The deepest kill, p.16
The Deepest Kill, page 16
“How could anyone work without snacks?”
“—so food and its packaging would be around.”
“Or,” Rachael said, “someone used dissolving string to tie the steering wheel in place, knowing that this daily deluge you say is normal would wash it away.”
“Huh. They come aboard, kill Ashley, take the laptop, rig the steering wheel to send the boat out into the Gulf, and with luck, sink in a storm and disappear. Though if they wanted to sink it they should have just pulled the drain plug. Eventually the bilge pump would burn out. Boats are designed not to sink, even in storms.”
“Maybe they aimed it toward land.”
“Why?” Ellie asked.
“They wanted it to be found.”
“The boat, but not Ashley. Interesting. Of course, if they really didn’t want Ashley to be found, they would have weighted her down with something.” She rubbed her jaw, using her fingers to stretch it out.
“TMJ?” Rachael asked, setting her tablet down.
Temporomandibular joint dysfunction could be a common cause of mouth pain, Ellie knew, but that wasn’t her problem. “No, it—” She hesitated, but in a burst of honesty went on: “I know it sounds dumb, but sometimes I walk around with this calm, pleasant smile pasted on my face because I know calm and pleasant is what I’m supposed to be and it’s what puts other people at ease . . . then suddenly I realize that my jaw is sore from grinning like a happy idiot for hours.”
“It’s not dumb,” Rachael said. “It’s what society teaches us a woman should do. Everyone else’s comfort is more important than our own.”
Ellie slumped against the table, abruptly feeling the long day in her bones. “Yeah. But you know, I like that about us. I wouldn’t want to change it. I just get tired of it sometimes.”
They stood in silence for a few moments, contemplating polyvinyl alcohol and society’s gender demands. Then Rachael said, “Buddha said that a gentle smile, a sita, is the point at which we approach the transcendent, the spiritual, the sublime. Keeping one on our lips brings a feeling of peace to our day.”
Ellie considered this. “That does seem a much better way of looking at it. More like a relaxation technique than purposely suppressing one’s personality just to fit in. Forty-five minutes?”
“At least.”
“I’m going to go for a run, then. Maybe that will line up all these facts in my head so they start making sense.”
“It’s going to rain. And the humidity is, like, ninety-five percent.”
“I won’t go far. And this heat is nothing compared to summer.”
“Fine, but don’t come crying to me when you have a heart attack. What’s the mistress like?”
“Young.”
Rachael made a face. “Aren’t they always?”
Chapter 26
“Dude, you didn’t.”
“I wasn’t given much of a choice.” Michael handed his partner a coffee cup, courtesy of the Naples Police Department break room. “Things happened kind of fast. I couldn’t get her to shut up.”
“But an interview in motion! And she was driving. And you weren’t even in the front seat!”
“I know.” It had been, Michael reflected, about the worst possible situation for interviewing a witness.
Cops had reasons to talk to people in small, empty rooms, across a blank table—no distractions, nothing for the person to do or comment on or attend to. Nothing to keep their hands busy to disguise nervously tapping fingers or cause their eyes to dart from side to side or push around with their feet. Feet could be the body’s lie detectors. We learn young to school our faces, but that discipline lessens on its way down the body. Hands aren’t as controlled as eyebrows, and toes aren’t as controlled as shoulders.
Cops also had reasons to start out with small talk, calm, nonconfrontational. This helped to establish the interviewee’s baseline behaviors—how they looked and acted when they answered easy questions with obviously true answers: their names, their addresses, where they work. Yes, they wouldn’t be completely relaxed, because who would be completely relaxed in a small room at a police department being questioned about something bad that happened? But they’d be a lot more relaxed than later, when asked about their role in that thing and perhaps needing to lie about it. Constant, steady surroundings also helped to differentiate between behavior of discomfort from lying about the crime at hand, or because the room was too cold, or because, in Kayla’s case, the light turned yellow at the last minute.
Agents also had reasons to videotape or record or at least scribble a note or two of what the person actually said. Relying on one’s memory had never been a good idea, and an investigator’s “contemporaneous notes” always counted for much more in a courtroom than a report written hours or even days later.
So, yes, getting Kayla’s statement during their very own version of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, when she had been majorly distracted by Florida drivers, traffic laws, three possibly hostile total strangers who had thrown themselves inside her vehicle, all while escaping the following sea of ravenous media hounds, when Michael could only see one side of her face and her eyes reversed in a rearview mirror and very little of her body—it had not been, he had to admit, ideal.
