“What is it, Ms. Binder?” I asked. “Lotty said the people looked familiar, but she couldn’t remember their names.”
“Of course she couldn’t: she was a Herschel. The rest of the world was beneath her notice. Just go! You’ve hurt me enough for one day.” She thrust the photo inside her sweater, her face squeezed into a tight knot of misery.
I put one of my cards next to the rockets. “If you change your mind about your daughter, or if you want me to help you find your grandson, let me know.”
5
COMPUTER GAMES
I BRUSHED PAST KITTY and left Martin’s room, but before I reached the basement stairs, she called to me. “Ms. Detective! Don’t run off.”
I went back to Martin’s den. After a certain amount of backing and forthing, she decided she wanted to hire me to find her grandson. I told her I’d get her a standard contract, but that my rates were a hundred dollars an hour. She backed and forthed some more, but in the end, her worries about her grandson trumped her worries about money and contracts. She told me she’d pay for two full days’ work and then we’d see how I’d done. I also managed to dig out the name of the company where Martin had been working: Metargon, some ten miles north of the house.
When I got back outside, my body felt as though someone had tied me to a wall and thrown rocks at me. I wanted to go to bed for a year or two until my muscles stopped aching, but after slumping in my car for a time, I pulled away from the curb. As I left Kedvale Street, I saw the blinds twitch in Kitty’s front window.
Since I was already north, I decided to go to Metargon first, to see what they knew about their missing computer tech. Before I turned onto the expressway, I looked up the company on my iPad. I’d heard of them, of course, because their game box, the Metar-Genie, was an industry leader, and their search engine, Metar-Quest, was coming up the ranks as a rival to Google. I hadn’t known, though, that Metargon was big in energy technologies. They were defense contractors, they had plants in seventeen countries around the world. Martin had worked in their computer research lab, just the place for a young man with a passion for rockets and computers.
I had an easy drive at this time of day, but once I got to Waukegan Road, it was difficult to spot the building. Every big-box retailer on the planet has an outlet along Waukegan. Sprinkled among them are giant fast-food outlets. Their signs flash and dazzle in a muscular competition for notice, but Metargon didn’t draw attention to itself. I finally parked outside a Kentucky Fried and made my way down the street on foot, looking for street numbers.
Metargon had wrapped itself in a forest of evergreens. I found the sign and the address on a small plaque attached to a set of high rolling gates. On the left, at driver’s-window height, was a phone. I picked it up and told the scratchy voice at the other end that I was hoping to speak to someone about one of their computer techs. The voice asked me to spell Martin’s name, then put me on hold.
While I waited, the gates rolled open and a few cars came out; a UPS truck pulled up behind me and got buzzed through. I was tempted to walk in behind it, but I continued to hold and in another minute my virtue was rewarded: the voice was replaced by someone who announced himself in an incomprehensible squawk, but added he’d meet me in the lobby in twenty.
The gates rolled open and I walked into an industrial park totally at odds with the clamor on the street outside. The lab looked like the latest thing in functional modernity, steel and glass, solar panels on the roof, white screens at the windows to minimize the heat. Beyond the drive, a pond surrounded by marsh grasses created a completely different mood, contemplation, peace. As I crossed the parking lot toward the main entrance, I saw a man emerge from a copse on the pond’s far side. He stopped to stare at the water.
Since I had twenty minutes to fill I went over to stare at the water myself. I could see carp lazing about under the surface. Ducks were hunting for food in the reeds, and the ubiquitous geese, the rats of the urban parkscape, were waddling along the bank. If you had to come up with an idea for a new kind of energy or rocket, the water and the birds might bring you to that calm interior space where creativity lives. Staring, thinking about nothing—my neck muscles began to relax from Kitty’s battering.