Jupiter's Bones (24 page)

“Asserting his independence, maybe.” Decker shrugged. “Venus’s real name is Jilliam Laham. Originally, she was a friend of Ganz’s daughter, Europa. Andromeda’s name is Lauren Bolt. She’s missing, by the way. She, and a twelve-thirteen-year-old kid named Lyra, disappeared from the Order around eighteen hours ago.”

“Are you putting me on?” McCarry asked.

“Wish I were. Yesterday Pluto called up the station house in a rage. He all but accused us of kidnapping them. Which is one of the reasons we were up at the ranch…sure you don’t want to write this down?”

McCarry’s disbelief was cut short by the ring of the cellular. The tapes clicked on and he connected the call. “This is Special Agent Bennett McCarry of the FBI. Talk to me.”

Guru Bob was pissed. “Get me Decker!”

McCarry had experience with these types of situations. He had worked with the Freemen in Idaho and Montana. The trick was to keep cool yet remain firm. He said, “He’s not available. What can I do for you, Bob?”

“It’s guru to you, shithead. Besides, I don’t talk to idiots I can’t see—”

“I’ll step outside—”

“Don’t interrupt!” Bob was shouting. Decker could hear him through the receiver, see his voice waves spike on the monitor. “You have a minute to
make
Decker available, Special Agent
McCarry
or I’ll pulverize seventy-six children to dust. I’ve got plastics as well as conventional explosives strategically set throughout the entire compound. So don’t even think about a sudden raid. We’ve made over three hundred pounds of the shit—sulfuric acid, nitric acid, toluene along with gel explosives.
I’ve got TNT stored not only in cell batteries with long-range detonators, but we’ve also got stuff in shootable projectiles and pellets. If you think I’m bluffing, I’ll send a sample from our chem labs. I aim at your face, Special Agent
McCarry
, and you’re cosmic vapor.”

“I understand, Bob. I don’t think you’re bluffing. I’ll give you Deck—”

“
Stop
interrupting me! As long as you’re on the line, just shut up and listen! Don’t even think about turning off the
electricity
. We have backup power. If you start in any way, shape or form to flex muscle, I’ll flex
mine
. And I’m looking at a detonator switch and my finger’s getting itchy!”

McCarry said, “Bob, I believe you. I’ll try my best—”

“Like Yoda said, there is no try—just do or not do.” A raspy breath. “And you know what I’m going to
do
for you, Special Agent McCarry? I’m going to call the media circus and tell them your name. So when they report the seventy-six dead kids flying in the air, they can announce to the world that Special Agent Bennett McCarry
tried
his best!”

“Wait a minute, wait a minu—”

But Bob had hung up. McCarry cursed. He had a loud voice and his swearing reverberated in the van. He was sweating as if trapped in a hotbox.

Decker raised his eyebrows and held out his hand.

Wordlessly, McCarry gave him the phone.

The apartment was
a mile from the university, easily within biking distance. Europa obviously took advantage of that fact as evidenced by the European two-wheeled racer in her living room. An athletic woman, she had hung her walls with pictures of herself skiing down a steep, snow-packed slope; battling choppy, white waters in a raft; standing in a vegetation-packed forest decked out in hiking gear and showing off a glorious view while precariously balancing on a mountain bike. Other photographs included ice-cold landscapes of stellar-laden skies. Her concession to the ordinary was a prefab entertainment unit containing a stereo receiver, a CD player and holder, and a small TV. There was also one particle-board bookshelf filled with paperback novels. The furniture consisted of two tan, overstuffed leather love seats topped with patchwork throw pillows, a free-form wooden coffee table piled with magazines, a pair of low-slung, bag-type chairs and a telescope.

After waking Europa up, Martinez and Webster gave her a two-minute rundown on the turmoil at the Order. She immediately switched on the TV. At three-thirty in the morning, the unfolding events had full network coverage and were on most of the local and cable news stations as well. The men gave Europa a chance to dress. But when she returned to the living room, she was still
in her green terry-cloth bathrobe. She was holding a beat-up photo album, the cover torn and tattered.

Brushing her soft bangs off her face, she said, “I found a few old pictures of him.” She rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know if they’ll help.”

She showed the detectives the page where the photographs had been mounted askew. The man in the snapshot was as thin as spaghetti. He had hair past his shoulders and sported a long, full beard. He wore bell-bottomed jeans, and his shirt print was of a melee of gawdy, tropical fruit. He had his arm around a woman who was also skinny as wire. She had stringy, dishwater hair and her ears were adorned with large hoops. Accoutrements included wire-rimmed glasses and platform shoes.

Europa noticed that Webster was staring at her. “Hippie dress. You’re probably too young.”

Webster smiled. “You flatter me.”

Martinez stared at the photographs. “More like…hippie-cross-disco.”

“Astute,” Europa commented.

“Hippies would have been wearing earth shoes.”

“College protester or former vet?” Europa asked him.

“Vet.”

“Poor you.”

“I know,” Martinez said. “I saw Hell and missed all the fun.”

