The Sixth Idea (9 page)

T
he only good thing about the long drive from Minneapolis to the country was the sensation that you were moving from some anxiety-ridden place of noise and crowds and traffic to someplace better. Lydia's jangled nerves finally started to still once she'd pulled off the freeway, and by the time she'd turned onto the wooded, snow-dusted back roads that would bring her home, she had calmed into a gentle sorrow for Chuck Spencer.

She hadn't really known him, but he'd been such a nice man. She'd never met his friend Wally, but surely neither one of them deserved such a senseless, brutal end. The coincidence of their murders on the same night wasn't lost on her, but that was work for the detectives.

She pulled into the aspen-lined drive and up to the house that had felt like home the first time the realtor had shown her the place.
She stopped her car at the front walk and listened to the cold, peaceful silence of her woodland sanctuary. Here, deer romped and songbirds and wild turkeys feasted at her many feeders; fox patrolled for rabbits and mice, nature went on as nature always had, and people didn't kill each other.

She left her snowy boots on the braided rug by the door and ate a lunch of leftover chili and cheese, then went down the wooden staircase to the basement, where she kept useless and precious things.

The cupboard next to the washer and dryer held soaps, cleansers, and the meager remnants of her mother's legacy. She carried the box upstairs and placed it on the old oak table in her kitchen.

On top was her duplicate of the photo Chuck had shown her on the plane—eight men, including Chuck's father and her grandfather, standing next to a prop plane on some unknown tarmac with President Eisenhower—only her photo was a little different. On the back, her grandpa had written in flowery, old-fashioned script:
I am become death, destroyer of worlds.
A little creepy, but no revelation there. It was from the
Bhagavad Gita
, which she'd read some of in her college Hinduism class. And more interestingly, Robert Oppenheimer had quoted it in an interview when describing how he'd felt after witnessing the 1945 Trinity test in New Mexico of the world's first atomic bomb.

There wasn't much else in the box: stacks of old notebooks filled with scribbles and equations she would never make sense of—they might as well have been Egyptian hieroglyphics—and then, the book. She remembered what her mother had said from her hospital bed the night she died.

Remember the book in that box in the attic I showed you last year? Father gave it to me a long time ago and told me to memorize the part about the generator, that it was very important. I don't know why. Go get that box, Lydia. Get it tonight.

Lydia lifted the book out of the box. It was nothing but a worn paperback in the 1950s Cold War pulp fiction genre. She'd never read it, but it was something about nuclear Armageddon and the last survivors. Given her grandfather's occupation, it made sense that he'd given it to his daughter, perhaps as a cautionary tale or even as a survival manual.

The cover art was as atrocious as she'd remembered it—a comic book rendering of a scantily clad, buxom ingénue running from a conflagration. It had probably been a scandalous cover for the time. And how screwed up was that? She was sitting next to papers that in all likelihood amounted to a how-to manual on building the most destructive weapon ever conceived, and yet a cartoon of a half-naked woman had been unthinkable in polite society at the very same period in history.

She opened the book and ruffled the pages until she found the section bracketed in pink crayon, and in the top margin written in childlike printing by her mother when she was only nine years old: “Memorize this. Never forget.”

Lydia read the marked material, which was nothing more than poorly written prose couching a tedious set of instructions on how to build a generator after the world had been nuked to smithereens. She closed the book and placed it facedown on the table. Obviously her
grandfather had genuinely believed the world might end and he had wanted his daughter to be prepared. It seemed quaint now, that a generator had seemed like salvation in a post-Armageddon world. Then again, the world was more dangerous than ever, so maybe knowing how to build a generator wasn't such a bad idea. What if the power grid was attacked and went down? Or the Web?

She started when her cell phone rang, then relaxed when the caller ID flashed on her screen. “Hi, Otis.”

“Hey, Lydia, how was your lunch?”

“It never happened,” she blurted out, feeling her eyes well and her throat tighten. “Chuck was murdered last night.”

Otis was silent for a moment. “Mind if I come over?”

C
heeton was a small Minnesota town so far north you could blow kisses to Canada. It was one of those inhospitable places where sane people would never choose to live, unless you'd been born here, and then you couldn't figure out how anyone would want to live anywhere else. You had to favor houses made of whole logs, the night howling of wolves in winter, and skedaddling out of the way when grumpy black bears came out of hibernation in the spring. The human population barely topped one thousand.

