Chapter One
The day of the first murder began just like any other Monday in Los Alamos. At 8:30 a.m., reporter Patrice Kelsey moved her magnet, a bloodshot eyeball, from OUT to IN on the board behind the receptionist.
Marian looked up from a mound of mail shoved through the door slot over the weekend and tried unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn. "Morning, Patrice. How’s it going?"
"Oh, same old cornflakes. How ‘bout you?"
"Ummm, same old oatmeal." Surveying the mail, Marian curled her lip. "Here it is Monday, already. Oh well, another day, another dollar."
"What? Did you get a raise?" Patrice rested one hand on her hip. "How come I don’t get that much?"
"I was referring to before taxes. Another day, another fifty-seven cents." She noticed Patrice’s holly-green crocheted vest. "Did you do that? It’s nice, brings out the green in your eyes."
"Thanks." Patrice turned her head to show the matching crocheted elastic band that held her long, ash blond hair in a low ponytail. "No, I don’t do handwork. It’s an early Christmas present from my mom. Which reminds me, three weeks ‘til Christmas."
"You going anywhere?" Marian placed a stack of Sunday papers on the counter by the door and unlocked the cash register.
"You kidding? I can’t afford to go anywhere, and I only have about three days of leave accrued anyway." She
took a tissue off Marian’s desk and wiped a streak of mud off her black pumps. She couldn’t help but long for attractive boots to set off the vest and gray wool skirt, but $9.99 Payless pumps would have to do.
"You do anything fun over the weekend?"
"Ah, Marian, I wouldn’t know where to start. The laundromat, the frozen pizza, the wink meant just for me from Louis Rukeyser on Wall Street Week. It’s all a mad blur."
"Girl, you gotta slow down," Marian said with a wry laugh as she picked up the ringing phone. "Good morning, Guardian. Yes, Rose, Patrice is right here. Hold on while she staggers to her desk carrying thirty pounds of mail." Marian pointed to a stack so tall it could collapse at any time and said, "Yours! Get it out of here, please." Back into the phone she said, "When will your daughter get home from college?"
Patrice leaned the stack against her chest, then bent way down to pick up a catalog that fell from her grasp. She unloaded the stack of mail on her desk and formed a dike with her hip to keep it from sliding off. Four yellow and three blue Post-It Notes adhered tenuously to her computer screen and waved like butterflies in the breeze from the front door.
"Poor man’s e-mail," she’d called it with a slight roll of her eyes when she started working at the paper. Now she participated enthusiastically in the office confetti-graffiti, sticking her own green notes on chairs, monitors, telephones and keyboards, wherever the recipient would most likely see it.
She peeled off the notes and stuck them on the surface of her desk. "How many editors does it take to change a light bulb?" said one of the yellow ones. "See me ASAP--RR" was scribbled on a blue one. Patrice leaned past her desk to see the desk of her boss, managing editor Rick Romero. He was on the phone, his face swivelled away from the newsroom. Two more jokes and three questions from Composition completed the set of mini-missives.
She waved to Marian and waited until she saw her put down the phone, then picked up the receiver and punched the flashing light. "Hi, Rose, what’s up?" Her friend Rose was a woman of vast stores of energy and wide-ranging interests, especially history, and in particular the history of Los Alamos. A veritable bulldog when she sank her teeth into a story, Rose had her canines imbedded in a spy tale, a spy who went by the code name Perseus. Although Rose was twenty years older than Patrice, give or take a year, Patrice thought of Rose as her contemporary.
"I got the papers from the FBI in the mail today," Rose said. "The Freedom of Information Act stuff."
"So, hit the high points for me. I’m all yours." Patrice sat down at her terminal and waited impatiently for her computer to boot up. While she listened to Rose she thumbed quickly through the mail for an envelope from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the heart, lungs and brain of the isolated New Mexico town, or at least its main paymaster.
"I can’t go into it now," Rose said. "But it gives me more to go on about the ‘Last Man.’"
