[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Barcleigh's widow, junior's mother. She remarried, her husband adopted the child and changed his name
to Hazlett. Sometime last winter she gave her son all his father's papers, and sent him packing.
That was the first time he'd heard anything about his real father, she says.
We haven't found him yet, but we've put out a bulletin.
He's been in and out of school, in and out of trouble for the past ten years or more. Clean at the
moment, though. He'll check in sooner or later, and we'll nail it down. His mother said he called her in
early spring, full of questions about the work, what his father did at the university, about Kellerman. As
far as he knew, there was only one Kellerman, I guess."
"He couldn't have known any more about his father's death than anyone else did at the time," Sarah said
after a moment. "It was something in his father's papers, then, something about the work."
"We think so," Fernandez said. "You know about the library books?"
"Yes.
He sighed again, deeper this time. "There's something about the work they were doing, something wrong
about it. I found a tame biochemist to go over those books, see if he can find a link, anything. We'll
know in a week or so, sooner if we find Duane, Junior."
She was hearing again her uncle's voice, ragged, in coherent words, but words with meaning,
nevertheless: They would have got the Nobel.
Not we would have, they, the students. "I think he didn't have anything to do with their work," she said
dully. "He stole their work and published it as if it were his own, as if they had assisted him, that's what
he couldn't face having revealed.
Duane's papers must have information, notes, something to prove that the students were working without
Uncle Peter. All these years, pretending he came that close to the Nobel Prize, pretending he missed out
because of a stupid accident..." She felt Fernandez's hand on her arm and stiffened. "Lieutenant, I
wanted him to die out here. You know that, don't you?"
"I know that, Judge."
"He would have hired a team of good lawyers, it would have dragged through the courts for years,
ruining all our lives in the process-Winnie, Virgil, me, Michael, all of us, in an insane effort to keep his
selfesteem, keep his reputation. Crazy, Alzheimer's, that was all right; he would have accepted that, but
he had to keep the pretense of the great man alive. A great man finally brought down by fate, that was
his role. He would have fought forever to maintain that illusion.
I wanted him to die instead."
"He tried to kill you, Sarah. Remember that."
"I knew he would. He had to. I set him up so that he saw no other choice. I thought I could stay hidden,
and then walk out and leave him dead, or dying. Justice, MY style."
"Sarah, listen to me. In just a few minutes a whole team will be here, swarming all around us. Tonight
you've been shot at, you've had a couple of nasty falls, you're bruised and battered and cut, you were
nearly blown up and burned up, you're in a state of shock. Period. I intend to send you home with a
young woman, Sergeant Pulaski, and she will help you get to bed, if you need help, and she'll see to it
that no one bothers you tonight. And tomorrow 1,11 come around for a statement.
Until then you make no statements to anyone.
Understand? You clam up totally."
"Justice, my style. Justice, your style."
"That's exactly right," he said sharply. "Listen. I told them to come by way of three ninety-five. I think
they're here."
There were car sounds now, and lights came into view, shining directly into his car, blinding Sarah. She
closed her eyes and leaned her head back, waiting for them to tell her what to do, as if his words, that
she was in a state of shock, were enough to induce a state in which she no longer had to act, no longer
had to think of what next.
Now she could close her eyes and wait, knowing things would get done without her.
WHEN she woke up the next morning, she felt as if she had emerged from a dream that had gone on for
many nights, on and on eerily, with disjointed bits of reality intermixed with great gobs of pure fantasy.
Sergeant Pulaski had cleaned her cuts, as gentle as any nurse, and she had Put Sarah to bed as firmly as
a nanny; Sarah had heard her talking to Winnie and Virgil, but the words had been too difficult to follow,
too far into the fantasy realm that she slipped in and out of all night.
When she moved that morning, she yearned to escape again into the fantasy that had permitted her to
watch this wretched woman from a safe distance, and Say tsk, tsk. Instead she was forced to be the
wretched woman who ached from top to toe, who was a mass of bruises, one on her cheek that glared
red with purple and yellow already shading into it.
A scrape on her arm, another on her leg, and everywhere an ache or a pain or a burning sensation, and
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]