He looked at her closely, then studied me. “What’d you do, interrogate her to death? Squeeze her hand really, really hard?”
I hesitated, unsure whether to tell him about the Nembutal. Would there be any harm in not telling him? It wasn’t as if Beatrice had given away any secrets in the past half century. True, she’d murdered Jonah Jamison, but she had just executed herself. Why not leave her a bit of privacy and a shred of dignity?
Because, I realized. Because I remembered something Art Bohanan had said to me a year or so before, when he and I went to confront a man who had murdered a serial pedophile: If you cross the line once, it’s easier to cross a second time, and it gets steadily easier, until finally you lose sight of the line altogether. “She killed herself,” I said. “She drank vodka and Nembutal, and I had no clue until it was too late.” I caught his gaze and held it. “I thought about not telling you,” I said. “Seemed almost like a sleeping dog. But I couldn’t let it lie.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Otherwise it would’ve been awkward when I heard the recording.”
“Recording?”
“We got a warrant for audio surveillance before your first visit,” he said. I must have looked startled. “Leonard Novak was once a high-level atomic scientist,” he explained, “and somebody killed him with an intense radioactive source. The director considered this case a high priority. He’d be very disappointed if I didn’t investigate every angle thoroughly. And I’d be very disappointed if you held back the truth.” He hesitated. “But I guess I’d also be disappointed if you hadn’t given some thought to an elderly woman’s reputation. Even if the old gal was an under-handed, soulless Commie spy.”
I laughed and sighed and shook my head all at the same time. “How’d you end up as a cop instead of a diplomat?”
“Didn’t want to end up huddled in an embassy compound in some plague-infested, two-bit, Third World shithole,” he said.
“Too bad,” I said. “With that silver tongue, you’d have made one hell of an ambassador.”
“Damn skippy,” he said. “By the way, I wouldn’t be surprised if we wanted this kept fairly quiet. The Bureau and the NSA are still trying to track down quite a few Cold War spies. We might not want to let on that we’re wise to Beatrice.”
The logic seemed flimsy, but then I had another thought. “Agent Thornton, is it possible? Is there a bleeding heart somewhere behind that FBI badge?”
“Not a chance,” he said. But I thought I saw a hint of a smile as he called for an ambulance to ferry Beatrice to the afterworld.
CHAPTER 42
I SPENT ALL THE NEXT MORNING AND MOST OF THE afternoon at the hospital with Miranda and Carmen. A hand surgeon cut three fingers from Garcia’s right hand and amputated the left hand entirely, because everything below the wrist had died. There was a good chance, the surgeon assured Carmen, that Garcia could resume his work someday, with the help of sophisticated prosthetics and extensive rehabilitation. What the surgeon didn’t say was that there was also a chance Garcia might yet die from a runaway infection or internal bleeding.
Miranda’s fingertips, thank god, had begun to show signs of healing. She’d lost some tissue from the tips of her thumb and first two fingers, but Sorensen predicted she’d be left with little or no permanent scarring. She was getting off far more easily than she might have. Miranda had driven Carmen to the hospital, and once Garcia was back in his isolation room, still sedated, Miranda drove her home.
The light was fading and a cold, pitiless rain had begun to fall as I parked at the library in Oak Ridge. Thornton had left a message on voice mail while I was out of signal range inside the hospital. They’d identified a suspect in the radiography-camera theft—a Japanese-American immigrant named Arakawa—but he had died just as the agents were about to question him. He died, said the message, of radiation poisoning.
Opening my briefcase, I removed the large, padded envelope Miranda had handed me just before my drive to Oak Ridge and stared at it again. A yellow Post-it note on the outside, in Miranda’s handwriting, said, “Only grad student named Isabella who’s done a thesis on Oak Ridge.” The envelope itself was from UT’s Interlibrary Loan service; inside was a bound copy of a master’s-degree thesis, sent from the History Department at Tulane University. “The Role of National Myth in Legitimizing Mass Murder,” read the title. “From Oak Ridge to Nagasaki,” the subtitle added. The author of the thesis was listed as Isabella Arakawa, M.A.