Simple Genius (7 page)

IT WAS ONE A.M. when over the sounds of Cheryl’s light
snoring
Michelle heard footsteps in the hallway again. Already dressed, she stepped out in the hallway in her stocking feet and followed the person. It was Barry’s tread, she was pretty sure.

She stopped as the footsteps up ahead halted. Michelle looked around. She was on the corridor headed to Sandy’s room. She hadn’t believed Barry when he’d said he didn’t know the woman. His explanation had been too clumsy. Her ears perked up as the person started walking again.

She slid forward, her gaze sweeping across the dimmed lights of the hallway ahead. She heard a door open and close. Michelle edged forward and peered around the corner. There was a light on at the end of the hallway. Then it went out. She ducked back behind the wall when another door opened and closed. After waiting about five minutes, Michelle heard a door open and close again. The footsteps started coming back toward her. She looked around for someplace to hide.

She ducked inside an empty room and crouched next to the door. When the person walked past she peered through the window in the top half of the door. It
wasn’t
Barry. The person was too small. She didn’t get a good look at him because he had on a hat and his coat collar was turned up. When he disappeared from her line of sight she left the room and debated whether to follow him or go and see where he had been. She finally opted for the latter. She crept down the hall, turned the corner and continued on.

At the end of the hall was the door to the pharmacy. Was that the one she’d heard open and close? She looked to her left. Sandy’s room was here too. She peered through the glass of the woman’s door. Sandy was asleep in her bed or at least she seemed to be.

As Michelle glanced down at the floor, her gaze caught on something. She stooped and picked it up. It was a piece of white puffy plastic that people used in shipping boxes. She put it in her pocket, looked once more at Sandy sleeping and quietly made her way back to her room.

The next morning Michelle woke early and made the rounds of the corridors. She passed Sandy’s room as the woman wheeled herself out into the hall. Sandy wore a Red Sox ball cap and a generous smile.

“How’s the migraine?” Michelle asked.

“All gone.
One good night of sleep usually does it. Thanks for asking.”

“When’s your shrink session?”

“My first is at eleven. Then there’s a group session after lunch. Then they give me my drugs. Then a counselor comes and sees me. Then I get another little pop of joy pills and then go gab with some more strangers. At that point, I’m so looped I could give a shit. I’ll tell ’em whatever they want to hear. Like my mom breast-fed me until I left for the prom, stuff like that. They eat it up and then go write articles on it for the medical journals while I’m laughing my ass off.”

“I don’t think I could do the group thing,” Michelle said.

Sandy spun her wheelchair around in a tight circle. “Oh, it’s easy. All you have to do is get up, or, in my case, remain seated, and say, ‘Hi, I’m Sandy and I’m screwed up so bad, but I want to do something about it. That’s why I’m here.’ And then everybody claps and throws you kisses and tells you how brave you are. And then I get a sleeping pill and crash for ten hours and get up and do it all over again.”

“Sounds like you have the routine down pat.”

“Oh, honey, I’m at the point where I see the questions coming before they even ask them.
It’s
cat and mouse stuff, only they haven’t figured out that I’m the cat and they’re the mouse.”

“You ever try and address whatever’s
actually
making you depressed?”

“Hell no, then it gets way too complicated. The truth will not set me
free,
it’ll just make me suicidal. So until they let me out of here, I dance my little jig”––she slapped the wheels of her chair––“figuratively speaking of course, and Sandy goes with the flow, so long as they keep giving me my pills.”

“Are you in a lot of pain?”

“When people tell you you’re paralyzed from the waist down, you think to yourself, ‘Okay, that’s a real
bitch,
but at least I can’t feel anything hurting.’
Wrong with a capital fucking W.
What they don’t tell you is how much being paralyzed hurts. The bullet that took my legs away is still inside me. The quacks said it was too close to my spine to remove. So it just sits there, that little nine-millimeter son of a bitch.
And every year or so it moves a tiny bit.
Ain’t that something?
I
can’t move but
it
can. And the real zinger is the quacks say that if it ever hits against a certain place on my spine, I might just drop dead, or lose the feeling in the rest of my body and become a full-fledged quad. How ’bout that? Isn’t that just too screwed up for words?”

