Mystery: Satan's Road - Suspense Thriller Mystery (Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Suspense Crime Thriller) (6 page)

CHAPTER TEN

I get up every morning and go to work just like you.

Most days I hate what I do – despise the politics and the bullshit and the endless paperwork that goes with it. And if I have to listen to one more drunk at two in the morning – in some crowded bar, lipping off to me about his excuse for a good life wasted – I swear I will happily make him eat the working end of my service revolver.

But I haven’t yet because the paperwork would kill me. So just let me dream.

Then there are those other days. Days when I feel like I’ve accomplished something bordering on important. Well, maybe that’s going too far. It feels important to me anyway. Like finally catching that arrogant pimp Rodriguez dead to rights, the asshole who made four of his girls disappear over the past year, smiling at me with his missing teeth. Or putting the cuffs on some rich asshole from Georgetown whose wife of twenty-five years went on a permanent vacation and has never been seen again. These small successes keep me going for another few days. That’s what I live for.

I work for the Washington D.C. Homicide Bureau if you haven’t already guessed – for far too long. Over twenty years. Half of my partners have retired or croaked or died in the line of duty. That should tell you something – that I’m lucky or blessed – or maybe not trying hard enough.

Being around this long and still in one piece, gives me the luxury of working a special unit – a unit we unofficially call the
Lost Hope Division.
Cold cases and sometimes, special cases. Cases the Captain doesn’t really know what to do with and doesn’t want some rookie mishandling and making more work for him. The
watch-your-ass
cases loaded with ugly political potential. So I get them. Gregory Hyde at your service.

This is such as case; a professor at Georgetown University, who went missing a week ago and was found yesterday in his four car garage lying dead on the concrete floor. The diagnosis was carbon monoxide poisoning. We’ve had a dozen of these cases this year alone. A pretty common way to go actually. Painless. Neat.

But then why get me involved? Because the professor’s wife, who has a lot of connections in the community, made a big commotion and called the Captain personally.
Her husband wasn’t suicidal and never had been
she said.

That wasn’t what caught our attention. A number of his peers had coincidentally died in the past few weeks as well. A Cosmologist he knew threw himself off a balcony yesterday in Toronto. An Engineering Ph.D. at Columbia had been accidentally cooked in a radiation chamber, a few days earlier.

Was it open season on professors?

I visited the wife of the prof from Georgetown U on my own. I’m told it’s budget cuts. I had lost a partner the year before, and there still wasn’t a replacement. That or no one wanted to work with a detective who had lost as many partners as I had. After all, cops for good reason are superstitious.

I was surprised how young the professor’s wife was. Then I learned that her husband had been some kind of whiz kid. University education at fifteen. PhD at eighteen. Professor at twenty-two. He was an expert on antiquities. And a very successful writer and entrepreneur – who also taught history.

Turns out he was younger than many of his students and his wife looked like the homecoming queen.

She invited me into her freshly painted Georgetown mini-mansion, and we sat in front of the largest flat screen TV I had ever seen. She stared at me with red eyes, looking completely wrung out for someone so young.

“I’m so relieved you’re here, Detective. Somehow I need to convince you that there is absolutely no way that Henry would end his life. You have to believe me. Henry was murdered. You need to find his killer.”

“Mrs. Gridley, I don’t want to get your hopes up. I’m here to add my perspective to this case. That’s all. We really don’t have any evidence of foul play.”

She leaned into me. “I know people who are depressed, Detective. I’ve had a close friend kill herself, but I’ve known Henry since he was a teenager. He wasn’t depressed a day in his life” Clearly more than I could say for myself. Just looking at her house depressed me.

“Anything unusual in the last few weeks? Anything he did? People he worked with? Travel?” I asked.

“He teaches. He writes. Does some lecturing. Or did.” She paused then and gently blew her nose on a monogrammed handkerchief. “That was his life. He had a new book coming out on the history of the Jesuit Commandos. He was very excited about making personal appearances to support the book.”

