The Price of Innocence (35 page)

She couldn’t quite breathe with that image in her mind, either.

Her phone ran out of space and she closed it. She couldn’t send the video anyway, and the phone would wind up in the same shape as her body. In pieces.

‘It’s not as if I like any of this, Theresa. But I’ll do what I have to. I always have.’

‘What about your empire?’ she asked Lambert. ‘What about your IPO?’

‘It will dip a little,’ he said, quite seriously, ‘what with two explosions in my lab in the same week. But I’ll still end up with more money than God, and I can access my accounts from Bora Bora just as easily as I can here.’

‘You’d leave your home? Spend the rest of your life in exile?’

Lambert closed his laptop, unplugged it and moved it closer to the nitrogen triiodide. Whatever was on its hard drive, he wanted it disintegrated along with Theresa. ‘Not saying I’m happy about it, but every failure is a new beginning. I’ll miss my homies, but America? I’ve been ready to shake off the dirt of this puritan, everybody-is-special wasteland of idiots for a long time.’

He turned to his former, and current, partner. ‘Thanks, DaVinci. And if you’re ever in the south Pacific – don’t look me up.’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ Leo said. The two men nodded at each other, and the soon-to-be richest man in the world left the room. He did not so much as glance at Theresa.

Theresa’s boss returned to the small metal box and touched it. She heard something click. Then he looked at her. The sheen of bravado he’d kept up with his old friend now faded from his face. He seemed deeply concerned, and almost sad.

Almost.

‘Goodbye,’ he said. Then he walked out as well, moving briskly, leaving her behind.

‘Hell with that,’ she said.

S
he had to work quickly. All Lambert and Leo had to do was clear the building and get out to the street, which would take, what, four minutes at the most? No reason to set the detonator for any longer than that. She checked her Swatch. 9:15.

She could not jump over the bricks. The two men had obviously moved them somehow but she didn’t know how and couldn’t risk it. She could see wires running underneath them as well – possibly a booby trap.

The only way out was straight up.

The ceiling of the workroom stretched far above, but the suspended track for the crane had been built to help workers move large car panels on and off the working chassis. The beam passed only three or four feet above her head. She could not reach it but with luck she could lasso it.

Leo hadn’t even bothered to empty her pockets, leaving her not only the useless cell phone but her set of keys. The mini Swiss Army knife was too short to be considered a weapon, but still sharp enough to function as a knife. She held up the body bag with her left hand and sliced down the middle of its back, anchoring the bottom with one foot so that the loose ends didn’t flop on to any of the explosive bricks. There might be tiny crystals around her feet, but she didn’t have time to be
that
careful.

Body bags were constructed to carry up to four hundred pounds without complaint, so slicing through its interconnected fibers made tough work even for a sharp knife. At least half a minute gone already.

Now she had two halves of a body bag, still connected at the foot area. She took one half, held it in one hand like a ranchero, and began to twirl. Being careful, of course, not to let even the lightweight plastic brush the tops of the stacked bricks lest it disturb the crystalline structure of its molecules, just enough to blow her to bits. Then she let go, thrusting the bulky plastic toward the ceiling.

It went up nicely, but came straight back down, prompting a frantic grabbing collection to keep any of it from landing on top of the crystals. She needed it to go up and over, but didn’t have a lot of room for footwork.

She gathered it up, began to twirl again, trying not to think about how much time had already elapsed. Threw it.

The loose end sailed over the oily beam at least. But it was like trying to throw a ribbon – it didn’t sail far enough, and the anchor side wasn’t stiff enough to push it further. So she wiggled it, hoping to snake the free end down to her upstretched hand.

9:17.

She wiggled too hard, and the whole bag slid back down on top of her. Another frantic grab to keep it from striking the tiny molecules of the crystals. She prepared for another throw, acutely aware that if she could not do this, and immediately, she would be vaporized, leaving her child motherless and her own mother grieving.

She threw, all the desperation in her body traveling through her arms and into the lifeless plastic.

