The Day After Tomorrow

“How? In a box or a limo?”

“Where can I reach you in ninety minutes?”

“You can’t. I’ll reach you.”

It was past 9:30 before McVey knocked on the door to Osborn’s room. Osborn opened the door to the chain and Peered out.

“Hope you like chicken salad.”

In one hand McVey balanced a tray with chicken salad in white plastic bowls with Stretch-Tight across the top, in tie other he juggled a pot of coffee along with two cups, everything purchased from an irritable counter clerk at the hotel coffee shop as he was trying to close for the night.

By ten o’clock the coffee and chicken salad were gone and Osborn was pacing up and down, absently working the fingers of his injured hand, while McVey sat hunched over the bed, using it for a worktable, staring at what he’d written in his notebook.

“Merriman told you that an Erwin Scholl—Erwin spelled with an E—of Westhampton Beach, New York, paid him to kill your father and three other people sometime around 1966.”

“That’s right,” Osborn said.

“Of the other three, one was in Wyoming, one in California, and one in New Jersey. He’d done the work and been paid. Then Scholl’s people tried to kill him.”

“Yes.”

“That’s all he said, just the names Of states. No victims’ names, no cities?”

“Just the states.”

McVey got up and went into the bathroom. “Almost thirty years ago a Mr. Erwin Scholl hires Merriman to do some contract killing. Then Scholl orders him knocked off. The game of kill the killer. Make certain whatever’s been taken care of is permanent, with no loose ends that might talk.”

McVey tore the sanitary wrapper off a water glass, filled it, then came back into the room and sat down. “But Merriman outsmarted Scholl’s people, faked his own death, and got away. And Scholl, assuming Merriman was dead, forgot about him. That was, until you came along and hired Jean Packard to find him.” McVey took a drink of the water, stopping short of mentioning Dr. Klass and Interpol, Lyon. There was only so much Osborn needed to know.

“You think Scholl is behind what’s happened here in Paris?” Osborn asked.

“And Marseilles, and Lyon, thirty years later? I don’t know who Mr. Scholl is yet. Maybe he’s dead, or never was.”

“Then who’s doing this?”

McVey hunched over the bed, made another note in his dog-eared book, then looked at Osborn. “Doctor, when was the first time you saw the tall man?”

“At the river.”

“Not before?”

“No.”

“Think back. Earlier that day, the day before, the day before that.”

“No.”

“He shot you because you were with Merriman and he didn’t want to leave a witness. That what you think?”

“What other reason would there be?”

“Well, for one, it could have been the other way around, that he was there to kill you and not Merriman.”

“Why? How would he know me? And even if that were the case, why would he kill all of Merriman’s family afterward?”

Osborn was right. Seemingly no one had known Merriman was alive until Klass discovered his fingerprint. Then the boom had been lowered. Most probably, as Lebrun had suggested, to keep him from talking, because they knew the police, once they had the print, would grab him in no time. Klass might have been able to delay release of the print, but he couldn’t deny it existed because too many people at Interpol knew about it. So Merriman had to be shut up because of what he might say after he’d been caught. And since he’d been out of business for twenty-five- odd years, what he might have said would have been about what he had done when he was in business. Which would have been almost exactly the same time he was under the hire of Erwin Scholl. Which was why Merriman, along with anyone else he was close enough to have confided in, had been liquidated. To keep him, or them, from talking about what he had done while he was in Scholl’s employ, or at the very least, from implicating Scholl in a murder-for-hire scheme. That meant they either didn’t know who Osborn was or had missed the connection that he was heir to one of Merriman’s victims and—

“Dammit?” McVey said under his breath. Why the hell hadn’t he realized it before? The answer to what was happening lay not with Merriman or Osborn, but with the four people Merriman had killed thirty years earlier, Osborn’s father among them!

McVey stood up in a surge of adrenaline. “What did your father do for a living?”

“His profession?”

“Yeah.”

“He—thought things up,” Osborn said.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“From what I remember, he worked in what was probably then a kind of high-tech think tank. He invented things, then built prototypes of what he invented. Mostly, I think, it had to do with the design of medical instruments.”

“Do you remember the name of the company?”

“It was called Microtab. I remember the company name clearly because they sent a large floral wreath to my father’s funeral. The name of the company was on the card but nobody from the company showed up,” Osborn said vacantly.

McVey knew then the extent of Osborn’s pain. He knew he could still see the funeral, as if it had happened yesterday. It had to have been the same when he saw Merriman in the brasserie.

“This Microtab was in Boston?”

“No, Waltham, it’s a suburb.”

Picking up his pen, McVey wrote: Microtab—Waltham, Mass.—1966.

“Any sense of how he worked? By himself? Or in groups, four or five guys hammering these things out?”

“Dad worked alone. Everybody did. Employees weren’t allowed to talk about what they were working on, even with each other. I remember my mother discussing it with him once. She thought it was ridiculous he couldn’t talk to the person in the next office. Later, I assumed it had to do with patents or something.”

“Do you have any idea what he was working on when he was killed?”

Osborn grinned. “Yes. He’d just finished it and brought it home to show me. He was proud of what he did and liked to show me what he was working on. Although I’m sure he wasn’t supposed to.”

“What was it?”

“A scalpel.”

“A scalpel?—as in surgery?” McVey could feel the hair begin to crawl up the back of his neck.

“Yes.”

“Do you remember what it looked like? Why it was different from any other scalpel?”

“It was cast. Made of a special alloy that could withstand extreme variations in temperature and still remain surgically sharp. It was to be used in association with an electronic arm driven by computer.”

Not only was the hair standing up on McVey’s neck, it felt as if someone had poured ice cubes down his spine. “Somebody was going to do surgery at extreme temperatures. Using some kind of computer-driven gizmo that would hold your father’s scalpel and do the actual work?”

“I don’t know. You have to remember that in those days computers were gigantic, they took up whole rooms, so I don’t know how practical it would have been even if it worked.”

“The temperature business.”

“What about it?”

“You said extreme temperatures. Would that be hot or cold or both?”