"Does the report mention Doyle Silver?" She ran her tongue over a chapped spot on her lower lip. Pulling open the center drawer of her desk, she found a compact and applied coral lipstick. Oh, say, that’s an improvement! Now I have chapped lips that shine like Day-Glo. She glanced at her eyes to make sure her mascara wasn’t in splotches.
"No, not exactly. It does mention the Soviet courier he saw in Santa Fe in April 1945." Rose cleared her throat, then added, "The courier he says he saw."
"Ah, yes, the courier he allegedly saw. We’ll make a newswoman out of you yet. Does the FBI report use her name? Lona Cohen?" Her computer booted up and she checked e-mail. Nothing urgent there. She filed four messages and swiveled her chair away from the monitor.
"Yes, it names her, but it doesn’t say who handed her any secret papers."
"Well, Doyle Silver hasn’t named anybody, either. All he does is dance around like a six year old with a secret."
"I would hardly describe him as dancing. He’s bedridden in a nursing home, for heaven’s sake."
"I was speaking figuratively," Patrice went on. "He dances around verbally." She mimicked an old crone’s voice. "I saw a Russian spy in 1945, and if you’re real, real nice I’ll tell you his name." She turned back to her computer, brought up the menu of stories she was working on for that day’s paper, then continued.
"And speaking of names, yes, Doyle named Lona Cohen as the courier he saw, but let’s not forget, in the thrill of the chase, that she was named in papers coast to coast six years ago. He could have picked up her name then. When is he going to name the men, the Big Five? Or the Big Four plus himself?" Patrice was losing patience with the old man and his "big spy story," as he insisted it was. Someday soon he’d tell Rose and her all about the "Last Man bottle" and why the five men toasted each other by the light of the first atomic bomb. It was always "soon," then he’d put off spilling the beans for yet another day, another visit.
"Actually, I have a lot more to go on now, a lot more, but I can’t go into it now, over the phone."
"Now you’re doing it!" Patrice said, exasperated.
"Doing what?"
"Teasing." This time she mimicked a little girl’s singsong, "I have a secret, and you don’t know it!"
"Look, I’ll tell you everything on the way to Española tonight. A whole lot has been happening, but I can’t go into it on the phone."
Rose added something, but even with the receiver pressed to her ear Patrice had trouble hearing her. Kent Bolt, publisher of the Los Alamos Guardian and her Boss with a capital B, made a grand and noisy entrance to the newsroom from his office.
Kent bellowed across the room to Rick Romero as if the people at the desks in between were mannequins who had no need of eardrums. "Rick, where are Danny and Patrice?"
The expensive double-breasted suit, accented by a red silk tie and matching handkerchief in the breast pocket, failed to compensate for Kent’s deficit in height and looks. Might as well tape peacock feathers on a bantam rooster.
"What?" Patrice said to Rose. "You’ll have to talk louder to compete with this barnyard. Breaking news or something."
"I’ll tell you tonight on our way down."
"Down where?" Patrice asked as she bent over her wastebasket to retrieve an envelope that had slipped in from the edge of her desk. "You May Already Be a Winner!" it screamed in red letters. She tossed it back in the basket.
"To Española, to the nursing home." Now it was Rose’s turn to sound exasperated. "Don’t tell me you forgot!"
"No, I remember." Patrice’s shoulders slumped at the thought of the tiring evening ahead. The trip had, in fact, slipped her mind, and she planned to spend the evening with a new James Doss mystery.
Patrice saw the paper’s photographer, Danny Carter, stroll in from the darkroom at the same time Kent Bolt spotted her. "I’ve got to go, Rose," she said. "I’ll call you later; I can’t promise anything."
Rick Romero closed the distance to his boss and Kent lowered his voice to a humane level, gesturing to Rick by punching the air and pointing in the general direction of the front door. Rick nodded vigorously and Kent strode back into his office.
Rick pointed at Patrice, then Danny, and then toward the coffee break room. Following in Danny’s footsteps, she sighed in unison with him and shuffled into the room. Danny was about five-six, muscular, and always needed a haircut. He was the first one to hear the latest jokes and had a gift of telling them for maximum effect. Yes, Danny was one of the few bright spots of working at the Guardian, Patrice smiled to herself. One step behind them, Rick shut the door half way.