It went over the beam but not far enough. Reason failed her and she began to jump for it. Leo and Lambert had put the crystals in place somehow, surely they could stand a little vibration. On her third try her fingers brushed the dangling end and on the fourth, she grasped it.

The next step required some thought. She had to pull on both ends equally or one end would slide over. She could twist them together – but then they’d simply untwist as she climbed. Wasn’t the rope-climbing thing in gym class what all boys feared? Though she’d never seen a rope in her high school gymnasium … if she could slice a third strip, she could braid it.

9:18.

She opened her knife again and made horizontal cuts in the white plastic, first on one side and then further up on the other. Another two stretching as far as she could reach, then she carefully stowed the knife in her front pocket where it could not fall out. The small but heavy object would certainly set off the nitrogen triiodide. Then, grasping her makeshift ropes with one in each hand, she slid one foot into her first makeshift rung.

Finding the second was considerably more difficult, but once she did she could distribute her weight equally, stabilizing the structure just enough for her to slide her hands up to a higher point, grasp, and move her feet to their next toeholds. She did all this with the sinking sensation that she would never get away from the crystals in time. Any split second now the entire room was going to erupt in a fireball of her own personal hell. Would she even know it when it happened? Or would she already be dead?

Remarkably, the last toehold brought her in reach of the crane’s beam. She strained upward to reach around the track but this left her feet, which were at uneven levels, to balance the two sides of her snowy rope, and it shifted rapidly. A quick grasp with both hands arrested it, leaving her swaying above the explosive crystals.

She reached again, caution using up seconds she did not have. She should be dead already. Surely by now Leo and Lambert were in their cars and exiting the parking lot? Her boss would not have left extra time on the detonator. Leo did not take chances.

Her fingers met over the greasy beam and intertwined. She then swung both legs up and around it and somehow managed to climb on top, a surprisingly painful effort. The beam was not solid, more like two flat sides that bit into her palms with a chain track running inside the hollow center. On top of that neither foot would slide easily out of her makeshift rungs so arms, legs and torn body bag wound up wrapped around the beam in a mess. At least it kept the bag from falling on to the crystals.

As soon as she was on top of the beam instead of dangling below it she began to slide, using hands and knees like a child straddling a log. Her tangled feet weren’t much help and the thin sides of the beam felt like they were slicing her palms. Water could set off NI3. Could blood?

She couldn’t help but catch sight of her watch face out of the corner of one eye. 9:19.

When she cleared the crystal pile by two precious feet, she threw herself flat on the track and slid both feet off one side of it. The last thing she wanted was to end dangling from the beam in the shreds of a body bag, or have it catch at least one foot so that she landed on her head. The rest of her body followed without hesitation and it felt a lot further than nine or ten feet. At last she landed back on the linoleum, knees bending to absorb the shock.

One foot had managed to free itself but she had to waste another precious moment yanking the other loose from the white bundle, not wanting to drag it alongside the crystal bricks. Then she could finally approach the small metal box.

Unlike detonators on television, this one had no handy digital read-out showing how many seconds of life she had left. In fact, it had nothing at all, just a smooth, plain, unadorned metal face with a thin wire protruding from either side. This wire, she could now see, circled and entered the ring of white crystal bricks. Flat grommets occurred every six inches along the wire.

She had no idea what it was or how it worked. All she knew was she had to get rid of it if she wanted to take another breath.

Theresa whirled around to the desks about her. This room was full of tools – there had to be one here somewhere. She ran to one, then the next, looking among the printouts, Post-it notes and leftover lunch scraps. She opened a drawer or two. To have gotten this far just to go up in a ball of flame – maybe she should run, just run, but she’d never make it.
Don’t
think about Rachael.

She found possible salvation on the desk with the fluorescent Post-Its and the four-foot-long pipe cutter. A pair of wire cutters sat next to the blotter.

She returned to the detonator and opened the cutters over the thin wire protruding from its side, fully aware that her action might set it off instead of disabling it. But she didn’t have time to ponder … everything she knew about Leo and Lambert told her that they were careful not to over-think things. Speed was more important than durability here. They wouldn’t have had time to install fail-safes, only to make the explosion occur as quickly as they could clear the area.

