With Jeff at his side, Emory drove his car toward the security station of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “Get your ID ready.” He tilted his body toward the door. “Would you mind getting mine?”
Jeff pulled Emory’s wallet from his back pocket. “Is this place even open on Saturday?”
“Dr. Sharp said he works every day but Sunday.”
“Did you get us on the list?”
“I hope so. I texted him this morning, but I haven’t heard back.” Emory could see in his periphery Jeff giving him his Seriously? face.
“We drove all this way on hope?”
“We do everything on hope.” Emory put down his window and greeted the mustached security officer in the booth window, handing over their IDs. “Hello. We’re here to see Dr. Barry Sharp. Emory Rome and Jeff Woodard.”
The officer checked his computer and handed the IDs back. “Neither of you has been cleared.”
“There has to be a mistake.” Jeff lowered his head to smile at the officer. “He told us to come up today. Could you call him?”
“No,” the officer replied without inflection. “If you’re not—”
Emory noticed the edge of a red snake tattoo just above his wrist. “You’re the officer who was here the other day when we came.”
“I remember you.”
“I don’t know if Dr. Sharp told you, but he’s helping us with a case – a double-homicide. It’s vital we talk to him today. Would you mind calling him?”
The officer thought for a second before picking up his phone and dialing. “Dr. Sharp, I have two men here to see you – Emory Rome and… Okay, I’ll let them in.” He hung up but didn’t say anything to the PIs. Instead, he typed on his computer before stepping away from the booth window.
Jeff strained to see. “What’s he doing?”
“I have no idea.”
The security officer appeared a moment later with two guest passes on lanyards. He handed them to Emory. “You know where the fulminology lab is?”
“I do.”
The officer opened the gate and waved them forward. “Have a good day.”
After parking, the PIs headed for the lab and knocked on the door. Dr. Sharp greeted them a moment later. “Emory, such a nice surprise. And uh… George?”
“Seriously? Do I look like a George? My name’s Jeff.”
Emory shook his hand. “Hi Dr. Sharp. Thank you for seeing us.”
“You’re lucky you caught me.” Dr. Sharp led them through the laboratory.
Jeff cleared his throat and side-eyed his partner. “Emory said he texted you this morning.”
Dr. Sharp opened the door to the control room. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’ve even looked at my phone today.”
Emory saw the room had changed, now in disarray and with a half-dozen open boxes. “What’s going on here?”
“I was notified last evening that my lab is now officially closed. They moved the date up arbitrarily. I’ll no longer have access to the facility come Monday, so I’ve been scrambling to pack up all my research and what little equipment I have that isn’t owned by the government. Hopefully, they’ll let me buy the rest once I get my grant.” Dr. Sharp emitted a slight laugh. “Did you guys come to help me move?”
Emory wasn’t sure if he were kidding or asking, but he avoided volunteering. “Actually, I have a fulminology question for you, if you don’t mind.”
“Then you’re in the right place.” Dr. Sharp motioned to the chairs and took one himself. “What can I answer for you?”
“As you know we were hired to investigate Blair Geister’s death. Well, we’ve determined without a doubt she was murdered.”
Dr. Sharp’s head jerked back. “Scheisse! Sorry. I don’t like to curse in English.”
“Someone hooked her solid gold bed up to the lightning rod on her roof.” Jeff dropped his elbows to his knees and stared at the professor. “Now, who would possibly think to kill someone with lightning?”
Emory spoke up before Dr. Sharp could respond to the accusatory question. “Which brings me to the reason we’re here. When I was a teenager, I experienced something.”
“Seriously?!” Jeff pushed back in his chair. “He gets your backstory before I do?”
“It’s not my backstory. It’s just a curious incident that I believe has some bearing on the case.” Emory returned his attention to the professor. “I was in the woods, beside a pond, when something came toward me through the trees.”
Dr. Sharp leaned forward. “What was it?”
“It was a sphere of blue light.”