The folks up here were deep-rooted and what they used to call hardy stock, born and bred on the same land where their ancestors trapped beaver and fox a couple hundred years ago. They all took some sort of stupid pride in being able to stand the brutal winters and a growing season so short you could hardly get a radish to come up out of the ground before the frost settled in again.

It was barely December and the snowbanks were already piled at
least ten feet high on the sides of the Klapton fire road, named for the family of five who had died in their cabin long before the single Cheeton fire truck had made it on the scene. You had to be a brave soul to live this far north in Minnesota, or maybe just an idiot.

Sheriff Ernie Fenster slowed his SUV cruiser once he hit the fire road. The snowplow had made a token pass to clear a single lane, but it would take a heck of a lot more work than that to make the road truly passable after last night's dump of the white stuff, and Andy wasn't going to be doing any more plowing today. His voice had been shaking pretty bad when he called it in, and that after driving all the way to his cabin and a landline before he remembered he had a radio in the truck.

Tenth signpost in, Sheriff, right at the top of the northern bank. All you can see is one arm, sticking up out of the snow like he's waving at somebody, and even if I could have climbed up there, which I can't, not with my ticker, no way I was going to try and dig him out. Creepiest damn thing I ever did see.

Ernie had already been pulling on his snowmobile suit, scrambling in the mess on his desk for the cruiser keys, and trying to raise somebody on the dispatch radio. No joy, so he scribbled a note to whatever deputy got into the office first and thumped his heavy boots straight for the door. He was breathing hard by the time he got there, what with all the heavy gear he was wearing to keep from freezing to death.
Look out your kitchen window, Andy. Has Ethel left for the office yet?

Hell no. Her car's still in her driveway, buried under an eight-foot snowdrift. I don't expect you'll be seeing her anytime soon.

Well, run next door, have her call the boys and send them out there
as soon as she gets through. She knows all the numbers by heart, and I can't get anyone on the radio or the phone. Any chance that guy was still alive?

The arm was all black, Sheriff. Stands out pretty good against all the snow . . . and . . . the thing is, he was bare-ass naked from stem to stern.

If the arm was the only thing sticking out, how do you know he was naked? Andy? Andy? Are you still there?

Yeah. I never saw him, Sheriff. Swear to God. I was just scooping with the bucket and dumping it on top of the snowbank . . . and he fell out, all floppy and black way up there . . . oh dear Lord . . .

Ernie pulled the cruiser to a stop at signpost number ten and looked up at the top of the northern bank of plow-pushed snow, already towering a good ten or twelve feet above the road. He couldn't see the arm. Andy would have had a better view from his higher perch inside the snowplow.

He sat behind the wheel of his idling SUV, savoring the blast of lukewarm heat on his legs when he kicked the fan up to its highest setting. Not that it did all that much good. Cold seeped into the car just about as fast as the heat blew out. Keeping the side window cracked wasn't helping, but ever since he'd found Artie Jensen dead from carbon monoxide poisoning in his locked-tight Grand Am, he'd no more sit in a car with the engine running than he'd pick his teeth with razor blades.

He glanced at the climate setting on the car's menu and saw that the outside temperature was below zero. What a pisser.

O
vernight in Minneapolis, the temperatures had crashed down into stupid-cold territory. Such a thing was a rare occurrence in mid-December, but it happened every decade or so—a stern reminder from Old Man Winter that he was the boss and he'd do whatever he wanted to, whenever he wanted to do it.

“I hate this crap,” Gino muttered as he and Magozzi walked into City Hall early the next morning.

“What?”

“When it's so damn cold, the minute you step into a warm building, every inch of skin on your body burns like somebody dumped gas on you and threw a match.”

Magozzi subconsciously flexed his fingers in his cold-stiff leather gloves, feeling prickles in them as his sluggish blood started to move again. “The first day of spring is only ninety days away.”

“God, I feel so much better now. Maybe I won't hang myself after all. Did you see the sun dog this morning?”

“What's a sun dog?”

“When it's so frigging cold, ice crystals form in the air and when the sun starts to come up, it creates a halo. Kind of like a subzero rainbow without all the pretty colors.”

“Why were you up that early?”

