chapter thirty-four

Raymond Lee was registered at Caltech for advanced mechanical engineering, robotics, and fluid dynamics this term. Engineering some sort of IED to rupture the fuel line to his dad’s car should be in his playbook, but I needed confirmation and specifics. So while Shin charged Pink and got him seated in an interview room, I went to get it.

Attractive and surprisingly human-scaled, the CalTech campus boasted lots of low-slung off-white buildings and plenty of places to sit outside under old oaks with a cup of coffee as you pondered the mysteries of dark matter.

Professor Paul Reiter had agreed to meet me at one of the tables planted next to the campus Starbucks under a cluster of old oaks. The thirty-something man who matched Professor Reiter’s online photo barely looked up from his glove-phone as I flashed him my badge and introduced myself. I sat opposite him across a worn table with several generations of students’ names scratched into the white paint. Immortality on the cheap.

Reiter was a thin hollow-chested man. His lank reddish-blond hair was pinned atop his head in a man-bun, anchored by thick black plastic glasses with a kind of geek-chic. He wore a plaid shirt older than he was over faded black jeans. The robo-server read our barcodes and gave us our orders, a shot of coffee snuff for him and a cup of bad java from burned beans for me. I waited as Reiter peeled the foil top from the little silver shot cup of espresso crystals and raised it to one nostril. He took a snort as I navigated away from the obligatory small talk to queries about Raymond Lee.

“Was Lee in class on October 6^th from two to five p.m.?” I asked.

Reiter called up the attendance roster on his glove phone. “The auto-roster doesn’t show him logged in that day.”

“Does he miss a lot of classes?”

“Lately he does.” Reiter nervously tapped his steepled fingers against his lips. “His work has fallen off. I understand there are some problems at home.”

I nodded. “He talk to you about that?”

“No. After midterms and before final exams, Student Health sends us notices about students struggling with severe anxiety and depression. With student permission, of course.”

“You got a notice about Ray?”

Reiter’s turn to nod.

“Did you see signs that he was self-medicating?

“I don’t want to speculate. And he’s a good student otherwise,” Reiter said hurriedly. “One of my best, actually.”

“Good enough to alter a GPS tracker?”

Professor Reiter pulled his glasses down from the top of his head and peered at me. “Alter how?”

“Into something that could cause a fuel line on a Lexus to rupture?” I pulled out the piece of cardboard Harvey Pink had given me. “This is the equipment we’re talking about.”

Professor Reiter picked up the piece of cardboard and examined it from several angles. Reiter slouched so much that when he angled his own body to examine the cardboard in the dappled sunlight streaming through the oak leaves, he looked like a backlit question mark.

“You wouldn’t need to alter much,” Reiter said. He tapped the words “titanium alloy” on the box. “I can’t be sure without more detail, but I don’t think this is a GPS tracker.”

“What is it—exactly?”

“We call them disrupters. DARPA declassified them a few years ago.”

DARPA was the research and development group that worked on top secret defense technology and scenarios for the government.

“They resemble GPS trackers externally,” Reiter continued, “but they release nano-bots you control remotely or via a timer.”

“The microscopic robots used in surgery and construction?”

Reiter nodded.

“So somebody could release these nano-bots and direct them to cause a fuel leak or shut down transmission, if this disrupter was affixed to the underside of a car?” I flashed on the pink trail of fluid spraying from Dr. Lee’s Lexus.

“They can perform multiple functions,” Reiter said. “That’s what makes disrupters so useful. Very versatile. They were initially designed for remote control of rovers on Mars.”

“You said they were declassified. How would a civilian get hold of one?”

“Oh, they’re available in a limited way now,” the professor said. “We use them.”

“In robotics?”

He paused. “Some of my students do work at JPL for the Mars and lunar rovers. When parts break down on another planet, we can’t just send a repair team. We use remote control nano-bots to do repairs.”

“That’s a pretty powerful tool. Do you take precautions about access?”

Reiter nodded. “Disrupters are registered like explosives or poisons. Homeland Security keeps track.”

“Do you keep a copy of that log? For your robotics classes? I’ll need to see it.”

He nodded and began to root through his glove phone files. “Here we are.” The professor bumped the information to my phone.

His face told me even before I looked that Raymond’s name was on the list.

“Of course, I collect them back from the students at the end of term,” Professor Reiter said. Or deactivate those we can’t recover. We’ve never had a problem.”

There it was: the perpetual refrain cops hear when we’re mopping up after a tragedy. He was such a nice guy, a quiet neighbor, kept to himself. Nobody can believe that silent cypher could—fill in the blank—rob a friend, murder his father, or blow himself and half the city to smithereens. But the evidence says different. That’s the dark matter in the human soul.

“I don’t think you’ll be getting Ray’s disrupter back, Professor,” I said. “But let’s put the request on record. Text him now and let me know if he responds.”

The flesh on Professor Reiter’s face sagged as he watched me leave moments later.

Raymond Lee didn’t pick up Reiter’s text about the disrupter. Further checks with the rest of Ray’s professors told the same sad story.

As I walked back across campus to my car an hour after that, I spotted students perched on the roof of one of the taller buildings chucking a giant pumpkin to the ground where it splattered with a satisfying thunk. It was a Caltech Halloween tradition. I found myself humming a remix of the Smashing Pumpkins’ alt-rock anthem “Disarm.” The killer in me is the killer in you. What I choose is my choice.

It was time to bring Raymond Lee in.