The Einstein Pursuit (4 page)

‘Are you an animal-lover?’

‘I like some, not all. Why do you ask?’

Eklund shined his light toward a series of metal grids that comprised the opposite wall. ‘Come see for yourself.’

Dial raised his flashlight and climbed over the rubble that blocked his path. As he did, the acrid stench of seared flesh suddenly became overwhelming, so much so that he was forced to cover his nose and mouth as he examined the first grid. Much to his surprise, it was all that remained of a cage. A thick Lucite plate had once covered it, but that had melted away in the blaze. Inside the box, Dial could see the charred skeletons of dozens of mice.

Eklund sidestepped to the right, his light still focused on the wall.

Dial followed and saw a similar cage. This one contained something bigger. They could have been rats, they could have been hamsters – he could no longer tell. ‘Are those squirrels?’

Eklund said nothing. Instead, he stepped back and swept his beam of light down the aisle. Dial could see that the entire wall was lined with cages of progressively larger sizes.

‘Fuck me,’ he mumbled under his breath.

As they made their way down the row, Dial’s stomach churned. The burned remains of rodents gave way to larger mammals. There were cats whose last acts were to paw frantically through the metal grate, dogs whose teeth had become hopelessly lodged in the mesh as they tried to gnaw their way out of their enclosures, and primates who had died clinging to the heavy bars that separated them from their captors.

All had been reduced to little more than blackened skeletons.

Dial couldn’t help but feel for these animals. It was a sense of sorrow mixed with rage and confusion. They were defenseless, and he knew their deaths had been painful. He wanted answers as to what they had been used for. Why were they even there? And who was responsible for their demise?

‘Where are the scientists?’ he asked.

Eklund led Dial up some stairs and into a maze of overturned lab tables and scorched equipment. Stone and glass crunched underfoot. In the center of the back wall of the laboratory there was a section of the room that was deeper in width than the main floor, as if the concrete walls had been specifically laid to create two thirds of a room. What remained of the fourth wall – the wall that separated the room from the rest of the laboratory – was badly scorched.

‘We have no idea how many people worked in the lab, but so far we have found more than twenty. Most were gathered here.’

Eklund pointed his light toward the rear of the room, his nostrils flaring as he tried to stave off the pungent scent of roasted flesh. His years as a homicide detective had prepared him for many things, but not something like this. Despite the scent, he stood steadfast, as if turning away in disgust would dishonor those who had died.

Unprepared for sights and smells, the first cops on the scene had vomited in the middle of the floor – and who could blame them? The scene was horrific. Like a protective father, Eklund straddled the spot where the young officers had purged, preventing Dial from accidentally stepping in it and further contaminating the crime scene.

In truth, a pool of vomit was the least of Dial’s concerns.

He turned a halogen spotlight from the main floor and pointed it into the room, adding to the single lamp that had already been placed inside. He saw bodies piled against the farthest wall, and in an instant, he knew exactly what had happened there.

After the blast, those trapped on this floor had backed away to avoid the heat. As the fire swept through the laboratory, they huddled against the back wall – the farthest they could run from the flames. In the growing inferno, they covered their exposed skin with clothing or anything else they could find, including each other, hoping to shield themselves from the intensely radiating fire.

Dial grimaced and thought back to the wall of cages.

Down there, the fire had washed over the animals, incinerating their fur and flesh and leaving only their bones. Horrible as their deaths were, the animals were the lucky ones. The flames would have engulfed them quickly, and their suffering would have been short and merciful.

In here, it was far worse. It wasn’t the explosion, or the smoke, or the fire itself that had killed the humans; it was the heat. These unfortunate souls were literally roasted alive. Every fluid in their bodies – their eyes, their blood, the moisture in their lungs – would have slowly begun to boil. Their tissues would have broken down, causing intense bleeding from the eyes, ears and nose, and eventually their organs. Each breath would have grown more agonizing until they could breathe no more.

