Mercy

to find things that they could use to embarrass the United States. But most of what they found was mundane material like requisition orders for stationery.

The point was that they kept at it, laboriously re-assembling every page.

It can be done.

And if Nat had shredded the fax, then it would be among the strips at the top of the pile.

22:24 PDT

Jonathan was sitting on the bed, looking down at his hands. He was no longer crying. Whatever mixture of emotions had coursed through him — guilt, regret, fear — had all passed now. All that was left was a kind of exhausted passivity, as if he could now accept anything else that life threw at him.

“Jonathan, I can’t condemn you for what you did. I think I understand the pain and torment your father put Dorothy through. And it must have pained you no end to witness it. And to see it at such a young age yourself, must have made it all the more painful. But there are some things that I need to understand. Like, how did you shooting your father lead to Dorothy running away to England?”

Jonathan looked up.

“After I shot him, I went into a complete panic. But some kind of self-preservation instinct kicked in. I wiped the gun and dropped it near the body. I wasn’t trying to stage the crime scene or anything like that. I mean, I didn’t think to make it seem like suicide. I just didn’t want to leave any evidence pointing to me. So I just wiped the revolver, dropped it and ran.”

Something in these words didn’t quite make sense to Alex.

“Wait a minute. You didn’t stage it to look like suicide?”

“No. I didn’t think of that at the time. I didn’t think of anything other than saving my skin. I just wanted to get out of there.”

Ordinarily, Alex would have known better than to interrupt a man when he was in the full flow of a confession. But he needed clarity.

“Okay, so what happened then?”

“I ran home, terrified. And I told Dorothy what had happened. She got me to wash my hands to make sure there was no gunshot residue and throw my clothes in the washing machine to make extra sure. She also made me take a shower.

“By the time I got out of the shower I’d already calmed down and I began to think I’d got away with it. Even though the gunshot was loud, no one had come out of their apartments to see what it was. No one had seen me leaving and no cops had come knocking on the door. I’d remembered to wipe the prints off the gun and washed away any evidence that might have been on me or my clothes. I mean, I was naive enough to think I had. If I’d come under suspicion, they’d probably have found some evidence.

“I know now that there’s a limit to what you can wash away. There were probably traces of my father’s brains on the T-shirt. The trouble was, while I was over the hysteria, Dorothy had just hit panic mode.”

“Why?”

“Because she’d remembered that she’d loaded the revolver. Her prints were on the shells. And I’d left it there!”

22:28 PDT

Nat was driving frantically, trying to put it all together. Alex had decided on the spur of the moment to go to Jonathan’s place. Why? Something was going on … but what? Was Juanita holding something back? Why was she being cagey?

By this stage, Nat was panicking himself. He had to find out.

With a press of a button on his cell phone, he called Juanita again.

“I was just wondering if we’d heard any more news from David.”

A pause.

“Why do you ask?”

She sounded suspicious.

“Well the way I see it we’ve run out of options unless David can come up with something that we can take to the governor.”

“David was attacked in the lab. Or just outside it.”

“Holy shit!”

She told him the details as Alex had described them to her.

“So now we’ve got nothing,” Nat said, sounding sorrowful.

“Not unless Jonathan gives us something. Oh … and the other platter.”

“What other platter?”

“Well whoever attacked David didn’t know that one of the platters from the hard disk was still inside the microscope.”

22:32 PDT

“I wanted to go back and retrieve the gun — or go there with gloves and wipe her prints off the shells,” Jonathan said. “It was a revolver so we’d have had to take each of them out and wipe them.”

“That would have been risky wouldn’t it? I mean they might have found the body already?”

“I know. I mean, Dorothy realized that at the time. That’s why she wouldn’t let me do it.”

“And that’s why she had to flee?”

“Exactly. She knew that they’d dust the shells for prints and it would only be a matter of time before they matched the dabs to hers.”

“Did she have a rap sheet?” asked Alex, surprised.

“No, but we figured they’d check with the CDMV.”

Alex nodded approvingly at Nat’s sharp logic — or possibly Dorothy’s. The California Department of Motor Vehicles kept thumbprint records of drivers licensed by the State.

“You think they’d check?”

“Sooner or later. And with murders, they always consider other members of the family and check their prints. They’d know it wasn’t a robbery, because nothing was taken.”

“But I don’t understand one thing. Edgar Olsen’s death was accepted as suicide. How could that have happened if neither of you went back to stage the crime scene and make it look like suicide?”

“I don’t know. That’s something that I’ve never been able to figure out. All I know is that, up until the time Dorothy left, the police and the coroner were staying tight-lipped. After she fled, I found out that they were treating it as suicide. But by then it was too late to tell her. I’d lost all contact with her.”

“And did they say why they accepted it as suicide?”

“Well the entry wound was in his right temple. I mean, that makes perfect sense ’cause he turned away just before I fired. But there was something else … something that didn’t make any sense at all.”

“What”

“They said the gun was in his right hand.”

“But you said you dropped the gun on the floor after wiping it?”

“I did!”