Scorpio Rising by Alan Annand
Chapter 28
Albuquerque
Carrie Cassidy’s flight came in on time. The plane taxied to the terminal, across the south face of which the name Albuquerque International Sunport stood out in big bold letters. She was intercepted just inside the Arrivals gate by a robust blond man in a tan suit.
“Mrs. Cassidy? I’m FBI Special-Agent-in-Charge Cobb. May I have your car keys, please?”
“I can drive myself.”
“It’s better if you come with me. I need to ask you a few questions. One of my associates will follow with your car.”
Carrie retrieved her keys from her purse as they traversed the arcade toward the baggage carousels. Cobb was in a hurry and walked ahead, scanning the crowd of travelers, occasionally glancing over his shoulder to make sure she was still with him. At the baggage carousel they waited as the first pieces of luggage came off the conveyor.
She handed him the car keys. “How did you recognize me?”
“A photo from your husband’s file.” He gave her an apologetic smile.
She studied him as they waited, a writer’s habit she’d developed, always observing people. His diction pegged him for a New Englander and he had the coloring of someone who’d spent more time in the sun than his genetics were designed for. The back of his neck was sunburned. It was easy to burn at an altitude of five thousand feet, which was why New Mexico had the highest incidence of skin cancer in the country.
Her luggage tumbled off the conveyor. Cobb signaled another man of whom she’d been previously unaware. Once that guy had her luggage and car keys in hand, they went out into the parking lot to her car, a ten-year-old red Honda. She followed Cobb to a white Ford where he held the passenger door open for her.
Within a few minutes, they were headed north on the I-25.
“What can you tell me about my husband? How did he die, exactly?”
“Nobody told you anything?” Cobb sounded surprised.
“The security officer who phoned me, Horton, said there was an explosion in the parking lot at work. That’s all he knew, or that’s all he was prepared to tell me.”
Cobb cleared his throat. “Someone planted a bomb in his car. Because of the nature of his work, we suspect a connection.”
“The war on terrorism.”
Cobb glanced at her. “Did he discuss his work with you?”
“No more than he was allowed to.”
“But you put things together.”
“There’s not much a man can keep truly secret from a woman. Not if she really wants to know.”
“Why did you want to know?”
“I’m curious by nature.” She let a moment pass. “Do you know who did it?”
“We picked up some suspects today but it’s too soon to tell if they were involved.”
“When will you know?”
“Impossible to say. Every investigation is different.”
“These suspects are from Santa Fe? Is it somebody we would have known?”
“I can’t discuss it.” Cobb cleared his throat again. “But I need to ask you about your movements the last three days. What were you doing in New York?”
“A combination of business and personal affairs. My mother lives in Manhattan. I’ve written a novel and I’m looking for an agent. I left here early Monday. That afternoon I saw one agent and did a little shopping. That evening, took my mother to a show. Tuesday, saw five agents. Dinner that evening at my mother’s. This morning, breakfast with another agent and caught my flight home.”
“Who knew about your being out of town?”
“Aside from Walt, only a girlfriend I play squash with.”
Cobb was silent for a few minutes. They passed one of the area’s casinos, built a short distance from a dried-out river bed on a luckless stretch of land halfway between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. “Did your husband have money problems of any kind, business or gambling debts?”
“Quite the contrary. He was a very smart investor.”
“Skeletons in the closet? Personal enemies of any kind?”
“Only his brother.”
Cobb glanced at her. “What do you mean?”
“Just kidding. His brother hated my guts. It was an issue between them. But if push came to shove, William would sooner kill me than Walt.”
“Did he ever receive any threats?”
“Not that I know of.” She looked at him. “Your questions don’t seem to have anything to do with his work. Does that mean you just don’t know what the motive is, that it might have been personal?”
“Tell the truth, we’re still exploring all possible theories.”
“And what’s the best among them?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”
Carrie reflected on that. He could be as canny as he wanted but it wouldn’t get him anywhere. And as long as he hadn’t cuffed her and informed her of her rights, she had nothing to worry about yet. She took a tissue from her purse, dabbed her eyes and blew her nose. “Can you tell me what’s happened to his body?”
“It’s with our medical examiners.”
“Do you know when he... it will be released?”
“Probably tomorrow.”
“Do you know anything about his death benefits and insurance?”
“Someone from Human Resources will explain all that to you.”
“Do I have to call them or is someone going to contact me?”
“They know you’re coming back today. You’ll probably get a call.”
They were both quiet for a bit. Carrie stared out the side window watching the sagebrush go by. After a bit Cobb cleared his throat and glanced over at her.
“You’ll pardon my saying this, Mrs. Cassidy, but you don’t strike me as being overcome by grief.”
“What do you know?” she snapped at him, giving him a taste of her righteous indignation. “Maybe I cried my eyes out all the way from New York.”
“Did you?”
She turned in her seat, giving him a hard look. Was he disappointed? Had he expected her to cry on his big rugged shoulder? Maybe it was an option she should have exercised. She did like his looks, that bulked-up physique that suggested weight training and punching bags and sweaty cardio-vascular workouts. And to work for the FBI, he had to be smart...
