“Yeah, I know,” Artie muttered. They had walked out without taking a damn thing with them.
The far end of the hall was the master bedroom. It was neat, the bed made up, the rug freshly vacuumed. A brief portrait of Cathy surfaced in Artie’s mind. Trim, obsessively neat, compulsively friendly. Adored her kids, was probably more proud of Larry than in love with him. At parties he’d caught her glancing at Larry with a faraway look in her eyes and had wondered who she was thinking of. Not Larry, that was for sure. But she was a dutiful wife and he didn’t want to look behind the curtain to see who might be hiding there. Cathy was Susan’s best friend, and Larry had been one of his and he’d never wanted to know too much.
Artie glanced in the closet. He’d already guessed that Cathy hadn’t packed anything either.
They hesitated a moment outside the closed bathroom door, then Artie turned the knob and abruptly pushed it open. Empty. One of the towels, the one featuring Batman, was bunched up on its rack. Andy’s. Superman, next to it, was neatly hung, the edges carefully lined up. James took after his mother when it came to neatness. He was a skinny kid with thick glasses and his nose constantly in a book, so quiet you seldom knew he was around. When he reached his teens, he’d be another patient for Mitch.
The towels were soiled but dry; nobody had used them recently.
“So what now, Mitch?”
“His office—we probably should have searched it first.”
“Mitch, what the hell are we looking for?”
Levin seemed completely dispassionate now, pure intelligence captain. “Anything and everything, Artie. Try and find out who saw him last.”
The office was off to one side of the kitchen. It was small, no bigger than one of the boys’ bedrooms, with bookcases overflowing with medical books, two four-drawer filing cabinets, a copier and a portable phone, plus an IBM clone and HP printer. And on the edge of the desk, a Rolodex, a leather-bound Daily Reminder, and half a dozen copies of
Science,
one of them opened to the contents page. Chandler was right—Larry had probably been working on an article.
Artie picked up the Daily Reminder and thumbed through it. Larry had stopped making entries in March. Most likely he kept an appointment calendar in the computer.
Mitch was ahead of him. He was sitting in front of the computer and had already opened the appointment file. He glanced at the screen a moment, then shrugged. “Nothing, didn’t use it. Probably kept everything down at work.”
Artie was watching over his shoulder. “See if he had any research files.”
Mitch clicked the mouse on “Program Manager” and read down the directories, stopping at “Research/December.” He double-clicked on the entry but no filenames appeared on the screen.
Artie looked over the desk, picked up a small box of floppies, flipped through them, and pulled out one with the same directory name. The diskette had a dozen filenames penciled on the label, starting with
Austin
and ending with
Talbot.
He handed it to Mitch. “Try this—probably the backup. See if you can access ‘Talbot.’”
Mitch inserted the diskette in the B drive, then clicked on the name of the directory. The screen read:
No files found.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Artie murmured. “He wouldn’t have made a backup if there was nothing to back up.”
“Maybe somebody erased both it and the hard drive.”
“So where does that leave us? We’ve no idea what Larry was working on or who he was seeing or what happened. We’re back to square one.”
Mitch shook his head. “Check out the desk.”
Artie squatted down and inspected the desktop. A small clock radio by some shelving had been moved several inches, and Artie could see a light ridge of dust where it had been. Most likely Cathy and the boys had stayed out of the room and Larry hadn’t been the type to do much in the way of cleaning—the desktop clutter was a sure indication of that. Why would anybody move the radio now? he wondered.
Then he saw the row of small boxes behind it, several of them out of alignment with the others. Somebody had checked out all the boxes of backup floppies, not just the one he’d picked up. They had been neat about it, but not too neat.
There was a lined yellow pad on the desk, a corner of it jutting over the ridge of dust where the radio had been. Somebody had moved it, too. He picked it up and squinted along the edge. The paper was smooth, no impressions at all. But there were sheets missing; he could see where they had been ripped out. Larry had probably written on it, but somebody had taken his notes and the few pages beneath.
Mitch clicked off the computer and leaned back in the chair, his face blank of expression. “You put it together yet?”
“You tell me.”
“Cathy knew what Larry was working on—no way he wouldn’t have talked to her about it. Whatever it was, it worried her. More than that, it frightened her—a lot. When the police called, she grabbed the kids and split. Right in the middle of the meal—no time to pack. She was out of here. Sometime later—maybe within minutes—she had a visitor who was looking for something. The house was empty, so her visitor went right to the office. He knew exactly what to look for, and it wasn’t the family silver.”
“Why a visitor?” Artie asked. “Why not several?”
