Switcheroo (7 page)

Chapter
11

Tuesday morning I had to work
double quick on my field assignments from LISA in order to have extra time for
my two new cases.  By four thirty, I managed to get back to the office and give
my pictures and notes to Wendy to type.  She gave me copies of the stuff she
had emailed to LISA this morning.  My shoes clicked quickly and loudly down the
marble hall to my own office.  It had a waiting area and reception desk, but I
was currently without a secretary. I have had only had one secretary in four
years of business.  Took only three months before it became to great a
financial strain, a luxury I could not afford.

In my office I made coffee and
frantically started dialing my phone.  My first call was the hardest one to
make.  I called Lt. Stratton at KPD.  He did not sound like the Big Bopper when
he answered.

“Listen, I gave you a free bust
last weekend.  I need a favor.  I need a plate number run and no one else at
the department will help me.  I don’t even do much real detecting anymore,
mostly just field investigations, so I just need help this once. What do you
say?”  I tried to inject real sincerely into this appeal, but it still sounded
cheesy.

“Okay, but I need to know what
this is for,” Stratton said.  I heard keys tapping in the background as I began
to talk.

I started from the beginning,
skipped ninety-five percent of the story, made up a few things and basically
just told him that I was trying to chase down a stolen vehicle for a client. He
asked my client’s name, checked his computer, and he said there was no case in
the file.  She should have called the cops.  I told him that she lacked
confidence in our law enforcement, although I did not share her view.

“How did you meet this girl?”
Stratton asked.

“I was inspecting her dead
husband’s vacant house trailer.” Try a little truth for a change.

“I don’t know why I even asked,”
sighed Stratton. “The State of Tennessee shows Tammy and Travis McHenry as
owners.  Prior owners, Vanguard Leasing. Doesn’t show who the lessee was.
There’s no way for me to pull up the actual person driving the car,” Stratton
said.

I had Stratton read me the vehicle
ID number, hung up and called my pal Nick at Dickinson Ford.  He put me on hold
and called Vanguard Leasing to get me the lessee’s name for the truck.

My pen was on the paper, eagerly
ready to write. Here was the answer to this case.

“So, what’s his name?” I said.

“There ain’t no him. The truck’s
leased to Oakridge National Labs.”

“Thanks, Nick. I’ll see ya.”

I said bye and hung up.

Not registered to an individual,
but to an institution.  This was getting way too involved for pro bono work,
damn it. Now what?

The dear old woman who opened the
door Wednesday morning looked at me with motherly affection. Unfortunately, she
was not my mother.  He name was Ruby Harper and she was my mother’s personal
assistant. The term “maid” was beneath both of them, but Ruby did a lot of that
kind of work. Some cooking, too, but no windows. Ruby was a solid woman with
hair the color and texture of steel wool. She worked five days a week, from ten
until six.  Her main duties were cooking and dealing with lawn and cleaning
contractors.  She had worked for my mother for thirty-some years now.  She had
seen me grow up, graduate from high school and college, and had followed my
illustrious detecting career.

“Rust, how have you been?” She
said, hugging me. “You look thinner than the last time I saw you.”

Previously, jockeying a desk at
the police station and all those donuts had worked their magic.  I was now on
the south side of two hundred again and feeling healthier.

I thanked her as she stepped aside
and I walked through the tall double doors into my mother’s high-ceilinged
foyer. The cold marble floor was a reminder of the reception I would probably
receive from mother.

She came into the sitting room
wearing a dress with a floral pattern. Mother rarely wore pants. Maybe only to
garden, which she never did.  She kissed my cheek and I sat down.  I hadn’t sat
down with her like this for several months even though I lived only two miles
away.

“Are you stilling detecting or
have you switched again?” She asked.

“Still detecting.” I went on to
tell her about my missing truck case, leaving out the teleportation part, of
course.

“Listen, I know you still go out with
Drew Chandler sometimes and I was wondering if you could arrange for me to meet
with him.” At one point her being seen with this man in public had been a sore
spot for me.  I never said anything to her, but I think she sensed I did not
like this man.  It is silly to expect Mom to still be mourning my father four
years later.  At least they hadn’t moved in together.

“Rust, this isn’t some kind of
macho stunt, is it?  Drew is very dear to me and I won’t have you bothering
him,” she said, sharply.

I told her no, I just wanted to
ask him some questions about ORNL that involved a case. I would have to pretend
to be nice in the meeting, which probably wouldn’t be to hard since he was
actually a nice fellow.

