‘My client’s not in any trouble, but call me any time.’
No trouble apart from being a potential murder victim, thought Parnell. He said: ‘Anything come up since we talked?’
‘Nothing that helps join the dots together,’ dismissed the agent.
‘What about Rebecca’s house? You’ve been through the house. Her uncle told me.’
‘You’re not next of kin, Mr Parnell.’
‘I’m the person who was going to marry her and got wrongly arraigned for her murder and whom your partner a couple of days ago agreed it was worthwhile to talk things through with.’
Dingley sighed. ‘We picked up an address book and found a listing in Arlington for an Alan Smeldon. He left there about a year ago. The couple who took over his apartment think he went to California. He didn’t leave a forwarding address.’
‘Nothing else?’ persisted Parnell.
‘Like I said, nothing that takes us forward,’ refused Dingley. ‘Everything kept very neat and tidy. That’s what Ms Lang was, very neat and tidy. You thought of anything that might help us, Mr Parnell? A friend of Ms Lang’s, maybe.’
Parnell shook his head, unsure when he’d last had a comprehensible thought. But then, abruptly, the clouds cleared in his head, to a moment of crystal clarity. ‘The key!’ he exclaimed. ‘You asked Giorgio Falcone for the key to get into Rebecca’s house. But she had one, in her purse. Would have had to have had one, when she left me, to get back into her house!’
‘There wasn’t one among the property Metro DC police surrendered to us,’ said Dingley.
‘Did you and your partner do the search?’ asked Jackson, entering the conversation at last.
‘Yes,’ said Dingley.
‘You find any evidence of someone having been there before you?’ persisted the lawyer.
‘We didn’t,’ said Dingley. ‘But we’ve got forensics there now. They’re better at finding out the little things than we are.’
Seventeen
R ichard Parnell thought one of his better successes – maybe even his only success so far at Dubette – was perhaps his refusal to be distracted by the fame-or-fear procession up and down the open-plan, glassed corridor to Dwight Newton’s lair. He would have ignored the bustle that day, too, if Beverley Jackson’s remark hadn’t included an FBI reference. Parnell looked up in time to see company lawyer Peter Baldwin hurrying towards the vice president’s innermost office, leading two briefcase-carrying, dark-suited men.
He said: ‘How do you figure it’s a Bureau thing?’
‘They’re lawyers and I know lawyers, remember? They’re cloned in a lawyer factory, somewhere hidden in Ohio.’ Beverley had the bench space next to him for the avian-flu investigation.
‘Barry doesn’t look like that.’
‘He was a prototype that didn’t work – they abandoned the model.’
‘He sure as hell worked for me,’ said Parnell, uncaring at the American phraseology. He felt better. Not totally better, convinced as he once had been that he could climb mountains and swim oceans, but the cotton-wool feeling had gone from his head, and every moving part of his body didn’t ache at the slightest motion. The previous night had again been more of an exhausted collapse than sleep, but it had been rest of sorts, and that morning, alert as he now had to be, there hadn’t any longer been the confused disorientation of making monsters out of shadows.
‘Pity he didn’t work so well for me.’
It was more a throwaway line than an inviting complaint – an invitation Parnell wouldn’t anyway have accepted – but he thought it confirmed that Beverley Jackson was someone who always demanded the last word in any one-to-one conversation. He decided to allow it to her, because he wasn’t interested in trying to out-talk the woman.
What he was far more interested in was configuring something from the earlier influenza pandemics with the current outbreak, which yet again he accepted to be an illogical expectation but for which he’d hoped after Sean Sato’s initial, seemingly encouraging discoveries. Tokyo’s response to Parnell’s SARS query was as Lapidus had predicted, that their research was predicated on a connecting transmission link between that and avian flu, and that they had anticipated the exploration would be duplicated in America. Parnell copied the email to Russell Benn, together with his reply that the pharmacogenomics unit were treating the two respiratory conditions separately. As an afterthought he made a separate copy to the vice president, towards whose office he’d just seen the legal procession head.
By then he, Beverley Jackson, Ted Lapidus and Sato had exhausted every microscope comparison with the limited Tokyo samples without finding anything approaching a visual match to the spiked 1918 haemagglutinin gene or the structure of the 1968 Hong Kong virus. It was because there was a momentary hiatus in their work that Beverley had been looking out into the corridor, and it was the woman who said again: ‘And then there were more!’
Parnell looked up in time to see Howard Dingley and David Benton passing. Parnell almost expected them to be walking in step, but they weren’t. As he went by, Dingley looked into the unit and gestured. Parnell said: ‘They’re FBI.’
‘So I was right,’ insisted Beverley.
Definitely a last-word syndrome, thought Parnell. He said: ‘It was set up at the funeral.’
‘What’s our next step forward?’ impatiently broke in Sean Sato.
There was something proprietorial in the way the Japanese-American spoke, as if his earlier findings qualified him above the other two under Parnell’s supervision. Parnell said: ‘The obvious one, animals. We’ll try to synthesize, in mice to begin with. See if we can bring about a mutation and then monitor it, to find the bridge the virus crosses.’
‘All of us?’ queried Lapidus.
‘We don’t need to be involved, all of us, this early,’ acknowledged Parnell. ‘You three kick it off. I want to go back on that research Sean found, see if we can take it further and open up a separate path. We’re going to need more samples from Tokyo, too. We’ll jointly discuss each day’s progress.’
‘You’re second-checking?’ seized Lapidus.
Parnell was surprised at the interjection. ‘Of course. Nothing’s going to leave this department unless it’s been second and third and fourth time checked. And that’s before it goes into the statutory three-phase licensing process.’
‘We going to manage that in our lifetime?’ asked Lapidus.
‘It’s somebody else’s lifetime we’re concerned with,’ reminded Parnell.
‘I didn’t mean…’ started Lapidus, disconcerted.
‘I’m talking about what emerges from this unit, not anything else,’ Parnell halted him, sparing the man. ‘We all clear on what we’re doing?’
The two other men nodded. Beverley said: ‘Perfectly.’
Kathy Richardson looked up at Parnell’s emergence from the restricted laboratory, shaking her head at his enquiring look as he approached, to let him know there were no messages. Inside her office the woman was enclosed behind the battlement of file boxes, some already filled, many more waiting to be filled with the raw data she was in the process of sorting.
He said: ‘It’ll get better.’
‘You promise?’
‘I promise. And I’ll send my own emails.’
‘You needn’t.’
‘Democracy rules in the Dubette pharmacogenomics unit.’
‘I’ll get the T-shirts and the fender stickers printed.’
Parnell laughed openly at the gradually emerging independent irony, convinced he’d made the right choice in Kathy Richardson, as he had with everyone else. His email to Tokyo was brief, a simple request for more samples. Parnell experienced a nostalgic deja vu of his open-minded, free-exchange period in pure research when he began communicating with the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego and the National Institute for Medical Research in London. Literally within an hour, there were enthusiastic acknowledgements from the directors of both, each
