The Camelot Gambit Read online

  "In the Pythagoras neighborhood, all the houses are basically knockoffs of Frank Lloyd Wright and I. M. Pei," he said.

  "Oh, you recognize the architectural stylings of I. M. Pei?" she asked.

  "Oh God, no," Donovan replied. "My new neighbor. . ."

  "Our new neighbor," she corrected, and he nodded.

  "LeDonRic James informed me of the design styles."

  "LeDonRic is the one with the Dalmatian named Lady Macbeth?" She seemed to be asking just to solidify it all in her mind. As though she was taking notes.

  "Got it in one," Donovan said, smiling as he led her into the open space concept design.

  "It's a really nice place." She looked at the high ceiling and up the modern-cut staircase. “Though I can’t tell if it’s a Pei or a Wright.”

  "Me neither. And the view sucks," he told her as they looked out the floor-to-ceiling glass windows onto the medium-sized backyard and wood fence blocking the houses behind it.

  "Well, there wasn’t much to expect," she said. "It's not like you can be on a hilltop and look at all the cornfields."

  He laughed. They'd driven through plenty on the way over. Luckily, she'd arrived in the middle of the afternoon, and he'd even been able to take her to the roadside stand that sold Lightning Tree Corn, something he'd learned was a bit of a local delicacy and a Curie favorite.

  Donovan set the corn onto the counter and helped Eleri carry her bags from the car. Their cover was that the house was Donovan's, that he had tested into Curie first, and that Eleri was an old friend living with him while she looked for a place of her own. They hadn't tried for anything more complex, like posing as a married couple—they couldn’t pull it off. Siblings didn’t work with their coloring. So Westerfield hadn’t aimed for anything more than friends in a house. Apparently, even their boss was concerned about their acting ability. Eleri had lamented her poor skills earlier, and Donovan was convinced his own were worse.

  "The problem with my cover story," he said, following her up the stairs with a duffle bag she'd brought as she dragged her small suitcase, bouncing up the carpeted staircase, "is that Westerfield saw fit to give me a job."

  She stopped two steps above him, spun around and looked down on him for once. "You have a nine-to-five?"

  "Not that bad. But I'm supposed to be a consultant at the hospital in Lincoln. And I’m on call at the local emergency clinic.”

  Eleri's eyes widened. "Did Westerfield just forget how long it's been since you've worked on a live patient?"

  "I don't even know," Donovan said. "Westerfield says it’s unlikely I’ll get called. I'm just going to try not to kill anyone."

  "Is that why the big textbooks are out on the table?"

  He nodded. He'd been reading up. Next to the books, his computer was open to fifteen different sites as he’d downloaded article after article on the state of current ER triage and treatments. He’d closed the screen, but not the tabs. He was in the town of smart people, and his brain already hurt. After he'd helped settle her in the second bedroom, he showed her the room across the hall.

  "I took the master bedroom because supposedly it's my house, and that seemed normal to me. So, you're in that room and I set up the smallest room remaining for the two of us to share as an office. We'll have to keep it closed up. If we have anyone over, no one can see what we've got in there."

  Eleri nodded, understanding, as the darkness began to fall around the house. The time of day was always obvious with the large glass windows. Whatever the daylight was affected the interior.

  She followed him back downstairs again as he explained, "There's pie on the counter, and I bought a handful of sandwich fixings and freezer meals."

  "I'll probably start cooking for us," she said. "If I don't have a job, and I just have the one case to investigate, it makes sense that I would fix meals. Plus, I'm guessing getting out to the local grocery stores will help me get acquainted with people.”

  Donovan thought it sounded like a good idea—one that was going to get him fed better. He also thought it sounded like a good idea that he wasn't going to be the one to do it.

  "We'll need to get your car," he said. "We've got a fake budget to ‘buy’ you one at a dealership outside of town." He'd used air quotes around the word buy, and Eleri understood they'd be meeting another agent who was handing over a thoroughly unmarked car.

