The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels)

The

Vesuvius

Isotope

P.O. Box 178963

San Diego, CA 92177

www.murderlab.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, and, especially, any references to the pharmaceutical industry are strictly products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons or companies, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Kristen Elise, Ph.D.

Cover art and formatting by Damonza.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address above.

ISBN: 978-0-9893819-0-1 (print book)

ISBN: 978-0-9893819-1-8 (ebook)

Ordering Information: Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address above.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Acknowledgements

I thank two brilliant ladies who dedicated countless hours to making this work possible: My editor, Cyndie Duncan, for her encyclopedic knowledge of em dashes and ellipses, and for stopping me from creating a world in which the dead have mood swings and pianos are portable; and my alpha, beta, epsilon, kappa, gamma, mu and zeta reader, Sara McBride, for reading every single chapter just
one more time
, and never being afraid to tell me when I have “pulled a total wanker.”

I thank my mom, Glenna Fraser, for not letting me watch
The Dukes of Hazzard
because they used bad grammar, for instead teaching me Scrabble and Teakettle, and for convincing me that I could do anything I wanted with this life (sorry to have taken that advice
so
literally…) And for putting the manuscript back on the right track when it wandered off into Never-Never Land.

I thank the pharmaceutical company that laid me off so that I could finally
finish
the manuscript.

I thank good friends and family who have encouraged this endeavor and convinced me it would be worth the effort—the Lissner/Swann/Boddie family, my brothers, Lindsay, Amy and Bryan, Jenn, Ashley, Gray, Laurie…

I thank Damonza’s Awesome Book Covers for the awesome book cover.

I thank my chicho, Senior Antonio; my beautiful stepdaughters, Nataly and Christina; and my little love, Harmoni, for their friendship and keeping it real; and my kids, Rambo, Haley, and Pilgrim, for always listening to Mommy reading aloud.

Most importantly, I thank my wonderfully loving and encouraging husband, Sonny, for working twice as hard as the rest of us put together, for date nights and family days, for sending me off to Egypt well-prepared, for being a marketing genius, and for thinking it was a great idea for me to publish a book instead of pursuing another “real” job. You are my Jeffrey Wilson, except that you don’t die in the first paragraph.

The

Vesuvius

Isotope

Kristen Elise, Ph.D.

San Diego, CA

Ashes were already falling, not as yet very thickly. I looked round: a dense black cloud was coming up behind us, spreading over the earth like a flood. “Let us leave the road while we can still see,” I said, “or we shall be knocked down and trampled underfoot in the dark by the crowd behind.” We had scarcely sat down to rest when darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room.

-Letters of Pliny the Younger (ca. 61–112 CE)

Prologue

Thousands perished in the ashes the day the darkness fell as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room. So, too, was buried a medical breakthrough that today, nearly two millennia later, could save thousands. Six weeks ago, it emerged.

The person who rediscovered the ancient isotope did not at first realize the magnitude of the find. Except for the curious property of restoring life, it is inert. It is harmless to humans—indeed, to all living things. It survives for only moments. Yet, despite its transient nature, it appears to bring death as well as life; a trail of cadavers has followed the isotope through the centuries.

Is it magic, as believed by the ancients? As a scientist in 2023, I have a more logical hypothesis. But when it comes to murder of the strictly mortal variety, I must admit, empirically I know for certain of only one. My husband, Jeff.

When I find it, or recreate it in a lab as the case may be, I will name the isotope Vesuvium. I think Jeff would appreciate that. Like the erupting volcano, in fact, like Jeff himself, it is as majestic as its lifespan is fleeting.

He was my world. I loved him more than anything. I hope he would forgive me for all that I have done.

Part I: The Ancient Remedy

You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.

-Letters of Pliny the Younger (ca. 61–112 CE)

Chapter One

There is a crash. I feel wetness, and pain. I see a thousand memories.

My husband was naked the first time we met. The image of him at that moment has not faded from my mind in our five short years together. Now, as I feel myself slipping beneath the surface, there is another image as well—of the last time I saw my husband. He was lying dead from two gunshot wounds. Again, he was naked.

The first time I saw Jeff, I was sprinting along Black’s Beach in La Jolla, California. The secluded strip of coastline is world-renowned as a runner’s paradise, with its intense four-mile loop of steep mountain switchbacks and deep sand. Black’s has long been my favorite place to jog, despite the fact that it is a clothing-optional beach.

That morning, as I rounded the corner into a nook beside a jutting shoreline cliff, I almost crashed into him before managing to change course. My first impression was beach bum, not nudist as I later liked to teasingly call him. At five o’clock in the morning, the beach appeared totally abandoned. I assume he thought he was alone and, therefore, felt comfortable stripping out of his wetsuit to dress after his morning surf session. Black’s was, after all, a nude beach.

He was no more than five feet away from me, so nothing escaped my attention. Seawater was running down his lean surfer’s body as he tossed a dripping wetsuit onto a boulder beside him and then reached for a towel lying next to a pile of clothing.

He glanced up. As he did, a lock of sandy hair fell over his forehead. His eyes met mine, and then he flashed a mischievous grin of straight white teeth.

“Whoops,
that’s
embarrassing!” The handsome nude man with the smoky blue eyes chuckled while belatedly bringing the towel up to shield himself.