“Just a hunch. Maybe there were more than one, but nothing indicates it. House is too clean—they would have left more traces.”
“So what do we do now? We’ve no idea what Larry was doing or who he saw or what happened.”
“You’re right. Let’s pack it in.”
Mitch stood up and started for the door, Artie following. Then Artie snapped his fingers and headed back to the kitchen. “If you were married and you were looking for an appointment, you’d know the first place to check is the fridge.”
The yellow Post-it was stuck to the front of the refrigerator, nestled between episodes of Doonesbury torn from the Sunday paper. A brief reminder to see a Dr. Paschelke of East Bay Medical Center, dated the day before the meeting. There were two numbers listed, followed by an
H
and an
O.
At the top of the tiny sheet were three red-inked stars. Important.
Mitch studied it for a moment. “You pick it, Artie—home or office?”
Artie glanced at his watch. It was still early in the evening.
“It’s the Christmas season; he’s probably working short hours—try home. Set up an appointment for tomorrow.”
Mitch looked through the windows at the darkening shadows outside. “Whatever’s going on, I have a hunch there’s a time frame involved. Cathy ran the moment the police called her with the bad news. I’d feel better if we could see the doctor tonight, get it over with. He can’t live too far away—the call’s local.”
He had a point, Artie thought. And they’d come this far—wrap it up tonight and he could concentrate on ecology and Connie tomorrow. If he wasn’t home by six, Mark would assume he was working late and defrost a frozen meal for supper. He wouldn’t be too disappointed; he lived on them.
Artie slipped into his coat and buttoned up while Mitch picked up the kitchen phone and started dialing. He was halfway through the entrance to the side door when he saw it. An old raincoat dangling from a hallway hook, flanked by jackets and scarves and several school caps hanging from other hooks.
Artie felt the folds of cloth. Bingo. A three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk in the right-hand pocket. There was no name on it but it was smudged with prints and was obviously a “traveler” diskette. Larry apparently took his homework to the office so he could work on it when he had an occasional few minutes of free time.
Artie slipped it in his coat, then snapped alert when he heard Mitch suddenly say, “Dr. Paschelke?”
Much to Artie’s surprise, the doctor was in.
Castro Valley was half
an hour from the Oakland hills in the daytime but closer to forty-five minutes during the evening rush hour with a light rain slicking the streets. Dr. Leonard Paschelke’s home was hidden in a small grove of young redwoods a hundred feet off the road. His office was in the basement rec room and was a lot like the man himself: large, rumpled, and comfortable. Books lined the walls; a stack of well-thumbed medical journals held down a corner of his desk. The far end of the room was taken up with a cheap stereo system and an old TV set. The battered couch in front of it was half-filled with torn pillows and kids’ toys. Paschelke shooed his two small daughters off the couch and sent them upstairs to keep their mother company in the kitchen. He turned off the TV and waved Artie and Mitch to take a seat, then waddled over to an easy chair and sank into it with a sigh.
“You said you wanted to talk to me about Larry.” He added affectionately: “The son of a bitch in some kind of trouble?” Paschelke peered at them over the top of his thick glasses. “You said you were friends of his, right?”
They hadn’t talked to Paschelke about Shea’s death over the phone, and Artie was now sorry that they hadn’t; it was going to be much more difficult face-to-face. He and Mitch looked mutely at each other, then Mitch told a simpler story about Shea being mugged and killed in the city and his wife and children having disappeared. He didn’t go into detail about the dogs.
A fat, pale-faced man who nervously polished his glasses and rubbed his nose, Paschelke looked more mournful with every word. When Mitch had finished, he said in a husky voice, “We did our internship together. Good man, good doctor. We kept in touch. Sometimes I’d ask him to come over to East Bay Medical for a consultation.”
“Outside of his wife and kids, you were probably the last one he knew who saw him alive,” Artie said.
Paschelke blew on his lenses and attacked them with a dirty handkerchief for the third time. “Nobody knows where Cathy and the boys are?”
Artie shook his head. “They obviously went someplace, but there was no sign they had packed for it—their suitcases were still in the closet.”
“I don’t know what I can add …” Paschelke paused in midsentence, frowning. “You said Larry was going to give a talk at your meeting?”
Artie edged forward on the broken-down couch.
“Did Larry mention it to you?”
Paschelke looked from one to the other, suddenly cautious. “If he did, I’m not sure I’d remember.”
Artie sank back, disappointed. Dry hole. Or maybe Larry had mentioned the meeting and the subject matter but Paschelke didn’t want to talk about it. If he didn’t, it must have been a hot topic between them. “Larry was a consultant for East Bay?”
