“Stand by the door and listen,” I said, swallowing hard.
“I want to leave.”
“Wait for me in the car, then,” I said. “Keep an eye out.”
“You can’t touch anything!” she said in a muffled cry, knotting her fingers. “We should call the police now.”
“Quiet, please!” I said between gritted teeth. I pulled up a chair to sit and think. I stared at the freezer, heard Lissa march away on the old gray carpeting in the hall.
Her footsteps returned.
“Did Rob do it?” she asked.
I shook my head, no way of knowing.
“If so, why?”
“Please, let me think.”
Lissa pulled out a second chair and sat.
“Fingerprints,” I warned. She took a fresh Kleenex from her purse and wiped where she had touched the chair.
“It’s a lab, obviously,” I said. “Maybe the body is someone who tried to hurt him. Kill him.”
“Why cut it up?” Then, in a small but steady voice, Lissa added, “You should try thinking like your brother.”
I straightened and walked around the room. Something nagged, some awareness fogged by more immediate shocks and events. I looked through the clutter of slides, trays, plastic bags, dishes, bottles of chemicals, and found a box of disposable synthetic lab gloves. Rob and I were allergic to latex. I pulled a pair from the box and slipped them over my hands.
Lissa handed me another Kleenex and I wiped the freezer handle. “Take those with us,” I said. She stuffed them into the purse.
“Do you think someone’s searched here already?” she asked. “It looks that way.”
“Shh,” I said, hoping to kindle that elusive spark of memory. I tried to look at the room through other eyes than my own, similar eyes, windows to a similar brain. I opened the small refrigerator. Thirty or so petri dishes had been stacked on the upper shelves. I slipped the cover off one dish and sniffed the pinkish, puddinglike contents.
“Yogurt,” I said. Behind the dishes, in the back of the refrigerator, stood a small, apparently unopened cup of piña colada Yoplait, one of my favorites.
One of Rob’s favorites.
We looked at each other.
“He was trying to learn how they doped his food,” I said. “He was culturing samples from things he might have eaten, or things he knew had been tampered with.”
I closed the refrigerator and looked around with a slow pirouette, as if to catch a shadow off guard. My head hurt with the effort of trying to remember.
A file box about two feet long had been tucked in the corner beside the freezer. I pried up the lid with one finger. Inside were stuffed a pair of gray slacks, a soft knit shirt, pointy-toed black Italian shoes, a black-leather belt, and on top of them, an eelskin wallet, some keys, and a pair of wire-rim sunglasses with small oval lenses.
I picked up the glasses. It all clicked. I opened the freezer and shoved my face and hands down into the cold mist.
“Don’t!” Lissa said, her voice high. “You’ll drop a hair or something.” She must read mysteries, I thought. Could forensic specialists detect the difference between the hair from one twin and the hair from another? I strongly doubted it. Genetically, I was my brother.
I stared at the face, locked in a corpse’s zazen, its frosted eyes indolent. The scalp, like a loose toupee, was covered with thick black hair.
“I’ve seen this guy before,” I said. I lowered the sunglasses over the face, working one temple piece past a stiff fold of scalp and hair. With the top of his head removed, it should have been difficult to recognize him, but I focused on the sharp nose, the lean features, the glasses. Bingo.
A glance and poke in the ribs between two fit, wiry men standing at a bus stop in Berkeley. Not far from the market on Claremont Avenue, before the incident of the little man with the spray bottle.
The corpse in the freezer was one of those two men, alive more than a month after Rob’s murder in New York.
“Rob couldn’t have done this,” I said, and dropped the lid. “Somebody else is involved.”
“Banning?” Lissa asked.
I couldn’t see Banning performing any kind of crude autopsy. “I don’t think so. He’s a book, not a knife.”
It was very, very important that we get the hell out of the room, the building. With my gloves still on, I opened the door and looked up and down the hall. Empty. We stepped out and I closed and locked the door behind us.
We had to walk by the receptionist to reach the stairs. As we passed, she looked up and called out, “Are you from Mr. Escher’s office? I have something for you.”
Numbers. She had been reading numbers to her mother.
“Shit!” I grunted. I grabbed Lissa’s hand and pulled her down the hall.
The receptionist popped from her doorway like a cuckoo out of a clock. She carried a big cardboard box. “Wait!” she shouted. “Someone left this!”
I pushed Lissa into the stairwell. She screamed and half jumped, half stumbled down the first flight, fetching up hard against the cinder-block wall.
I was mostly shielded by the corner when the explosion threw a ragged hammer of flame and debris down the hall. Nails, bolts, jagged splinters of glass and scraps of metal ripped the backs of my shoes and my shirt and shotgunned through the large window. The shock wave kicked me down the steps and I rolled beside Lissa. Smoke filled the stairwell, black and harsh like burning rubber. The valise dug into my diaphragm. I could hardly move, could not breathe.