"Kent heard there’s a big anti-nuke demonstration out at the Plutonium Facility. He wants it front page, today, in color."
"How come we gotta give protestors every flippin’ thing they want?" Danny shoved his hair back with one hand."We working for them, or what?"
That question had hung in the newsroom like the odor of dirty laundry ever since Kent Bolt bought the failing Los Alamos Chronicle from a consortium of losers six months before. Changing the name to "Guardian" signaled a fresh start, but not good news for the staff. Or, Patrice was prepared to argue, for the readers. She pulled the elastic band from her hair and placed it on her wrist, snapping it in annoyance. Why did Kent come to Los Alamos if he hated the place so much, she’d like to know. Or at least hated what it represented, research in nuclear weapons. Nothing would change the history of Los Alamos, that it was the Secret City, the Atomic City, where the first atomic bombs were built during World War II.
"This is not the place or the time for that question," Rick said to Danny without a smile to soften the words. "Just head for Tech Area-55 and do your usual excellent work, in half the usual time."
*****
As Patrice strapped on her seat belt in Danny’s Dodge pick-up, he counted the rolls of film in his bag, muttering under his breath. "Rick is right about it being ‘not the place for that question,’ but he’s wrong about the other. It is the time for it."
"I admire your principles," Patrice said, "but this is the world. I’m older, wiser, and I’ve been unemployed more than you have." At twenty-eight, Patrice was only four years older than Danny, but it felt like more. Losing three jobs in seven years had aged her.
"Sure," she continued, "Kent is a Trojan horse, bought and paid for. But a publisher is just a politician with unlimited ink. Every paper serves its master."
"I can’t believe you’re saying that!" Danny said. "Why did you become a reporter if you feel that way?" He pulled onto Trinity Drive from the Guardian’s parking lot.
Patrice thought back to her first jobs. With a degree from University of Missouri School of Journalism and a great portfolio from part-time jobs and internships, she first snagged an excellent job on a Chicago paper, only to lose it when the paper merged with a competitor and both staffs were cut by forty percent. The same thing happened to her twice more on big Midwest papers. She shook her head to banish the clutch of fear such memories always engendered.
"I became a reporter," she answered, choosing her words deliberately, "because I felt like you obviously still do-–that Truth is something pure, something worth fighting for, something to give a flip about. I have remained a reporter because..." She shrugged. "Okay, so I’m not sure why."
"Must be the money," Danny said with a snort. On Diamond Drive, the main artery of the town, he headed left across the Omega Canyon Bridge and out Pajarito Road toward the Plutonium Facility.
Each time Patrice lost a job she had picked herself up, got a deferral on her student loans, and flooded the mail with her résumé. A friend from Mizzou who worked for the Albuquerque Journal heard about the job at the Los Alamos newspaper and recommended her. She had occasion since that time to wonder how good a friend he really was.
She ran her fingers through her hair to gather it in a tight ponytail and secured it with the elastic band. Danny will have to make his own mistakes. I’m not even sure I’m through making mine.
The weather report called for only a slight chance of snow at Los Alamos’s altitude, 7,200 feet, but clouds were building in the west and the temperature was dropping precipitously. Patrice hoped Rose Hulle would change her mind about the two of them driving to Española that evening to see Doyle Silver at the nursing home, but she doubted Rose would be deterred.
Rose would probably nag at her again about getting a job that used her skill and talent better. Lately she’d been pushing the idea of the two of them writing a book together, a book about Doyle Silver and spies and stuff. "I don’t work well without a net," Patrice had said. Still, the idea of writing a book was intriguing...
"Well, well, well," Danny said when he saw the crowd at Technical Area-55, the Plutonium Facility, "all the world’s a stage."
"And all the men and women merely bad actors," Patrice added as she checked the pocket of her blue and gold parka for a pen and a skinny notebook. Danny cut across a curb and parked the Dodge Dakota on a dusty lot with scruffy chamisas. Slinging the strap of his heavy bag over his shoulder, he jumped out of the truck.
