Simple Genius (20 page)

“GAS LEAK,” SHERIFF HAYES SAID as they stared at the charred rubble that used to be the makeshift morgue.

“Isn’t that what they always say?” Michelle said.

“And you said the ME died?” Sean asked.

Hayes nodded. “He was in there working on Rivest’s remains. There’s not enough left of him to do an autopsy on.”

“So Rivest’s and Monk’s bodies?”

“Pretty much bone and cinder.”

“That’s
way
too convenient, don’t you think?” Sean said.

“I thought I told you to keep the hell out of my way,” boomed a voice.

They all three turned to see FBI Special Agent Ventris striding toward them. He came to a stop a few inches from Sean’s face. “Do you have a hearing problem?”

“He’s working with me, Agent Ventris,” Hayes said hastily.

“I don’t give a shit if you’re working with God Almighty Himself, I told you to stay out of my way.”

“I just came down here in response to a call I got from Sheriff Hayes,” Sean said evenly. “And would you care to explain to me how the FBI has jurisdiction over a local death that’s unrelated to any federal matter or person?”

Ventris looked ready to take a swing at Sean. Michelle stepped between them.

“Look, Sean and I used to be part of the federal side too, Agent Ventris. Our main contact was Len Rivest and now he’s dead. Sean discovered the body; it’s only natural that we want to stay informed about the matter. But we will in no way interfere with a federal investigation. All we’re looking for is the truth, same as you.”

Her words seemed to take a bit of the steam out of Ventris.

Hayes quickly said, “Sean, maybe you better fill in Agent Ventris on your theory about Rivest.”

“I don’t want to be seen as interfering,” Sean growled.

“Just lay it out,” Ventris snapped.

Sean grudgingly explained about the absence of towels and the bath mat and the missing plunger and his theory of how Rivest could have been killed. “We’d asked the ME to check the body for a trace of something like that happening.”

Ventris studied the pavement for a few moments. “I actually noticed that there were no towels,” he said. “And the bath mat, but I didn’t know about the plunger.”

Michelle said, “So you were suspecting murder too?”

“I always suspect murder,” Ventris said. “I’m bringing in a team to go over everything here.”

Sean said, “And you’re interested in Rivest’s death because you think it ties into Monk Turing’s, which
was
on federal property.”

“So maybe we should join forces,” Michelle suggested.

“That’s not possible,” Ventris said. “If you have information you want to share with me, fine, but it’s not a two-way street. We have ways of doing things at the Bureau.”

“I thought your ways of doing things included working with the local police,” Sean said.

“And I fit that bill,” Hayes added.

“But
they
don’t,” Ventris replied fiercely, glaring at Sean and Michelle.

“Isn’t the point that we catch whoever did all this?” Michelle said.

“No, the point is,
I
catch them,” Ventris snapped.

“I’ll make it easy for you,” Sean began. “We’ll just make it a competition. Who gets there first gets the credit. But just so you know we’re going to kick your ass.” He turned and stalked off.

Ventris turned on Hayes. “If he in any way impedes my investigation, you’ll be going down with him, Hayes!”

“I’m just trying to do my job here,” Hayes shot back.

“No, apparently you’re trying to do
my
job.”

Ventris noticed Michelle staring at him and smiling.

“What the hell are you looking at, lady?”

“Should’ve taken me up on my offer of cooperation, Ventris.
Because when we crack this thing you are going to look like such an idiot.” She turned and walked off.

“I can arrest you for saying shit like that,” Ventris screamed after her.

Michelle turned back around. “No, you can’t. It’s that little bedrock thing called free speech. Have a nice day.”

A minute later Hayes joined Sean and Michelle in front of her truck.

Hayes said, “Great, we’ve now managed to piss off the CIA
and
the FBI. Who we gonna do next?
DEA?”

Michelle said, “Assuming the morgue was blown up on purpose, the question becomes why.”

“And the answer seems obvious,” Sean remarked. “There was something on those bodies that the ME would find that would point us down the right road.”

“He’d already done the cutting on Monk,” Hayes pointed out. “So it couldn’t have been Monk’s body they were worried about.”

“Right,” Sean said. “Burning up Rivest’s body means we can’t tell if my theory on how he was killed was correct.”

Michelle added. “Do we know if the ME had looked for that already?”

“If he did he didn’t have a chance to tell us,” Hayes said quickly. “I asked him to call me as soon as he found anything and he never did.”

“We can follow down a lead Ventris doesn’t have,” Sean said confidently.