Mother picked up the phone,
called, and had it all arranged. I would go over after lunch.  Mother invited
me to eat with her. We went into the sun room and ate a quiet lunch. I was
supposed to be admiring her array of plants and flowers.  The chicken salad
sandwiches had the crust trimmed off.  I hugged Mom good-bye when we were done
and showed myself out, glancing at old photos of me and Mom and Dad along the
way.

I walked out to the car parked in
mother’s circular drive and glanced over my shoulder.  The only thing keeping
the huge house from looking obscenely oversize were the giant oak trees in the
yard.

I left with the weight of prior
disappointments working on my stomach; or maybe that was one too many chicken
salad sandwiches. I cranked the LeBaron and rolled away, under the canopy of
Oaks onto Cherokee Boulevard.

I arrived at Lions Bend
subdivision and pulled into Drew Chandler’s drive around two p.m.  A large
Georgian colonial house, nowhere near the size of Mom’s, but still a big stack
of bricks. Himself a widower and a high-minded intellectual, Chandler answered
the door himself when I rang.  A skeleton of a man but dressed stylishly in an
L.L. Bean fashion.  He was about as dashing as a seventy-year old man could
be.  We had met a few times, but had never had what I would call a real
conversation.

“Hello, Mr. Chandler.  Thanks for
seeing me on short notice,” I shook the man’s bony hand. It was like holding a
soft leather bag full of small sticks.

“Please call me Drew,” he patted
me on the shoulder as he ushered me into a den with dark red walls and leather
furniture.  I took a seat.

“Russell, your mother told me you
wanted to question me about a case. Am I a suspect?” He said, with a little
chuckle.  His voice had the smooth grit of finishing sandpaper.

“You know, you can call me Rust,
everybody does.  Uh, I actually came across a reference to ORNL in one of my
cases.  I know you used to work in Oakridge and I was hoping you would give me
a starting point.  I also want your opinion on another matter involving this
case. You are the only real scientist I know,” I said, beginning to get a
little more comfortable with the old man, in spite of being disturbed by my
mother’s attraction to him.

“What do you know about
teleportation? Is this something that can really happen?”  I started in the
middle to keep from playing all my cards at once.

“Oh?” Mr. Chandler’s eyebrows
moved up his skull like white caterpillars. “Well, that’s really too wide open
a question, Rust. I can summarize some things for you, if you like?” he said.

I nodded, leaning forward as he
kept talking.

“You see, there are two types of
teleportation. One has been performed in a lab environment already, about
nineteen years ago.  These experiments, some of which were performed in our
labs in Oakridge, utilized protons. These protons were in groups of three. One
analyzed by the computer, one destroyed during the process and one teleported
down a wire to a nearby chamber. This first method is called quantum
teleportation. It’s interesting, but since the original subject is destroyed,
quantum teleportation cannot be used on a living thing.”

“The second method is called hole
teleportation.  The hole method uses a theoretical device to make a tear or
hole in the space-time continuum. The object passes through the hole to come
out a similar hole in another place or even another time.  Most advocates of
this method say that all points in space time touch each other or can be made
to touch. Like folding the corners of a piece of paper together, for example.
This concept is often used when talking about time travel as well. Oh, I must
be boring you, rattling on so.”  He waved his hand in apology.

“No, no. Please continue,” I said,
still leaning forward. Drew’s old, thin lips started talking again.

“Well, there is another theory
that states if quantum teleportation were used on humans what arrives at the
new location is actually be a replica, almost a clone.  If you were teleported
you might not be you when you arrived,” Drew laughed thinly at his own joke.
“To do this, a computer would need to be designed to digitize all the atoms in
the human body. That’s about ten to the twenty-eighth power, or a trillion
times a trillion atoms.  Some place in this digital map would be your ‘soul’.
Maybe too great a task even for future machines.”

“What about hole teleportation?
Could a person teleport that way?”

“They certainly could, Rust. But
opening and closing the ‘hole’ has never been done, except on Star Trek,” again
he laughed at his own joke, a real comedian.

Well, here goes.  For the first
time I tried telling someone this whole story from the beginning, including two
mysterious trucks and their ability to switch places.   This took quite some
time and Mr. Chandler had a few questions. Finally, I brought him up to date
through Monday night’s meeting with Mr. Glasses.