“I’m trying to be strong. Crying won’t bring him back.”
Cobb nodded and said no more.
Carrie stared straight ahead, wishing they were driving twice as fast so this would be over sooner. Still she knew Cobb’s suspicions had to be addressed. She decided to take a chance and throw him a bone. It was something that would eventually come out so he might as well hear it from her as from one of Walt’s friends.
“Truth is, Walt and I went through a rough patch a few years ago. I moved out for six months. He begged me to come back and eventually I did. But something died between us and no amount of resuscitation ever brought it back to life. Maybe I’ve already done my grieving for him and our marriage.”
That left him lots to read between the lines, but it was as much as she would confess to this G-man. Truth be told, her sex life with Walt had gone down the tube years ago. Although she’d accepted that he’d always be a little on the chunky side, and in the early years enjoyed his weight bearing down on her, lending momentum to the old bump and grind, there was a limit. But once Walt hit forty, he’d piled on the pounds and then there was no way she could pretend that flab was sexy. She’d tried to get him to exercise but he was an Einstein, not a Schwarzenegger, and he stayed fat.
It didn’t help that in the past few years the War on Terror had placed huge strains on their marriage. The pressure to produce results was enormous, forcing him to work fifteen-hour days, frequently pulling all-nighters, after which he wasn’t much good for anything but a meal together and a little TV before he crashed. A lot of wives and mothers hated the war because it had killed their husbands or children. Carrie was supposed to feel lucky because Walt was serving his country withou
And thus had begun her wandering phase, in which she’d successfully sought alternate partners on a catch-as-catch-can basis. But even that didn’t make her happy because of all the sneaking around. After a while she just began to resent Walt, seeing him as her jailer in a sentence of monogamy she didn’t want to serve. She’d moved out, gone to Alamogordo for a winter, her excuse being that she needed to break the back of the novel she’d been struggling with for over a year. The real reason was that she just needed time alone, to sleep with whomever she wanted, free as a college girl again, and not have to watch the clock.
“So you didn’t love him any more?”
“It wasn’t that I stopped loving him, but that I loved him in a different way. He was a great guy and we had some wonderful times together. I’m going to miss his clever repartee and his jokes. He was like a big teddy bear, and my bed’s going to feel empty without him there beside me. In fact, I don’t know if I can keep on living in that house. There’re too many memories.”
She had worked herself into an emotional state appropriate to the occasion. She took another tissue from her purse and blotted her eyes again, half surprised now that there were really tears there.
“We’ll do everything we can to bring his killers to justice,” Cobb reassured her.
Chapter 29
New York
Axel Crowe walked west on 51st, shifting mental gears, moving his centre of gravity from left brain to right. Man was a highly evolved thinker but much of the human psyche remained pure animal, and there were techniques for accessing that primal intelligence. Guruji had taught him many things, half of which were non-rational. Astrology, palmistry and ayurveda all depended on one’s ability to memorize hundreds of principles and invoke them when a particular configuration in the birth chart, palm print or human face triggered their recall. But for every rule of logic, Guruji had a totally intuitive wild card up his sleeve.
One night at a party thrown by a wealthy Hindu in Toronto, Guruji had set up shop in the kitchen, armed with a cleaver and a bowl of fruit. People queued up to ask him questions, and he chopped the fruit in four and gave answers based on how the quarters fell and what they looked like inside. Other occasions, Guruji strolled with Crowe through Parkdale, looking at house numbers and the shape of windows, Guruji saying whether the resident lived alone, had children, or cared for a sick person, after which Crowe knocked on doors to confirm Guruji’s declarations.
Crowe felt a twinge of regret. He’d learned all the logical stuff from Guruji and, though not a master, had achieved a level of superiority over most people in the field. But as for the intuitive stuff, he’d barely wet his toes in an ocean so deep and wide it awed him to think what lay beneath the surface. With Guruji’s guidance, he might have gone deep sea diving. Since that was no longer likely, he would settle for splashing around in the shallows.
At Broadway and 51st was a news stand painted turquoise. Behind the counter stood an old white-bearded guy in a jacket with a howling coyote on his left breast. Nearby, a young woman handed out flyers for an off-Broadway play called Wicked.
At 51st and Ninth a hot dog vendor sold cheese dogs, chili dogs, corn dogs, kosher dogs and veggie dogs from a cart. Once upon a time Crowe had enjoyed hot dogs but fourteen years of vegetarianism had pretty much ruined the allure of tube-tied mystery meat for him. The sight of the vendor, however, reminded him of a joke. A yogi goes to a baseball game and orders a hot dog. The vendor asks him, what do you want on it? The yogi says, make me one with everything.
Intersections were focal points of energy, which was why Crowe paid attention to what he saw on street corners. In Tantrik philosophy dawn and dusk were considered magical moments, literal transition points between day and night. For the same reason, spring and fall equinoxes represented seasonal transition points. Geophysical space had its ‘power points’ too – the seashore, the junction of rivers, the peaks of mountains, the entrance of caves, as well as crossroads and doorways – places where movement experienced a block or a change in direction.
