Pyramid Lake (13 page)

T
wenty-odd people stood in scattered clumps near the fence. Segregated by uniform, they spoke quietly among themselves, like groups of kids on the playground after an ugly fight sent someone to the hospital.

Four tribal police stood outside the chain-link barrier, creating a cordon around the geyser. Red and blue flashers flickered from two tribal police cars parked nearby. Three sheriff’s deputies were outside the fence, too, talking to the tribal cops. I spotted my new buddy from the shooting range, Evan Peterson.

The group of men in dark suits on the base side of the fence were probably the Feds, and the nearby men and women in blue suits were NCIS. The MPs had cordoned off the area around the fence hole and stood at parade rest with impassive faces.

Everyone seemed to be waiting—just standing around, costing the taxpayer a of couple thousand dollars an hour. And doing nothing while the upside-down dead guy’s legs waved lazily in the geyser’s spray like a dancing windsock man in front of some car dealership.

It pissed me off. Even McNulty deserved more respect than this.

Triangulating the impatient glances from the different groups, I followed their collective gaze toward a cluster of men gathered at the corner of the parking lot. I headed in that direction.

Cassie followed without a word. A tall, fit native guy in his fifties, wearing a tan blazer, jeans, and cowboy boots, stepped away from the others to meet her.

She pulled ahead of me to embrace him. The tribal chairman, I figured.

He returned her hug with what looked like genuine affection, deep lines crinkling around his eyes and in his cheeks. “I’m so sorry you had to come home to this, Cassandra,” he said.

“Just tell me how we can help.” She turned toward me. “Uncle Jim, this is Trevor Lennox, my project co-lead at DARPA.”

“James Barry,” he said. His eyes narrowed slightly as he shook my hand in a powerful grip. He looked like a no-bullshit kind of guy, and I wondered how much Cassie had told him about me. Judging by his expression, he had already heard about my little misunderstanding with Tank-Top Ray.

“Aren’t you supposed to have some kind of authority?” I asked him. “They’re all standing around looking at you while a dude slow-cooks in there.”

“We’re waiting for an interagency MOU,” he said. “A memorandum of understanding, to establish—”

“I know what a MOU is, Jim. But who is actually
in charge
here?”

“That would be me, Dr. Lennox.” Another man detached himself from the group and wandered over to join us. “Ronald Bennett.”

“Trevor,” I said.

Bennett nodded to Cassie also. “Dr. Winnemucca.” He wore a tan blazer and slacks, and a surprisingly ugly shirt—rust orange and slightly glossy. Maybe a wife’s sad attempt to dress him hip. To his credit, at least he wasn’t wearing a tie. He held out two business cards to us.

I took one, glanced at it, and had to resist the urge to crumple it and toss it aside in annoyance—the bozo brigade was here.

“Department of Homeland Security?” I said. “Give me a fucking break. Who invited
you
clowns to this party?”

Bennett was definitely ex-military. He had the look, from his parade-rest stance to his iron gray razor haircut. He had probably put in his twenty years, then started a second career as a bureaucrat, on top of his military retirement package.

I watched his jaw harden.

“Dr. Lennox, surely you of all people understand the sensitive nature of DARPA’s mission here at Pyramid Lake.”

“Yeah, I know why
we’re
here,” I said. “What I don’t understand is why
you’re
here.”

He gestured toward the fence and started walking. “Follow me.”

“Seriously?” I asked James Barry. “Homeland Security is taking point?”

The tribal chairman shared a resigned smile with Cassie. “Our people lost the battle for homeland security a hundred and fifty-three years ago, so we’re the wrong ones to ask. But it does look like the county coroner has arrived as well.” He started after Bennett, and the rest of the group followed.

Bennett pushed through the cordon of MPs and led us through the hole in the fence. “Dr. Lennox—”

“Trevor,” I said.

“You reported the victim to base authorities,” he said. “I’m curious about the timing. How did you happen to be here at”—he checked his watch—”six a.m. more or less?”

“I had a lot of work.”

“What were you working on?”

“That’s classified,” I said.

“I hold a current TS clearance.”

