“I see.” Piter continued down the huge opening. They walked briskly down another set of stairs to the underground entrance. Their shoes echoed hollowly against the bare cement walls. “We can go inside the Tevatron, now that the beam is shut down. We don’t have to worry much about residual radioactivity.”
Piter took a right-hand turn and stopped before another control room door. He used a badge-locked key with a magnetic strip and access code, making three attempts before he finally gained access. “Too many disconnections and supposed upgrades,” he said. “Nothing works the way it should anymore.” Ahead, the underground tunnel curved around, vanishing around a bend in the distance.
Glaring lights shone down on wide conduits mounted to the walls. Banks of superconducting magnets surrounded the beam channels, and substations, and fuse junction boxes; diagnostics stood out in regular intervals.
Technicians moved down the line, a pale young woman with dark hair and a twentysomething man with a goatee and the build of a weight lifter. The woman stopped at each junction box, checking readings as she munched from a bag of fat-free pretzels.
Craig stepped up and spoke quietly. “Dr. Piter, can you verify that you were at the lab early this morning, when you said you were called in?‘’
Piter looked up with an astonished look on his face. “Of course I can-but what on fool’s earth for?”
“Someone attempted to kill Dr. Dumenco in his hospital room this morning. The killer got away, but we have a witness.”
“Then why are you bothering me if you have an eyewitness?” Piter drew himself up to his full five feet six inch height. He purposely brushed lint from his suit and straightened his tie. “Surely they don’t think it’s me?”
“I just want to eliminate as many potential suspects as I can.” He paused. “That includes everyone, Dr. Piter.”
Piter drew his mouth tight and lifted his chin. “You may confirm my presence here with any one of those technicians. Or one of my grad students, Frank Chang- he’s showing your partner around as we speak. We’ve all been here putting in a lot of hours. I refuse to believe that you would seriously consider me, the Director of High-Energy Research, a possible suspect in any scheme to harm my esteemed colleague, Dr. Dumenco.”
“People have plenty of motives to do things out of the ordinary, Dr. Piter. How about the Nobel?‘’
Piter took a step backward and blinked. “That’s just an award, Agent Kreident. It certainly isn’t worth killing someone over! In fact, even coveting the prize is considered quite unprofessional.”
Craig just watched him, knowing that Piter coveted the Nobel a great deal.
He thought he would be going back and forth between the medical center and Fermilab quite a few more times before he had answers to this case.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Thursday, 1:03 p.m.
Fox RiverMedicalCenter,
Main Cafeteria
“Have lunch with me,” Craig said to Trish, gesturing toward the cafeteria. “It’s hospital food, but it’s the best I can do right now, considering Jackson is meeting me here at three. And I’m paying. I owe you anyway, because you won our bet.”
“Our bet?” she asked with an uncertain smile. She adjusted her delicate glasses, falling into step beside him.
“When you first called me on the phone, you swore that this case would be unlike any of the others I’ve worked on. You were right.” He held open the swinging cafeteria door for her. The food inside smelled as if it had gone through an automatic dishwasher, but his stomach rumbled anyway.
“So I get fine hospital dining,” she said, arching her eyebrows. “Good thing I’m not normally a gambling woman.”
In the cafeteria line they each took a tray and studied the unappealing selection of foods. Craig refused to take one of the bowls of jiggling, brilliantly colored Jell-O, choosing tapioca pudding instead. He ladled out a serving of mushy spaghetti and meatballs. Trish looked at him sidelong, and Craig decided it might be better if he didn’t eat the meatballs after all. Trish chose a dubiously fresh salad, a helping of fruit cocktail, and a carton of skim milk.
They settled down at a table at the far end of the cafeteria. Craig scanned the mix of doctors, nurses, volunteers, and families visiting patients. The noise droned around them, giving them complete anonymity. He still had the nagging suspicion that she knew or suspected something about that morning’s attack, and he decided to follow his intuition.
“I’ve been thinking about you a lot recently,” Trish said, self-consciously removing her glasses.
Craig swallowed hard. That was a bold move for opening their first real one-on-one conversation in some time. “Then how come you never called me until a murder case forced you to?”
“Me?” Trish blinked. “How come you never called?”
Craig looked away, studying the gelatinous red and white swirls of the alleged spaghetti. He searched for the right words, but Trish had his thoughts in too much of a turmoil. Things had changed. They were two different people from the years they were together at Stanford.
Finally, she answered her own comment. “You’re right. We promised not to get into that finger-pointing thing, but I had hoped you would send me a letter… or something. I really did want to be friends.”
“Well, my caseload has been very full,” Craig said with forced enthusiasm. “You know me, devoted to the FBI.”
Trish took a bite of her salad. “And I’ve been intently involved with my own research. Johns Hopkins isn’t any more relaxing than your Bureau.”
“I don’t suppose it is,” Craig said.
“Because of my specialty I’m in intermittent demand, whenever a radiation accident happens. But my work with the PR-Cubed keeps me on the go constantly. We’re still doing follow-up and tracking of all the studies we did in the aftermath of Chernobyl. Remember when I went over there as a pre-med?”
“How could I forget?” Craig said. For months she had been wrapped up in her own thoughts, or bombarding him with stories of what she had experienced there. She had merely been a junior member of the team, a relief worker interviewing residents who had lived in the densest fallout plume from the nuclear reactor disaster. It had been her job to keep massive statistics, chronicling the overwhelming tide of medical problems from the Chernobyl survivors.
“The Ukraine is a beautiful country, like our Midwest. It’s the breadbasket of what used to be the Soviet Union… but that power plant accident was the greatest man-made disaster in history. The fallout spread from the Ukraine into Belarus, even around the world in the jet stream.” She shook her head, blinking her dark eyes as if to wipe away haunting memories.
Then she leaned forward, fixing him with her gaze. Craig felt a sense of dread as he wondered what she was about to confess.
“I met Georg Dumenco there, in the Ukraine, all those years before. He and his family. He desperately wanted to leave the country, to get his family safe, but there was nothing we could do. Once he emigrated here, I kept tabs on him through the PR-Cubed.” As she took her dark gaze from him, he felt as if a targeting cross had just slipped away. “So did other people, I think.”
Craig took a deep breath, trying to assess the information. “What do you mean by that? What happened to Dumenco’s family, the ones in the snapshots I found?”
Trish shook her head. “Nobody knows. They disappeared during the upheaval, the breakup of the Soviet Union. For years now, somebody… somebody at the PR-Cubed…” She trailed off.
Reflexively she drank her milk and ate more salad while Craig waited in silence. “I’m… having a hard time with this. It’s bringing back too many memories. Dumenco is dying from a radiation exposure, just like those people at Chernobyl. Maybe his family died back in the Ukraine before he came to this country. There’s nothing I can do for him, or for them.”