A famous philosophical treatise likened the human psyche to a fisherman’s net. The twine represented subliminal impressions from our previous lives. The knots in the twine were our unconscious actions bound to reality. The resulting net was the mesh that trapped us in our personal perceptions and experience of life.
Stand at the crossroads of time and space, Guruji would say, and you will see, hear, smell, taste and touch everything. And via the portal of your subtle senses, you will experience all that is, all that was, and all that will be…
No sooner had he recollected Guruji’s words, Crowe smelled pizza. A little further down Ninth Avenue he came upon the Casanova Pizzeria. He realized he hadn’t eaten anything since a bowl of cereal at six this morning. He entered the pizzeria and ordered a slice with goat cheese, black olives and sundried tomatoes. One of Guruji’s favorite combos. Crowe reflected on the irony of eating pizza at Casanova’s, perhaps never sharing one again with Guruji, all because he had the recessive Casanova gene…
He sat at the window counter and drank a can of Brio while he checked his astrology app for the planetary lineup at post time in Belmont Park. You could keep the punter away from the track but these days you couldn’t keep the track away from the punter.
A black man walked by carrying a pre-school girl on his shoulders. She dug the heels of her sneakers into his ribs and whipped him with the ponytail of a black Barbie gripped in one hand. The black man rolled his eyes at Crowe as he passed his window, clearly having a good time. Crowe waved to the little girl, who stuck out her tongue.
He studied the online tote board and selected a few promising horses for the day’s races. He tripled his usual bet for Black Daddy in the Ninth, figuring the omen he’d just seen would pay out. He made his bets online and finished his pizza.
His phone rang. It was Blaikie.
“I just got a call from the office of the Chief of Police,” Blaikie said. “You’re cleared to meet the detectives at Mid-Town North who’re handling the case. Levinson and Rossimoff, about an hour from now.”
“What did you tell them about me?”
“Only that you’re a private investigator and a personal friend.” Blaikie paused. “Don’t worry, I didn’t alienate them by revealing your true stock-in-trade. Speaking of which, when I was with my parents this morning, I asked my mother what time Janis was born. She remembers five forty-five AM.”
After they hung up, Crowe put the birth time into his astrology app. Sure enough, Janis’s chart came up with Libra rising, just as he’d speculated this morning. Score one for intuition.
Chapter 30
Los Alamos
Several miles outside of Los Alamos, Site 8 of the National Laboratory squatted on a hillcrest commanding an impressive view of the Jemez Mountains. The building’s few windows, tall and narrow as giant gun slits, were recessed into a façade whose concrete slabs contained a lot of iron, resulting in a rusty weathered look that blended into the landscape. Satellite dishes clustered at the southwest corner but the rest of the roof was clear, and at its north end was painted a huge ‘H’ surrounded by a circle, indicating a helicopter landing pad.
A five-seater Bell Jet Ranger descended, its prop-wash setting aflutter the American and New Mexico state flags that flew in front of the north-end entrance. Special-Agent-in-Charge Liam Cobb climbed out, ducking his head beneath the rotor as he walked to the roof entrance where Mack Horton waited for him.
They exchanged greetings and went downstairs to Horton’s office where they sat at a table in front of a gun-slit window. Horton’s secretary brought glasses, a selection of soft drinks and some jalapeño nachos in a bowl.
“So, any progress?” Cobb asked.
“Our analysts are finished with Dr. Cas
“If Cassidy was a smoker, why didn’t it go off earlier in the day on his way to work?”
“Whoever did this was clever.” Horton took pen and paper from his desk and drew a schematic for Cobb. “There were five components: digital timer, thermocouple, MP3 player, and a primer embedded in a pound of C4. We figure the timer was set to wake up the circuit sometime late in the working day. That’s why Cassidy was able to drive his vehicle to work but nothing happened because the circuit was asleep. But then, say, around four or five PM, the timer woke up the circuit and primed the system. When Cassidy quit work shortly after eight PM, he entered the parking lot and started his vehicle. That switched on the MP3 player wired into the car’s sound system and pumped out some high-decibel Arab music. The thermocouple kicked in a few seconds later and ka-boom!”
“And all this stuff was inside the car?”
“You know how big a pound of butter is. Squash it down to half the height and twice the footprint, shove it under the driver’s seat. The timer, thermocouple and MP3 player combined were no bigger than a pack of cigarettes.”
“You’re sure it was inside the car? Not under the chassis or in the engine compartment?”
“No doubt about it, once we saw Cassidy’s body. You want, I can show you pictures.”
Cobb fluttered his hand. “I believe you. I’m just working backwards now. How did someone gain access to his car?”
“We’ve looked into that,” Horton said. “It hasn’t been serviced since the New Year, when he had it in for an oil change. He hand-washed it himself, didn’t want to risk anyone scratching the finish. And his wife had her own ride.”
“Yet somehow, someone got into his car.”
“It didn’t happen on government property. Our parking lots are all under camera surveillance. We’ve reviewed the video of all the installations where he worked.”