“The ‘C’ in a TS/SCI means ‘compartmented,’ in case you weren’t aware,” I said. “Surely you of all people understand the sensitive nature of what we do here.”

“Can you describe the nature of your DARPA work to me in general terms, then?” he asked.

“Defense. Advanced. Research. Projects.”

We joined the wide circle surrounding the geyser. Warm sprinkles drizzled over us as the wind shifted. The plume of water made the dead man’s projecting legs dance at the top of the rocky tufa cone. They flopped in grotesque kicks as if he were still alive and trying to swim deeper into the geyser.

The coroner and his assistant spread a plastic tarp on the ground nearby. They were getting ready to pull him out.

Roger threw me a desultory salute from fifty feet around the circle, where he stood with a bunch of Navy personnel. Closer by, Kate’s eyes met mine and widened. She turned to whisper something to one of her team members, pointing me out.

Blake was seated listlessly on the ground thirty feet away, his back to the geyser and a cigarette in his hand. An MP crouched alongside, speaking to him. I couldn’t hear their conversation, because Bennett was yapping in my ear again.

“I respect your commitment to security, Dr. Lennox, but I’m going to need more cooperation from you,” he said. “I’m sure your program manager would agree with me.”

“Probably,” I said.

He looked around the circle. “Perhaps I should speak to him or her first, then.”

“Be my guest.” I watched the coroner and his assistant, wearing heavy forearm-length rubber gloves and averting their faces from the hot spray, each grab one of the corpse’s ankles. Together they dragged him out of the hole and onto the plastic.

I was right. It was McNulty.

I waved Bennett forward, toward the steaming corpse. “Let me know what he says.”

W
isps of steam rose from McNulty’s peeling, fish-white hands and bathtub-wrinkled fingers. He lay faceup on the tarp, his forearms raised defensively above him, clawing at the sky—frozen in place by rigor mortis.

His purple-mottled face was bloated to twice its normal size, his nose indistinguishable, the press of swollen flesh folding his ear like a fat guy’s. One milky, bulging eye stared like a poached egg; the other had burst, leaving shreds of tissue dangling from the empty socket.

Cassie made a faint noise and turned away. I didn’t blame her. But I couldn’t help staring at the sight even as I felt my stomach tighten. A chorus of gasps and other muted reactions rose around us, followed by the hushed murmur of shocked conversation.

McNulty’s puffy, discolored cheek sagged, shifting with the pull of gravity. Then it sloughed away, splitting the skin and separating under its own weight, like overcooked stew meat, to reveal clenched teeth and a bare strip of jawbone beneath. The flesh inside the split was boiled lavender-white all the way through. He had been in the geyser for a long time.

Several of his teeth had broken off, too. The degree of agony that could make someone clench his jaw hard enough to do that wasn’t something I wanted to think about.

My own jaw tightened in helpless rage. McNulty was an asshole, true, but he had been my co-worker for the past four years. Now these Homeland Security bozos were going to fumble around with their MOUs and waste everyone’s time while whoever killed him got away with it.

Bennett cleared his throat. “The victim was your supervisor?”

“Shut up,” I said. “I need a minute.” I took a deep breath and looked at McNulty more closely. The knot in my stomach hardened as I stared at the boiled turkey that had been his head, realizing what kind of damage I was really looking at.

Across from me, Kate’s cheeks were blanched with shock. Her wide-eyed gaze was focused on the corpse, too.

“Why is his face all purple like that?” she called to the coroner, a white-haired guy.

He looked up from where he knelt beside the corpse. “That’s normal,” he said, sounding annoyed. “He was upside down, and after death, blood settles in the lowest part of the body. But let’s wait for the autopsy results.”

I glanced at Bennett beside me and spotted the momentary lift then tightening of eyebrows, followed by an even briefer crows-feet wrinkle at the corner of his eye before his face relaxed into neutrality again: surprise, anger, and then approval at the coroner’s carefully chosen words.

Neither of these guys was dumb. They were both seeing exactly the same thing I was seeing, although they didn’t want to advertise it—yet.

I thought of the bruises on my knuckles and resisted a powerful urge to stick my hands in my pockets and out of view.

McNulty had been boiled alive in the geyser.