Jeff scoffed. “Are you saying you were abducted?”
“What? No.”
“They just probed you?”
“No. Jeff, it wasn’t a UFO. It was about the size of a cantaloupe, and it floated – more like drifting with the wind than self-propelled. It blew up a few feet from me, throwing me back into a tree and knocking the wind out of me. I think it was—”
Dr. Sharp finished his thought. “Ball lightning.”
Emory smiled at the confirmation. “Yes. Am I right?”
“I need a bit more information than that.”
Jeff grimaced. “Ball lightning? Isn’t that a myth?”
“No, not at all.” Dr. Sharp popped out of his chair. “Ball lightning’s been reported by witnesses all over the world, since at least ancient Greece.”
Jeff said, “So have UFOs.”
Dr. Sharp searched the open boxes. “Yes, but I can’t create a UFO in my lab.”
“You’ve created ball lightning?” asked Emory.
“Oh yes. Here it is.” Dr. Sharp pulled an iPad from a box. “I can’t take credit for it. I was just recreating Tesla’s experiments. He was the first to do it.” He tapped the iPad a few times before turning it around to show the PIs a video. Two Tesla coils of different sizes produced streaks of lightning between them. “Keep your eye on the smaller terminal.” A ball of light floated up from the terminal and extinguished five seconds later. “Did you see it?”
Jeff sneered at the professor. “Yeah, but it didn’t last very long.”
“The life span and size of natural ball lightning varies. Going back to your account, Emory, was there a storm or at least a raincloud?”
“It had been raining. I remember I was soaking wet.”
Jeff asked, “Why were you out in the rain? Were you camping?”
“Not exactly.”
Dr. Sharp returned the iPad to the box. “There are wide-ranging theories on the causation of ball lightning in nature, but I believe it’s an offshoot of standard lightning, ionizing the air around the strike point and creating a globular pocket of plasma.”
Jeff stood as if ready to leave. “Fascinating. I mean, not really, but it felt like a good way to end the discussion.”
“Jeff, I had a reason for bringing this up. Dr. Sharp, I hadn’t thought of that incident in years, but it came to mind last night when I was examining the evidence in Tommy Addison’s death.”
“Who’s Tommy Addison?”
Jeff sat back down. “He was Blair’s handyman. He died that same night.”
“Dr. Sharp, would you mind looking at this?” Emory took his phone from his pocket and scanned through the pictures.
“Only if you’ll start calling me Barry.” Dr. Sharp smiled at him before stepping behind his chair to look over his shoulder.
“Agreed.”
Jeff scooted his chair closer to Emory’s. “Thanks Barry.”
Emory held the phone for both to see. “This is a picture of the floor beneath the headboard of Ms. Geister’s bed. Notice the black spot?”
Dr. Sharp nodded. “That could be a burn from the lightning that struck the bed.”
Emory scrolled to another picture. “This is a similar stain on the ceiling of the den, which is directly below the bedroom.” He continued scrolling. “This is the floor of the den, and this is the ceiling of Juniper Crane’s bedroom, below the den.”
“What’s that coming out of the wall?”
“It’s a TV mount. The TV fell to the ground. Ms. Crane said Blair Geister’s spirit came out of the TV, floated across the room and killed Tommy Addison in a violent rage before disappearing. She described the spirit as an orb of light.”
Jeff asked his partner, “You think the lightning striking the bed created a ball of lightning that penetrated two floors before exploding?”
“Yes. Dr. Sharp… Barry, is that possible?”
Jeff asked, “Can it go through a solid floor?”
Dr. Sharp replied, “There’s a report from England in the 1600s of ball lightning entering a church through the wall like a ghost and killing several people when it exploded. To answer your question, Emory, it is possible, but I would want more evidence before declaring it a fact.”
“I think I have it.” From his pocket, Emory pulled a baggie with a shard of black metal and handed it to the professor. “This is from the TV mount in the picture. Try to break it.”