“You mean besides the fact that we're working a case? I've got a five-year-old, why do you think? I was stupid enough to get him a three-D Advent calendar, and every day you get to open up a little window in the calendar and there's a piece of chocolate inside. He gets up half an hour earlier every morning the closer to Christmas it gets.”

“You let him eat chocolate in the morning?”

“It's the only time I let him eat chocolate. Mornings on school days, then his sugar buzz is the teacher's problem, not mine.”

The Homicide room wasn't a madhouse yet, but it was still humming for such an early hour. Generally, murder ebbed a little during the holiday season, but there were still enough call-outs to keep everybody busy. Unfortunately, most of the suspicious deaths they got in December ended up being suicides.

Johnny McLaren was situating himself at his desk, shrugging out of his parka and revealing an epically bad, striped sports coat. Nobody really knew if McLaren's astoundingly poor wardrobe choices were intentional or not, and nobody really wanted to know, because any answer would destroy the mystique.

“Hey, Johnny, what's up?” Gino asked as he passed by on his way to the snack table.

He smiled and rattled a waxed paper bag. “I've got Cronuts and there's one with your name on it.”

Gino stopped in his tracks, reversed his course, and gave McLaren a melty smile that people usually got from watching a cute kitten or puppy video on YouTube. “You've gotta be kidding me. Where did you get those?”

“Kiosk in the IDS tower. They just started selling them.”

“You are the man. You ever try one of these, Leo?”

Magozzi held up his hand. “They're all yours. Crossing a croissant and a donut is like breeding a zebra to a goat—it's a complete abomination.”

McLaren snickered. “Suit yourself.”

Magozzi looked down at his phone—the call he'd been waiting for was coming in. “Hi, Grace.”

“Magozzi. I finally got into the surveillance footage from the Chatham Hotel. You and Gino need to see it and I'm uncomfortable sending it over the wire.”

“We'll be right over.”

•   •   •

Grace had no concept
of time when she was working—hours seemed like minutes, and sometimes it was the other way around. Getting lost in an abstract world that was far less dangerous than the real one she inhabited was like taking a vacation. Harley, Annie, and Roadrunner understood this—anybody else would probably question her sanity, as if the real world were all there was.

It didn't surprise her to see that the sun had risen when she finally looked up from her computer. The office was quiet except for the
faint hum of the machines. Harley and Charlie were absent and she'd never even noticed their departure.

A few minutes later she heard the elevator rising to the third-floor Monkeewrench office in Harley's mansion. Instinctively, she put her hand on her Sig. Just in case.

“Hey, Gracie.” Harley clomped into the office hugging large bags of takeout. Charlie was close on his heels, his nose busy with the scent of food. “You were really in it deep and the dog's stomach was growling, so I thought I'd order in.”

Grace sniffed the air. “The German place down the street?”

“Yeah. Best sauerkraut and sausage in the world. Did you hit the jackpot while I was gone?”

Grace pushed back from her desk and retied her loose ponytail. “I finally hit something. There was a breach in the Chatham server all right. My first guess was that somebody came away with some credit card numbers.”

Harley set the bags down on his desk and started unloading foam containers. “If it was a credit card job, why the blackout on the video feed?”

“That was the weird thing. This wasn't an amateur job, and usually attacks like this are pretty surgical. They go for the data and that's it. This one covered more ground, including all the camera feeds in the hotel, so I started on the floor where Charles Spencer had a room.” She arched a brow at him, which was just about as self-congratulatory as she ever got. “Fortunately, the attack didn't delete the actual surveillance footage, it just disabled the playback.”

Harley gave her a big, white grin that spliced his black beard. “You are a genius. So what's the upshot?”

“The upshot is some excellent film of a couple men with guns outside Spencer's room. I'm running it through our facial recognition right now. Gino and Magozzi are on their way.”

Harley whistled. “Who the hell was this Spencer guy and what was he into?”

Grace shook her head. “That's the kink. By all accounts, Charles Spencer was about as vanilla as you can get.”

“He was obviously a somebody, and I'm guessing whoever tried to wipe the surveillance did a damn fine job of making his website disappear, too. I've been banging my head against a brick wall for hours trying to recover Spencer's website, and man, it's pissing me off.”

“You'll get it. You always do.”

Harley grinned. “Damn right I will.”