“Jesuit Commandos?”

“You’ve never heard of them? Sometimes they’re called the Pope’s Soldiers.” I couldn’t for the life of me see why the Pope would need soldiers. But if he did, and this wasn’t suicide, could it be possible that the publication of this book could have created enough animosity to get someone killed? Was that a potential motive? Or was it just her expensive perfume scrambling my senses.

“Did Professor Gridley have any enemies?” I asked.

“Professional jealousies perhaps. But he was a very likeable teacher. His students loved him.”

“When you say jealousies, any names come to mind?”

She thought about that for a moment. “There are always campus politics – people fighting for tenure or to get published. I’d really hate to send you out into the world with a hit list of cotton-headed eccentrics though.”

She stopped to rub her nose and I couldn’t help but notice how perfectly it was shaped.
Natural or surgical?

“I would be very careful with any information you volunteered. Like I said, we haven’t even decided if this is a homicide.”

She ignored that possibility. “Then I could probably provide you with names of professors – and not just ones teaching here at Georgetown. Henry was working with a committee of professors from Universities all across the states for example. They were working on
Revelations
. One of his favorite topics.”

“
Revelations
… as in
the end of the world
book from the Bible?”

“Yes. The Apocalypse.” Sitting in a bright and very modern room with a beautiful woman talking about the end of the world was a jarring experience. Even for me. I stared at her for a moment, which I could tell, made her uncomfortable. I’m six foot four and some people say I have a head like an anvil. I wasn’t built for heart-to-hearts over tea.

“I’m sorry Mrs. Gridley, but I don’t often talk to people about Armageddon – especially in such fashionable surroundings. It threw me off a bit.” She smiled for the first time and then lightly touched my knee.

“Detective, my husband lived in a strange world. One foot in the twenty-first century, the other in the Old Testament.”

I stood up to stretch, happy to change the subject and asked to see the garage.

We walked through a monstrous kitchen that could easily feed our entire precinct and through a back door into a spotless garage. There were two vehicles. A black Range Rover I assumed was the professors and a lime green Kia Soul. She then explained the Soul was her husbands. All evidence of the suicide was cleaned up.

“He was found lying just beside his car. The door was open, and the car was running,” she explained. “The medical examiner said she thought he might have changed his mind at the last minute and tried to get out, but it was too late. But they don’t know my husband.”

“What do you mean?”

“If he was planning on killing himself, he wouldn’t have changed his mind. You don’t get to be a full professor at the age of twenty-eight by waffling on your decisions. And you don’t become a millionaire at the age of twenty-five by wanting it all to end.  He was killed, Detective. He may have tried to get away. He may have woken up. But he was not changing his mind.”

She was clearly a very unique woman. She was standing only inches from where her husband had spent his last few minutes and yet appeared fully composed. In my experience, most people would just have pointed me in the direction of the garage and stayed away from the scene.

I watched her for a few seconds, intent on where her gaze was directed. She kept looking at the Kia. “It says in the report that your husband had disappeared for three days before showing up here. Why didn’t you report him missing?”

She looked up at me, guessing for the first time that she might actually be considered a potential suspect. She frowned. “Henry used to disappear on a regular basis. I know that sounds odd, but he was a unique character. Whenever he was finishing an important project or book, he would take off. We talked about it quite a bit. It was the only way he could finish something with so much going on around him.”

“So where did he go?”

She pondered that for a moment, and her lip began to quiver slightly. “I don’t know, detective. I guess we will find out when his credit card bill shows up in the mail. It was three days lost to us; that’s all I think about.”

I gave her a moment, then moved on to Gridley’s schedule that day, his appointments, and I got her to give me the names of several of the teachers he worked with at G.U. as well as the names of the professors he was working with on the
Revelations
project.

I walked around the garage trying to understand what Gridley was thinking. Carbon monoxide worked best in a smaller space. This garage was bigger than my house. From the police report, I knew there was no hose running from the exhaust to the car’s interior. It didn’t look very well thought out. Not the kind of suicide planned by a boy genius with an IQ of 145.