She studied herself in the snapshot. “You’re absolutely right. This was post-hippie time, although Southwest was never a bastion of antiwar sentiments. They couldn’t afford it, since the war machine built half of the current campus…
state-of-the-art
labs. We have one hell of a particle smasher—two and half miles long. They don’t come cheap.”

She removed the snapshots from the album.

“You can have these if you want. God only knows why I kept them. Bob wasn’t the love of my life.”

She glanced at the TV. Nothing but sweeping exterior
shots of a lifeless compound. A sudden cut to the police and FBI commotion yards away.

Martinez took in the pictures. “Bob’s last name is Ross? He never did tell us.”

Europa said, “When I knew him, it was as Robert Ross—playing the WASP. He claimed he was an Easterner.” She spoke with her nose up in the air. “Yeah, Easterner all right. New Joisey. Have a seat. Can I get either of you anything?”

“No thanks.” Webster parked himself in one of the slouch chairs. “So Ross is his
real
last name?”

“Maybe,” Europa said. “With Bob you can’t tell. He was always hiding things. This is not supposition, this is fact. He was expelled from Southwest early on. Why didn’t I tell your lieutenant this juicy but before? Because Bob wasn’t the focus of his investigation—my father was—and it didn’t seem important. Now it does. Sit down, Detective Martinez.”

Martinez sat on one of the leather couches. She took a seat on the opposite arm.

“Bob showed up at my dorm one day, asking questions about my dad,” Europa said. “That wasn’t unusual. After all, Southwest had been the great Ganz’s school and I was the great Ganz’s daughter. I found it annoying—everyone asking about my father—but I was polite about it.”

“What kind of questions did he ask?” Webster inquired.

“It was about a year before Dad’s miraculous reappearance. Back then, the school’s favorite parlor game had been
Where in the world is Dr. Emil Ganz?
Basically, Bob asked me if I had any inside dope as to the whereabouts of my dad. As if I’d be holding back.”

She clutched the photo album and sighed.

“Anyway, Bob was barely maintaining a C average. And this was
after
grade inflation. Schools were still sympathetic to the students even though the draft had been abolished. Ten years earlier, Bob would have flunked out. His average in real grade time was closer to an F.”

“Why was he doing so poorly?” Webster asked.

“Hard to keep all the math straight when your brain’s saturated with hallucinogens. Still, there were other druggies at the school who did fine. Bob was a weird case. First of all, I think he only got into Southwest because of connections.”

Martinez was scribbling notes. “Who sponsored him?”

“I don’t know if someone sponsored him or his dad gave money or if he was a legacy…you know, an uncle who’s an alumnus. It’s impolite to ask.”

Suddenly, she stopped talking. Her face registered anguish.

“I can’t believe Bob gunned down that poor guy just like that. Was there some kind of internal politicking…you know…was this guy a threat to him?”

“I don’t know,” Webster answered. “Do you reckon that Bob might react violently if threatened?”

“Bob always had a suspicious nature.” A laugh. “Small wonder. He was doing illegal things. Guess that would make you look over your shoulder. Anyway, back-tracking for a moment—to Bob and school. How should I put this?”

She mulled over her ideas.

“Bob had some real interesting flashes. Mental flashes—”

“You mean visions?” Martinez asked.

“No, no, no,” Europa answered. “Although I’m sure he had plenty of drug-induced trips. I’m talking about mental mathematical flashes. Partial solutions to age-old problems—which divides the kids from the adults in abstract math and physics.”

“I’m lost,” Webster said.

“It’s hard to explain,” Europa said. “The true geniuses often have these epiphanous,
mental
pictures of a mathematical solution—a drawing or chart or a diagram or an object—way before they even begin to work with the math. Einstein actually visualized his theory of relativity. He saw space bending in the presence of dark matter, he
saw time distorting and objects foreshortened. All of them—Euler, Fermat, Gauss, Bohr, Heisenberg, Hawking, the famous Feynman diagrams, the Riemann sums, which are the basis of calculus. The greats seem to possess this uncanny ability to formulate images that answer mathematical problems. Of course, they need the numbers to prove them correct. But the numbers are rarely the starting point. When Einstein tried to fit his theory
around
the math, he made one of the biggest blunders of his life.”

Webster asked, “So Bob had these genius mental pictures?”

Europa smiled. “I believe the word I used was flashes. He got some momentary flashes, but they never resolved into anything meaningful because (a) resolution takes perseverance and patience and work ethic, and Bob had none of those qualities, and (b) math was not Bob’s forte. Sure, he could teach calculus to a bunch of engineers. But you need more than the basics to be a brilliant astrophysicist. I don’t know if Bob was lazy or if he just didn’t have it up here.”

She touched her temple.

“They kicked him out?” Martinez asked.

“Yes, he was kicked out, but not for failing. He was expelled for embezzling. He should have gone to jail. But because he said he’d leave quietly, they let him go.”

“Tell us about it,” Webster said.

“He worked the register at the cafeteria. When things got hectic at lunch, people would put down a buck for a ninety-cent item and leave without their change. Bob didn’t ring up the sale. Instead, he pocketed the dollar.