Dr. Sharp applied pressure, and the metal crumbled between his fingers. “Scheisse. This is likely an aluminum alloy, cast with silicon to make it lightweight, but that makes it highly susceptible to internal corrosion when heated. Contact with plasma could also speed galvanic corrosion, causing it to become brittle.” The professor smiled at Emory. “I support your theory.”
Driving back to Geisterhaus, Emory and Jeff called Virginia to fill her in on the presumed cause of death for Tommy Addison. Afterwards, Emory asked Jeff to make a video call to Cathy Shaw. The medical examiner answered with, “Hey handsomes!” and an energetic wave to the camera.
Jeff greeted her with a grin. “Hey Cathy. Do you have a few minutes to talk to us?”
“Is this about the Geister/Addison case?”
“Yes,” answered Emory. “The sheriff is coming by the house this afternoon to examine some evidence we discovered, but we wanted to run it by you to make certain it aligns with your findings.”
“What evidence?”
The PIs told her about the lightning rod rewiring and Emory’s ball lightning theory.
Cathy took a moment. “When you asked me about lightning before, I dismissed it because both victims died indoors with no evidence of a lightning strike, but damn if you didn’t find it.”
Emory asked, “Would you say that contact with lightning is consistent with the anomalies you found – Blair Geister’s ruptured eardrum and Tommy Addison’s eye petechia?”
Cathy whistled air between her teeth and tilted her head. “Consistent isn’t really a term you can use when it comes to lightning-related injuries. If I find visceral congestion and cyanosis along with petechia, I know the COD is asphyxia. If I see something as basic as saltwater in the lungs, I know it’s drowning. But lightning’s a trickster. Rarely do you have a mode of lethality with such a vast array of potential expressions – from walking away without a scratch to nearly complete incineration. Apart from the victims in this case, I’ve only examined two other lightning-strike victims. When I was an intern doing an ER rotation, we had a woman come in with everything beneath her right knee disintegrated from where the lightning exited her body. She didn’t make it. Then when I was a resident, I had a male lightning victim who looked perfectly fine, but he was suffering from maddening tinnitus – ringing in the ear. What I’m trying to say is that lightning could explain it all – the myocardial infarction, petechia and ruptured eardrum.”
Emory sighed in relief. “Thanks Cathy. That’s exactly what we needed to know.”
“Glad to help. Now when are you guys going to take me out on the town like you promised?”
Jeff asked, “How about next Friday?”
“I’m going to hold you to that, Bright Eyes.”
“Bye Cathy.” Jeff hung up the phone. “Lightning is the perfect murder weapon.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Emory replied. “The perfect murder weapon would be one that didn’t leave a trace.”
“It barely left one. She had the deaths ruled as heart attacks.”
“But the killer couldn’t have known that for certain. You heard Cathy. Lightning’s impact on the body is unpredictable. Whoever killed Blair Geister had no idea what state her body would be in.”
“Or that it would end up killing someone else. Okay, what would be the perfect murder?”
Emory shook his head. “There’s no such thing. Murderers always forget something. Some minute detail that can be found if you just look.”
“If you were going to murder someone, how would you do it?”
“I wouldn’t.”
“I’m not saying that you would. Just put yourself in the mindset of someone capable of murdering another person in cold blood. How would you go about it to give yourself the best chance of getting away with it?”
Emory sighed. “Hypothetically, the most successful murder would be one that was never identified as a murder.”
“You’d want it to look like natural causes or an accident.”
“Yes, but how you went about it would depend on the intended victim – their age, health, habits, et cetera. You could push a young skateboarder’s head into a cement curb and have his skateboard nearby, and perhaps no one would question if it were ruled an accident, unless the victim was known to never skate without a helmet.”
Jeff thought for a moment. “Say your victim is a forty-year-old male in perfect health with no unusual habits.”