And not at all proper FBI standard procedure. They had tried to fix it by having her repeat it all in a small, plain room and with the video and the note-taking.
Her story hadn’t changed. Greg had been with her since right after he left the Post estate—at which time Ashley had not yet gone out on her boat—until five when he left to go back—at which point Ashley had already been declared, at least by her father, to be missing. She was certain of the times, even adamant.
Michael finished his coffee. They had the break room to themselves, the regular officers going on or off their shifts or busy writing reports, and the admin staff had gone home.
Luis said, “It kind of makes sense, as she explains it. The day stuck in her mind because she had a cold and felt crappy, which is a little awkward when you’re only there to have sex. I can picture that, he’s trying to be the understanding guy while she’s watching the clock, secretly hoping the date ends sooner rather than later. But when she was blurting all this out in the car, did you believe her?”
“Yes.” Drawing out the syllable just a little.
A little was enough, because Luis knew his partner. “But you’re not sure.”
“It’s been a week since she found out about Greg, and his connection to Ashley. She had to figure we’d catch up with her at some point.”
“Not necessarily. My wife’s brother has been painting houses for two years and her mother still insists he’s just on a break from med school. Human beings are really, really good at magical thinking.”
“Yeah, but past the glitter eyeshadow and the neon stars on her fingernails, she seems sharp enough to me. They had seven days to get her story straight.”
“Frosted.”
“What?”
“Frosted eyeshadow. Not glitter.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Glitter is metal flake, dude. It would slice up your cornea.” Luis drained his own cup. “Okay, then. We check her details. Stores are usually open until nine or ten. Then we could drop in at her apartment, make sure she isn’t packing her bags for Aruba.”
Michael stood up. “Frosted. Got it.”
Chapter 27
Ellie took off from the driveway and ran along the empty sidewalks, keeping a slow, steady pace to warm up her muscles, the same route she had taken all through high school. Spanish moss drooped from the oaks and sycamores, and the humidity—she hadn’t missed that. DC could get incredibly humid at times, but not for ten months out of the twelve.
As usual, running helped focus her mind. What was the deal with that storage unit, anyway? Greg stays married to Ashley when he clearly isn’t happy, keeps living in her father’s house—wants to keep living in her father’s house with its outstanding luxury—but then talks his father-in-law into renting a windowless tin box for him, purely to have one space to himself?
Maybe it wasn’t Ashley or the luxury that he couldn’t part from. Maybe access to the inner circle of the brilliant Martin Post, the apex of the biggest, best tech company in the world, was what Greg didn’t want to let go of.
Or maybe, like so many people, what Greg thought he wanted hadn’t been what he really wanted at all.
Or again, like so many people, he wanted everything. The inclusion. The prestige. The fame and attention that came from being one of the Posts, even if by marriage, to have breakfast with the same people every morning. Maybe he even wanted a baby, provided all he had to do was hand out cigars and maybe bounce it on his knee once in a while. But at the same time he also wanted to hang out and play video games instead of working, wanted to have a string of interchangeable young beauties who would hop into the Bugatti without question.
Maybe he had been dazzled by the glamour of the Post family, only to find his soul mate in Kayla. Though having met Greg, she felt this to be the least likely theory.
Who knew? Who ever knew what they really, truly wanted?
Ellie had always thought that all she wanted was to have her mom and dad back. But then she would be a different person now, maybe a weaker person, or maybe a stronger one.
A fertile one. One who hadn’t moved through five states before college. Would she want that?
Hell, yeah.
After circling the block once, her muscles had adjusted, become looser. She barely paid attention to what her body did, other than watching the concrete squares for uneven edges . . . she’d scraped too many knees that way. With windows tightly closed to maintain the air-conditioning, little sound could be heard along the street, though the hum from a main road floated in and another jogger pounded up the sidewalk somewhere behind her.
The hum reminded her of that afternoon’s commute. How could there be a rush hour in a place where most people were retired, and those who weren’t likely worked in the irregular hours of hospitality, retail, or food service? But then there still must be plenty of nine-to-five type concerns . . . schools, doctor’s offices, banks—
“Dr. Carr?”
