Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [70]
The creature took off its gloves and removed its slit-visored helmet. Out shook the long sable hair of Colette Rousseau. She sat on a bench, the brightness of the sun blinding her after the double darkness of the laboratory and her helmet.
Colette and Luc had returned to New Haven early Saturday morning so that she could resume her laboratory duties, from which she had taken two days off. Her experiments were designed to test the existence of ionium, a putative new element that Professor Bertram Boltwood claimed to have discovered—the “parent of radium,” he called it. Madame Curie did not believe in ionium, judging it to be only a manifestation of thorium. Accordingly, Colette did not believe in ionium either. She had already established that ionium could not be separated from thorium with any of the ordinary precipitants, such as sodium thiosulfate or meta-nitro-benzoic acid. Today she was trying fumaric acid. But her hands had begun to shake within her heavy lead-lined gloves, and she’d had to stop.
She gathered her hair into a long braid, threw it behind one shoulder of her radiation suit, and, using both hands, reached to the nape of her neck. She drew out the chain and locket that always hung at her chest. Turning an ingeniously crafted bezel first one way, then the other, Colette opened the two halves of the locket. Into the palm of her hand fell a thin, tarnished metal oval—like an oblong coin—with two tiny holes punched through it.
One side of this metal oval was bare. Turning it over, Colette let eyes linger on a series of machine-etched letters and numbers: Hans Gruber, Braunau am Inn, 20. 4. 89., 2. Ers. Masch. Gew. K., 3. A.K. Nr. 1128.
Although it was a Saturday, Littlemore saw lights in the Commissioner’s office. The detective knocked and entered.
“Captain Littlemore—just the man I wanted to see,” said Commissioner Enright from an armchair by a large window, looking up from a report he’d been reading. Enright was revered by his men. He was the only Police Commissioner in the history of New York City to have risen to that position from the rank and file. “I’ve been in touch with the Canadians. They’re happy to extradite. Send someone to Ontario to collect this Edwin Fischer.”
“Already on their way, Mr. Enright,” said Littlemore.
“That’s the spirit. You met with Director Flynn of the Bureau yesterday. What were your impressions?”
“Big Bill’s not giving us a thing, Commissioner,” said Littlemore. “Fischer, for example. Flynn knew Fischer was in custody. Wouldn’t say where, wouldn’t say how he knew. After we turned over all our evidence to them.”
Enright shook his head ruefully. “It’s no more than I expected. That’s why I chose you as liaison officer. They have greater resources than we, Littlemore, but not greater brainpower. Keep a step ahead of him. Keep us in it. Flynn found the circulars. Let the next find be ours.”
“I don’t like the circulars, sir,” said Littlemore.
“You don’t ‘like’ them?”
“Flynn’s story doesn’t wash. There’s no way the bombers got from Wall Street to that mailbox by 11:58. Plus the flyers don’t read right. They don’t even mention a bombing. If I’m the Wall Street bomber and I want to tell everybody I did it, I’m going to say so. Mr. Enright, I’m not even sure the circulars were picked up from a mailbox at all. I just got done with the mailman who would have made the pickup. He went home sick that morning.”
“What are you suggesting, Littlemore?”
“Nothing, sir. All I know is that Flynn’s doing everything he can to connect our bombing to the ones from 1918 and 1919. He even said the Chicago Post Office was bombed on the third Thursday of September, so that September 16 was the exact anniversary.”
“Yes, I read that in the Times,” said Enright.
“The Chicago bomb went off on September 4, 1918,