"The situation goes like this," Markin said. "It makes no difference if we are dealing with a suicide or a homicide, this death could involve issues of national security. Two days from now, we're going to be flooded with people from Washington. Not only DOE Headquarters, but FBI. It would be very nice if we could tell them, when they arrive or sooner, that we know exactly what happened, how, and why. I'm setting up a special task force to work on this, and a special charge number. Its members will be relieved of all other duties. Jeff King, who I think all of you know" --he gave Jeff a big, friendly grin --"will be in charge. Don't get in his way, and if he needs your help, cooperate in any way you can. Questions?" There were many --what do we know about Frank Lazenby, what did he do, why was he out on the test site at night?

  Jeff hardly listened. For one thing, Tom Markin didn't have any answers, and took a long time saying nothing. For another, it was clear to Jeff that the "special task force" was going to be isolated from the rest of security for a reason. If they succeeded, which at the moment seemed remotely improbable, Tom Markin would re-absorb them into the rest of the operation and claim credit. If they got nowhere, they were there to be pointed at as a team who had failed. It was no comfort to know that the other two people on the task force were marginal employees who had already received warnings for poor performance.

  Jeff escaped from the meeting as soon as he could. Outside in the corridor he found that there was more bad news waiting for him. It took the shape of a pudgy woman in a white lab coat.

  "Sergeant Jefferson King?" she said, as soon as he appeared.

  "That's me."

  "I'd like to talk with you about the death of Frank Lazenby." He stared at her. She was black, with corn-row hair and rimless glasses. "You, too. I guess they hope to get rid of all of us at once, eh? No quotas under this administration." It was an absolutely stupid thing to say, and Jeff regretted the words before they were out of his mouth. The woman stared at him. "I don't know what you mean by that, and I think that I prefer not to ask. My name is Lassandra Kane, and I'm in charge of research for the lab --including Radiological Hazard Research."

  She held out a hand. Jeff took it, feeling like a total fool.

  "Frank Lazenby worked for me," she went on. "And just so we won't be blinded by stereotypes, I'm going to do what I hate doing and usually refuse to do. I'm going to tell you my background. I majored in physics at Texas A&M, fully-funded merit scholarships all the way; then I did a Ph.D. at Berkeley doubling with a position at Lawrence Livermore. Then two years post-doc at SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator, working on decay modes of the superheavy elements. I _earned _this position. All right, Mr. King?"

  She was looking at him expectantly. Jeff decided there was only one way to handle this.

  "More than all right, Dr. Kane. And now for me. I worked eighteen years for the police in Washington, DC. I saw as much corruption inside the force and in the city government as I did in the streets. I was a good street operator, and the best when it came to legwork. That makes me well-qualified to serve as a general security officer here. But I never worked for homicide, and I'm as unqualified to investigate a murder from unknown causes as that there goldfish."

  He pointed to the little aquarium along the corridor wall, where a pale and solitary fish goggled out at them. The sign above the aquarium read: "Department of Energy Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL): Making our country safe for all forms of life." Lassandra Kane glared at the goldfish for a few moments, then to Jeff's relief she burst out laughing.

  "I can live with that. Knowing what you can't do well is something a lot of people never learn. But you're in charge of looking into Lazenby's death, aren't you? That's the word my office got from Tom Markin."

  "I am."

  "Are you free to come and go where you like?"

  "So Markin says."

  "Then let's get out of here, and find somewhere quiet where we can talk." The weather had warmed up a lot since Jeff's early morning ride. It was a shirt-sleeve day, and he had put on a suit for the meeting with Tom Markin. He was glad he had, though he would pay for it now. Lassandra Kane led him to a small blue hybrid-electric convertible. She seemed to be one of the few people at the Lab who didn't favor giant SUVs and pick-up trucks. That showed admirable concern for energy conservation, but had other disadvantages. Jeff squeezed into the passenger seat with nothing to spare. The upholstery was burning hot under his broad behind.

