Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (11 page)

Difalco scrounged for some bluster. “I did wait! Almost fifteen minutes! But I had things to do—a subject was due to meet me in the lab.”

Without a word, Green turned up his radio and paged the Ident Unit at the police station. Lou Paquette was just logging the last of his analyses and was looking forward to a warm meal and bed. He suppressed a groan when he heard Green’s request, but he agreed to be there within fifteen minutes.

“Fingerprints!” Difalco sputtered, but Green held up a brusque hand and rang dispatch. This time he ordered a squad car to take Difalco down to the station and hold him for questioning. When he hung up, Difalco was staring at him, ashen again.

“What are you doing?”

“Bringing you down for questioning on break and enter, attempted robbery.”

“But I told you—”

“You told me you were removing Jonathan Blair’s files from his office!” Green retorted. “That’s attempted robbery. The
fingerprinting will tell us what else you touched in here. Now let’s move!”

Difalco’s eyes darted from the gun to the open door, but in the end he seemed to deflate. A sullen look stole over his face as he slumped towards the door. Green herded him briskly; he was anxious to have Difalco out of the building before Halton arrived. He wanted Halton ignorant of Difalco’s misdeeds until he himself chose the crucial moment to deliver the news.

Besides, an hour or two sitting alone in an interrogation room might do Difalco some good. Green smiled as he watched the squad car pull away, the handcuffed Difalco scowling in the back seat. Now we’re getting somewhere.

The squad car had barely turned the corner, and the smile was still on Green’s face when a second squad car pulled up to the curb. A huge, bearded man hauled himself from the back seat, visibly perturbed.

“I hardly think this was necessary, Detective. Having this man pull up in full view of the neighbours! You’ve embarrassed my wife, you’ve embarrassed me! I’m not a criminal, I pay plenty of taxes and I think a little consideration is in order.”

The devaluation of his rank may not have been intentional, but Green suspected it was. He pretended to be oblivious. “This is common procedure, Professor. No disrespect intended. I need you to help me examine the contents of Jonathan Blair’s office, and I was anxious to expedite matters as much as I could. Homicide trails grow stale very quickly.”

Ice blue eyes appraised him from behind shaggy white brows, then Halton bobbed his massive head. “Very well, let’s get on with it. I want to visit Marianne Blair tonight.”

It was very smoothly done, the delivery beyond reproach, but this time the message was unequivocal: “I move in the same circles as the country’s elite, sonny, you remember that.”
I’ll be the picture of respect, asshole, Green replied inwardly and put on his breeziest smile. “I shouldn’t keep you more than an hour, sir. Shall we start in your office?”

Inside his office, Halton chose to sit behind his mammoth mahogany desk, flanked by his degrees, which left Green the hard-backed student’s chair opposite. Looking up at the icy eyes across the desk, Green realized he had made a tactical error. To regain control of the interview, he had to alter the power balance. Rising, he walked to the window to study the view of the canal and the Château Laurier which glistened in the rain-slicked evening light. Halton was forced to swivel his chair and look up at him.

From his vantage point, Green tried for the grave and humble look. “To minimize the inconvenience to you, sir, I won’t go over the routine ground which my detectives covered earlier. Instead, I’d like to clarify some inconsistencies which have emerged in the investigation. First of all, what was Jonathan Blair working on?”

“It’s highly technical, Detective. And hardly relevant, I can assure you.”

The grave and humble tone never wavered. “I’m sure you’re right, but I’m trying to fill in his last few weeks. He seemed to be working very hard, and a few people thought he had run into a snag in his research.”

“Snags are commonplace in technical research. In fact, ironing out the kinks in the methodology is often the major part of original research. Jonathan was a hard worker, and when it came to problems he was like a dog with a bone. He would forget all else.”

“Did he seem upset or preoccupied to you?”

“I hadn’t seen him in a few days, and I don’t babysit my graduate students.”

“He tried to make an appointment with you yesterday morning. He seemed upset then.”