She squeezed the handles.

Click
.

She encircled the wire from the other side.
Click
.

Still alive, she didn’t waste time breathing a sigh of relief but picked up the metal box and carried it away. She didn’t know what it would do and didn’t intend to take the chance. Halfway to the nearest desk, it clicked and shuddered in her hands.

9:20.

She breathed, staring transfixed at the little device. Had she really come that close? Or had it been clicking and shuddering all this time? Would it really have worked at all?

Yes.

She had cheated death with about one second to spare, and the knowledge made her knees buckle. So she pushed it away and resolved not to think about it. Not now. Not
ever
.

Instead she set the box down next to Stitch and picked up the pipe cutter, which felt like her thirty-pound barbell. She moved to the door, took up a position to the right of its opening.

And waited.

Exactly three minutes later, Leo stepped inside. She swung the metal object as hard as she could.

Cell phone use might have been impossible, but the landlines on each desk worked just fine. She called her cousin and told him that Lambert was in the wind, but she had Leo.

‘Your boss? What the hell is he doing there?’

‘Long story.’

‘You sound grim. Is he alive?’

‘I don’t know,’ she told him. ‘And right at the moment, I don’t much care.’

T
heresa placed the Cavs sweatshirt worn by an unlucky convenience-store clerk face downward on a sheet of treated photographic paper, so that the bullet hole just beneath the team’s logo sat in the center of the paper’s rectangle. Then she placed a piece of gauze, soaked in a different set of chemicals, on the fuzzy inside surface of the shirt and applied a steam iron to it. The chemicals in the gauze and the paper reacted with the gunpowder left on the victim’s shirt to form a new compound, one that would turn bright orange against the white paper.

Everything was chemistry.

Chemicals had nearly killed her in the basement of the M.E.’s office, and then they had saved her. Chemicals still coated one side of her face and both her hands as the mild burns there healed. Chemicals had kept David Madison alive during his time in the ICU.

What were humans, really, but electrons and protons and neutrons, whirling in constant motion, more empty space than anything else? Atoms stuck together because each had a gap in its orbit of electrons, a gap it could fill by sharing the electrons of another. Each completing the other to become something new, something bigger, something stronger.

And sometimes it wasn’t even that definite a bond, not a covalent bond, only an ionic one. Just mutual attraction.

She and David Madison could have continued in their own orbits, but mutual attraction had brought them together. It should have made them both stronger, giving her a life outside her job and worrying about her daughter, helping him to feel like a man again, able to stare the world down when it brought up his ex-wife.

Instead he had lied to her about knowing Lily and Ken, and pretended not to recognize the Payne Street address. He might have saved Ken’s life if he had spoken up after Lily died. He had to know then it was Lambert, that no one else would have the ability or the resources, but he said nothing lest he implicate himself. He truly hadn’t known that Leo was her boss, or made any connection between Lambert and the Bingham explosion. But still, Marty, Lily and Ken, once his
friends
, all dead. And he kept his silence.

Then he invented the media frenzy regarding his wife in order to get his kids out of town and fled to
Theresa’s
house, with Lambert out to erase his past and the people in it. David didn’t want to endanger his children – admirable – but qualms about her or her child or her family? Not so much.

The bond had begun to weaken, her own electrons drawing back to their own orbits.

Theresa had showed up at the alumni tour of Lambert’s factory and then during the Bingham excavation, asking about nitrogen triiodide, and suddenly Lambert had a problem just as pressing as his old college gang. He called his old friend and business partner.

She still couldn’t wrap her head around Leo’s betrayal. Rumors were already circulating that she had somehow framed Leo for her near-murder, perhaps because she herself had fallen under Lambert’s sway. Or because she really wanted to be supervisor. Or because she and Leo had had an affair years ago and a new spat gave her motive for revenge. This did not occur because Leo had so many friends at the Medical Examiner’s Office; quite the contrary, he had none. But government employees thrive on gossip and nothing beats a good conspiracy theory. So while her fellow employees amused themselves, Theresa felt like crawling into a hole and staying there forever.