Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (14 page)

“At these prices, I’m still having a few misgivings,” he said.

When the waiter came, Dani ordered a salad and he ordered coffee and a side order of garlic bread.

“Do you come into the city much?” Quinn asked. “You’re up in Westchester, aren’t you?”

“Just when I teach,” Dani said. “John Jay College of Criminal Justice.”

“What are you teaching? It’s really good to see you, Dani.”

“It’s good to see you too.”

“Listen, before we go any further, let’s just say that whatever was going on between us in Africa, we blew it, or I blew it, if you need me to take 100
percent of the blame, because that’s fine with me. And probably accurate. I blew it, it’s over, no regrets, moving on, all’s forgiven, still friends—okay? I wanted to get that out, straight off.”

“Okay,” Dani said, both startled and comforted by his directness.

“I trust you’ve moved on and are seeing somebody?”

“I am,” Dani said.

“I’d say tell me about him, but it’s none of my business. I’ve been too busy to date. But that’s not what I should be telling you—your e-mail asked if I could help you with something, and I’m making it sound like I couldn’t possibly find the time. Which I can’t, but for you, I will tell somebody else to go—I will tell them my dog deleted my homework. I got a dog—did I tell you I got a dog? A bloodhound. I call him Otto. I’m trying to train him to sniff out depression.”

“Vanillylmandelic acid?”

“Well done!” Quinn said. “This is why we had such a good time together. My friends say I should just let him be a dog, but he’s a bloodhound—he
wants
to sniff things out. It’s incredible, what he can do. What did you say you were teaching?”

“You didn’t give me a chance,” Dani said. The waiter brought their food, and as they ate, Dani told him about the teaching she’d been doing, classes in criminal psychopathology, character evaluation methodologies for noncooperative subjects, forensic psychiatry in the courtroom. She told him about her job in general terms. When he wasn’t talking nonstop, Quinn could be a very good listener. When she’d finished, Dani thought it only fair that he have the floor to update her on his recent activities.

“What’s the paper you’re delivering about?” she said. “‘An Immunoradiometric Study of Hyperandrogenism and Autism’?”

“Well, it’s kind of a spin-off from the work I’d been doing on neurotransmitters of the frontal cortex—”

“Impulse control?”

“Exactly. The original work was with dopamine dysregulation syndrome
and Parkinson’s and Tourette’s, and then we went longitudinal and started asking what happens to autistic children when they hit puberty. You’re aware of the effect of hyperandrogeny on teens in the A-A spectrum?”

“Not the way you are, evidently,” Dani said, “but sure. Kids with autism who already have a hard enough time coping with emotions have an even harder time when they reach puberty and become flooded with testosterone or estrogen. They get completely overstimulated.”

“And when they can’t take it anymore, they explode with anger,” Quinn said, fishing for his wallet to hand the waiter the money to cover the bill. He hadn’t touched his coffee or his garlic bread. “Sometimes. Not every time. Walk me back to my hotel?”

They headed north on Broadway.

“What do you know about Provivilan?” Dani said as they dodged pedestrians approaching from the opposite direction.

“Not a thing, thank you very much,” Quinn said.

“Isn’t Linz Pharm one of the conference sponsors?”

“Indeed they are. Provivilan is the new miracle drug. If memory serves, one of those comes along every 2.5 years. Actually, I haven’t really dug in. Though I should. They offered me a job. Just last summer. In fact, this invitation to speak may be part of an ongoing wooing process. I could have made more money than Croesus.”

“Maybe you should have listened,” Dani said. “You could have funded your research for years. No more grants to write.”

“Yes, but they would have told me what to work on,” Quinn said. “I’m not cut out for that. I’m better off following my own path. If my life is ever going to amount to anything, I think that’s the way I have to go.”

Dani thought it was odd to hear him sounding so fatalistic. When they’d first met, the sky was the limit and he spoke as if nothing would ever stop him. Now he seemed aware that the clock was ticking. Perhaps that was the curse that came with winning awards and scholarships at an early age—the gnawing sense you’re not living up to your potential.

“Did the name Peter Guryakin come up when they offered you the job? I met him at an art opening in East Salem.”

“It did not, but it probably would have if I hadn’t turned them down. He’s one of the research directors, right?”

Dani smiled. “He told me he was in marketing.”

“Perhaps he was just being humble. Or lying outright, which would not surprise me. The word on the grapevine is that he was running a KGB weapons program. Weren’t they trying to use their mental powers to make goats explode back then, or was that just a Hollywood movie?”

“That was a movie. And I think the CIA tried that, not the KGB.”

“Either way, the whole thing sounded unsavory,” Quinn said, craning his neck to look up at a tall glass building. He folded his hands together behind his back and rocked on his heels. “This is my hotel. We’ve had a snack and a walk, and you still haven’t told me how I can help you.”

“I have a favor to ask,” Dani said. “Actually, two. We tested a boy, postmortem, who killed a young woman in a rather terrible way. I diagnosed him as having dissociative identity disorder, but that wasn’t with a full intake. His proteomics were all over the map. I was hoping you could explain the findings. The only catch is that I can’t send you the file. You’d have to come up.”

“I don’t have a car. Can I take the train?”

“Take Metro North to Katonah and I’ll meet you at the station. Can you do it?”

“I deliver my paper this afternoon, but I’m free after that. This is good—it gets me out of dinner. What’s the other favor?”