“Morning,” I said casually, continuing past him with a smirk.

Less than a month later, it was my turn to be caught off guard. I was at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases delivering a lecture about biological terrorism. The conference was held in Paris that year, and attendance was at an all-time high. I was at the podium in the main lecture hall speaking to an audience of approximately five thousand. In the midst of my speech, I glanced up from the microphone, and one audience member sitting front row center of the auditorium caught my eye.

My voice faltered when I saw him. The handsome, well-dressed man with the smoky blue eyes looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. Then he flashed that mischievous grin, and our brief moment on Black’s Beach returned to me.

I completely lost my train of thought.

My presentation trailed off mid-sentence. A few people in the audience cleared their throats. I felt my face flush. I took a few well-rehearsed steps to recover my composure—three deep breaths, a sip of water from my glass on the podium, another deep breath.

“Whoops,
that’s
embarrassing!” I said into the microphone. I could feel myself smiling.

Later, as I sat sipping coffee and reviewing my notes between sessions, he approached me. This time, with the advantage of seeing him coming toward me, I was prepared.

“Dr. Stone,” he said with a professional nod.

“Naked surfer,” I said and nodded back.

A pair of women at an adjacent table glanced toward us. He acknowledged them with a smile before returning his attention to me.

“I’m surprised you recognized me,” he said.

“I
was
looking at your face, for the most part.”

It was then that I noticed his conference-issued name badge. Jeffrey Wilson had been granted the Nobel Prize in Chemistry a few years prior for the creation of a new chemical element, one of the very few so-called superheavy elements in existence at the time. He had received the Nobel both for creating the new element and for the ground-breaking method by which it was created.

I remembered the media circus that surrounded his winning the Nobel. The majority of press attention was concentrated at The Scripps Research Institute where Jeff was a principal investigator. That facility is less than a mile from Black’s Beach.

Jeff must have known immediately that he would die.

The shot to his back passed all the way through his body. The bullet had to have come from within our bedroom.

He was still standing. The waist-high wrought iron railing enclosing our bedroom terrace stopped him from falling forward. As he stood naked, leaning against the railing, with a bullet hole through his middle, a steady red river gushed from the exit wound. The blood gathered along the edge of the railing and then trickled down, tracing the intricate ironwork like lava flowing through a vertical maze. A small crimson pool formed on the edge of the terrace’s natural stone floor, but the majority spilled over. Down it poured, past the second and first floor windows of our house and onto the forward deck of my yacht.

Jeff’s right hand went first to the exit wound in his bare stomach and then to the terrace railing, where it left a bloody handprint. It must have been at that moment that he turned to look at the shooter behind him.

The second bullet hit him in the upper chest, sending my husband—the most handsome, brilliant, kind, charming, Nobel laureate chemist in the history of the prize—plunging backward over the terrace railing to his death.

The yacht was a gift from Jeff for our first wedding anniversary, but I always teased him that
Teresa
was as much his gift as mine. While the small yacht was easily maneuvered by one person, Jeff and I almost always took her out together.

I was standing on our bedroom terrace enjoying the panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean when I first saw her. I was wearing a backless evening gown of shimmering royal blue, a color Jeff loved on me for the way it accentuated my blue eyes and long auburn waves. The dress was floor length and fitted to my slender, petite frame. A single alluring slit in the gown exposed my left leg to the thigh.

Jeff stepped out of our bedroom and joined me on the terrace. His standard attire of jeans, T-shirt, and tennis shoes had been transformed, and Jeff was dashing in a black jacket and tie. The thick sandy brown hair that almost always fell over his forehead was now smoothly slicked back. In each of Jeff’s hands was a glass of champagne. He handed one to me and appreciatively ran his eyes over my dress before pulling me close for a kiss.

“Happy anniversary,” he said. “You look gorgeous.”

I set my champagne down on the terrace railing to embrace my husband with both arms. “Where are we going for dinner?” I whispered between kisses.

Instead of answering, Jeff stepped away from me and leaned casually against the railing. He glanced down at the water below, and his face lit up with the same mischievous grin I had first seen three years earlier on Black’s Beach.

“You know what has always bugged me?” he said.

“What’s that, love?”

“That we had a boat dock but no boat.”

Instead of thinking to look down, I looked at Jeff. He dipped his eyes downward once more. This time mine followed, and I saw her for the first time.

The yacht was directly beneath us, moored unassumingly in the formerly empty space as if she had always been there. On
Teresa
’s forward deck was an elegantly set table for two. Standing next to the table was a man in a chef’s hat who announced, as if on cue, that dinner was served.

It was upon that very same spot on
Teresa
’s deck that Jeff’s body landed after falling from our bedroom terrace three years later.

The front door was unlocked, so I was certain my husband would be there. “Jeff,” I called as I entered the house, “I’m home.” I was not surprised there was no answer. If he was still in the shower, he would not have heard me. Or maybe he was out on our private terrace lost in his own thoughts. Or perhaps he had simply ignored me.

I dropped my purse and my laptop on the living room sofa and began climbing the stairs.

It had been a chilly three days between us. We had barely spoken since the biggest fight of our marriage, and I now wondered if our relationship could ever return to the way it had been. A part of me wanted so badly to just forget the events of three days prior and to surprise him on the terrace in the nude, as I had done so many times before.