“Hi, Doc, it’s Jim Emert at ORPD.”
Emert was the Oak Ridge detective who’d investigated the Novak murder. I hadn’t spoken with Emert in weeks, not since shortly after Isabella had disappeared into the rushing maze of storm sewers beneath the city. That last conversation, two days after she vanished, had been brief. The detective had brought in a cadaver dog to search the tunnels, and the dog, Emert told me, had come up empty-handed, or, more precisely, empty-nosed. I knew the dog’s track record at finding corpses, and it was impressive, so if he’d failed to detect death in the sewer, I felt pretty sure Isabella had escaped. What I felt unsure about was whether to be dismayed or relieved.
Part of me—the part that held fairly old-fashioned notions of right and wrong, of law and order—was frustrated and disappointed that the woman who had killed Leonard Novak and maimed Eddie Garcia appeared to be getting away. But another part of me—the part that felt compassion for the way her family’s lives had been shattered by the dropping of the atomic bomb during World War II—figured she’d already suffered for years and would continue to suffer as long as she lived. She’d expressed anguish at the injury she caused to Garcia’s hands, and she herself had sustained radiation burns to her own hands as well, though hers were less severe than Eddie’s. Finally, although I was reluctant to admit it even to myself, my judgment was clouded by the fact that Isabella and I had made love once.
“Hey, Jim, what’s up?” I hoped I sounded more casual than I felt. I had never told Emert—nor anyone else, for that matter—that I’d slept with Isabella. “Am I about to read headlines about a high-profile arrest in a bizarre Oak Ridge murder?”
“Not unless our friends at the FBI have made a breakthrough they haven’t told me about,” he said. “But there is something I think you should know. We’ve found something really interesting.”
“Tell me.”
“I’d rather show you,” he said. “It’s short notice, I know, but is there any chance you could head over this direction on the spur of the moment?”
“I’m on my way,” I answered, scrambling to my feet. “I’ll be in Oak Ridge in half an hour. Should I meet you at the police department?”
“No. Meet me at the Alexander Inn.” The words sent a chill through me. Thirty minutes later I turned in to the driveway of the boarded-up, run-down Alexander Inn, feeling as if I’d come eerily full circle. The inn was where the Novak case had begun, when I’d cut the elderly physicist’s body from the scummy ice of a long-neglected swimming pool. Now, two months later, the pool was drained, its cracking walls and floor coated with slime in shades of black and green and brown. The building itself seemed to have aged by decades during the past two months. Sixty-five years earlier, the stately hotel, with its broad veranda and homey rocking chairs, had played host to the leading scientists of the Manhattan Project. Physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the Bomb, had stayed at the Alexander during his wartime visits to Oak Ridge; so had Enrico Fermi, whose primitive atomic reactor under the stadium at the University of Chicago had produced the world’s first controlled chain reaction. Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron—harnessed to separate uranium fuel for the Hiroshima bomb—had likewise stayed at the Alexander.
Now, six and a half decades after Hiroshima, the historic hotel was crumbling virtually before my eyes. Glancing up at the white-columned fa?ade, I noticed that several letters of the hotel’s name had dropped off the building since I’d last seen it. ALEXANDER INN had now been reduced to ALE AND I. It was still possible to read the sign, because the blasted and blistered paint on the fa?ade was less blasted and less blistered where it had been protected, until recently, by the missing letters. But the entire structure was one burning match away from irreversible destruction.