“Oh hell.” She stopped, in order to turn and give the man a proper glare. “I suppose I should be grateful that you’re not trying to break into my house this time. Excuse me, my aunt and uncle’s house.”
“I never tried to break in. I simply wanted to interview you.”
“Well, you can’t.” She began running again. He kept pace, dressed in khaki pants and a T-shirt already spotted with sweat.
“Bruce Dunning, Forester News Service. In case you forgot.”
“I had.” He wore sandals closed with Velcro straps; she could easily outrun him, but wasn’t about to try. That would be undignified. Besides, they were on a public sidewalk and he was doing a legitimate job, so she tried to forget how much he’d startled her the night before. “Mr. Post asked me to consult on something that is not only his family’s personal business but an open police investigation as well. I am legally and ethically constrained from blabbing about it. Sorry.”
“Who was that girl you ran off with? Was that the mistress?”
“No comment.”
“Kayla Parker? She already gave a statement to the press.”
“Then you don’t need me, do you?”
“What was Ashley working on?”
“No comment.”
“Was it the CurrentSDI project?”
“No comment.”
“Does Martin Post think Greg killed his daughter?”
“No comment.”
“Have you heard of the Star Wars Deaths?”
Ellie took a moment to sort those words into some sequence that would make sense, and couldn’t. She opened her mouth to ask him what he meant, remembered that she was not supposed to be commenting, shut it again, and picked up her pace.
“From your expression I’ll take that as a no.” He seemed to find this greatly encouraging even as his breath grew short and the sweat circles in his shirt widened. “Way back in the dark ages before personal computers on every desk and watching TV on your smartphone, in 1983, Ronald Reagan talked about starting the Strategic Defense Initiative, a bunch of satellites to float around in space and shoot down any missiles incoming from Russia and China. Everyone promptly named it Star Wars. It never came into being, but that was okay because it freaked out the Soviet Union enough that it collapsed.”
“That probably wasn’t—”
“The only reason, yeah.” His language stayed leisurely, as if he had nothing better to do on a hot night than jog in inappropriate attire while delivering a history lesson. “It never came into being because A, detecting and tracking missiles from outer space so that they can be picked off in the sky like a game of Asteroids is not as easy as it sounds, and B, the cost was astronomical. No pun intended.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“But for a while, defense research and technology was hot and heavy. Scientists all over the place worked on it or pieces of it, university types, military subcontractors, guys at GE. Computer guys. Not Martin, he was a kid developing OakTree at the time. But his rival, EntreRobotics—they were EntreComp then—were the tech half of McCann. McCann diagnostic programs were used in most ICBMs at that time and still are. An ICBM is a—”
“Intercontinental ballistic missile, yes, I know. When do we get to the part about deaths?”
“It’s munitions, Dr. Carr. They’re always about deaths.”
He puffed this out so solemnly that she began to wonder if he had some antiwar agenda to push with the story. Or he wanted to make her feel guilty enough to keep listening. They had come back around to her starting point, but she had several laps to go and she didn’t pause.
“So everyone’s working on Star Wars, right? And they start dying. They fell out of windows, jumped off bridges, one put a bunch of gas cans in his car and crashed into an empty building. Another tied one end of a rope around his neck, one end around a tree, got in his car and drove—who does that? One overdosed. Two died of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation, though they didn’t call it that then.”
“And this was all in 1983?”
“Between ’82 and ’88.”
Ellie didn’t keep the skepticism from her voice. “If there’s one thing I can assure you of, it’s that people do die—”
“Twenty-plus. Some reports say twenty-five, and most in a two-year period. They worked for different companies, defense contractors, research, like that, but all in some way connected with SDI. There were four guys from a subsidiary of GE, called Marconi, like the guy who invented the radio, four guys from Marconi died in one month! Two of them in the same day. That time a guy fell”—his fingers made air quotes, the hands swaying as he ran—“from a bridge near the same property where a woman supposedly put a rope around her neck, tied her own hands behind her back and her feet, then hobbled on her high heels over to a lake to drown herself. Can we slow down?”
“No.”
“All these people had, usually, either just left a company or were just about to get promoted. Somebody was covering their tracks, that’s for sure. They were all British too . . . I guess the Americans weren’t much of a threat at the time.” He glanced sideways at her. “Unless you guys did it. The FBI.”
“Not to my knowledge,” she said.
