Bones of Betrayal

Thornton nodded. “Remember, Jacob Arakawa lost his mother and his wife and maybe his prostate to the bomb,” he said. “So it’s possible he raised his daughter on hatred. But that’s just speculation. What we do know is this. Four weeks ago, he retired from Pipeline Services, Inc., on the eve of the company’s financial collapse. Three weeks ago, according to credit-card transactions at gas stations, he drove from New Iberia to Oak Ridge. The very next day, he turned around and drove home again.”

 

 

“So he made the trip just to bring the radiography camera he’d stolen,” said Emert.

 

“Looks that way,” said Thornton. “Shortly after he got back to Louisiana, he showed up at a hospital ER in New Orleans. Two days ago, just as we were closing in on him, he died of acute radiation sickness.”

 

“From removing and handling the iridium source,” I said.

 

“Exactly,” said Thornton. “We’ll probably never know which one of them put it into the vitamin capsule Novak swallowed, or how they got the capsule into Novak’s pill bottle. From the burn you saw on Isabella’s hand, she must have handled it at some point—probably longer than Miranda did, but not as long as Dr. Garcia.” Miranda shot me a look of pain, and I knew she was grieving for Garcia’s hands.

 

“So,” I said to Emert, “where’s Isabella now?”

 

“Don’t know,” he said. “It’s like she’s evaporated. She never showed up at her house, never came back for her car. Every officer in Oak Ridge has her picture committed to memory. If she surfaces here, we’ll nab her. But I think she’s gone. She knew we were onto her, Doc. She was about to skip out when you showed up at the library.”

 

I turned to Thornton. “What about you guys? What are y’all doing?”

 

“We’ve frozen her bank account,” he said, “we’ve tagged her credit cards, and her picture’s at every international airport and border crossing in the country. We’re also talking to everybody she worked with here and down at Tulane during graduate school. So far, we’ve got nothing. An elusive woman and her dead father. If she could find a way to get there,” he went on, “she might try for Japan. Her whole sense of identity seems to revolve around Nagasaki. Turns out she’s been there five times in the past ten years. But I don’t see how she’d get out of the country now.”

 

The memory of her hands, and how she’d cried out when I’d pried her fingers from the gun, stabbed at me.

 

Miranda shifted in her chair. “I hate to be the one to bring this up,” she said, “but is there a chance she’s still underground? Still somewhere in the sewer system?”

 

“Come on,” said Emert. “It’s been a week. Surely you don’t think she’s been hiding out down there in the dark for a week?”

 

“No,” she said quietly. “That’s not exactly what I was thinking.” She glanced in my direction, saw the pain in my eyes, and looked away.

 

“Ah,” said Emert awkwardly. “Well, we haven’t been able to search all the tunnels yet. Some of the pipes are fairly small, and the folks who work on the sewers all seem to be fairly stocky guys.” He seemed to have something more to say, but he stopped. Nobody else seemed to want to say it, either.