“Well, now I have confirmed that
these two trucks were formerly leased to ORNL and I had a close call with a man
driving a vehicle which is also leased to ORNL.  The key to this whole thing is
that lab. I need a name, someone out there that has access to their systems
that I can use to get my foot in the door.”

“Oh dear,” Drew raised his
eyebrows, “I can do you one better than that.  I think I know who has your
truck.”

“Who is that?”  I asked, hoping
this old man really knew.

“A fellow named Kendrick, Randall
Kendrick,” he sounded pretty sure of himself.

“Kendrick, huh?  Never heard of
him.  Is he dangerous?” I asked.

Thoughtfully, a bit amused, he
said, “I think mostly to himself.”

After a bit more awkward chitchat,
I got in my heap and split.  The rest of the day was a blur of mobile home
inspections and a bunch of smells that formed an olfactory blur of bacon
grease, cigarette smoke and poop.

Chapter
12

Randall Kendrick was a man who had
started life at the top and worked his way down.  I sympathized since I had
endured that slide myself. He seemed to have had everything going for him and
then over the last twenty years he had pissed it all away.  If he had an eye
patch and a bottle of rum he could have been a Buffet song.  Sadly, he had a
bottle of Tums and a nicotine patch.

He was now fifty-five years old
and having a mid life crisis.  Kendrick lived in a large expensive house in a
suburb of Oakridge.  He had a short commute to his laboratory and office at
Oakridge National Labs (ORNL) where he was director of special research.  His
adoring wife was a society belle in Oakridge and Knoxville, heading committees
for charitable organizations and tending to their beautiful home.  Everything
was seemed rosy from the outside.

On the inside, it stank. Some
days, Kendrick really questioned whether he wanted to go on living.  He was
deep in debt. The house payment and his wife’s maxed out credit cards were
killing him. He was paying college tuition for two daughters. His third
daughter was in a pricey private high school in Oakridge and he hadn’t been
laid in about two years. If he did not come through with a major scientific
break through by the end of the budget year in December, his department was
going to be dissolved, as dead and gone as an eight track cassette player.   He
would be reassigned, probably to a lesser position with less pay.  Then, in
short order, a flood of angry creditors would be followed by bankruptcy and a
costly divorce.

Randall Kendrick had been voted
most likely to succeed in his class at Knoxville’s West High School.  A
talented baseball player, he attended Georgia Tech in Atlanta and graduated in
engineering in the top five percent of his class.  He moved back to Tennessee where he interned at and was eventually hired by ORNL. He worked in the labs as
he continued college at UT and earned a masters degree.

At the time, the Lab was shifting
its focus from nuclear research to other forms of science.  Kendrick drew plans
for and was integral in perfecting a lens that was part of a missile guidance
system we know today as ‘smart bombs.’    This technology created great revenue
for ORNL and propelled Kendrick to “made man’ status in the lab’s
organization.  He was given a fat budget, title of director and commissioned to
do research in defense and other areas that could create more revenue for the
labs.

There was only one problem.  After
several months, Randall found that the missile guidance system was a bit of a
fluke.  He did not seem to have another invention in him.  He was not stupid,
but he was no Einstein.

Realizing this, he knew he had to
hire some engineering talent.   He began going to colleges and recruiting young
physicists and engineers right out of school. He looked for genius types with
no social skills, the real nerds.  They would do the inventing; he would take
the credit and keep the ball rolling.

Along the way, he had moved three
times to successively larger houses which tripled his mortgage. Now he had
three daughters to support.   His wife found little to occupy herself except
shopping each day.  After twenty years of marriage he had built a huge debt on
a house, furnishings, a pool and pool house, a new Land Cruiser, a BMW, and a
Corvette.

The Corvette especially upset him
because he had purchased it more to piss off his wife than for his own
enjoyment.  She was only mad for one day and now he was stuck with an
eleven-hundred-dollar monthly car payment for seven years. The car was
painfully small and folding himself into the seat made his bones ache like a
bad yoga class.   Plus she punished him the next week by signing a thirty
thousand dollar landscaping contract for their home and the pool grounds.

Kendrick was working like crazy
and did not have much time for family.  This was good, because it kept him from
killing his wife.  He was pretty sure his two girls in college were doing
well.  His youngest daughter- still living at home- was dating a kid who had
attended a public school (graduation uncertain), was way too old for her. A
complete loser.  Kendrick was positive the boy did drugs or sold them, or
both.  This kid ate at the table with his hat on and his jeans hung low,
bagging down to his knees.  He went by the name Dink or Slink, Randall couldn’t
remember.