He did not seem reassured. “People assumed it was the Russians, and the Russians implied it was MI6, but it could have been other SDI companies. So either someone wanted to knock off all of the competition, or working on SDI makes you crazily suicidal.”
“And which do you think it is?”
“I don’t think it’s the latter.”
They had come round again. He stopped, so she paused without thinking, which gave him time to look pointedly from her to the house and back again. “Got coffee?”
“Not a chance.”
“Water?”
“Two more laps.”
“Two?”
She took off. She thought he might wait there for her return, but then the slapping of his loose soles on the sidewalk pounded up beside her. “Maybe working on SDI doesn’t make you crazy, but makes your coworkers crazily competitive. Maybe it was the Russians, or maybe it was someone at Marconi determined to claw their way to the top. Or EntreRobotics, determined to keep the U.S. market to themselves.”
“That’s a leap.”
His pants were lengthening into gasps. “It’s a jeté worthy of Nijinsky, I know that. But here’s the thing: work on SDI largely petered out when the Soviet bloc collapsed. No need to worry about shooting the things down when nobody’s lobbing them at us. Bush the first scaled back the program, and Clinton slashed it even more by agreeing to outsource the management and development. Contractors are a huge chunk of the federal budget, of course. Not even defense contractors—the biggest campaign contributors to our representatives? AT and T, FedEx, SBC. I did a story on—”
He paused to breathe as they began the last lap, and apparently decided she didn’t need to hear about his body of work right then and they ran for a while in silence. She had to admit that he did a pretty good job of keeping up with her, even in sandals. His arches would pay for it later.
When his wind caught up with him, he went on: “So Star Wars faded over the years but it never really went away. The stream of money to R and D became part of the steady stream of defense spending without anyone paying too much attention. The cost of putting all those satellites in space kept it unrealistic—but then 9/11 happened, and suddenly no cost was too high again. The threats like Russia and China might have faded but now morphed into Iran and then Iraq and now North Korea.”
They were rounding the corner back to Paul and Joanna’s house, and she felt she’d waited long enough for him to get to the point. “So—”
“Two things. Post has figured out how to bounce signals off enough space junk so that we won’t need a whole fleet of satellites, and our old buddies Russia and China are working really hard on hypersonic missiles.”
“Uh-huh.”
“—so food and its packaging would be around.”
“Or,” Rachael said, “someone used dissolving string to tie the steering wheel in place, knowing that this daily deluge you say is normal would wash it away.”
“Huh. They come aboard, kill Ashley, take the laptop, rig the steering wheel to send the boat out into the Gulf, and with luck, sink in a storm and disappear. Though if they wanted to sink it they should have just pulled the drain plug. Eventually the bilge pump would burn out. Boats are designed not to sink, even in storms.”
“Maybe they aimed it toward land.”
“Why?” Ellie asked.
“They wanted it to be found.”
“The boat, but not Ashley. Interesting. Of course, if they really didn’t want Ashley to be found, they would have weighted her down with something.” She rubbed her jaw, using her fingers to stretch it out.
“TMJ?” Rachael asked, setting her tablet down.
Temporomandibular joint dysfunction could be a common cause of mouth pain, Ellie knew, but that wasn’t her problem. “No, it—” She hesitated, but in a burst of honesty went on: “I know it sounds dumb, but sometimes I walk around with this calm, pleasant smile pasted on my face because I know calm and pleasant is what I’m supposed to be and it’s what puts other people at ease . . . then suddenly I realize that my jaw is sore from grinning like a happy idiot for hours.”
“It’s not dumb,” Rachael said. “It’s what society teaches us a woman should do. Everyone else’s comfort is more important than our own.”
Ellie slumped against the table, abruptly feeling the long day in her bones. “Yeah. But you know, I like that about us. I wouldn’t want to change it. I just get tired of it sometimes.”
They stood in silence for a few moments, contemplating polyvinyl alcohol and society’s gender demands. Then Rachael said, “Buddha said that a gentle smile, a sita, is the point at which we approach the transcendent, the spiritual, the sublime. Keeping one on our lips brings a feeling of peace to our day.”
Ellie considered this. “That does seem a much better way of looking at it. More like a relaxation technique than purposely suppressing one’s personality just to fit in. Forty-five minutes?”
“At least.”
“I’m going to go for a run, then. Maybe that will line up all these facts in my head so they start making sense.”