“More for me than for East Bay.” Paschelke squinted at Artie, the light from the desk lamp reflecting off his glasses. “You’re not a medical man, are you?”
“TV newswriter,” Artie said. “My job has nothing to do with Larry.”
He could read the suspicion in Paschelke’s face. Reporter, so be wary. Paschelke turned to Mitch.
“You’re the psychiatrist?” Mitch started to fumble for his wallet and identification, but Paschelke held up a hand. “No, no, I believe you.” He hesitated, then made up his mind to trust them. “I’m on staff at East Bay. They’ve got a twenty-four-hour trauma center and it gets pretty busy on the weekends. I’m usually on call in the ER—the interns call it the Knife and Gurr Club because we get a lot of inner-city homicides. Also, freeways 580, 880, and 238 run close by, and if you get racked up on any of them, the East Bay ER is where they’re going to take you.”
He hoisted himself out of his chair and shuffled over to a small refrigerator in the back of the rec room. “You want a beer? Soda?”
Artie declined with thanks. Mitch asked for a beer and Paschelke returned with two cans of Miller, wiping the frosted tops against his pants.
“We were just trying to follow up on Larry’s last day or two,” Mitch said.
Paschelke popped open his can of beer and took a sip, then looked at Artie with renewed suspicion. “Anything I tell you, I don’t want to see it on the evening news. Larry was the private type, and so am I.”
“I was a friend of Larry’s,” Artie said simply. “That’s why I’m here. You don’t want to tell us anything, you don’t have to.”
Paschelke stared at him a moment longer, then nodded. “Banks … I think Larry mentioned you.” Another sip of beer. “Anyway, three weeks ago last Friday there was a bad accident on 580 about one in the morning. Two high school kids high on beer and methamphetamine were driving an old forty-nine Merc—can you believe that? a classic car—and plowed right into this poor old bastard in his Saturn. The kids went through the windshield and it was slice-and-dice all over the freeway. No seat belts, no air bags, no nothing … . There wasn’t anything we could do but pour them into buckets and notify their folks. They went straight to the coroner.”
He was silent for a moment, concentrating on his carr of beer.
“The old man in the Saturn was … something else. We did what we could for him but he was pretty badly busted up—died on the table.” He sank back in his chair, his expression suddenly remote as he remembered the scene in the ER.
“You said the old man was ‘something else,’” Mitch prompted, curious.
A snort. “Because he was something else, that’s why. That’s when I called Larry and asked him to come over and have a look-see, confirm what I thought I was seeing.”
Artie was puzzled. “There must have been other doctors present.”
“Always is. But not everybody sees the same thing … or is interested in seeing the same thing. Larry and I had worked together a number of times; we usually saw things the same way.”
There was an edge to Mitch’s voice. “You didn’t call the police? Notify the relatives?”
Paschelke looked pained.
“I guess it’s been a while since you did a rotation in an ER, Doctor. The police are usually first on the scene—they follow the ambulance crews to the hospital. They’re the ones who go through the victim’s pockets and the car, find the ID, and call the next of kin. They were right there with this one. I made my report and they went away. Nobody they could notify in this case. The car wasn’t his. And he had no ID.”
“No place of employment?” Artie asked, surprised.
“I told you. No ID, no nothing. The police went through what was left of his car with a fine-tooth comb. All they got was a name on a cleaner’s tag on the inside of his coat. William Talbot. Just a name and a garment number, nothing more—no address or city for the cleaner, nothing. Only a tag the wearer had forgotten to remove. Not even sure that was his real name—what the hell, he could have borrowed the coat, I suppose. The police checked out the car. A rental but the name on the rental agreement didn’t check out either. Perhaps his prints will, I don’t know. The police will probably just log him in their files and hope someone reports him missing. Maybe somebody will, but I doubt it. Had to be a reason why there was no ID anywhere in the car.”
Artie forgot about his long trip back to the city.
Talbot was the name on one of Larry’s files.
“Why did you call
in Larry?”
Paschelke crumpled the empty beer can in his fist. “Specifically? Condition of the body. Facially, Talbot looked like he was in his early sixties. Only thing was, his bones weren’t old. We tried to set a few of them while he was on the table—I told you he was pretty broken up. A lot of compound fractures where the long bones protruded through the flesh.” He shook his head, remembering. “A real mess.”
“I don’t understand about the bones,” Artie said, frowning.
Paschelke leaned forward to explain, his expression almost professorial.