“I don’t know. If I’m remembering correctly, the leading cause of death for that age group is unintentional injury, mostly from accidental poisoning like drug overdoses or interactions. An over-the-counter potassium-sparing diuretic mixed with a common salt substitute could cause a heart attack in an otherwise healthy individual. Viagra mixed with the nitrates from eating bacon can do the same thing.”
“Seriously? I guess no post-sex BLTs.”
“Right? Now the example you gave is of a man in perfect health, but people are usually in their forties when they start worrying about their cholesterol levels and might be on cholesterol-lowering medications. Grapefruit’s interaction with these drugs is pretty common knowledge, but not a lot of people realize that other fruits, such as tangelos, have furanocoumarins, the chemical in grapefruit that causes the interaction. They could inadvertently eat that without knowing that it could cause a heart attack. You can get furanocoumarins from over-the-counter supplements. Dissolve a large dose in his drink, so it interacts with the medication he’s taking and throw some tangelos in his fruit bowl. The effect from furanocoumarins can last for three days, well after it’s gone through the stomach. The ME might not find any trace of the fruit in the stomach, but it wouldn’t raise any flags.”
Jeff gaped at his partner. “Damn, that’s cold.”
“You asked!”
“I wasn’t expecting that much detail. Okay, what about if you didn’t care that people knew the victim had been murdered, but you still wanted to get away with it?”
“That makes it more difficult.” Emory inhaled as if a thought had struck him.
“What is it?”
“I just remembered something that happened when I was a kid. A couple of kids propped a scarecrow up on the train tracks, hoping to make a freight train throw on its brakes.”
“What’s the point of that?”
Emory shrugged. “Just a prank. Anyway, the train never even slowed down. It got me thinking what if that had been a person who looked like a scarecrow.”
“You mean on Halloween.”
“No. Someone drugged and dressed up like a scarecrow and tied to the posts. The train would’ve gone right through them.”
“You do have a sick mind.”
Emory laughed. “You can’t catch a killer without thinking like one. Okay, what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Same question. How would you murder someone?”
Jeff touched his chest. “Me. That’s easy. I wouldn’t.”
Emory repeated Jeff’s hypothesis. “Put yourself in the mindset of someone capable of murder.”
Jeff shook his head. “Yeah, I’m not feeling it. I can’t even hypothetically think so deviously. It’s just not who I am.”
“You jerk. You made me do it.”
“Oh look! We’re home.”
Emory turned onto the driveway to Geisterhaus and parked to the right of Jeff’s car. When he exited the vehicle, he glanced inside the passenger-side window and saw clumps of dirt on the driver-side floor. Huh. His car was spotless before we left Knoxville, and he didn’t want to dirty it. That’s why we took my car. As the two approached the front door, Emory stopped.
“What is it?”
“Um…” Emory searched for words.
Jeff snapped his fingers. “I forgot. I brought some fresh cloths. I’ll meet you inside.”
As Jeff walked back to his car, Emory stepped inside the house and stood there. What do I do? Wait! I have an idea. He walked back outside and intercepted Jeff, who was now dragging a piece of luggage behind him.
“I told you I had it. It’s just one bag.”
Emory pointed behind him with his thumb. “Virginia’s in there going nuts looking for her keys. She can’t find them anywhere.”
“Why is she stressing?” Jeff pulled out his keychain. “She knows I have a copy.”
Emory’s eyes widened, and he jabbed a finger into Jeff’s chest, growling, “It was you!”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“When we first saw Zyus Drake at Blair Geister’s will reading, I commented on his mask. Virginia explained they’re used in the military, and she said that she had one. You heard her.”
“So?”
“The night you stayed in Knoxville, I saw someone wearing the mask by that huge cedar tree, holding a shovel.”
“You told me. Zyus Drake.”
“I chased him out the front gate, and then I walked down the driveway back to the house. I was soaking wet from the rain when I got back to the house, and I saw Zyus about a minute later completely dry. There’s no way he could’ve cleaned up that quickly, which means the guy I saw was someone else.” Emory jabbed his finger into Jeff’s chest. “You!”