“It’s going to rain. And the humidity is, like, ninety-five percent.”
“I won’t go far. And this heat is nothing compared to summer.”
“Fine, but don’t come crying to me when you have a heart attack. What’s the mistress like?”
“Young.”
Rachael made a face. “Aren’t they always?”
Chapter 26
“Dude, you didn’t.”
“I wasn’t given much of a choice.” Michael handed his partner a coffee cup, courtesy of the Naples Police Department break room. “Things happened kind of fast. I couldn’t get her to shut up.”
“But an interview in motion! And she was driving. And you weren’t even in the front seat!”
“I know.” It had been, Michael reflected, about the worst possible situation for interviewing a witness.
Cops had reasons to talk to people in small, empty rooms, across a blank table—no distractions, nothing for the person to do or comment on or attend to. Nothing to keep their hands busy to disguise nervously tapping fingers or cause their eyes to dart from side to side or push around with their feet. Feet could be the body’s lie detectors. We learn young to school our faces, but that discipline lessens on its way down the body. Hands aren’t as controlled as eyebrows, and toes aren’t as controlled as shoulders.
Cops also had reasons to start out with small talk, calm, nonconfrontational. This helped to establish the interviewee’s baseline behaviors—how they looked and acted when they answered easy questions with obviously true answers: their names, their addresses, where they work. Yes, they wouldn’t be completely relaxed, because who would be completely relaxed in a small room at a police department being questioned about something bad that happened? But they’d be a lot more relaxed than later, when asked about their role in that thing and perhaps needing to lie about it. Constant, steady surroundings also helped to differentiate between behavior of discomfort from lying about the crime at hand, or because the room was too cold, or because, in Kayla’s case, the light turned yellow at the last minute.
Agents also had reasons to videotape or record or at least scribble a note or two of what the person actually said. Relying on one’s memory had never been a good idea, and an investigator’s “contemporaneous notes” always counted for much more in a courtroom than a report written hours or even days later.
So, yes, getting Kayla’s statement during their very own version of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, when she had been majorly distracted by Florida drivers, traffic laws, three possibly hostile total strangers who had thrown themselves inside her vehicle, all while escaping the following sea of ravenous media hounds, when Michael could only see one side of her face and her eyes reversed in a rearview mirror and very little of her body—it had not been, he had to admit, ideal.
And not at all proper FBI standard procedure. They had tried to fix it by having her repeat it all in a small, plain room and with the video and the note-taking.
Her story hadn’t changed. Greg had been with her since right after he left the Post estate—at which time Ashley had not yet gone out on her boat—until five when he left to go back—at which point Ashley had already been declared, at least by her father, to be missing. She was certain of the times, even adamant.
Michael finished his coffee. They had the break room to themselves, the regular officers going on or off their shifts or busy writing reports, and the admin staff had gone home.
Luis said, “It kind of makes sense, as she explains it. The day stuck in her mind because she had a cold and felt crappy, which is a little awkward when you’re only there to have sex. I can picture that, he’s trying to be the understanding guy while she’s watching the clock, secretly hoping the date ends sooner rather than later. But when she was blurting all this out in the car, did you believe her?”
“Yes.” Drawing out the syllable just a little.
A little was enough, because Luis knew his partner. “But you’re not sure.”
“It’s been a week since she found out about Greg, and his connection to Ashley. She had to figure we’d catch up with her at some point.”
“Not necessarily. My wife’s brother has been painting houses for two years and her mother still insists he’s just on a break from med school. Human beings are really, really good at magical thinking.”
“Yeah, but past the glitter eyeshadow and the neon stars on her fingernails, she seems sharp enough to me. They had seven days to get her story straight.”
“Frosted.”
“What?”
“Frosted eyeshadow. Not glitter.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Glitter is metal flake, dude. It would slice up your cornea.” Luis drained his own cup. “Okay, then. We check her details. Stores are usually open until nine or ten. Then we could drop in at her apartment, make sure she isn’t packing her bags for Aruba.”
Michael stood up. “Frosted. Got it.”
Chapter 27
Ellie took off from the driveway and ran along the empty sidewalks, keeping a slow, steady pace to warm up her muscles, the same route she had taken all through high school. Spanish moss drooped from the oaks and sycamores, and the humidity—she hadn’t missed that. DC could get incredibly humid at times, but not for ten months out of the twelve.