But first, someone had beaten the living shit out of him.

“D
r. Lennox—”

“Trevor.”

“I need to speak with you
now
.” Bennett’s eyes held mine. “Privately.”

His earlier lack of reaction when I goaded him told me something: he was no low-level flunky. But where did the Homeland Security angle come in? They had no reason for even being here, let alone running the show. I pulled his business card out of my pocket and looked at it again:

Ronald Bennett

Deputy Director, Office of Infrastructure Protection (OIP)

National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD)

Department of Homeland Security

Typical public-sector alphabet soup. I would Google it later, but for now it told me nothing. I shoved it back in my pocket. “Do you have some kind of
real
ID, besides a business card anyone could print for himself?”

He pulled out a bifold wallet and flipped it open, revealing a badge behind a clear plastic window.

“Let me see that.” I reached for it, and he handed it over with a grimace of impatience. I wasn’t interested in his badge, though. Rifling through the card slots of his wallet, I pulled out a government credit card.

“GAO still lets you Homeland Security guys have these? I thought they pulled ’em after the auditors found y’all buying yourselves beer brewing kits, designer rain jackets, iPods, and boats. Remind me, was it your division that tried to write off private game-fishing charters as meal per-diems?”

Holding the credit card up to the light, I squinted at it. “Quarter-million-dollar limit on these, if I recall. Or maybe that was just for the rank-and-file. Is yours higher?”

But I didn’t really care about ancient Homeland Security waste and scandals; the next slots in his wallet held what I was really looking for. I fanned his airline frequent-flier cards out like a poker hand.

He took a half step forward. “Dr. Lennox…”

“They make you guys buy coach-fare tickets because it looks better in an audit—government’s funny that way. But maxing out a quarter-million-dollar credit card sure earns you lots of frequent-flier miles to upgrade to first class with.”

Cassie and James Barry were watching our conversation with interest. We were drawing quite a few gawkers, too, despite what lay steaming on the tarp fifteen feet from us, competing for their attention.

I fished out a wallet-size picture nestled in an inside compartment. It showed Bennett, his wife, and two twenty-something adult children—a boy and a girl.

“Let me guess: both kids still live at home?”

“Please put that back.”

“Your wife doesn’t look real happy.” I tilted my head and squinted at him. “You appear to be at least semicompetent, though. How’d a guy like you end up working for the Department of Hopeless Stupidity, anyway?”

“Are you about through yet?” I could see the anger now, coloring Bennett’s face. He was nowhere near as smooth as Linebaugh.

“Come with me.” I put everything back in his wallet and handed it to him, then tilted my head toward the lab building. “I want to show you something. And then we can talk. Privately.”

Bennett turned toward Cassie. “I’ll want to speak to you separately afterward, Dr. Winnemucca. Please stay right here until we get back.”

She nodded, looking queasy. Tribal Chairman James Barry put an arm around her shoulders and regarded me with a speculative gaze. He seemed unsure what to make of me, but then again, I got that a lot.

“Trevor,” he said. “Would you care to join us for dinner tonight? My wife’s cooking something traditional.”

Cassie glanced involuntarily down at McNulty, then looked away and swallowed. The queasiness on her face deepened into nausea.

I was about to say no thanks, that I had plans already, but Bennett spoke before I could.

“Until we’ve concluded the initial phase of the investigation, I have to ask that you two not fraternize—”

James Barry whistled sharply—a single harsh, birdlike note loud enough to cut Bennett off cold. I looked up in surprise.

“With all due respect,” he said, “I’ll not have someone come onto
my
people’s land and tell me whom I can or cannot invite to dinner at my own home.” He turned back to me. “Cassandra can text you the address. Come around seven-ish.”

“Thank you for the invitation,” I said. “That’s very gracious of you. See you then.”

As I led Bennett toward the hole in the fence he raised a hand to wave the FBI guys over. I shook my head.

“Nuh-uh. Those guys aren’t cleared for this.”

He waved them back with a frustrated gesture and glared ahead. “You better not be wasting my time.”

S
tanding at the entry keypad on my lab door, I said, “I think you already know what I’m going to show you.”