The Price of Innocence (16 page)

HS staff also informed them that Bruce Lambert had graciously opened the lobby of his adjacent factory for workers who needed a bathroom, a rest or some warm air. The lobby had also been stocked with coffee, sandwiches, water and donuts.

‘Dunkin’s or Krispy Kreme?’ Theresa queried the slender Homeland Security agent.

‘Presti’s.’

‘Bless the man.’

Don snorted. ‘PR – the richest man in the country being nice to the little guy.’

‘Good for him,’ Theresa defended. ‘Us little guys need a lot of nice.’

A temporary metal staircase led to the first sublevel and their huge storage room. Originally, a section of the room had been closed off by a chain-link fence and a padlock, to which only the trace evidence section had the key, and stored boxes of evidence and row after row of victims’ clothing. Now the fence had been mangled and most of the clothing racks flattened, though some of the cardboard boxes had survived – they’d been stacked against the wall, which remained in parts. The rest of the storage unit had been filled with file cabinets of old case files, X-rays and histology slides (slides made from sections of tissue for the pathologists to use in making a diagnosis). Along with Theresa and Don, one histologist, one toxicologist, two off-duty deskmen and poor little Dr Banachek had been recruited to work at the site.

All of them plucked their items from the collapsed stones and carted them to the road where the county had rented a U-Haul box truck for this express purpose. This work could not be outsourced. These items were not bricks or books or furniture. They were evidence, and had to remain in the custody of the M.E.’s office at all times. It was mindless manual labor instead of intelligent forensic work, the stuff that ‘other duties as assigned’ covered in the job description, the tasks that came along more often than TV would suggest, but Theresa had long since become accustomed to them. She only wished she’d thought to bring a radio. Every job went more smoothly with tunes.

She and Don assembled the supply of new cardboard boxes to fill with the clothing from victims past. For approximately forty years the bloody shirts and pants and underwear had been stored on hangers, covered with thin dry-cleaner’s bags and hung on wheeled racks, like closeouts from the old May Company’s bargain basement. Nowadays all items were sealed in breathable paper bags after thorough drying, better for forensic testing though not necessarily easier to handle, and certainly no more impervious to tons of rubble suddenly falling through the roof. Theresa pulled a piece of crushed fence to the side to reach the first rack. They both wore heavy leather gloves to protect their hands from broken glass and stone.

‘Usually these smell kind of musty, with that dried-blood smell,’ she commented to Don. ‘But now I don’t even notice it over the iodine fumes.’

He folded the clothing into a fresh box. ‘At least it helped the dogs sniff out any remaining unexploded crystals. Wouldn’t want you filling your pockets again.’

She shuddered at the thought.

Don changed the subject, sort of. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t iodine fumes carcinogenic?’

‘Yep. That’s why we don’t often do iodine fuming for fingerprints any more except in a fume hood or a very well-ventilated area. It works great, but it just might kill you.’

‘I’m surprised OSHA doesn’t object to our being here.’

‘We’re government employees.’ She mashed the sets of clothing into the bottom of the box in order to fit as many items in as possible. It would all have to be sorted out later; the objective now was to move as much as they could as fast as they could. ‘OSHA doesn’t apply to us.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘I am not. Government employees are exempt. Always have been. We’re covered by the Ohio Department of Health, which –’ she panted a bit while hefting another thick set of bloodied clothing into the box – ‘subscribes to all OSHA guidelines, except they don’t do surprise inspections.’

‘So they instruct all government offices to take care of us, but never actually check to see if they do.’

‘We’re civil service. It’s another word for expendable.’ She pushed on the stack of clothing inside its cardboard walls with all her weight, but it would not budge. It had taken all it would take. Don held the flaps closed while she taped them with red tamper-proof evidence tape, then added her initials over this seal with a Sharpie pen. Then they motioned to the two deskmen, who now had the unenviable task of maneuvering the very full box up the temporary staircase and out to the moving truck. When the truck filled, either she or Don would have to ride back to the M.E.’s office with it. The garage had been emptied of vehicles and all available basement space had been pressed into service as temporary storage.