  "I'll take us over to the breeder reactor site," she said. "I have an office there, and chances are better that we won't be disturbed. Why don't we start with basics. How much do you know about Frank Lazenby?"

  "I never heard of him before. I don't think I'd even seen him around, though it was hard to tell just from looking at his body this morning."

  She grimaced. "It was horrible. I had to identify him. If the cause of death was radiation burns, it was far worse than anything I've seen or heard of."

  "What else could it be?"

  She turned to give him a quick grin, and the sun glinted off her rimless glasses. "Aren't you supposed to tell me?"

  Jeff judged that as a rhetorical question. "No wife, no family?" He would ask for a full background from personnel, but there was no harm in getting a head start.

  "He must have had family somewhere, everybody does. But he never talked about them."

  "A bad personal history, do you think?"

  "More like just a very private person. Which he was."

  "No women friends?"

  She hesitated. "Define friends."

  "Sex."

  "Yeah, that sounds like a man's definition. No, no 'friends.'"

  "Could be either a woman or a man."

  "Still no. Look, I wouldn't want you to take just my opinion on this, but I think Frank Lazenby was one of those people who are natural neuters. I don't think he had any sex drive at all. There are people like that."

  "So they say. I'll tell you, from my time as a cop I'd never have known it. In DC, the whole world is sex-mad."

  "Even Congress?"

  "Especially Congress."

  They had reached the experimental breeder reactor site, which Jeff had driven past a thousand times and never been inside. Lassandra Kane parked in a spot labeled DIRECTOR ONLY, right in front of the main building.

  "He's in Washington," she said. "Or he was, first thing this morning. My bet is he's on a plane to Idaho Falls this minute, heading back."

  The office she led Jeff to was not what he had expected, given her position, and most of the space was filled with what looked to him like junk.

  She saw his skeptical expression. "If you want to know where the real work gets done in a lab, look for trailing wires and duct tape. My office in the other building is all coffee cups, conference table, and projection screens." She cleared a monitor off a chair and gestured to Jeff to sit down. "Ask."

  "How sure are you about Lazenby's private life?"

  "Pretty sure. Though if it was _private _private, I wouldn't know. Why do you keep asking?" Jeff wasn't sure. He organized his own thoughts as he answered. "Assume that we're dealing here with a homicide, by unknown means. If you look at the statistics, the vast majority of homicides are family matters --son shoots father, jealous woman stabs lover, husband kills wife during a messy divorce."

  "Terrible."

  "But true. Now, when I first asked about Frank Lazenby's family, I wasn't thinking too clear. It doesn't matter a hoot how well he got on with his relatives, because unless they worked here at the lab they'd have trouble getting anywhere near him. This place is pretty good when it comes to security. So we're looking for an insider. If it's not a lover, we're down to the next level of intimacy. Was Lazenby popular?"

  "Too private and standoffish to be popular. But he wasn't _unpopular_."

  "You liked him, didn't you?"

  "Actually, I did. How could you tell? Never mind, every profession has its secrets. Does that make me a suspect?"

  "No. _Why _did you like him?"

  "Oh, that's a hard one." Lassandra Kane frowned at the monitor beside her desk. "Well, for starters he was smart. I mean, _really _smart, in a shy and quiet way. He didn't show it off at all, but in some ways he was maybe the brightest man I've ever met."

  "Or woman?"

  "That, too. The brightest _person _I ever met. But just being smart wouldn't do it. Some very intelligent people are absolute sons of bitches. The thing about Frank Lazenby, there was a sort of innocence to him. He believed in absolutes. The United States is the greatest country in the world. Our form of government is the best. Motherhood and apple pie and fireworks on July 4th, and people are fundamentally good and can be trusted. Simple things, and you might think they're old-fashioned. But I never knew Frank to do a mean thing, or say a mean word."

  "Not ambitious?"