  "Is that the fractal pie?" Eleri asked as she peered at what was left from what he’d cut into the night before. "Is it apple, or is it some variant?"

  "It's apple," he said. "When she brought it over, Maggie—LeDonRic’s girlfriend—informed me that she liked to bring apple, as it was statistically the most commonly liked of pies and the least likely for someone to have an allergy to."

  "Very statistically thoughtful," Eleri commented.

  "Wait until you get a load of the high school," he said. He'd been confident that he'd grown up in some very poor neighborhoods with underfunded schools, but this place confirmed it. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he realized Eleri may have gone to schools just as nice as the one here, though her family would have paid directly for her to go to them. She'd been raised in private school systems with twenty and even thirty-thousand dollar a year tuition, even at the elementary school level. So he shrugged, and she shrugged as well. They would check it out tomorrow.

  "Should we do a nice little drive around town?" she asked.

  "Yep." They needed to do it tomorrow, while it would still look acceptable for Donovan to be giving her tours.

  She opened the fridge and peered inside, but apparently rejected his sandwich makings, because she closed the door without grabbing anything. "Is there ice cream?"

  "You know there is."

  "Vanilla?"

  He only motioned her to open the freezer, and she immediately asked if he wanted a piece of pie as well. After a few moments of microwaving, they sat down at the table amidst all his textbooks, and he was grateful that while the back of the house was almost fully glass, the front was a little more conservative. It wouldn't help if the neighbors saw that he was reading medical manuals and not as competent at his job as perhaps he'd been sold to be.

  She turned her plate from side to side, having put the ice cream next to the pie so she could examine the pattern of the crust. "It's really quite impressive. Do you think she made her own fractal-based cookie cutters?"

  "Who knows? I think this particular fractal is a Dragon Curve." Donovan had yet to quite get a grasp on the people who lived in Curie. He wasn’t sure how to make himself and Eleri blend in the way they needed to. They would have to get to know all the major players to find a killer. Still, he was discovering that, while he didn’t fit in, the people who lived here seemed to fit together quite well. Whatever vision Marshall Bennett had for the town, he'd managed to put together a crew that appeared to be working.

  The town was small, even by Nebraska standards, but Donovan had been impressed. The small size had made the residents notice a newcomer in their midst, although apparently, newcomers were a regular occurrence. The town was growing exponentially, and the residents were simply trying to keep up.

  Donovan caught Eleri up between bites of what was truly a fantastic pie. Probably everything had been measured to a statistically perfect percentage. Perhaps she'd run a variety of taste tests. Having met Maggie, even only for a few minutes, and knowing she was friends with LeDonRic next door, Donovan was fairly certain that had to be the case.

  He pointed out the side window, to where he hadn’t yet closed the curtains for the night. “LeDonRic’s lights are still on. There’s always a light on. I don’t think he sleeps.”

  “That’s sometimes the case for highly intelligent people. They also tend to die younger, but it’s not proven whether that’s a lack of sleep issue or a lack of social support issue.”

  “Look at you, already trying to fit in!”

  She wadded up her paper napkin and tossed it at him, missing by a wide enough margin to make hi
m shake his head.

  "So apparently," he told Eleri, "Marshall Bennett hand-picks the applicants that get in. Therefore, a certain score or higher on an IQ test is a requirement, but. . ."

  Eleri seemed to catch on. "It's not entirely enough to get into town."

  "Exactly. So," Donovan told her, noticing she was yawning and she would run out of steam soon. "So even though everyone here is smart, and everyone passed that threshold, Marshall Bennett let us in to examine this case—but he also, at some point, let in a murderer."

  3

  Eleri stood over the body of Marat Rychenkov the next morning. It was way too early to be at the CDC and in a morgue. But here she was, paper gown, hair cap, booties, and gloves. Aside from size, she and Donovan were indistinguishable. At least the smell didn’t bother her.

  The tour of town had been pushed to later in the afternoon, after both of them decided that coming back here and looking at the evidence head-on was their best first step. Eleri did not like what she saw, and she didn't like what Donovan had to say next, either.