‘Not that I’m complaining,’ she went on. ‘Because you can have all the rules and guidelines you want, but when it comes down to something like this, one fact always wins out.’

‘You gotta do what you gotta do,’ Don supplied.

‘Exactly.’

They worked in silence for a while. Then Don said, ‘Not much of an explosive. It’s bad enough it has to destroy something, but make it smelly and possibly mutagenic too?’

‘It’s an extremely odd choice for an explosive. Oliver says it would have taken between one thousand and two thousand
pounds
of nitrogen triiodide to take down this building. That’s like a cubic yard. That’s like over five hundred gallons. That’s, like, a
lot
. They must have stockpiled it here, just like we stockpiled our old X-rays.’

‘Or they made it here. I wonder if the Feds found any equipment in the wreckage.’

‘If they did, they’re not going to tell us.’ Theresa picked up a small metal box designed to store glass slides, listening to the disheartening tinkle of the broken shards inside. ‘It might not have been that much, if there had been other explosives in the room, or potentially combustible compounds throughout the building, like metal shavings or pervasive organic materials. Sugar dust took out that company in Georgia a few years ago. The shock wave from the NI3 would have set off anything else. Though I can’t see a combustible dust problem in a residential building, and apparently the explosion generated from one point, that gaping black hole next to us.’

‘So we’re back to a big ol’ pile of NI3.’

‘Which Leo insists is the most impractical explosive ever; he says no one could have brought that much of it together without blowing themselves to tiny bits long ago. On top of that it tends to decompose, quickly, even if treated well and sealed up. The iodine would begin to subliminate and produce smelly, staining purple gas.’

He helped her place the slide box into one of the fresh large boxes. ‘Do they still think it’s this Kadam guy? For any reason other than being of Middle Eastern descent?’

‘They have a few more reasons than that. Christine gave me a few more details. His employer supposedly rented the space here but his work address comes back to a vacant lot. Kadam’s own personal history fell off the charts three years ago. No address, no income tax return, no credit cards.’

‘How did Christine find that out?’

‘I didn’t ask.’

She helped him seal up the box and maneuver it up the steps. ‘This should finish off the truck,’ Don said. ‘If I don’t return, I’m on my way to the office. Want anything?’

‘A cot and a sleeping bag would be nice.’

‘How about coffee?’

‘That, too.’

If she had thought it would be lonely in the near-center of downtown in the middle of the night, she now learned the error of it. Cars came and went, with the Doppler principle affecting the sound as they moved up the street. At least once every half-hour a police car from the nearby police headquarters or a lone ambulance fired up the siren. Theresa wondered how the tenants who had lived in the Bingham’s trendy lofts ever got any sleep. The blast site, ringed with blinding light, teemed with not only the M.E. staff, but Homeland Security and FBI agents. Other people’s conversations formed a background hum like a radio played in the next office, only loud enough to catch a theme here or there but not the whole song.

Theresa peeked over at the FBI’s storage area, well on the other side of the building. ‘It looks like a bunch of old paperwork,’ she told Don when he returned. ‘Nothing interesting, like our stuff.’

‘Should we loan them a few boxes of bloody clothes?’

‘It would be the neighborly thing to do.’

Having passed her fortieth birthday the previous year, Theresa cared for few things less than pulling an all-nighter. But once resigned to the idea that she would not see her bed that night, it wasn’t that bad. Don made regular trips to the Lambert lobby for coffee, as much for the warmth as for the caffeine. The constant activity, though she would no doubt feel each muscle tomorrow, kept the time moving. And she had too much pride to falter in front of either the much younger Don or the much older Dr Banachek.

She kept an eye on the portly pathologist. Occasionally he would ask Don for help in wrestling a mangled drawer from its file cabinet but then would become lost in its contents, reliving past cases through X-rays of the victim’s broken bones or gunshot wound. One of the histologists would have to prod him gently back into action.

Around three a.m. Theresa sealed up the last container of clothing. ‘Time for a break before we start on the rest. I need a ladies’ room and some more coffee. Want a donut?’