Michelle said, “I’m really sorry. My problems don’t seem like such a big deal now.”

Sandy waved this remark off. “Let’s go get some breakfast. The eggs are for shit and the bacon looks like pieces of tire tread and tastes worse, but at least the coffee’s hot. Come on, I’ll race you.” Sandy took off and Michelle, smiling, trotted after her, then grabbed the wheelchair’s handles and sprinted down the hallway, Sandy screaming with laughter the whole way.

After breakfast, Michelle met with Horatio.

“I talked with your brother Bill again.”

“And how is Bill?”

“Good. He doesn’t see you much, though. That goes for the rest of the family.”

“We’re all busy.”

He handed her the letter from her mother.

“I was at your and Sean’s apartment and picked it up. I know you haven’t seen the place, but it’s really nice. I’m glad I got to see it before you trashed it like your truck. Speaking of major landfills, ever think of cleaning your Toyota out? I mean just from the perspective of preventing bubonic plague.”

“My truck might be a little messy, but I know where everything is.”

“Yeah, about two hours after I eat spicy Mexican I know what’s inside my colon, but that doesn’t mean I want to see it. You want to read the letter from your parents? It might be important.”

“If it were, they would’ve reached me some other way.”

“Do they keep in touch with you?”

Michelle crossed her arms. “So is this
parents
day with the shrink?”

Horatio held up his notepad. “It says right here that I have to ask.”

“I talk to my parents.”

“But you almost never visit them.
Although they’re not that far away.”

“Lots of kids don’t visit their parents. It doesn’t mean they don’t love them.”

“True. Do you feel like you have a chip on your shoulder being the only girl and your big brothers and father being cops?”

“I prefer to think of it as healthy motivation.”

“Okay, do you like the fact that you pretty much can physically dominate any man you come across?”

“I like to be able to take care of myself. It’s a violent world out there.”

“And being in law enforcement, you’ve seen more than your share of that. And
it’s
men who commit the vast majority of violent crimes, isn’t that right?”

“Too many men tend to lead with their muscle instead of their mind.”

“Do you still want to hurt yourself?”

“You have the most awkward segues of any person I’ve ever met.”

“I like to think of them as something to wake you up in case you were starting to doze off.”

“I never wanted to hurt myself in the first place.”

“Okay, I’ll just check that one off in the ‘I’m
lying
my ass off’ box, and we’ll move on. So what do you see as the problem? And how do you think I can help you?”

Michelle looked nervously away.

“It’s not a trick question, Michelle. I want you to get better. I can sense you want to get better. So how do we get there?”

“We’re talking, isn’t that something?”

“It is. But at this rate I’ll be long dead and buried and you’ll be sucking your dinner through a straw before we figure out what makes you tick. There’s no rule against going for the point of least resistance.”

Michelle blurted out, “I don’t know what you want from me, Horatio.”

“Honesty, candidness, a real desire to participate in this exercise we call soul searching. I know the questions to ask, but the questions don’t help if the answers to them mean nothing.”

“I’m trying to be honest with you. Ask me a question.”

“Do you love your brothers?”

“Yes!”

“Do you love your parents?”

Again she said yes. But Horatio cocked his head at the way she said it.

“Will you talk to me about your childhood?”

“Is that what every shrink thinks? It all comes down to crap that happened when you were a kid? Well, you’re running down the wrong road.”

“Then point me in the right direction. It’s all up in your head. You know it is
,
you just have to suck it up and have the courage to tell me.”

Michelle stood, trembling with rage. “Where the hell do you get off questioning my courage, or my ability to suck it up? You wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes in my shoes.”