  "His wife is waiting on us. She wants to cremate him, or plant him in a tree, or something."

  "Crap," Eleri muttered. The last thing they needed was pressure. After thoroughly examining the body, she still found no apparent cause of death, and when she asked Donovan, he'd only confirmed the same. She looked up at him. "There's not even a partial fingerprint! I mean, you did the same thing, right? Everybody's looked at him, his clothing, everything? With blacklight, with. . ."

  "With every filter we have," Donovan continued for her. "There was not a hair found at the scene that doesn’t immediately trace to a known person. The techs were good and found a handful. Most are Mr. Rychenkov and his wife, Johanna Schmitt. Others are for people that Schmitt confirmed had visited the home and were friends of the family. Those hairs were not found in other parts of the house where a guest might not have gone. Though the home was kept organized and relatively clean, there were no perfectly clean rooms—nothing that looked as though the killer had sterilized the place. There weren’t even stray footprints on the carpeting. Basically, there’s jack shit."

  "There's no evidence of a fight or struggle," she said.

  "There's no evidence of a murder," Donovan added, his frustration already clear.

  He wasn’t volunteering any sensory information, which probably meant he had nothing, but she asked anyway. “Do you smell anything?”

  “No, nothing of value. By the time I got here, the body was old enough that I’d only find the most prominent clues. And there aren’t any.”

  "Jeez." She pushed the word out through her teeth this time. "So what do we think happened? Or what crappy theories do you have?"

  She picked up Rychenkov’s nearest hand and rotated his arm from one side to another, checking the marks on his skin. The body, having been kept in cold storage for a handful of days, did not want to turn in a supple way. Still, she examined it carefully. "There are clear ligature marks on the wrists."

  "And ankles," Donovan added, though she'd noticed that before.

  "So what happens? This person comes in and—somehow without a fight—gets Rychenkov tied up. Rychenkov is married and appears to have no kinky lovers in the background—”

  “Unless you count his research.” Donovan grinned.

  “What was he researching?”

  “Robotics something. But Johanna—the wife—laughed when asked if he maybe had a lover. She said, ‘His work.’”

  Eleri nodded and turned back to the body. “So no lover, but he lets someone else tie him up and kill him in some unknown way. No real struggle until well after it’s too late to fight back. Then the killer unties him and leaves the body there?"

  "That's what it looks like," Donovan said.

  They had looked at the body under lighting that would have illuminated bruising. He had a mark on his arm and another on his right ankle, but both were quite normal-looking. In fact, Eleri suspected there would be worse bruising found on her own skin at that moment if someone checked. She was pretty sure she’d run into the countertop in the kitchen this morning when she’d taken the turn too close.

  Stepping back, Eleri peeled her gloves and smacked them hard into the nearest trash can. Perching her hands in fists at her hips, she paced a tight circle. "Okay, what if it's not a murder? What if he's having an affair, and somebody ties him up, and then he just dies? His lover freaks out, unties him, and runs scared. Why doesn't that work? What if this isn't a murder at all, and we don't need to be here, because it's just a weird, accidental death?"

  "All right, three problems," Donovan said. "One, there's no cause of death still: no drugs and no wounds—obvious or not. The blood panel showed no protein markers from any kind of heart attack or even high cholesterol."

  "Are you sure about the drugs?" she asked.

  "I mean, I can't be positive, but nothing showed up on the tox screen, and the CDC here has tested for just about everything. I don't smell anything, and I sniffed his liver up close and personal," Donovan commented, as Eleri turned and noticed the Y incision on the front of the body. Then he dialed back a bit. “But that may be because the body isn’t fresh.

  “Two,” Donovan continued, “there’s no evidence at all of another person even being in the house. Why would a secret lover come over ready to leave zero evidence behind? Sexcapades tend to leave an abundance of evidence, not the opposite.”

  Didn’t Eleri know that one from previous cases?

  "And three, there are no external wounds. Plus, it looks like he might have suffocated."