  "That's a different and more complicated question. He didn't care about money, or titles. A couple of times he refused promotion, because he wanted to go on with his research and administration would get in the way. But in his work, he was as ambitious as you could get. Not for personal fame, you understand, but for worthwhile results. He always said that this country had been very good to him and given him a lot, and he wanted to give something back."

  "Did he succeed?" Jeff was finding it harder and harder to visualize the sort of person who would kill Frank Lazenby.

  "Oh, yes. He had over forty patents in the field of lasers and electronic detectors. They would have been enormously valuable in private industry, but of course here they all belong to the government. The only problem was getting him to talk about them."

  "How can you possibly file a patent without talking about it?"

  "Oh, he'd write everything up eventually --when he was sure that there were no unresolved problems. You know, everyone is supposed to keep daily notebooks, recording the status of their work. You should have seen Frank's. They were utterly useless. They revealed nothing but platitudes and minor progress, until one day there would be a working model and a perfect paper on his desk. He couldn't publish in the open literature, of course, because of national security. But within the classified community he has a terrific reputation."

  She stared shrewdly at Jeff. "You don't look too happy with any of this."

  "I'm out of my depth. Show me a night club where two guys get drunk, argue, and one of them sticks the other in the street outside, I'll figure out who started it and who to charge. Here, there's no motive, no method, and no suspects. Hell, where Lazenby was killed there's not even a street to fight in."

  "There's still a scene of the crime." Lassandra Kane turned to the computer on the desk. She hit a dozen keystrokes, and a color image popped up like magic on the monitor. "Want to see exactly where Frank Lazenby died?" A red cursor showed on the screen. "It was here." Jeff stared at the picture. It didn't tell him one thing. "What is that?"

  "A Landsat-7 image of the Idaho test area. Taken from space, seven hundred kilometers up, then ortho-rectified so we know exactly where each point on the picture is on the ground. What you're looking at covers about ten thousand square kilometers. Here's the test area boundary." An irregular polygon traced itself on the screen. Jeff recognized the shape from maps he had seen. "How did you do that?"

  "It's not hard. The Landsat image and the boundaries are layers in a GIS --a Geographic Information System. You can enter different kinds of information into the computer as different data layers, registered to a common reference frame, and overlay them on each other. Like this, for instance." A series of closed curves appeared, black outlines on the monitor. "Altitude data. Important if you care about water run-off and land use."

  "Does this have anything at all to do with Frank Lazenby's death?"

  "Believe it or not, it does. The Landsat image is just a kind of background, to give the user a feel of where you are. The data that we care more about for our work are these." A grid, regular and close-spaced, jumped onto the image. "What you are seeing is the overall radiation level at each grid point."

  "You can measure the radiation value from space?"

  "I wish. No, this is the result of thousands and thousands of hours of ground measurements. And what you are seeing has been simplified for display purposes. The real data provide dose rates to one percent or better, but we only use eight colors on the image. Blue indicates low-dose, and red means a bad hot spot that we need to worry about in the remediation program for nuclear waste clean-up. So, for instance..."

  Her voice trailed off. Jeff had been following her technical explanation --just. However, he found the puzzled tone in her final words far more significant.

  "What is it? You've seen something, haven't you?"

  "I don't know. But this is strange." She moved a cursor on the screen. "There's where Frank Lazenby's body was found. Didn't you say he was walking north?"

  "It looked that way, from the orientation of the body."

  "Well, look at the radiation data to the south. Every grid point is red for the next kilometer."

  "So he would have been in danger, walking that way?"

  "Oh, no. We've taken care of the very worst clean-up. You can walk through the hottest hot spot on the Idaho test range, and not be hurt. But Wally Bronsteed and Pete Walden drove that path this morning, and they reported that the radiation levels were all _below _normal."

  "They were. I was with them when we walked back from the van to Lazenby's body. The radiation counter didn't click at all. Is that telling you something important, Dr. Kane?"

