Killing Time

CHAPTER 5

Another lousy cab ride later, and I was back at Max's. I found him switching on the various systems he used to jam and otherwise thwart listening devices, after which he guided me over to a stack of DNA sequencing and identification equipment near a window that had a beautiful view of the river.

"I found a few hairs embedded in the brick wall at the murder scene," Max explained, indicating the buzzing equipment. "I ran them through my remote terminal while we were there, but what I got back didn't seem to make any sense, so I wanted to try it again on the big rig. Results came up the same. A few of the samples belong to John Price, but the rest? The rest match a guy who's in jail."

"In jail? Then how—?"

"Don't start asking questions yet, Gideon, or we'll be here the rest of the night. So while I'm trying to figure out how somebody who's already locked up could off our boy, I find these." He dropped a few metal pellets about the size of mouse feces into my hand. "Any idea what they are?"

"No," I answered dimly.

"I didn't either, until I ran them for stains. Price's blood was there." Max took a deep breath. "You know what condition his body was in?"

I nodded. "Almost disintegrated, the cops said."

"By these," Max went on, taking one of the pellets and studying it. "Any idea how fast they'd have to be traveling to do that to a human body?"

"Could they do that to a human body?"

"Sure. Theoretically. If I toss a little lump of lead at you, it isn't gonna kill you. I shoot it out of a gun, that's a different story. Fire a bunch of these jobs at a high enough velocity, and yeah, your body would almost vaporize. But that's a hell of a velocity. And nobody heard any gunfire, not even the doorman. Or so he says."

"So what could—?"

"Gideon, I told you — wait with the questions. Now—" He walked purposefully back over to his main bank of computers. "It took me a while, but I finally busted Price's encryption of the second batch of information on the disc — though why he worked so hard to hide this is beyond me."

Touching a keypad, Max called up an image on his main screen: an old piece of grainy film that offered a glimpse of what appeared to be — of what, I soon realized, in fact was—a mid-twentieth-century German concentration camp. There was a shot of some starving, laboring prisoners, a pan off to some SS officers, and then a further pan to reveal… a silhouette. A grayish human silhouette, moving, yes, but as unidentifiable as the similar blank spot in the second of the three versions of the Forrester assassination we'd seen had been.

"Okay," Max said, watching my dumbstruck face. "Now you can ask questions."

I took a deep breath. "Dachau?" I asked.

"Good call, Professor," Max answered. "I downloaded some matching footage half an hour ago. It's pretty stock stuff. Except for the mystery guest there."

I kept staring at the silhouette. "Something about that general outline looks familiar," I said. "There — when he turns in profile…"

"Okay. So maybe then you can tell me how this connects to some hairs from a guy who's already in prison and some kind of supergun that apparently turned John Price into so much jelly without making a sound."

I found it hard to take my eyes off of Max's computer screen, which kept replaying the same snippet of film footage over and over. "What's the guy's name? The one who's in jail?"

Max crossed the room to a table. "Got that, too — hacked into the correctional banks. Here — Kuperman. Eli Kuperman."

My head snapped around. "Eli Kuperman the anthropologist?"

"The same. Know him?"

I shook my head. "But I know his work. Controversial stuff— brilliant, though. The origins of primitive cultures."

"That's what they nailed him for. Down in Florida, he was in some Indian burial ground. Digging up graves, or so the folks who run the reservation say. Kuperman never contested it. Tribe agreed to the government's sentence — five years in the local state pen." Max's face grew even more puzzled, and his voice softened. "Strange thing is, the day after he went up, just last week, the Indians laid concrete over the whole burial ground. So much for sacred…"

"Maybe they didn't want any more desecrations."

"Maybe," Max said with a shrug. "Point is, what's this guy Kuperman's hair doing at our murder scene?"

"You're sure it's his?"

Max shrugged again. "The universal DNA database doesn't lie. So unless he's got an identical twin—"

"That's what I'm talking about."

"What's what you're talking about?"

"Kuperman," I said, not quite believing Max's confused look. "He's got a twin brother."

Max swallowed hard. "Screw you, Wolfe."

"He does! Jonah Kuperman — he's an archaeologist, just as famous as his brother."

"Well, it wasn't in any of the hits that I pulled up."

"Jesus, Max," I said, going back to the DNA analyzer. "The sum total of human knowledge is supposed to be on the damned Internet — you mean they missed something as basic as that?"

"Hey, don't start with me about the Net again, Gideon, a few occasional screwups do not mean—"

Suddenly the window with the beautiful view in front of me shattered into hundreds of crashing shards. Instinctively, I went for the floor; but when I looked up, I saw Max — foolishly, I thought at that instant — still standing. I screamed for him to get down, but he only swayed strangely in the half-light of his computer. Then I noticed a bead of blood on his forehead; and looking past him I could see that his computer screen was splattered with something a good deal more vital and substantial than blood. I crawled like a pathetic crab across the floor while he crumpled with grim grace to his knees. He fell forward just as I reached him, allowing me to see that the missile that had entered his forehead so neatly had, on exiting, taken much of his brain and a good deal of his skull away with it.