“The boy was supposedly in treatment, in a drug trial of some sort. I don’t know who was sponsoring the trial or even running it, but I think this is what they were testing.”

She handed him a small zip-locked baggie with the blue capsule Tommy had found behind the Sweet’N Low at Starbucks. Quinn held it up to the light to look at it.

“And you want me to find out what this is?”

“Can you do it?”

“I can, but I’ll need a lab. I know someone at Columbia. It’s not Provivilan, is it?”

“I don’t know,” Dani said. “I didn’t exactly get it from my pharmacist.”

“Did you steal it?” Quinn said, smiling mischievously.

“No,” Dani said. “One of the boys in the trial gave it to me.”

“But you think it’s an SSRI?”

“Or something related.”

“To treat depression?”

“Possibly.”

“I’ll have a look. Which of the two favors has the higher priority?”

“If you can assay the pill first, it may help explain the proteomics.”

“I’ll get right on it,” Quinn said. “I assume this is the only sample you have.”

“It is.”

Across the street a woman was already decorating a shop window for Christmas. Quinn put the baggie into his pocket and patted it.

“Then I’ll be very careful,” he said. “Maybe when I come up, you’ll introduce me to whoever it is you’re in love with. I’d like to meet him. He’s lucky to have you.”

“I didn’t say anything about—”

“You said everything but,” Quinn said. “I’m not a behaviorist, but some things are obvious. I’m glad for you. I really am.”

“It’s good to see you, Quinn.”

“It’s good to see you too,” he said. “I worried about you.”

“I’m strong,” she said. “And getting stronger all the time. You know me.”

“Not sure that I really do,” he said. “Or ever did. But that’s my loss. I’ll call you when I know something.”

She liked that he’d said
when
he knew something, and decided she’d been wrong to worry that it would have been awkward to introduce him to Tommy. She was certain Tommy would like him.

A new worry occurred to her. She was involving Quinn in something that could be dangerous. Was that fair? She wondered if she should have laid all her cards on the table instead of keeping a few in the hole. But in a way, she thought, the less Quinn knew, the safer he would be. Unless his curiosity led him into dangerous territory. And she knew there was no stopping his curiosity.

13.

By talking to the staff at the High Ridge Manor nursing home that morning, Carl had at first learned little more than the police already knew—that the windows of Abbie’s room were locked from the inside, and that the surveillance videos didn’t show anybody going in or out of her room in the hour prior to when her body was found. Her physician told Carl that the progression of her illness had been slow but steady. The candy striper, a girl of sixteen named Amber who’d helped box up Abbie’s personal effects, said the clothing in her drawers had not been as neatly folded as Abbie usually kept it, but nothing was missing as far as she could tell. Carl found nothing unusual in Abbie’s stuff, save that the spine of her well-thumbed Bible had been cracked and partially torn.

He was about to leave when Amber asked if he knew where Abbie’s son, George, was. “We’ve been trying to reach him,” she said. “He was here to visit that morning.”

“Didn’t someone go to the house to tell him the news in person?” Carl said.

Amber nodded and said with a shrug, “Nobody was home.”

Tommy was also looking for George. He wanted to run some of Abbie’s comments by her son to see if he could shed any light, so he and Carl drove to the Gardener farm. As he drove, Tommy told Carl about the visit earlier from Ben Whitehorse. Carl wasn’t sure what to say, other than they needed all the help they could get.

When they reached the farm, they paused at the long gravel drive. The hayfields beyond the low stone walls were brown, and they could see the slate-gray waters of Lake Atticus. Tommy turned down the drive slowly, honking his horn three times and turning his headlights on and off to let anyone in the house know they were coming. He parked in the circular drive in front of the house and shut the motor off.

The large old house was a Queen Anne, with a stone foundation, a wraparound porch, corner turrets and gables and reddish-brown siding, black shutters and black gingerbread trim, and thick climbers of dark green English ivy rising up and over the trellises. Tommy remembered that when Abbie was healthy, the gardens and the decorative shrubs around the house were pruned and weeded, but it had all gone to seed in her absence. In the fading late-afternoon light, a month shy of winter solstice, the house looked not just dark but dead, as if no one lived there now or ever had.

They got out of the car and without speaking split up to circle the house, looking in the windows to see if there was anyone inside. The day was getting colder and darker. Tommy turned up the collar of his navy peacoat against the wind and tugged down the brim of his Irish newsboy cap.

They met up behind the house on a broad lawn leading down to the lake. A gas grill on the back patio was covered with a large garbage bag. On the lakeshore, an Alumicraft rowboat was docked.

“That oughtta be turned over if they’re done for the season,” Carl said. “If George went to Miami to lie on the beach for the winter, he would have taken care of that. Is there a car in the garage?”

“First there’d have to be a garage,” Tommy said, heading for the barn.

“What does George drive?” Carl asked, following him.

“I’ve seen him driving into town to pick up stuff at the hardware store
in an old green Ford F150 with rusted fenders,” Tommy said. “I don’t know if he has any other vehicle.”

“Didn’t Abbie have a car?”

“A Dodge Dart. With a slant six. Those things were good for 300,000 miles.”

“So was the driver,” Carl said.

Tommy slid the barn’s great door open and saw both the Dodge Dart and the F150 parked inside, but with enough room left in front for a third vehicle. He paused to use the infrared handheld to scan the building. Carl looked over his shoulder.