Dr Lee Hsiung, professor emeritus of Biology, University of Hong Kong, creaked in his office chair. Hsiung’s walls were a photo gallery of the professor with preeminent scientists from around the world. Highlighted was a black-and-white photograph of a young Hsiung receiving a hand-shake and a plaque from Francis Crick. Beside it was a photo of an older Hsiung beside Dr Kurt Matthias. Hsiung was smiling, Matthias, dour and distracted.
Hsiung leaned forward, smiling at his visitor. “Markets are everywhere in Hong Kong, Dr Matthias. They’re a potent stew of humanity.”
Matthias sat on an ornate teak and silk couch, briefcase at his side.
“That was what I was looking for, Dr Hsiung,” Matthias said. “A potent stew.”
“I don’t recall you as interested in travel, Doctor. You were always a man of the laboratory. It was a big event when you’d leave the US for a symposium. Of course, given your reputation, the world’s geneticists came to you. May I ask why you’ve become such a seasoned traveler?”
Matthias waved the question away. “New projects, new horizons. I have, in the past few years, become very interested in fieldwork.”
Hsiung lifted an eyebrow. “The past eight years, perhaps?”
Matthias’s eyes turned dark. “Something like that.”
Hsiung shook his head. “Your views were not much accepted, old friend.”
“Not accepted?” Matthias’s eyes tightened to slits. “My views were misread. Spat on. Misused by the most disgusting creatures. A moronic Afrocentric politician in New York used his opposition to me to run for Congress. He won.”
“You never managed to elucidate your –”
Matthias’s hand slapped the desk in anger. He stood and walked to the window, silently watching a hundred students walking the commons below.
“I don’t explain myself to the gibbering masses. Certainly not to liberal spearthrowers, self-appointed centurions of political correctness. Damn them all.”
“You were vilified, Kurt,” Professor Hsiung said quietly. “I’ve not beheld such an uproar since The Bell Curve.”
“What does not kill us makes us stronger, Lee.”
Hsiung reached in his desk and produced a stack of computer readouts, the research Matthias had asked for. Hsiung studied his visitor with sad eyes.
“Yes, Dr Matthias. I would expect you to say something like that.”
The kid was gone; the screaming, terrified child had been handed off to Doc Norlin, summoned as soon as we kicked the weapon away from the abductor’s hands. We figured he was dead – Harry had aimed as far from Noelle as he could, tagging the perp on the outside rim of his eye socket. The slug had taken the inside track, removing a handful of head meat as it exited the rear of the skull at the end of its brief but potent visit.
People had started arriving. Hospital security. EMTs. Terrified staffers peeking around the corner before moving in our direction. Harry and I were still catching our breath. I stepped over the body to the window. Looked down five stories to the parking lot.
“He ran at the window like a rabid gazelle,” I said. “Dove into it full force. What happened?”
Harry tapped the pane with the muzzle of his .40. It didn’t tick like glass but thonked.
“Hurricane glass,” a security guard behind me said. “In all the windows. You might as well try to jump through steel plate.”
Forensics arrived to process the scene. Harry put uniforms to work taking statements. Before the upper-departmental types arrived for our own statements, Harry and I hustled to the paediatrics unit where Doc Norlin had just returned from the kid’s body scan and was getting her re-hooked to the various tubes and monitors.
“How is she?” Harry asked.
“Outside of abrasions and contusions, she appears unharmed, thank God. Not a bone out of place. I’m about to have the blood work updated, but she seems fine.”
Harry let loose a sigh that sounded like a dam breaking. He leaned against the wall for support. The doc started drawing blood for work-ups and we returned to the murder scene. The air smelled like a shooting range. We found the guard who had been furiously trying to save his colleague’s life. It had been, as suspected, futile. The guy, young, dressed in a blue uniform, looked beat down, eyes red, knees unsteady. The body had been collected but the floor was bright with blood.
“What happened?” Harry asked, leading the shaky guard to a chair at the nurses’ station. I found a coffee machine, brought him a cup.