Michelle looked at him. “Which is?”

“Valerie Messaline.”

Hayes groaned. “Damn. I was afraid you were going to say that.”

HORATIO BARNES SHOOK HANDS with Viggie as Alicia Chadwick nervously watched. They were in the small parlor at the B&B where Horatio was staying.

Before Horatio could say anything Viggie sprang up and settled herself in front of the small upright piano situated in one corner of the room. She began to play. Horatio rose and joined her on the bench. As she played away, he said, “Mind if I jump in?”

She shook her head and he waited a moment, studying her rhythm and then began playing smoothly. They performed a duet for about five minutes and then Viggie abruptly stopped. “I’m done.” She plopped back in the chair while Horatio resumed his seat across from her, studying her carefully.

“You’re an excellent pianist,” Horatio said. “And I hear you’re quite the whiz at math too.”

“Numbers are fun,” Viggie said. “I like them because if you add the same numbers up you always get the same answers. There aren’t many things that do that.”

“Meaning life is too unpredictable? Yes, I’d agree with that. So numbers feel very safe to you?”

Viggie nodded absently and looked around the room.

Horatio continued to study her while she did so. Body cues were often as important as verbal communication in his field. He asked a few preliminary questions about her life at Babbage Town. Horatio had intended to tread carefully around the subject of Monk Turing, but Viggie’s next words exploded that strategy.

“Monk is dead. Did you know that?” Viggie asked him. She plunged on before he could answer. “He was my father.”

“I know, I heard. I’m very sorry. I’m sure you loved him very much.”

Viggie nodded, picked up an apple from a bowl on the table next to her and began eating it.

“And how about your mother?”

Viggie stopped chewing. “I don’t have a mother.”

“Everyone has a mother. Do you mean she’s dead?”

Viggie shrugged. “I mean I don’t have a mother. Monk would’ve told me.”

Horatio glanced at Alicia, who looked pained by this exchange. She shook her head helplessly at him.

“So you remember nothing about her?”

“About who?”

“Your mother.”

“You’re not listening. I don’t
have
a mother.”

“Okay, what did you like to do with your father? He was good at numbers too, right? Did you play games with numbers, maybe?”

Viggie swallowed a bite of apple and nodded.
“All the time.
He said I was smarter than he was. And he knew about quantum physics. Do you know about that?”

“My IQ is not where it needs to be to understand that particular field.”

“I understood it. I understand lots of things people don’t think I do.”

Horatio glanced over at Alicia, who nodded at him encouragingly.

“So people don’t think you understand things?”

“I’m a kid. A kid, a kid, a kid,” she said in a singsong voice. “At least that’s what they think.”

“I bet Monk didn’t think that way about you, did he?”

“Monk treated me special.”

“How did he do that?”

“He trusted me.”

“That’s very impressive, an adult trusting someone your age. I bet that made you feel really good.” She shrugged noncommittally. “Do you remember the last time you saw Monk?” She shrugged again. “With a head like yours I bet if you try you’ll be able to do it easily.”

“I like remembering numbers better than anything. Numbers never change. A one is always a one and a ten is always a ten.”

“But numbers do change, don’t they?
If you multiply them together, for example?
Or add or subtract or divide them. And ten can be ten or ten thousand. And one can be one or one hundred.
Right?”

Now Viggie focused squarely on him. “Right,” she said automatically.

“Or is it wrong?” Horatio queried.

“It’s wrong,” Viggie said. “Wrong, wrong, wrong.” She took another bite of her apple.

Horatio sat back.
Quite a mynah bird.
“You like number puzzles? There was one I learned in college. Would you like to play it? It’s sort of hard.”

Viggie put the apple down and said eagerly, “Not for me it won’t be.”

He said, “Suppose I’m a grandfather and I have a grandson who’s about as many days old as my son is weeks old and my grandson is as many months old as I am in years. My son, grandson and I together are 140 years old. How old am I in years?”

Horatio glanced at Alicia, who was working out the problem on a piece of paper she’d pulled from her purse. When he looked back at Viggie he said, “Would you like some paper and a pencil?”

“What for?”

“To work out the problem.”

“I’ve already worked it out. You’re eighty-four years old, but you don’t look it.”

A minute later Alicia looked up. On her piece of paper was a series of calculations with the number “84” written at the
end.
She smiled at Horatio and shook her head in a weary fashion. “I’m so clearly not in her league.”

Horatio looked back at Viggie, who sat there expectantly.