“I don’t doubt it. But the answer to your problems is between your left and right frontal lobes. It’s a distance of about four inches and quite remarkable in that it contains trillions of bits of thoughts and memories that make you, you. If we get to just the right piece of you stuck away up there we can reach the point where you’ll never pick another fight with a guy hoping he’ll send you straight to the morgue.”

“I’m telling you that didn’t happen!”

“And I’m telling you, you’re full of shit.”

Michelle balled up her fists and screamed, “Do you
want
me to hurt you?”

“Do
you
want to hurt me?” he shot back.

Michelle stood there, glaring down at him. Then she let her hands drop, turned and walked out of the room, this time leaving the door open behind her, perhaps symbolically he thought, if unconsciously.

Horatio remained in his chair, his gaze on the doorway. “I’m pulling for you, Michelle,” he said quietly. “And I think we’re almost there.”

AFTER DINNER IN THE MANSION’S dining room Sean and Rivest went back to Rivest’s cottage to drink. After some wine and three vodka martinis Les Rivest fell asleep in his living room armchair after promising to meet with Sean the next day. That left Sean, who’d only sipped on his gin and tonic, to slip out and take a stroll around Babbage Town. Rivest had given Sean a security badge with his photo on it. The badge didn’t enable him to enter any of the buildings other than the mansion unaccompanied, but it would prevent his being stopped and detained by the compound’s security force.

Rivest’s bungalow was on the western edge of the main grounds and off the same graveled path as three other cookie-cutter residences. Near Rivest’s place was a far larger building. As Sean walked past it he noted the sign over one of the two front doors. It read: Hut Number Three. It seemed to be split into two equal premises. Sean watched as two uniformed guards armed with Glock pistols and MP5s came out the left front door and walked off, presumably on their rounds. That was a lot of firepower.
But for what?

He reversed direction, passing the rear courtyard of the mansion where an Olympic-size pool was located along with chairs, tables and umbrellas, an outdoor, stainless steel grill and a stone fireplace. A group of people were gathered around the fireplace, beers and wineglasses in hand, talking quietly. A couple of heads turned in his direction, but no one made an effort to greet him. Sean noted one person sitting off by himself nursing a beer. Sean sat down next to him and introduced himself.

The man was young, and looked nervously at his shoes. He had known Monk, worked with him, he said.

“And your field is?” Sean asked.

“Molecular physics, with a specialization in . . .” The young man hesitated and took a swallow of beer. “So what do you think happened to Monk?”

“Don’t know yet. He ever
talk
to you about anything he was into that could’ve gotten him killed?”

“No way, nothing
like
that. He worked hard, like all of us. He has a daughter. She’s sort of, well, she’s special. Super-bright, I mean things she can do with numbers, even I can’t do. But Viggie is one odd bird, though. Guess what she collects?”

“Tell me?”

“Numbers.”

“Numbers?
How do you collect numbers?”

“She has all these amazingly long numbers she keeps in her head. And she keeps thinking of new ones. She labels them using letters. You ask her for the ‘x’ number or the ‘zz’ number you get the right one every time. I’ve tested her. It’s astonishing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Monk ever
talk
to you about Camp Peary?
Maybe wanting to go there for some reason?”

The man shook his head.

“You knew about it, though, right?”

“Can’t hardly miss it, can you.” A few people from the pool area were pointing over at them. The kid quickly rose. “Excuse me, I’ve got to go.”

Sean continued his walk. Nobody at this place was prepared to talk. Yet if Monk Turing
had
killed himself, there had to be a reason. With enough digging, that motivation would surface, Sean was sure of it.

He stopped near the building with the water tower attached. The sign on this building read Hut Number Two. As he approached the front entrance an armed guard stepped forward and put a hand up.

Sean held out his badge and explained who he was. The guard scrutinized the security badge and then eyed him.
“Heard they were sending someone down.”

“Did you know Monk Turing?” Sean asked.

“No. I mean I know what he looked like but fraternization between the guards and the brains is not encouraged.”

