“What is it?”
“Shit!” he whispered. “Shit, I’m an idiot!”
“Ben, you’re white. What is it?”
Abruptly, he hung a steep right turn, almost mowing down an Asian girl and a chubby guy. Ro screamed, but he didn’t slow down until he found an empty parking spot. He yanked the wheel and pulled over to the curb, cutting off another driver who gave them a decidedly angry series of honks. Ro was trying to catch her breath as Ben muttered obscenities, most of them directed to himself. She gasped, “What is wrong with you?”
He ignored the question, and reached over and pulled out his duffel from the back. Immediately, he took out his laptop. “What’s wrong? I’m a moron, that’s what’s wrong!” He pressed a key on his computer in rapid succession. “C’mon and connect, you stupid machine! There has to be some Wi-Fi somewhere in the stupid area!” Again, he pushed the key several times in a row.
“You’re going to freeze your computer.”
He slammed his laptop shut. “Give me your phone.”
“How about a please?” When he didn’t answer, Ro gave it to him. Her heart was still beating like a machine gun. “You know you almost killed those two pedestrians, Ben.”
He still didn’t respond because he didn’t hear anything. Too busy trying to extract something from the Internet. “How could I have missed it? I’m such a cretin.” He showed her a map on the phone. “Just listen, okay.” Silence. “Look at this. If you start out in Berkeley and take the 24 through Walnut Creek, you can reach Mount Diablo State Park. Then all you have to do is . . . hold on . . . go back on the 24 South until you hit the 680 South. Then you hit the 580 and you’re there.”
“Where?”
“Livermore, California.” He hit his forehead. “He was headed for Lawrence Livermore, Ro. The guy started out at Berkeley, abducted Julia, raped and killed her, buried her in Mount Diablo, and then went on his way to Lawrence Livermore, which was probably his ultimate destination.”
No one spoke.
Ben said, “Dorothy, Lawrence Livermore is not only a sister lab to Berkeley and all the UC campuses, as Lilly so aptly pointed out to me yesterday, it’s right next to a satellite lab of Sandia National Laboratories, where Katie Doogan was abducted, and most important, it’s a sister to Los Alamos, which is about ten miles from River Remez.” His eyes grew wide. “Don’t you see it? The murderer is traveling between the national government laboratories!”
She was stunned into silence.
“I’m such an idiot!” Ben reiterated.
“What about Jamey Moore in Tennessee?”
“Oak Ridge National Lab,” he said without hesitation. He started playing with the phone again. “Look here, Ro. The killer lands in Knoxville, which is the natural place to land if you’re going to Oak Ridge. But instead of going west to Oak Ridge, he abducts and kills Jamey Moore, goes south through Louisville, then east to the tip of the Smokies in Cosby, Tennessee. He buries her there, and then he turns back and heads for Oak Ridge. Or he kills her on the way back to Knoxville from Oak Ridge.” He plopped back in the driver’s seat and hit his head. “It’s so obvious.”
“Okay . . .” Ro was trying to process what he had just told her. “How many other labs are there in the country?”
“God, let me think! There’s Fermi in Chicago, Brookhaven in New York, Plasma Lab in Princeton, Lawrence Berkeley on the UC campus, Sandia in New Mexico, which, like I just said, also has a lab in Livermore, California.” He paused. “The thing is, there are three national nuclear facilities in the country: Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, and Los Alamos.”
“Like they make bombs?”
“They make plutonium pits. Which are the essential component to a nuclear bomb.”
“All right,” she said. “So exactly what are you thinking?”
“What am I thinking?” Ben stared at her. “We’re working with a very prominent scientist if the government is bothering to send him around from lab to lab.”
“That’s good, Ben. You’ve narrowed down the killer—”
“No, it’s not good! It’s not good at all! We’re looking at someone with top, top, top security clearance. And because of who he is, he probably keeps a very low profile. He’s more like a fly on the wall than a rock star.”
“What about scientific conventions at the time of the murders? Maybe we can look those up on the Internet and find out if there was some kind of program which mentions people or—”
“Ro, when scientists get together, it’s not like some insurance company playing party games or listening to a motivational speaker. You don’t talk about bunker busters, bombs, or computer viruses for hostile nations’ nuclear facilities at a convention at a Marriott.”
“Okay, okay. I get it.” She took his hand. “We’ll think of something.”
Vicks was growing more morose by the second. “The labs we’re talking about, they’re impenetrable. We will never find out who he is even if we know what he does!”
“Maybe not. Let’s just think logically, Vicks. What’s our next step?”
Ben’s face was flushed and his eyes were wild. “There is no next step, Dorothy.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m fucked, that’s what it means!”
Chapter 6
In the winter, Highway 502 cut through snow-covered hillsides, making the road a treacherous mixture of water, ice, and gravel. Before he was even allowed to travel toward Los Alamos National Laboratory, abbreviated to LANL, Ben had been stopped by security, asking him his business on the road. He had been smart enough to bring his snowboard, playing the dumb kid who wanted to do some pop-tarts and ollies in the backcountry around the Caldera, a collapsed cone of a dormant volcano. The vast acreage of grasslands was rented out for cattle grazing in temperate weather. In the frigid air of winter, the unique geography was often below zero at ten thousand feet elevation. His snowboarding story made sense and the fact that he held a New Mexico driver’s license helped give credence to his lies. If the guards were suspicious, they didn’t let on. They passed him through, and now he was fighting through the elements.
He had taken several tours of Los Alamos when he was younger. Obviously, the standard spiel doesn’t say or show much, but he thought it might be a good idea to do it again. As he traveled, Ben took note of those blue signs with white lettering that marked bland one-story white stucco buildings—the various tech areas, each division gated and guarded and behind steel fences. He had been through the roads many times before, but this time everything seemed more menacing. He slowed down to take forbidden pictures, stupid because he didn’t even know what he was looking for. At this point, he was just trying to master the lay of the land.
This was your destination—before you left a trail of destruction and misery!