“The other way he pilfered cash was by adding lunch items in his head. He was a mental calculator. He’d always give the customer the correct total—tax and all. He wouldn’t ring up those sales either. He’d keep the money, and make change from his pocket. And he was clever about it. He rang up just enough sales to make it look like there was activity. Still, he’d pull fifty, sixty bucks a day. Five days a week. You figure it out.”

“He must have carried around a lot of pocket change.”

“Nah. Whenever he needed change, he’d feed the register a twenty, and take the change from the drawer. Everything always balanced. Finally, a disgruntled girlfriend finked on him.” She shook her head. “He always had this way of getting people to do his dirty work.”

“Yourself included?” Webster asked.

“Not stealing, but he talked me into drugs. We tripped together. I was lonely and we both missed my father.” She paused in thought. “Actually, Bob possessed lots of my dad’s lesser qualities—egotistical, grandiose, paranoid, sharp-tongued, glib—”

“A pathological liar?”

“Well, there was a psychopathic quality to him—the substance abuse, the stealing, the lying, the feeling that people were out to get him. Which was only reinforced when they
did
catch him stealing. Putting others down to bolster his own ego. Yeah, you did well in linear algebra, but grinds are usually good at the easy stuff. Wait till you hit number theory or group and ring theory.”

She shook her head.

“You know, sexually, he wasn’t good. But he always managed to make me feel like
I
should feel grateful. He was so full of himself. Still, I’ll say this much for him. He was one of the few guys who never made fun of me or my father’s wacky ideas.”

“The time machine,” Martinez said.

“Yeah, the time machine.” She rolled her eyes. “How’d you know? Your lieutenant must have told you.”

Martinez nodded. “I was just talking to some of my colleagues who had been spending the night in Central City. Did you know that your father had purchased a chicken ranch up there for the Order—”

“A
chicken
ranch?” She laughed. “Okay.”

“The hired hand up there—his name is Benton—told us your father had a telescope up there. He often took it out to look at the nighttime skies.”

“And your point is…?”

“He said that your father had revived his interest in time machines.”

Europa looked blank. “Really?”

“What do you think about that?”

“About time machines or my father’s interest in them?”

“How about time machines in general?”

“My specialty is subatomical particle spin. I leave the time machines to H. G. Wells.”

“What do you think about your father’s recent interest in them?”

“I don’t know what to think. The tragic part is my dad’s ideas about superluminal links had scientific data to back him up.”

“What kind of data?” Webster asked.

She smiled. “Do you really want to know the answer?”

“It’s complicated?”

“Technical. It has to do with photons given off as electrons descend from an excited delta position to one at rest. There are theories that if the same photons shared the same space and were given off at the same time, they’d forever have instantaneous communication. Hence,
super
luminal—faster than light—travel. That was Dad’s starting point. The trouble was, his entire project…it took on a paranoid quality. I remember only in bits because Mom shielded us from most of his erratic behavior. But I do remember him saying that he
had
to build this machine to escape the aliens who had already planted evil thoughts in his friends’ brains. We’d be next if we didn’t escape soon. As a kid and coming from Dad, I was very frightened. Not only by aliens but by my father’s belief in them. Back then, Emil Euler Ganz had a lot of cosmic credibility.”

“I can see that,” Martinez said. “How old were you?”

“Twelve, maybe. I was fifteen when Dad disappeared. At first, Mom was concerned, but not overly so. As the days passed, she became frantic. I was
petrified
. Because deep down, even at fifteen, I had thought that the aliens
succeeded. Given what he had been talking about, I thought it was eminently logical that he had been kidnapped by space creatures.”

She didn’t speak for a moment.

“Somewhere…in my child’s mind…I still believe it. Because how else do you explain a ten-year absence?”

“There are mountaintops in Nepal,” Webster said.

“True. For all I know, he took off somewhere. But being kidnapped by space creatures sounds so much less mundane.”

Martinez asked, “Was Bob interested in your father’s time machines?”

“If he was, he never told
me
.” She drummed the photo album she was still hugging. “The Order suited Bob. Lots of easy marks to boss around and plenty of young, vulnerable girls to have sex with. Plus, he really did admire my father’s work. I’m sure he kissed Jupiter’s butt. Dad was a hopeless sucker for flattery. It sure worked in Jilliam’s case—excuse me, Venus. You know that I knew Venus. She was my childhood friend.”

“Do you think it’s possible that Bob and Venus are an item?”

Europa thought about it. “Maybe. But I don’t think so. Sex wasn’t Jilliam’s thing. When I knew her, she was searching for the spiritual. Although if she did hook up with Bob, sex has to be a factor.”

“Although he wasn’t good,” Webster answered.

“Not with me.”

Martinez asked, “Without getting graphic, can you fill us in on why he wasn’t good?”

“I can get graphic. Doesn’t bother me.” A shrug. “He was never fully tumescent. Which I thought was strange because he always climaxed even with the flag at half-mast. It wasn’t very satisfying.”

“I wouldn’t think so,” Webster said. “Did he need things to make him interested?”

“No kinks that I could ascertain. He liked the usual adult hetero porno. I don’t remember seeing homosexual
stuff or child stuff. He did have a couple of B and D magazines. But we never did that kind of thing. He just never got fully hard. I suppose I didn’t thrill him.”