Don shook his head. ‘I’ve had enough sugar for one night.’

‘Silly boy. There’s no such thing as too much sugar.’ She took her water bottle to refill and climbed the metal steps, then followed the yellow tape path out to the sidewalk and turned to the south.

This would be her second visit to the Lambert mansion/workshop/factory in less than twenty-four hours. Strange. Now the lights were subdued and the noise near church level. What appeared to be a giant plastic frame had been erected over the damaged Entrance Number Two.

The lobby doors of frosted glass swung open with a mere whisper, ushering her in to a silent cavern. The room served as both museum and lobby, with marble floors and a vaulted ceiling. Glass cases ringed the area and huge diagrams and photographs hung on the walls. A long table with coffee urns, boxes of donuts and even a fruit plate waited for her on the left, but she turned away, in no hurry to rush back to work. Besides, she needed to find a bathroom first.

The story of Bruce Lambert began there to the right, with a blown-up photo of his humble beginnings in a weathered house on Fulton Road. Smiling parents, a maintenance man and a jewelry design assistant, flanked three boys dressed for Halloween. One, a scrawny thing with big ears, wore a magician’s outfit. According to the display text they suspected their son’s potential when he won his third grade science fair. And every science fair he entered after that, the placard added.

The glass cases did not follow the same chronological order, however, and the one nearest her held a blown-up model of a microchip that Lambert had developed when he – and Theresa – had been in their early thirties. The chip had earned Lambert his first million.

The next wall display jumped ahead to the college years, when Lambert took his undergraduate degree from Cleveland State and headed to MIT, which, the wording implied, only financial considerations had kept him from attending in the first place. Theresa hoped none of the alumni association staff noticed this placard, or Lambert might receive a sternly worded letter about loyalty and the lack thereof. He would have to put Ginny’s yearbook collection on display as a peace offering.

No mention of sending brother Carl on his short trip to Columbia, or who the youngest boy might be.

Next, a collage devoted to the rich man’s humanitarian efforts – providing Katrina victims with hyper-efficient generators and experimenting with a new kind of smart building by constructing an orphanage in Abkhazia, on the coast of the Black Sea. A footnote told how Carl fell in love with the country and its children and especially a teacher at the orphanage. They married and adopted two of the boys.

The next few cases and displays explained each area in which Lambert had become interested in turn, always leaving behind a trail of better, faster, cheaper products for the American people to use. The most powerful processor, the cordless phone with the highest range, the cleanest diesel fuel. The latter led him to the gasoline crisis and the internal combustion engine.

She leaned her elbows on a glass display case and read the printing around small models of six-cylinder engines; the leaning eased some pressure in her lower back. Electric cars were too inconvenient and unlikely to be accepted by Americans in any real sense, the writing proclaimed. The internal combustion engine had functioned well for a hundred years. All that was needed was to find something besides compressed gas vapor to provide the small, controlled explosion that pushed away the piston. After many experiments, Lambert believed he had found the answer in nitrogen crystals.

Did nitrogen come in crystals? And why did Theresa seem to find herself surrounded by nitrogen all of a sudden?

No joke intended. It
did
comprise nearly eighty per cent of the atmosphere. Humans sucked in much more nitrogen with each breath than any other element.

Could it be explosive? Not normally. She might know more if she had listened to Lambert’s tour instead of chatting up David Madison. Her weary brain needed a connection between all these events, the Bingham explosion, Marty Davis’ assassination, the Lambert factory explosion, Lily and her meth habit … Theresa formed the only link, and a completely random one. She rapped her knuckles on the display in frustration.

A voice startled her. ‘Please don’t tap on the glass.’

In the dim corner near the entrance to the rest of the building, behind a small podium, sat a black man in a nice suit, with the body type of a Buddha statue and the immobility to match.

‘S-sorry.’

‘That’s all right.’

She approached him, gingerly, as if he were a new species of amphibian which might leap at any moment. His eyes were invisible behind tinted glasses. She couldn’t even tell if they were open. ‘What kind of crystals?’