As usual, running helped focus her mind. What was the deal with that storage unit, anyway? Greg stays married to Ashley when he clearly isn’t happy, keeps living in her father’s house—wants to keep living in her father’s house with its outstanding luxury—but then talks his father-in-law into renting a windowless tin box for him, purely to have one space to himself?
Maybe it wasn’t Ashley or the luxury that he couldn’t part from. Maybe access to the inner circle of the brilliant Martin Post, the apex of the biggest, best tech company in the world, was what Greg didn’t want to let go of.
Or maybe, like so many people, what Greg thought he wanted hadn’t been what he really wanted at all.
Or again, like so many people, he wanted everything. The inclusion. The prestige. The fame and attention that came from being one of the Posts, even if by marriage, to have breakfast with the same people every morning. Maybe he even wanted a baby, provided all he had to do was hand out cigars and maybe bounce it on his knee once in a while. But at the same time he also wanted to hang out and play video games instead of working, wanted to have a string of interchangeable young beauties who would hop into the Bugatti without question.
Maybe he had been dazzled by the glamour of the Post family, only to find his soul mate in Kayla. Though having met Greg, she felt this to be the least likely theory.
Who knew? Who ever knew what they really, truly wanted?
Ellie had always thought that all she wanted was to have her mom and dad back. But then she would be a different person now, maybe a weaker person, or maybe a stronger one.
A fertile one. One who hadn’t moved through five states before college. Would she want that?
Hell, yeah.
After circling the block once, her muscles had adjusted, become looser. She barely paid attention to what her body did, other than watching the concrete squares for uneven edges . . . she’d scraped too many knees that way. With windows tightly closed to maintain the air-conditioning, little sound could be heard along the street, though the hum from a main road floated in and another jogger pounded up the sidewalk somewhere behind her.
The hum reminded her of that afternoon’s commute. How could there be a rush hour in a place where most people were retired, and those who weren’t likely worked in the irregular hours of hospitality, retail, or food service? But then there still must be plenty of nine-to-five type concerns . . . schools, doctor’s offices, banks—
“Dr. Carr?”
“Oh hell.” She stopped, in order to turn and give the man a proper glare. “I suppose I should be grateful that you’re not trying to break into my house this time. Excuse me, my aunt and uncle’s house.”
“I never tried to break in. I simply wanted to interview you.”
“Well, you can’t.” She began running again. He kept pace, dressed in khaki pants and a T-shirt already spotted with sweat.
“Bruce Dunning, Forester News Service. In case you forgot.”
“I had.” He wore sandals closed with Velcro straps; she could easily outrun him, but wasn’t about to try. That would be undignified. Besides, they were on a public sidewalk and he was doing a legitimate job, so she tried to forget how much he’d startled her the night before. “Mr. Post asked me to consult on something that is not only his family’s personal business but an open police investigation as well. I am legally and ethically constrained from blabbing about it. Sorry.”
“Who was that girl you ran off with? Was that the mistress?”
“No comment.”
“Kayla Parker? She already gave a statement to the press.”
“Then you don’t need me, do you?”
“What was Ashley working on?”
“No comment.”
“Was it the CurrentSDI project?”
“No comment.”
“Does Martin Post think Greg killed his daughter?”
“No comment.”
“Have you heard of the Star Wars Deaths?”
Ellie took a moment to sort those words into some sequence that would make sense, and couldn’t. She opened her mouth to ask him what he meant, remembered that she was not supposed to be commenting, shut it again, and picked up her pace.
“From your expression I’ll take that as a no.” He seemed to find this greatly encouraging even as his breath grew short and the sweat circles in his shirt widened. “Way back in the dark ages before personal computers on every desk and watching TV on your smartphone, in 1983, Ronald Reagan talked about starting the Strategic Defense Initiative, a bunch of satellites to float around in space and shoot down any missiles incoming from Russia and China. Everyone promptly named it Star Wars. It never came into being, but that was okay because it freaked out the Soviet Union enough that it collapsed.”