In a fire, nerve endings are burned away quickly. The pain is severe, but it is fleeting.

In a slow burn, the victim feels every agonizing moment. Only death brings relief.

Dial stared at the shriveled remains of the scientists. They looked like they had undergone a badly executed mummification – or worse. A few looked like meat that had been left on the grill for too long.

‘I want to know everything. What was the ignition source? What was the accelerant? Did this go down as planned, or did a small fire get out of hand?’

Eklund motioned skyward, to where the ceiling once was.

Now it was nothing but a gaping hole.

‘Best as we can tell, it started up there. They knocked out the upper two floors with a charge and let everything come crashing down. Whatever survived the blast and the falling debris was destroyed by the fire.’

‘And the accelerant?’

Eklund shrugged. ‘Possibly acetone, but we won’t know for sure until we run some tests.’

‘How long will that take?’

‘Probably a day or two.’

‘Screw that. We can find out right now.’

Eklund furrowed his brow, wondering how they would accomplish that feat in the blackened lab. He hoped it didn’t involve a taste test of any kind. Although he wanted to impress Dial, there was no way he could lick a corpse without vomiting. ‘How?’

Dial pointed at Eklund’s poncho. ‘Do you have a UV light under your skirt?’

Eklund nodded and pulled a small ultraviolet light from his utility belt. It was often used to detect blood spatter at crime scenes. He handed the device to Dial, who asked one of the cops to turn off the nearest halogen lamps.

The room quickly grew dark.

‘I learned this trick at Quantico,’ Dial said as he turned on the penlight. As if by magic, the rubble around them started to glow like the flowers in
Avatar
. ‘Acetone fluoresces in the right conditions. One of them is ultraviolet light.’

Eklund stared with amazement. ‘I’ll be damned.’

‘Based on this, I’d say that your theory is correct. They blew the upper floors, and the acetone fell from above like a waterfall. It burns
really
hot, so there was no need to bring in gasoline or any other accelerants.’

‘They used the lab against itself.’

‘Exactly.’

Dial hated to admit it, but he was impressed with the planning. He had seen a lot of creative ways to kill, but this was really ingenious. ‘Run a history of every scientist working here. I mean a
full
history. I want to know what their specialties were, where they went to school, what they did in their personal lives, all of it. Find out who might be targeting them.’

‘Already on it,’ Eklund assured him.

‘Good,’ Dial said as he glanced around the grisly room. ‘I get the sense these bastards aren’t done killing yet. The sooner we get to them, the better.’

When Mattias Sahlberg first arrived in America, he had every intention of settling in one of the few communities in Pittsburgh with a recognized – albeit small – Swedish population. Friends who were familiar with the city’s ethnic composition had suggested Homestead, Munhall or Braddock: all Monongahela riverfront communities east of the city. There he had hoped to find a pocket of his countrymen, people he could turn to if he ever felt homesick or craved Swedish delicacies like
köttbullar
(meatballs) or
inlagd sill
(pickled herring).

But his new employer had other ideas.

They wanted him to focus on his research.

To encourage his loyalty and to reward his talents, they bought Sahlberg a nice house in the hillside community of Duquesne Heights. With sweeping views of Pittsburgh’s skyline, its three rivers and dozens of bridges, the house was far more expensive than anything he could have afforded on his own. Having grown up in squalor, he jumped at the chance to live there, even though he was the first and only Swede in the neighborhood.

Not that it really mattered.

Once he’d settled in, he realized that Pittsburgh was an exceptionally friendly city, filled with immigrants who had left their war-torn countries for steady employment in the steel mills and, more importantly, a chance to pursue the American dream. Before long, he had made dozens of friends from around the world, most of whom had thick accents and calloused hands and a burning desire to give their children a better life than they’d ever had. And even though he had none of those things – thanks to his first-rate education, his job in academia, and his relative youth – he felt comfortable with those that did.