Patrice waited a few minutes to survey the demonstrators. She tried to focus her attention on the milling crowd, but the view of the Jemez Mountains to the west and the snow-encrusted Sangre de Cristo Mountains across the Rio Grande valley to the east made her catch her breath. She had lived in northern New Mexico for two years, and the scenery still amazed her.
She hopped down from the high seat and covered her eyes for a minute against the blowing dirt. The wind plastered her gray wool skirt against her legs like a mainsail as she tacked over to Danny.
"Damn wind," Danny said, turning away from the stinging sand as he changed lenses on the Nikon. As usual he had on only a thin nylon jacket.
"You’re going to get pneumonia," Patrice said reprovingly.
"Hey, I live with my mother, okay?" he snapped. "I don’t need more nagging on the job."
"Sorr-eee!" Patrice said. "I didn’t mean to strike a nerve."
Danny glared at her for a couple seconds, then shrugged and smiled. "It’s okay. I shouldn’t bite your head off, just because I want to see Kent Bolt arrested for impersonating a publisher. You know, that guy, with his pin stripes and his platform shoes, he gives short men a bad name."
"The name Napoleon has crossed my wicked mind from time to time," Patrice said with a laugh of relief. Danny was so happy-go-lucky, she forgot he could get edgy, too. The air at the Guardian seemed supercharged with tension lately. Even Rick had been uncharacteristically abrupt when he told them to go to the Plutonium Facility. Patrice sighed and shaded her eyes. Rick must be under a lot of strain, too.
She turned her attention to the crowd. "Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one," she counted under her breath. Aloud she said, "About forty protesters, and nearly that many waiting at the guard shack to get inside to their jobs."
The Plutonium Facility was certainly not the most representative site for the work that went on at the Laboratory, but it was a popular target of protestors. Dismantling nuclear weapons was more likely taking place there than building bombs. There was also a lot of research at the Lab on medicine, energy, oceanography, weather, and space travel. The time of big bombs was history; the time of giant computers, robotics and cooperation with private industry had arrived. But Kent Bolt didn’t want to hear it. He was making the Guardian an organ of the Lab’s enemies. More than once while shopping at the Farmer’s Market or standing in line at Daylight Donuts, Patrice had winced to hear the newspaper called the "Los Alamos Guillotine."
"Does that number sound about right to you? Forty protestors?" Patrice asked.
Danny didn’t have time to answer before they heard a guard shout, "Get back! Don’t push this fence! Get back!"
The outer gate at the facility opened to allow a pickup truck with a security guard through. The heretofore-quiet protesters took a cue from a tall, skinny man and began to shout. The leather fringe on his jacket and his long, red ponytail lashed his face in the wind. Danny and Patrice could make out the chant then: "No Nukes! No War! No Nukes! No More!" and she saw six or eight additional protesters alight from a van carrying signs with the universal symbol for radiation hazard.
"Let’s get closer to the fence," Danny said. He leaned his stocky body into the crowd like a linebacker and Patrice followed, keeping her head down to his height and clutching the strap of the camera bag. She bumped into him when he stopped abruptly. She stood up, then ducked as a sign was passed over their heads. Looking in the wrong direction, she stood back up to her full five feet-eight, just in time to get whacked in the back of her head by the next sign coming over. People closest to the fence snatched the signs and held them aloft like gilt banners in a holy procession. Patrice examined her head with her fingertips. Good, no blood. It might swell, but there’s no cut.
Then the protesters shoved like elevator doors from both sides at once as the wall-sized chain link gate swung toward them to make room for a security vehicle.
In a split second a pregnant woman spun around the outside of the crowd and broke through the open gate, holding on to the tailgate of the pickup. As the driver leaped from the truck and the shocked guards secured the outer gate, the woman poured red liquid--either blood or something that looked like blood--on herself and screamed as if she were being skewered. At the same time, she handcuffed herself to the inner fence and the crowd cheered wildly.
"Call me crazy," Patrice said as Danny’s Nikon fired away, "but I love this town."