“Any peculiar behavior that you noticed?”

The guard laughed. “Man, all these guys are pretty much
whack
jobs in my book. Too much smarts can be a bad thing, you know what I mean?”

Sean motioned toward the building. “So what’s Hut Number Two?”

“You can ask, but I won’t tell.
Not that I know all that much anyway.”

Sean tried two or three more times to get additional information but, to his credit, the guard held firm.

“You wouldn’t happen to know where Turing lived on the grounds?” he finally asked.

The guard pointed down a path with trees bordering either side.
“First right, second bungalow on the right.”

“His daughter living there?”

The man nodded.
“Along with somebody from Child Services.
And an armed guard.”

“Armed guard?”

“Her dad’s dead. You take precautions.”

“This place looks pretty well guarded actually,” Sean remarked.

“So’s Camp Peary, but someone managed to kill Monk Turing over there.”

“So you think he was murdered? Not a suicide?”

Now the guard looked uncertain. “Hey, I’m not the detective.”

“The FBI and the local police, you talked to them?”

“We all did.”

“They have any theories?”

“None that they cared to share with me.”

“No security problems with Turing? No strangers hanging around here?”

The guard shook his head.
“Nothing like that.”

“Turing was killed with his own gun. Did you know he owned one?”

“As far as I knew only the guards have guns.”

As Sean moved down the road he saw the row of bungalows up ahead. The first one was dark, the second one––Monk Turing’s place––had a light on in the front window. All of these residences were constructed of red brick and looked to be about twenty-five hundred square feet in size.
Nice digs,
he thought. The small lawns were well kept; the picket fences in front neatly painted. Pots of colorful flowers sat on the steps leading up to the front door. It was like one of those idyllic paintings depicting life as it
never
really was. From inside the house Sean could hear someone playing a piano. He opened the gate and headed up the sidewalk to the front porch.

He eyed a pile of sports equipment on a small bench on the porch. A couple of golf drivers, a basketball, a baseball and a first baseman’s glove were among the items there. Sean picked up the glove; it smelled of well-oiled leather. Turing must’ve been into sports, probably to relax after all the brain work.

Sean peered through the screen door. A plumpish woman dressed in a robe with slippers on her feet was asleep on the couch. There was no sign of a guard. In the far corner of the room sat a baby grand. Playing the piano was a young girl. She had long, white blond hair and pale skin. While Sean was standing there she switched from classical, Rachmaninoff Sean thought, to an Alicia Keys piece he recognized, without missing a beat.

Viggie Turing looked up and saw him. She wasn’t startled. She didn’t even stop playing.

“What are you doing here?”

The voice surprised Sean because it came from behind him. He turned and saw the woman right at his elbow.

He held out his badge. “I’m Sean King. I’m down here investigating Monk Turing’s death.”

“I know that,” the woman said tersely. “I meant what are you doing here, at this house?
At this hour?”

She was in her mid-thirties, about five-five. Her red hair was short, parted on the side with a little flip halfway down her neck. The front door light was on so he could see that her skin was freckled and her eyes a milky green. She had on jeans, black loafers and a corduroy shirt. The lips were too full for the thin face, the shoulders a bit too wide for the frame, the nose not quite in sync with the eyes, the chin too sharp for the neighboring square jaw. And yet with all that asymmetry, she was one of the loveliest women Sean had ever seen.

“I was just taking a stroll. I heard Viggie, I presume that’s her playing the piano, and just stopped to listen.” He assumed that was enough information to allow him to ask a question of his own. “And you are?”

“Alicia Chadwick.”

“She’s an amazing pianist,” Sean commented.

The milky green eyes settled back on him. “She’s an amazing child in many ways.” She put a hand on his sleeve and pulled him away from the door. “Let’s talk. There are some things you need to know.”

He smiled. “You’re the first person I’ve met here that’s willing to talk.”

“Reserve your judgment until you hear what I have to say.”