Halton shrugged. “Then you know more than me, Detective. I wish I could be of more help.”

Green pretended to study his notes while he let the silence lengthen. “Was he working with cats or humans?”

“Cats.”

“What were Joe Difalco and Dave Miller working with? Animals or humans?”

Halton seemed to pause, and a frown flickered across his face. “Humans.”

“Did their research have anything to do with Blair’s?”

“Well, it all fit together. We were all checking out facets of language or auditory processing.”

“Would Blair have reason to share his data with the other two? Would his data on cats be of any use to—say, Difalco?”

Halton scrutinized Green with a long, level gaze. “What are you getting at, detective?”

Green left the window to return to his student’s chair. The power shift had been achieved, and now it was time to enlist the professor’s help. He spoke softly.

“Professor, I don’t mean to imply one of your students killed Jonathan Blair, but I believe something unusual was going on. I know police investigations are very intrusive, and it’s uncomfortable to have your whole operation under a microscope. But everything I learn will go no further than my own notebook, not into the file or into my reports to superiors, unless it is relevant to the murder. And I will never be able to distinguish what is relevant from what isn’t if I don’t have the whole picture. So please bear with me on this.”

Halton had been watching him carefully, but now he lowered his gaze. “What have you been told so far?”

“That Difalco’s data disappeared. Difalco accused Miller of erasing it from the computer and Miller accused Difalco of falsifying his results. At one point, it came to blows.”

Halton nodded, his gaze still lowered. “That is the official version. I’m going to hold you to your word, detective. Not one word of what I’m about to tell you must leak beyond these walls, or the cause of my brain research will be set back years.”

Green said nothing. From his desk, Halton picked up a polished wooden brain that resembled a shelled walnut, stained different hues. He cradled it in his large hands reverently. “Back in the 60’s, this was called the black box. After centuries of ludicrous theories trying to guess its inner workings, behavioural psychologists said ‘Don’t even try’. Concentrate on what goes in and what comes out. Stimulus and response. But that’s like buying a twelve-cylinder Lamborghini and never looking under the hood. From medical and biological research, we knew the basics of how functions are located in the brain.” He turned the brain and pointed as he talked. “Visual cortex in the back here, motor cortex, language in the left temporal lobe. We knew if the occipital lobe was damaged the person wouldn’t be able to see. Cut out his prefrontal lobe—like in a lobotomy—and you not only disconnect his emotions but he can’t plan or organize.”

Halton split the wooden sphere in two and held each out dramatically. “There are two to three billion brain cells in here in the cortex alone. At least some are firing all the time, reacting to all the sights and sounds in this room, to the feel of my own body and the smell of the stale air conditioning. Put electrodes all over the scalp to record this electrical activity and they generate brain wave tracings called an EEG. Put enough electrodes, make them sensitive enough, filter
the waves through the proper computer program and you can detect the activity of a very small group of neurons. If you say a word, a tiny EEG spike shows up in this little section of the temporal lobe. That tiny spike is called an event-related potential, and it’s how we can map the functions of any part of the brain we want. We can see what parts of the brain become engaged when we ask it to do a particular task.

“We used to think every function had its own special corner of the brain, but we know now that’s it’s much more collaborative than that. Yes, there are specialized centres for different things, but there are also more neural connections from one to another than can be imagined.” Halton wrote something on a notepad and held it up. “Read this.”

It was the word “cat”, and Green smiled in spite of himself. In his work, he’d seen more brains than he cared to, splattered on the floor beneath a corpse or laid bare by the pathologist’s saw. He found this abstract insight intriguing but sensed that the professor had lost his rare moment of humility and was settling back into his favourite role of Grand Poobah. To forestall this, even more than to hasten the interview, Green shook his head.

“Professor, I don’t—”

Halton held up his hand sharply. “Now you bear with me, Detective. If you’re going to be running roughshod through the intricacies of my students’ work, I want you to understand the complexity of this organ, and the daunting challenge we face. Besides, you’ll never understand what you’re investigating without a bit of background.”