The guard wiped his eyes, sucked down half the coffee. “Homer was in the monitoring station, watching the six cams. I was up from the first floor, on break, asking if Homer wanted to go bass fishing next Saturday. He said ‘Hold on,’ ’cause he spotted some guy in a suit creeping down the hall, a backpack in one hand, a parcel in the other. Homer called for the guy to stop. The guy turned and shot with a pistol. Homer shot back. Then the guy pulled something heavyweight out of his pack, turned and fired a burst.” The guard nodded at the glass, the pocked walls. “Everything fell apart.”
“Can we see the security footage from the camera upstairs? The one at the end of the hall?”
“The roof-door unit? Sure.”
We followed him to the security station. He dialed up the camera in question, racked the recording to just before the event, started it forward. We watched the door open at the end of the hall. The abductor approached, running. He’d slung the backpack over a large shoulder, holding Noelle cradled down his forearm like a football. The lens had a fish-eye configuration, giving the psychologically warped scene a visual warp as well, a funhouse mirror at a psychotic carnival. He started to go beneath the camera – entering the door to the roof – but looked up and saw the device. He backed up and stared directly into the lens. His face was distorted, not by the lens, but by a defect or injury, a lopsided face that probably scared the hell out of kids.
The guy again started for the roof, caught himself. Returned and continued to study the camera, looking between the lens and the end of the hall. Something blossomed in the twisted face.
“He was heading to the roof to finish the action,” Harry said. “The camera stopped him like a brick wall.”
“He decided to leave a message,” I said. “A spur-of-the-moment suicide note.”
“But what was all that stuff about mutants and clones?”
“I’d say a head filled with speed and psyche-delics. And some kind of psychotic delusion.”
Harry asked the security guy to rewind to a specific moment. The perp raged at the camera.
“LOOK AT ME! FUCKIN’ LOOK AT ME!”
Harry turned to me. “There’s an old movie with an actor name of James Cagney. White Heat. Cagney plays a gangster with a mama complex; it’s actually a psychologically complex movie, Cars. You should check it out. Cagney’s character is as cold-blooded as a snake and pure psychotic to boot. Long story short: beloved Mama dies, the gangster goes full whack. Kill-crazy. There’s some more stuff about an undercover cop – a guy – who Cagney seems to want to please, just like Mama. Cagney’s character gets trapped in a tank yard by the police, flees atop a huge storage tank, a million gallons of gasoline. He decides it’s his day to die and he’s going to go out with a bang. He starts firing into the gas tank beneath his feet. As it explodes, he’s screaming, ‘Look at me, Ma. I made it. I’m on top of the world.’”
“Turning a dead-end into a blaze-of-glory moment?” I mused. “You think that’s our boy?”
“Given that no helicopter was waiting to pluck him off the roof, I think he was planning to fight the cops until he and the kid were killed, or dive overboard with the kid in his arms. Then he saw the camera and decided to have the finale right there.”
“Look at me, Ma, I made it?’
Harry nodded. “He was making a movie for someone.”
“But for who? He mentioned five names: Adolf, George, James, John and a Pastor Buford. And a number: eighty-eight. You know what that means.”
I’d seen it tattooed on prison inmates. Eight meant H, the eighth letter of the alphabet, thus, HH for Heil Hitler.
Harry said, “Guess we got us a white supremacist type. So we wait to see if forensics can ID the perp. I imagine he’s got an arrest record about a half-mile long. Then maybe we can track down all those names he was ranting.”
“I got another way to do things,” I said. “It’ll take a trip to Montgomery…”
“Can’t do it now,” Harry said, looking at his watch and sighing. “It’s gonna take the rest of the day to make our statements and fill out the paperwork.”
“We’ll leave first thing in the morning,” I said. “It’s a good time to get in some veterinary research.”
“Veterinary research?”
“We’re gonna study the underbellies of ugly animals.”
When I finally got home, I sat in the quiet of my living room and let the day dissolve. I wanted to call Clair, but knew I’d start babbling and when she asked why I was calling, have no answer whatsoever. The silence in my head grew so loud that I cranked on the TV and filled my eyes with a show about beautiful, soulless people purposefully stranded on an atoll.