“That probably wasn’t—”
“The only reason, yeah.” His language stayed leisurely, as if he had nothing better to do on a hot night than jog in inappropriate attire while delivering a history lesson. “It never came into being because A, detecting and tracking missiles from outer space so that they can be picked off in the sky like a game of Asteroids is not as easy as it sounds, and B, the cost was astronomical. No pun intended.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“But for a while, defense research and technology was hot and heavy. Scientists all over the place worked on it or pieces of it, university types, military subcontractors, guys at GE. Computer guys. Not Martin, he was a kid developing OakTree at the time. But his rival, EntreRobotics—they were EntreComp then—were the tech half of McCann. McCann diagnostic programs were used in most ICBMs at that time and still are. An ICBM is a—”
“Intercontinental ballistic missile, yes, I know. When do we get to the part about deaths?”
“It’s munitions, Dr. Carr. They’re always about deaths.”
He puffed this out so solemnly that she began to wonder if he had some antiwar agenda to push with the story. Or he wanted to make her feel guilty enough to keep listening. They had come back around to her starting point, but she had several laps to go and she didn’t pause.
“So everyone’s working on Star Wars, right? And they start dying. They fell out of windows, jumped off bridges, one put a bunch of gas cans in his car and crashed into an empty building. Another tied one end of a rope around his neck, one end around a tree, got in his car and drove—who does that? One overdosed. Two died of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation, though they didn’t call it that then.”
“And this was all in 1983?”
“Between ’82 and ’88.”
Ellie didn’t keep the skepticism from her voice. “If there’s one thing I can assure you of, it’s that people do die—”
“Twenty-plus. Some reports say twenty-five, and most in a two-year period. They worked for different companies, defense contractors, research, like that, but all in some way connected with SDI. There were four guys from a subsidiary of GE, called Marconi, like the guy who invented the radio, four guys from Marconi died in one month! Two of them in the same day. That time a guy fell”—his fingers made air quotes, the hands swaying as he ran—“from a bridge near the same property where a woman supposedly put a rope around her neck, tied her own hands behind her back and her feet, then hobbled on her high heels over to a lake to drown herself. Can we slow down?”
“No.”
“All these people had, usually, either just left a company or were just about to get promoted. Somebody was covering their tracks, that’s for sure. They were all British too . . . I guess the Americans weren’t much of a threat at the time.” He glanced sideways at her. “Unless you guys did it. The FBI.”
“Not to my knowledge,” she said.
He did not seem reassured. “People assumed it was the Russians, and the Russians implied it was MI6, but it could have been other SDI companies. So either someone wanted to knock off all of the competition, or working on SDI makes you crazily suicidal.”
“And which do you think it is?”
“I don’t think it’s the latter.”
They had come round again. He stopped, so she paused without thinking, which gave him time to look pointedly from her to the house and back again. “Got coffee?”
“Not a chance.”
“Water?”
“Two more laps.”
“Two?”
She took off. She thought he might wait there for her return, but then the slapping of his loose soles on the sidewalk pounded up beside her. “Maybe working on SDI doesn’t make you crazy, but makes your coworkers crazily competitive. Maybe it was the Russians, or maybe it was someone at Marconi determined to claw their way to the top. Or EntreRobotics, determined to keep the U.S. market to themselves.”
“That’s a leap.”
His pants were lengthening into gasps. “It’s a jeté worthy of Nijinsky, I know that. But here’s the thing: work on SDI largely petered out when the Soviet bloc collapsed. No need to worry about shooting the things down when nobody’s lobbing them at us. Bush the first scaled back the program, and Clinton slashed it even more by agreeing to outsource the management and development. Contractors are a huge chunk of the federal budget, of course. Not even defense contractors—the biggest campaign contributors to our representatives? AT and T, FedEx, SBC. I did a story on—”
He paused to breathe as they began the last lap, and apparently decided she didn’t need to hear about his body of work right then and they ran for a while in silence. She had to admit that he did a pretty good job of keeping up with her, even in sandals. His arches would pay for it later.
When his wind caught up with him, he went on: “So Star Wars faded over the years but it never really went away. The stream of money to R and D became part of the steady stream of defense spending without anyone paying too much attention. The cost of putting all those satellites in space kept it unrealistic—but then 9/11 happened, and suddenly no cost was too high again. The threats like Russia and China might have faded but now morphed into Iran and then Iraq and now North Korea.”
They were rounding the corner back to Paul and Joanna’s house, and she felt she’d waited long enough for him to get to the point. “So—”
“Two things. Post has figured out how to bounce signals off enough space junk so that we won’t need a whole fleet of satellites, and our old buddies Russia and China are working really hard on hypersonic missiles.”
“Uh-huh.”