So much so that he had lived there for nearly six decades.

Sahlberg’s day started as it almost always did. After a restless night, he rose late to a tangle of sweaty sheets. The noonday sun was waging war against his air conditioner and was temporarily winning the battle. He adjusted his thermostat and waited for the ageing compressor to fight back. A few seconds later, he felt the rush of cold air on his face as he combed his hair and brushed his teeth. It reminded him of the winter winds that used to seep through the thin walls in his childhood home in Sweden.

Sahlberg headed to his kitchen, where he made a sandwich and poured himself a glass of iced tea before carrying both to the living room table, where he would eat his lunch while surfing the web. It was all part of his daily routine. First he looked at the weather. Then he checked the headlines on several scientific websites. There were a few tidbits about the Human Genome Project, but nothing that really kept his interest.

Finally he turned his attention to his homeland.

Sahlberg had come to embrace modern technology in a way that few others of his generation had. Much of that acceptance had come through his work, but it had trickled down to other aspects of his life as well. He carried an iPhone. He owned an iPad. More importantly, he knew how to use both. He streamed music through his computer, downloaded movies frequently, and even kept a hard-to-find folder on his hard drive labeled
ANATOMICAL STUDY
– only the images had less to do with physiology and more to do with naked bodies in motion.

But his favorite technological advancement was his ability to peruse Swedish newspapers the instant they were published. He would read everything from sports to obituaries to the latest social gossip. He always started at the website for the
Dagens Nyheter
, one of Stockholm’s two daily newspapers, and then followed links from there.

The incident at the laboratory was front-page news.

He gasped when he saw the headline.

According to the article, a devastating fire had swept through a warehouse, destroying a lab and killing everyone inside. Strangely, no one was sure why the staff had been working so late or what type of lab it was. The article explained that it had no apparent affiliation with any pharmaceutical company or biological research facility in the country, but they hoped the ongoing investigation would eventually make a connection. Police were unwilling to release an official body count, but they confirmed that more than twenty victims had been found so far.

Sahlberg was saddened by the news.

Even though he did not know the purpose of this particular lab, the death of any scientist in Stockholm was sure to affect him personally. Sahlberg had never married, but a tragedy at a facility in his hometown was nearly certain to involve someone from his other family – his
scientific
family. He was sure he would soon learn that someone in the fire had either worked for him or with him, or was associated with someone who would fit into one of those categories. The research community was surprisingly close-knit, despite its worldwide distribution.

He immediately checked his email. He was searching for any first-hand information from his colleagues back home. All he saw were standard messages from the various mailing lists he subscribed to. He breathed a momentary sigh of relief. Unfortunately, the feeling was short-lived. He knew it was far too early to assume that no news was good news, so he went back to his browser and searched for more details.

Stockholm’s other major newspaper,
Svenska Dagbladet
, echoed the details from the other report, with one notable addition: an unnamed source in the fire department said that the scene had the look and feel of a controlled burn, intentionally contained to this specific building.

Sahlberg’s mind raced with questions.

The scientists were murdered?
By whom?

For what possible reason?

No longer in the mood to eat, he decided to walk off the growing tension in his shoulders with a quick lap around his neighborhood. He figured the exercise in the warm summer air would do him some good.

Despite his advanced age, Sahlberg didn’t need any assistance to get around. He still walked with the brisk stride of a man in his early thirties. Maybe even his twenties. Whatever the case, he was far more nimble than anyone his age had a right to be. When people asked him for his secret, he always smiled and answered truthfully: genetics.

As an expert in that field, he knew it to be true.

Strolling past the rows of homes that dotted his street, he thought back to the first few years after his arrival. Back then, the community was mostly Germanic. He couldn’t walk more than a few feet from his house before being overcome with the smell of curing sausages or fresh-baked streusel. God, he loved that smell. At least on the days when the air wasn’t heavy with the soot from the area’s mills.