too much curly brown hair to be flattering. She stared at the photo, willing the memory to come back to her, but it resisted until she gave up and examined the other students at the bar. One slender boy in the back stood with his shoulders hunched in, as if cowering, though he smiled, and his body language made her think of that squirrelly guy at Marty Davis’ funeral.

She went back to the young man holding a bottle of Pabst and leaning on David Madison. Maybe if she took off twenty years and added some pounds – that was it. She hadn’t met him in a class but at the crime scene where he’d been shot to death.

Marty Davis.

She paged briskly through the rest of the yearbook. David said he attended the funeral because Marty had been kind to him during the brouhaha with his wife. Well, why not because they had been classmates first? She had wondered at the time why a patrol officer would have had steady contact with him after the case had been assigned to detectives – surely Marty would have done what he could to walk his old friend through the myriad of events that made up an investigation, arrest and prosecution. But why not say, ‘I’m an old friend,’ and leave it at that, instead of bringing up the errant wife?

Maybe the investigation loomed so large in David’s life that he’d forgotten how he first got to be friends with Marty. Maybe some perverse impulse made him bring up his wife with any woman he felt attracted to – is he
attracted
to me? – the same way people pick at scabs.

She could imagine what Rachael would say. ‘You work in a morgue and met this guy at a funeral?
Mom
!’

‘I
am
in there,’ Bruce Lambert said, materializing next to her. He poured himself a plastic glass of very cheap wine. ‘Somewhere. I wasn’t exactly Mr Popularity.’

After the initial shock, Theresa found her voice. ‘Me either. I mean—’

From some place nearby she heard a long, warning rumble. Then the floor began to quake.

T
here was no force, no propulsion pushing her away. Just a deep-seated
sound
, at once too loud to have a rational explanation and too muffled to be identifiable. The room shook, glass shattered somewhere, and Bruce Lambert pushed her to the floor, partially under the table that held the wine and baby carrots. Suddenly her cheek pressed into the linoleum and his body partially covered hers while a wave of vibration passed through them, almost imperceptibly separate from the noise that followed.

Then it receded, and Bruce Lambert got to his feet, pulling her along. The air filled with dust that rolled toward them like a living thing. ‘Are you all right?’

She could only nod, stupidly. There must have been some sort of accident. One of Bruce Lambert’s many experiments hadn’t turned out so well.

Then a man somewhere to her left said, ‘Was that an explosion?’

‘They really are trying to blow this place up!’

Thirty-odd college graduates scrambled for the doorway, Ginny Wilson leading the way.

Out in the hallway, a door three to the west leaked smoke and showed the erratic lighting of flames within. She followed Bruce Lambert toward that ominous glow.

Then she smelled it.

The wispy smoke carried odors of melted plastic and charred upholstery, but also a faint aroma of disinfectant. The same acrid smell from the Bingham building, and the crystal that she’d carried in her pocket. Nitrogen triiodide.

She pulled out her phone.

‘You almost got blown up for the second time this week?’ Frank demanded.

‘It sounds bad when you say it like that.’ She had been all right until now, calling the lab, retrieving her camera to take photos of the charred storage closet outside the fishbowl workroom, helping the EMT move a badly burned technician and forbidding him to move the engineer he pronounced dead, trapped beneath one of the overturned robots – they were much larger up close – all the while trying not to ponder why the area she had been in only ten minutes beforehand had turned into a smoking hole.

But now the tremor in her cousin’s voice made her realize that neither one of them had even begun to deal with the close call they’d had at the Bingham building. She had grown accustomed to the physical threats of the job, and mostly of Frank’s job, by not thinking about it – after all, there was little she could do to control it. But clearly that would not be sufficient, not for this round.

She tried not to cough. The air still stunk of iodine. ‘I’m all right. Not even a scratch.’

Her cousin said, ‘It’s you. Someone’s trying to kill you.’

‘No, someone’s trying to kill America’s first truly popular electric car.’ She glanced over at Cleveland’s resident genius. Lambert stood over the dead engineer. Neck bent, he had one hand on his belt and the other covered his face, a still life of regret and grief. His brother Carl, a taller and handsomer version of Lambert, had draped one arm around his shoulders. The rest of the staff crowded in and out, gaping, exclaiming, some crying. All other movement had ceased. The huge robotic arms hung limp as if they, too, wept.

‘You think so?’ Frank asked.

Theresa explained what she had learned on the tour, the few things she had picked up when not distracted by David Madison. ‘This is where they design robots that assemble parts and suchlike. Bruce says the explosion obviously came from a supply closet off this main workroom.’

‘So now you’re on a first name basis with the richest man in the country?’

‘No, I heard him say that to the firemen. What I mean is, who knows how long the bomb could have been in there?’

‘And it just happens to go off when you are up the hall.’

‘Exactly – up the hall, not in the room.’ Outside, the sun emerged from behind one of Cleveland’s many clouds and surged through the skylights above them. Its beam picked up the swirling motes she’d been breathing in and turned the car parts, smoke and people into a masterpiece of surrealism. She did not mention David Madison’s early exit. The man had been with her every minute and could not have snuck a bomb into the supply closet during the tour. From what she knew of nitrogen triiodide it would take a chunk the size of a concrete block to cause this much damage, and he could hardly have been carting that around in the pocket of his suit coat.

Of course, he could have planted it
before
the tour. But still, size of a concrete block, strolling around a strange facility … ‘The security here seems adequate. Locked doors, security guards. We all had to sign in, get a pass, had a monitor with us during the tour, not to mention the said richest man. I’ve seen cameras. Plus every member of the staff seems to be best buds with every other member. Shipping a box here would be much easier than trying to get in yourself.’

‘Unless you already work there,’ Frank said.

‘But if you could get into this building, why blow up the Bingham next door? That sounds like someone who
doesn’t
work here.’

‘How long has that tour been scheduled?’

‘At least three weeks.’

‘What about Lambert? Any damage?’

‘Not hurt.’ Because he’d been lying on top of me underneath a table, she thought but didn’t say. ‘One of his engineers wasn’t as lucky.’ She and Lambert had worked to uncover the man’s head and one shoulder. One of the assembly robots had fallen over, crushing him before he could die of smoke inhalation or extreme heat. Blood seeped from his scalp, the puddle now thickened with ash and debris.