  "What?" Eleri turned sharply.

  "Look at his nail beds. There’s a tinge of blue. And some around his lips. But it’s just a guess, as I didn’t see the body until it was already old. Still, nothing else supports that. Nothing around his neck, not even the mild bruising one would see if there’d been a pillow over his face."

  "So he just randomly suffocated in open air? Sure." She plucked two more gloves from the nearby box and expertly slid them onto her hands. She turned Rychenkov’s head from side to side, looking at his neck. "No marks, Donovan." She looked again at his chest. "The Y incision is in the way, but I don’t see anything to indicate a hole in his lungs. Did his lungs collapse?”

  Eleri knew the answer even before Donovan shook his head. If that had been the case, Donovan would have told her first. It would have been in the report. Unless they found something new this morning, it didn’t exist. She looked back down at the neck and head again, pulling the eyelids up one more time.

  “There’s nothing. Not even petechial hemorrhaging," she added, noting the red blood vessels that tended to appear in the eyes when the oxygen was cut off, usually via strangulation.

  "I know," Donovan replied.

  “Blacklight?" she asked, and he quickly obliged. Though she knew Donovan had already done all of this himself, she just wanted to take her own look. Eleri was glad he didn’t begrudge a second pair of eyes. She knew he was hoping she would get lucky and find something he hadn’t. So far, she'd scored a big fat zero.

  Eleri searched the whole body, including rolling Rychenkov over. She rolled the body using a technique of pulling one arm up and draping the other across the chest and pulling. Though Donovan offered to help, she refused. She wanted to see everything herself, not risking one of his gloved hands getting in the way and making her miss something.

  Patiently, her partner continued to hold the blacklight on its stand and scan it over the body as she moved up and down, peering at anything that grabbed her attention. She noted the livor mortis—red and white coloring from where the body had cooled—all matched the initial reports. Nothing suspicious there. There was no evidence of anything trapped under the body and removed later, or even that he’d been rolled post-mortem. The coloring confirmed that the bindings had been removed soon after death, which was likely why the techs didn’t find the bindings at the scene.

  Donovan silently followed her from spot, to spot, to spot, and
still, she found nothing.

  Finally, she looked up and said, "Crap."

  Donovan only shrugged at her. "I think this is why we're here."

  "So the ME found nothing either?" The ME would have taken out each organ, weighed and tested it. She would have checked the contents of the stomach and looked for evidence of drugs, alcohol, or sex in the victim’s last twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

  “Neither the ME nor the CDC found anything. They're pretty sure he suffocated, but…nothing. Well, the only clue is the ligature marks."

  "Yeah," Eleri said. She frowned, thinking that one through, and assuming Donovan had once again already arrived at this. "So, if they tied him up, then. . ." She paused. "Okay, if they used something like a silk tie, you might not have seen the marks."

  "This looks more like rope." Donovan’s assessment agreed with hers. "Whoever was doing this wasn't being very kind."

  "And it looks like he struggled a little bit, but only after he was tied up," Eleri said. “If he didn’t want to be tied in the first place, there should be self-defense markings.”

  "Yes, so eventually he knew he was dying, or he knew something was wrong in some way."

  She stopped and thought about it again, simply repeating what they already knew and hoping it triggered something. "But someone untied him. He wasn't found tied up."

  "Nope," Donovan answered, holding up the folder and thumbing through the pages, reconfirming what they'd both already read.

  Eleri wanted to put her hands on her head and pull at her hair, but one did not do that while still wearing the gloves she’d touched the body with. "So, he gets willingly tied up, and at some point along the way, discovers he doesn't like it, fights against it, dies, and then whoever it is removes the ties."

  "Looks like," Donovan said.

  She stared at the body for almost another fifteen minutes, eventually turning the blacklight off and on, pulling other color filters over, looking at it under red light, and checking carefully for things that Donovan may have missed, though she trusted that he hadn't. He had more senses than she did, flat out, and he hadn't caught anything.