Here’s where it gets sticky. 
Randal Kendrick’s new recruits at Special Research were not cutting the
mustard.  They had been going for the big prize, teleportation.  Kendrick’s
star player, William Madison, was the smartest and the nerdiest of them all.   Madison had built a small black box that supposed to be able to move objects, maybe even
living things instantly, without regard for space and time. Wow.

Kendrick told him that he had
until Christmas to get it working or they were through.  He had received notice
that the Special Research Unit would be slashed from the budget unless it could
pay for itself, which it was not even close to doing now. Kendrick began
drinking.  Drinking led to hangovers. Hangovers led to Kendrick verbally
abusing his staff.

During the summer, he pushed
William Madison to perfect the teleportation device.  Kendrick was like a rabid
college basketball coach, he even threw a chair across Madison’s lab. Unable to
handle the strain, Madison had failed to report for work.  Kendrick could not
locate any of Madison’s notes, experiments, or the prototype black boxes.  He
couldn’t even find Madison.  He called the FBI and reported Madison missing and
told them it as a matter of national security.

It didn’t take long for the FBI to
locate Madison at his mother’s house in Mt. Gideon, Ohio.  Kendrick made
contact with him and eventually he verbally beat the location of the black
boxes out of him.  Madison said that all of his experiments had shown that the
boxes should work, but he had been monitoring them day and night for quite some
time and had not been able to make them switch.

Madison had since realized that an
error in the programming code made teleportation possible only once a day. 
Just a little more work on the programming and the box should do its trick on
command.  Where were these black boxes, Kendrick wanted to know?  Madison told him they were in two of the security trucks. He had used the old trucks from
the fleet as guinea pigs. A blue one and a black one.

Great, thought Kendrick, because
all he had to do was find those trucks. Easy. He went to the security motor
pool and found that he had a new problem.  About a month previously ORNL had
liquidated its aging security fleet and leased new small trucks for the
security officers.  No old trucks left.

Kendrick became physically ill at
this development.  He had been barely hanging in there while he hunted down Madison.  Now there was going to be more waiting and he had zero time.  If he could not
produce a working teleportation device by Christmas, January would bring
bankruptcy, probably divorce and certainly ruin.

This is when Randall Kendrick met
Darrin Mosley, the day security officer for his building at the lab.  Darin had
blonde hair, a little too long, but neatly kept.  He had round glasses that
were at a contrast with his bulging biceps and chest.  He used his gym
membership and it showed.  A classic case of a nerd who had gotten sand kicked
in his face.  Now this nerd had two hundred pounds on his small frame and could
bench-press three fifty.

Darin was not an engineer, he was
borderline intelligent enough for the security job at ORNL.  Kendrick did not
need smarts right now. He needed a man of action to find those missing trucks. 
He made a deal with Darin.  After his ORNL day job, Darin would work nights for
Kendrick. Searching. Kendrick would pay him five hundred dollars a week until
the trucks were found, with a five thousand dollar bonus for each truck at the
time of recovery.

But Kendrick could not control
Darin.  Macho man that Darin was, he started a fight with Travis McHenry.  The
plan had been to offer Travis twenty thousand cash for both trucks, not to
fight him for them. Travis ended up with a pool cue run through him.  Darin
hitched the stolen truck to his roll-back and hauled it back to the lab.

Darin Mosley was paid the five
grand bonus for the first truck.   When Kendrick read in the paper a few days
later that Travis McHenry had been killed, he confronted Mosley.  Darin told
the truth, stating that McHenry had it coming and that it was the only way. 
Besides, what was Kendrick worried about? He was one truck away from a huge
scientific breakthrough.  He also pointed out that Kendrick had saved the
twenty grand he was prepared to pay McHenry.

Numb at this point, Kendrick
looked the other way and became party to murder.

Although Kendrick felt the tail
was wagging the dog, he believed Mosley could get his other truck for him.  He
tried not to think about the dead man, as though waking nightmares would summon
police to take him away. And now it seemed they had. He had a six-foot tall
detective in his office with a note pad and a devil beard.

Kendrick told me this after I had
introduced myself simply as an investigator and had given him a quick glance at
my PI license. I was being as vague as possible with any information I gave
him. After I asked a few brief questions, he began what sounded like a
confession. I stopped talking and listened as he told me the whole thing.  
Damn strange.