At nine thirty I heard a knock on the door, opened it to find Archibald Fossie in suit pants, shirt and tie, sleeves rolled up, wearing a dapper straw fedora with bright paisley band.
I slapped my head. “I forgot. We had an appointment tonight.”
He looked at me closely. “You look like you’ve had a long day, Detective. I’ll stop back in a few days.”
I glanced down and saw a barn-shaped black bag in his hand, the kind doctors carried when I was a little kid. It was reassuring, like a talisman from the past.
“Come in,” I said, grabbing his sleeve. “The day’s been a bowl of boiled dung, but I need something. Maybe you’ve got it.”
“I hope so,” he said, stepping inside as I closed the door against the heat and mosquitoes.
“Can I get you a drink?” I asked.
“Got any Scotch?”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Not a glass of soy milk?”
A sly grin. “Alcohol can be healthy in moderation. Though for you, I’d prescribe red wine, four or five fluid ounces a night.”
“Duly noted.”
I got Fossie a neat single-malt kept around for Harry’s benefit, poured myself a tumbler of red wine, deciding to start nutritional therapy tonight. Fossie reached into his bag and produced a stethoscope, hung it around his neck.
“I’ll need you to undress, Detective. Down to skivvies is fine.”
I complied and sat on a dining-room chair as Fossie poked and prodded, thumped and listened. He studied my tongue, my hair. He had me walk across the room and back, making notes on my carriage. He had me do two minutes of push-ups, re-listened to my heart. I told him how I’d been feeling – lack of appetite, vague pains in my gut, lethargy, occasional lightheadedness, insomnia.
“The major machinery sounds fine,” he said, dropping the steth into his bag and plucking several vials out, pouring capsules into paper packets. “In the meantime, here’s a concoction to help you sleep: L-Tryptophan, valerian and a bit of melatonin. These others are vitamins, heavy on B-complex and good for stress.”
“Stress? Really?”
“So is ginseng. Here’s some ginseng extract. Natural medicines, one and all. Take two of each every morning, two in the early afternoon. None after four p.m. I’ll write up a diet I want you to follow, low fat and high protein.”
I nodded and followed him to the door. “What do I owe you?”
“Find out the truth about Richard Scaler,” he said quietly, hand on the knob, looking into my eyes. “Discover what he really was.”
I said, “You spend a lot of time at the Scaler home, right, Mr Fossie?”
“An hour a day or so. I’m actually on retainer, another thing that drove Richard nuts. I go to the co-op, buy fresh fruits and veggies, take them to Patricia. Or I grind herbal medications and mix infusions. She likes to watch and talk while I work.”
“What’s she talk about?”
“Her childhood. The pre-Richard days when she was carefree, a high-school girl with her whole life ahead of her. The conversation is therapeutic. I’m usually there in the morning. With the, uh, unfortunate event, I plan to stop by in the afternoon or evening to make sure Patricia’s all right.”
“You don’t really think it was an unfortunate event, Mr Fossie. Not if the Missus got free of a man who was hurting her.”
He closed his eyes, loosed a sigh. “Being free of that self-righteous beast is the best thing that ever happened to Patricia. But she’s not ready to let herself know that. Though she already knows it deep inside. Does that make sense?”
“Yes. And if you really want me to uncover the truth about Scaler, there’s a way you can help. I need to know who was with Scaler on his last night.”
Fossie’s eyes looked dubious behind the glasses. And maybe a bit scared.
“It doesn’t sound ethical.”
“You want me to reveal the truth about Richard Scaler? Give me something that provides insight into his secret life. See if you can find a calendar entry. Something on his desk. A phone number scrawled on a Post-it. Anything.”
When Fossie escaped into the night, I didn’t know if I’d succeeded in enlisting him. Expecting little, I washed Fossie’s prescribed capsules down with the last of my wine, falling into a sweet and dreamless sleep more satisfying than any I’d had in weeks.