“Did you see all the numbers in your head?” he asked and she nodded before resuming her apple eating.

He gave her two large numbers and asked her to multiply them together. She did so in a matter of seconds. He gave her a division problem, which she solved almost instantly. Then he quizzed her with a square root exercise. Viggie answered them all within seconds and then looked bored as Horatio jotted some notes down on a piece of paper.

“I have another problem for you to think about,” he said.

She sat up straight though she still seemed bored.

Not a mynah bird.
A well-trained dog,
aren’t
you, Viggie?
“Suppose you had a best friend that you did everything with. Now suppose this best friend moved away and you’d never see her again. How would you feel?”

Viggie blinked once and then again. She started blinking so hard that her face scrunched up with the effort. Horatio felt like he was watching a computer whose circuit board was overheating.

“How would you feel, Viggie?” he asked again.

“There aren’t any numbers in the problem,” she said in a puzzled tone.

“I know, but not all questions have to do with numbers. Would you be happy, sad,
ambivalent
?”

“What’s ambivalent mean?”

“You don’t really care one way or another.”

“Yes,” she said automatically.

“Or how about sad?”

“Sad, I’d be sad.”

“But not happy?”

Viggie glanced over at Alicia. “There aren’t any numbers in the problem.”

“I know, Viggie, just do the best you can.”

Viggie shrugged and resumed eating her apple.

Horatio wrote some other notes down. “Have you been thinking about the last time you saw your father?”

“Why wouldn’t I be happy?” she asked suddenly.

“You wouldn’t be happy because your friend went away. You do fun things with your friends. So if your
best
friend went away you couldn’t do fun things anymore,” Horatio explained. “Like I’m sure you did fun things with your father before he went away. You’re sad that your father went away, right? No more fun things with him?”

“Monk went away.”

“That’s right. Were you doing something fun with him the last time you saw him.”

“Lots of fun.”

“What was it?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Oh, it’s a secret? Secrets are fun. Did you have lots of secrets with Monk?”

Viggie lowered her voice and edged closer to him. “It was all secret.”

“And you can’t tell anybody else, right?”

“Right.”

“But you could if you wanted to.”

“Right, if I wanted to.”

“Do you want to? I bet you do.”

For the first time she showed hesitation with a prompting like that. “I’d have to tell it in a secret way.”

“You mean like in a code? I’m afraid I’m not very good at codes.”

“Monk loved codes. He loved secret codes. It made him bloody. He told me so.”

Horatio glanced questioningly over at Alicia, who looked equally confused.

Horatio said, “It made him bloody, Viggie? What do you mean by that?”

She smiled and said, “What do you mean by that?”

“I’m asking you, what did Monk mean when he said codes made him bloody?”

“That’s right, that’s what he said, codes made him bloody. Codes and blood, that’s what he
said
.”

Horatio sat back. “Did Monk get bloody the last time he saw you?”

“Yes,” she said happily.

“So he told you a secret?” She nodded again. “Can you tell us what it is?”

Her smile faded and she slowly shook her head.

“Why not?
Was it a super-secret?”

Alicia said gently, “Viggie, if you know something it’s very important that you tell us.”

“I don’t think I like him,” Viggie answered, pointing to Horatio. “I have to go now.” She got up and walked out of the room.

Horatio glanced over at Alicia, who seemed to have been holding her breath. “I told you she’d be a hard nut to crack. Did you learn anything useful?”

He said, “I know her better than I did an hour ago. That’s something.”

“Well, the next time you meet her she could be someone else entirely.”

After Alicia left with Viggie, Horatio called Sean and filled him in on the session.

“So is Viggie autistic?” Sean asked.

“Autistism is a broad term,” Horatio replied. “But even so, I don’t think she is.”

“What then?”

“I think in certain ways she’s so much smarter than the rest of us, that she can’t relate. In other ways she’s not very intelligent, or mature, I should say. It might be a perception problem.
Our
perception problem.
We expect her emotional abilities to match her intellect, but she’s still a little girl. And I got some strange vibes from her about her father.”

“Like what?”

“Monk apparently treated her like an adult, at least sometimes. But other times he treated her, well, like a . . . device.”

“A device?”

“I know I’m not making much sense. I wished I knew something about her mother. Viggie apparently doesn’t believe that she even had one.”

“So where does this all leave us?” Sean asked.

“Not much further, I’m afraid.”

“Well, at least our results are consistent.
Meaning nil.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to swing at a pitch and see if I can get on base.”