Dutifully, Green said “cat” and Halton grinned. “Now, in your brain, the following probably just happened, all within two or three hundred milliseconds. The visual cortex
deciphered the shapes, said oh, letters, and pulled in the left temporal lobe to get the sounds to match the letters, then the millisecond you got the word ‘cat’, a big chain of neurons all over your brain went off—in your visual cortex to activate the picture of a cat, in the temporal lobe because cats meow, maybe in the parietal lobe because they feel furry. All those ideas are part of your image of a cat, and it takes the whole brain to remind you what a cat is. And if you’re afraid of cats, the amygdala, which is the emotional control centre deep down inside here, might kick in its two-cents worth too.” He set the brain down again in the corner of his desk and took a deep breath, as if he were finally nearing the crucial point.

“For the past twenty-five years, I’ve been chipping away at the black box using this EEG technology to study language processing, especially in people with language impairment. But every day, expensive new technology is developed, and if I want to stay on the cutting edge, I have to keep up, or give up. Without money, I can’t buy equipment, without equipment, I can’t attract top students and researchers, without them, I can’t build a credible program to attract grant money.”

“Ring around the rosy.”

Halton looked up with a grim smile. “Exactly. In Canada especially, it’s a constant struggle to stay competitive with the Americans. High-resolution EEG is a wonderful tool for tracking a chain of events that all occur in less than half a second, but EEGs are not good at pinpointing the exact location in the brain. We can calculate a rough idea from electrode placements on the scalp. But brain imaging techniques that measure blood flow inside the brain can give us three-D pictures of exactly where the activity is occurring. They’re slower, so they can’t measure changes in tenths of a second, like an EEG, but the latest ones can tell us exact
locations. So, put the EEG and the imager together, and you’ve got dynamite. And that’s exactly my next step.”

Halton leaned forward with his shaggy brows drawn, and Green could feel the drama. “At this very moment, I’m in the midst of negotiations to team up with some medical researchers from Yale and combine resources to buy the most state-of-theart, high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imager.”

“You mean an MRI? Like the ones in the hospital?”

“Yes, but one designed to study not just abnormalities in the brain but specific areas of the brain as we stimulate it in different ways. We could map the brain on a far more detailed and complex level than was ever possible before. There are only a few of these units around for research purposes, because they are prohibitively expensive. Over three million dollars each. I have spent years building up the necessary financial backing to make this deal, and I now have the reputation I need to get the backing. But one hint that my results might be fraudulent, and the reputation, the backing, and the deal will collapse in moments. And with it, all hope of making the breakthroughs in learning that I know are just around the corner. Breakthroughs that will help the learning disabled, the retarded, the brain damaged. You cannot let that happen, Detective. And I can assure you Jonathan Blair would not have wanted himself to be the cause.”

Finally, we’re back to the crux of the case, Green thought. “What do you want to tell me, Professor?”

“I have wrestled with this all day. Believe me, Detective, I do not want to obstruct a police investigation. I have searched my soul to decide whether it was relevant. I honestly don’t know. The implications horrify me, but I can’t ignore the possibility that they are true.” Professor Halton took a deep breath. His humility had returned; he looked pale, even small,
behind his desk. Green waited out the silence patiently until Halton resumed.

“David Miller is a rare find in the highly technical field of brain research today. He’s a first-rate mathematician and statistician, a master at computer programming and simulation, and he has solid knowledge of brain research. For his Ph.D. dissertation, he developed an algorithm for analyzing multiple event-related potentials that is nothing short of genius. But half the people in the field can’t understand his work. They think it’s obscure, hopelessly complex and theoretical. And Dave can’t sell himself. He comes across like a bumbling, absent-minded, half-mad scientist. You can’t be like that anymore. The days of the creative genius left alone in his lab to make discoveries are long gone. Dave had trouble finding a university willing to continue his research once he got his doctorate. When I read his thesis, I thought he was on to something, and I offered him a post-doc. I hoped eventually to persuade the university to give him a proper professorship once he’d established his name with me.”