he denied the murder, and I couldn’t break him. Today I got his DNA test back from the lab. It matches the semen from the victim’s body. I told him that and he confessed. Jackpot.”
“Well done!” She kissed the top of his head.
“How about you?”
“Well, I still have a job, but it remains to be seen whether I have a career.”
“You have a career, come on.”
“I don’t know. If I get demoted for putting the Foong brothers in jail, what will they do to me when I have a failure?”
“You’ve suffered a setback. It’s just temporary. You’ll get over it, I promise.”
She smiled, remembering the time she had thought there was nothing her father could not do. “Well, I didn’t make much progress with my case.”
“Last night you thought it was a bullshit assignment anyway.”
“Today I’m not so sure. The linguistic analysis showed that these people are dangerous, whoever they are.”
“But they can’t trigger an earthquake.”
“I don’t know.”
Bo raised his eyebrows. “You think it’s possible?”
“I’ve spent most of today trying to find out. I spoke to three seismologists and got three different answers.”
“Scientists are like that.”
“What I really wanted was for them to tell me firmly it couldn’t happen. But one said it was ‘unlikely,’ one said the possibility was ‘vanishingly small,’ and the third said it could be done with a nuclear bomb.”
“Could these people — what are they called?”
“The Hammer of Eden.”
“Could they have a nuclear device?”
“It’s possible. They’re smart, focused, serious. But then why would they talk about earthquakes? Why not just threaten us with their bomb?”
“Yeah,” Bo said thoughtfully. “That would be just as terrifying and a lot more credible.”
“But who can tell how these people’s minds work?”
“What’s your next step?”
“I have one more seismologist to see, a Michael Quercus. The others all say he’s kind of a maverick, but he’s the leading authority on what causes earthquakes.”
She had already tried to interview Quercus. Late that afternoon she had rung his doorbell. He had told her, through the entry phone, to call for an appointment.
“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” she had said. “This is the FBI.”
“Does that mean you don’t have to make appointments?”
She had cursed under her breath. She was a law enforcement officer, not a damn replacement window salesperson. “It does, generally,” she said into the intercom. “Most people feel our work is too important to wait.”
“No, they don’t,” he replied. “Most people are scared of you, that’s why they let you in without an appointment. Call me. I’m in the phone book.”
“I’m here about a matter of public safety, Professor. I’ve been told you’re an expert who can give me crucial information that will help in our work of protecting people. I’m sorry I didn’t have the opportunity of calling for an appointment, but now that I’m here, I would really appreciate it if you would see me for a few minutes.”
There was no reply, and she realized he had hung up at his end.
She had driven back to the office, fuming. She did not make appointments: agents rarely did. She preferred to catch people off-guard. Almost everyone she interviewed had something to hide. The less time they had to prepare, the more likely they were to make a revealing mistake. But Quercus was infuriatingly correct: she had no right to barge in on him.
Swallowing her pride, she had called him and made an appointment for tomorrow.
She decided not to tell Bo any of this. “What I really need,” she said, “is someone to explain the science to me in such a way that I can make my own judgment about whether a terrorist could cause an earthquake.”
“And you need to find these Hammer of Eden people and bust them for making threats. Any progress there?”
She shook her head. “I had someone interview everyone at the Green California Campaign. No one there matches the profile, none have any kind of criminal or subversive record; in fact, there’s nothing suspicious about them at all.”
Bo nodded. “It always was unlikely the perpetrators would have told the truth about who they were. Don’t be discouraged. You’ve only been on the case a day and a half.”
“True — but that leaves only two clear days to their deadline. And I have to go to Sacramento on Thursday to report to the governor’s office.”
“You’d better start early tomorrow.” He got up off the couch.
They both went upstairs. Judy paused at her bedroom door. “Remember that earthquake, when I was six?”
He nodded. “It wasn’t much, by California standards, but it scared you half to death.”
Judy smiled. “I thought it was the end of the world.”
“The shaking must have shifted the house a little, because your bedroom door jammed shut, and I nearly busted my shoulder breaking it down.”
“I thought it was you that made the shaking stop. I believed that for years.”
“Afterward you were scared of that damn chest of drawers that your mother liked so much. You wouldn’t have it in the house.”
“I thought it wanted to eat me.”
“In the end I chopped it up for firewood.” Suddenly Bo looked sad. “I wish I could have those years back, to live all over again.”
She knew he was thinking of her mother. “Yeah,” she said.
“Good night, kid.”
“Night, Bo.”
As she drove across the Bay Bridge on Wednesday morning, heading for Berkeley, Judy wondered what Michael Quercus looked like. His irritable manner suggested a peevish professor, stooped and shabby, peering irritably at the world through glasses that kept falling down his nose. Or he could be an academic fat cat in a pinstripe suit, charming to people who might donate money to the university, contemptuously indifferent to anyone who could not be of use to him.
She parked in the shade of a magnolia tree on Euclid Avenue. As she rang his bell she had a horrible feeling he might find another excuse to send her away; but when she gave her name there was a buzz and the door opened. She climbed two flights to his apartment. It was open. She walked in. The place was small and cheap: his business could not be making much money. She passed through a vestibule and found herself in his office-cum — living room.
He was sitting at his desk in khakis, tan walking boots, and a navy blue polo shirt. Michael Quercus was neither a peevish professor nor an academic fat cat, she saw immediately. He was a hunk: tall, fit, good-looking, with sexy hair, dark and curly. She quickly summed him up as one of those guys who were so big and handsome and confident, they thought they could do anything they liked.
He, too, was surprised. His eyes widened and he said: “Are you the FBI agent?”
She gave him a firm handshake. “Were you expecting someone else?”
He shrugged. “You don’t look like Efrem Zimbalist, Junior.”
Zimbalist was the actor who played Inspector Lewis Erskine in the long-running television show
To her surprise he grinned broadly. “Okay,” he said. “You got me.”