  "Perhaps --but I'm afraid it's not something relevant to the death of Frank Lazenby. It just means that the grid mesh in the area is too coarse. You see, ground measurements were only recorded every two hundred meters. In the area south of where you found Frank's body, those grid point measurements indicate high radiation levels. But you walked along a path about halfway between grid lines, and you found low radiation. It means we need a finer grid, because we're missing local highs and lows. I'd better get onto that --it could affect our whole remediation program."

  She spoke as though what they had seen ended the discussion of radiation levels where Frank Lazenby had been found. It seemed to Jeff that he would have argued exactly the other way. Finding low values where a data base told you to expect high ones suggested something odd, something that needed to be looked into further.

  Unfortunately, that sort of exploration was far beyond Jeff's powers. He pushed the discussion back toward the only area where he might have an edge over Lassandra Kane: people.

  "The place where we found Frank Lazenby's body is twenty miles from the building he worked in. Assuming he didn't walk there, somebody must have given him a ride. You say he was a solitary and private person. So who?"

  "I can't give you a definite answer, as you very well know. But the fact that Frank was a loner actually helps. He had his own office, but he shared a small laboratory with three other people. Dr. Willoughby, Dr. Watts, and Dr. Schaefer. He didn't mix much outside that."

  Wall-to-wall Ph.D.s, but after three years Jeff was used to that. "Would those three know that he is dead?"

  "Not from me. But that sort of news travels fast. I'd guess they do know, along with almost everyone else at INEEL."

  "Then I'd like to interview them. All at once, if that's possible."

  "Wouldn't it be better to talk to them one-on-one? You know, to check consistency."

  "I'm more interested in observing how they relate to each other --how they watch each other."

  "I guess you know your business. Is it all right if I sit in?" It was a difficult question. Since Lassandra Kane was the general head of research, they worked for her. But were there things they might be reluctant to say in her presence?

  "I'd rather do it without you. I'll promise this, though: anything I learn, I will tell you. And my questioning will be informal."

  She stood up. "As I said, you know your business."

  Jeff wasn't at all sure that he did.

  "They're over in the Radioactive Waste Management Complex," she went on. "I'll call and say who you are, and that we are on the way over. We could walk, but if it's all right with you, we'll drive. Since I won't be involved past the introductions, I want to head over to where they've got Frank's body."

  "An autopsy?"

  "There has to be, but it's on hold until we hear from Washington." She made a quick phone call, then led the way back out of the building and over to the blue convertible. Jeff squeezed in and found the seat hotter than ever. As she started the engine he felt sweat beginning on the back of his neck. Two-seventy was too much, even for somebody six-four. What happened to the resolution to take off forty pounds?

  "Dr. Kane, I'm sure you know far more about the effects of radiation than I do. Even without the autopsy, what's your best guess as to how Frank Lazenby died?"

  The little car was underpowered and had a stick shift. Lassandra Kane changed gears with swift, economical movements. She stared straight ahead as she answered. "Radiation overdose. _Huge _radiation overdose, something that killed in minutes rather than days or months. That's a bigger dose than I've ever heard of or believed possible --and the Radiological Health Handbook has been like my Bible for ten years. Frank Lazenby wasn't just irradiated, he was _cooked. _And now I've said that, I'll tell you why I must be wrong. That much radiation should have induced secondary radioactivity in his body, things like potassium isotopes with half-lives of hours and longer. There was no sign of them." Jeff realized that he was listening more than he was understanding. "This Bible you said you used."

  "The Radiological Health Handbook?"

  "That's it. Do you know where I could find a copy, to borrow for a while?" She gave him a quick sideways glance, not quite a smile. "Reach under your seat, and you'll find my copy."

  "Oh, I wouldn't want to take yours." But Jeff groped around beneath him and pulled out an oversized book with a pale blue cover. He opened it at random, stared, then flipped through the pages. "Whoever wrote this didn't have much use for words, did they?"

 

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