“Look, when you grow old, your bones get brittle, they lose calcium. If you exercise a lot, the deterioration is slower, but it’s still there. What you can’t change are the pads of cartilage at the ends of the bones that begin to thin out as you age. You’re not as flexible anymore; you’ve got less connective tissue, less cushioning. The shafts of Talbot’s long bones were thick with heavy ridges for the attachment of what were exceptionally powerful muscles. If I had to go by the bones, I would have said the man was a naturally very strong thirty-, thirty-five-year-old. One thing for sure: He was either a young man who’d been through a helluva lot or he was one damn healthy old fart. That’s when I called up Larry and asked him to come over.”
Mitch looked at him sharply. “Larry wasn’t a specialist in orthopedics.”
“That’s not why I called him. Larry and I had worked together before; we were interested in the same things, medically speaking. In this case, the limits of human variability. Me, because as a surgeon I’m naturally curious. Larry, because he specialized in the circulatory system and, believe me, the anatomical variations can be enormous. Human variability is something all doctors are interested in,
have
to be interested in. It’s a good part of what makes horse races in medicine. How much a person can differ physically in heart size, brain size, weight, height—that sort of thing—and still be within normal bounds. Strip down a pygmy and a tall Swede, have them stand side by side, and you’d be hard pressed to say they were of the same species.”
He got up and waddled over to the fridge for another can of beer. When he came back, Mitch said, “So Larry came over. Then what?”
Paschelke looked uncomfortable. “The man was dead. He had no ID, no known relatives. You can’t hold them in the morgue forever. If the body isn’t claimed, it’s turned over to the coroner and cremated or donated to a medical school. Larry came and took a look and we got curious. There was nobody to notify, no way we could hurt the man no matter what we did. So as the physician of record, I decided to do an autopsy.”
Mitch raised his eyebrows. “And what did you find out?”
Paschelke held up his hand and started listing the findings on his fingers. “The arteries showed no signs whatever of atherosclerosis—they were what cardiologists call ‘pipes.’ Even when you’re young, your arteries usually show some fat deposits. The heart was oversize, beyond what I’d call normal limits. I mean the entire heart, not just the left ventricle, which might be expected if the man had valve trouble or was suffering from heart failure. The arteries feeding the heart were very large and, as I said, very healthy. No way in the world he would ever have had a heart attack.”
“What about the lungs?”
“Clean, much too clean even for those living in the country these days.” The basement was cool but Paschelke had started to sweat. “The body didn’t look—normal. To either of us. Larry took measurements, a lot of them, and inspected the other organs. No signs of deterioration in any of them—I’m talking about normal deterioration with age. If the man hadn’t died, our guess was that he would have lived a lot longer than a healthy hundred.”
He sank back in his chair, rolling the cold can of beer between his sweaty palms.
“And there was the accident itself. The kids were going the wrong way on a ramp. It should have been a head-on, both cars completely demolished. It didn’t happen that way. Talbot reacted pretty fast—far faster than he should have been able to. According to the police, he almost made it, twisting the steering wheel to swerve out of the way. The kids clipped his Saturn at the rear and it rolled down an embankment. That’s what did the damage, both to the car and the driver. Seat belt didn’t help and, since the car was rolling sideways, neither did the air bag.”
He lapsed into silence, concentrating on his can of beer.
“You think Larry was going to talk about this?” Artie asked. It was pretty morbid; he couldn’t imagine Larry picking it as a topic.
“I told you Larry took measurements.” Once again, Paschelke sounded uncertain of himself. “A lot of them. In anthropology, they call it cladistics, the science of measurements to determine what species a creature belongs to. The pygmy and our Swedish friend might not look much alike, but when you measure the shape of the skull and the way it sits on the spinal column, the teeth and the shape of the long bones and all of that, it’s obvious they’re members of the same species.” He paused, remembering. “Larry got pretty excited.”
“Why?” Artie asked, puzzled.
Paschelke looked embarrassed.
“He didn’t think William Talbot was human.”
“Jesus Christ, little green men,” Mitch muttered.
Paschelke sat up in his chair, suddenly very formal. “I didn’t say anything like that, Doctor. The man was genus
Homo,
there was no argument about that. But Larry didn’t think he was
sapiens.
From what he told me about your meetings, I’d say yes, that’s what he was going to talk about.”
It was suddenly so quiet in the basement that Artie could hear the wind in the redwoods outside.
“What did you think?”
Paschelke looked uneasy. “I can’t say as I came to any conclusions. The body certainly pushed the limits of human variability, but after you see a lot of bodies, you get reluctant to set limits. But I couldn’t disagree with Larry on any of his findings. And the man’s physical strength was certainly beyond the norm.”