“Did you know any of the other professors who worked on that project with your husband? Like this Abraham Bugloski?” I asked.

“From Columbia? Yes. I met him once. He was very old and frail, but his mind was sharper than anyone I know. A real match for Henry. You know how he died?”

“Something about radiation?”

“They have a radiating chamber at Columbia. It’s a small room where they can take something like a case full of golf balls and bombard them with high energy x-rays or other particle emissions.”

“Golf balls?”

“Yes. When you radiate a golf ball, it changes the chemical structure of the plastic, and the ball will fly further. About twenty yards they say.”

“He was a professor who worked on golf balls?”

“He had a Ph.D. in Engineering – a brilliant man. He radiated all kinds of objects and structures to see if he could increase their strength. One day he got locked in the chamber when the beam was on and got a huge dose of radiation. He died two days later.”

“The report I saw said they thought he was senile and forgot where he was.”

Mrs. Gridley shook her head. “Ridiculous. Like I said. He was sharper than most on a good day. Physically slight, but could still solve a Rubik’s cube in under sixty seconds at the age of eight-six. He used to do that at staff parties routinely.”

“So you think he was murdered too?” I asked.

She gave me a look of tired exasperation. “Detective. Someone is murdering brilliant researchers. There were four other professors working on that project with Henry. I was hoping you could get to them before they’re all killed and find out why someone thinks they’re so dangerous.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I tracked down the officer who attended the scene at Columbia U where Professor Bugloski died. He worked out of the 26th Precinct. Officer Brian Redpath. He joked that Columbia was currently celebrating
Brain Month
, which was hilarious to him considering one of their most senior profs just died because he forgot where he was.

I started with “I just spoke to someone who knew Bugloski, and they said he was no more senile than you or I.”

“Well, I can’t speak for you, Detective Hyde. You’re famous for being with the force for a hundred years, so anything is possible. That was a joke by the way.”
Funny guy.

“Who exactly told you they thought he was senile?” I asked.

“Let me check my notes. Yeah, the director of the Engineering Lab. Irene Quitzol. I’m not making that up. She took me aside after I looked around – after the ME had left – and filled me in.”

“And she said he was clinically senile?”

“She said he was a problem because he would wander the halls and forget his name and take things that belonged to people. But no one wanted to make a fuss because he was so respected. Seemed very likely considering his age and the circumstances.”

“So what happened?”

“This room is lined with lead and concrete. It’s like a freakin’ bank vault. The door is so heavy motors operate it. So an alarm sounds when they want to close the door. She ran it for me. Instant headache. Then the door rolls closed. Takes about two minutes and sounds like a freight train. There are no windows because of the high radiation, but one of the crew has to monitor the door to make sure no one gets left inside. Then they blast the living hell out of whatever is in this room. Twilight Zone time. Not a good place to be if you have Alzheimer’s.”

“Did you talk to the crew member who watched the door? Why didn’t they see him?”

“The ME said it looked like Bugloski had a mini stroke or something or fainted behind the packing crate. You couldn’t see him from the door. Poor guy. Musta felt like being left in the microwave. Lousy way to go.”

“And what did he die from specifically?”

“Oh. I’ve got that right here. Massive cell and organ failure about twenty hours later at the hospital at Columbia.”

There wasn’t much more I could do. I had him send me a copy of the report.

I now have a young whiz kid millionaire, an uncertain suicide, no note left behind, no apparent motive. Another Prof he knew, Dean of Engineering, who apparently dozed off in a radiation chamber.

The next name on the list was Esther Nates, a math Prof. I called her number at Berkeley. The phone was picked up by a woman in the Math department who wanted to know if I was a student or colleague. When I explained the situation, she immediately began to cry.

“Esther was killed,” she sobbed. “She was very generous. She was working with a local drug program and hired a former addict to help her work on a project. He strangled her yesterday.”