The World's Finest Mystery Part 86

He hurried out the door. Evelyn's grin widened. "Touchy, touchy."

"He hates to lose," Weisburg said.

"He should be used to it by now," I said.

"h.e.l.l, I think that's the problem. He's always losing," Bob said. "At least on the things that count."

"Excuse me." The voice came from the stairs. A middle-aged couple stood there. The wife had artificially blond hair that didn't match her sun-wrinkled face, and the husband had his arm around her protectively. "We're here to see Detective Gray."

"That's me," I said. The group silenced behind me and went to their desks. "How can I help you?"

The man looked at the woman. He cleared his throat. "I'm Nic Glisando, and this is my wife Anne."

I didn't let the surprise I felt show on my face. "Let's go somewhere private," I said.

I took them to one of the interview rooms and closed the door. They remained standing, as if the place were disgusting to them, and it probably was. Glisando's polo s.h.i.+rt had a designer label and his wife's hands were covered in jewelry worth more than I'd earn in the next fifteen years.

"We're Melanie's parents," Mrs. Glisando said, as if I hadn't already put that together. "She told us you'd been to see her."

"Yes," I said, not sure how this related to me. I hadn't taken Glisando into custody, and I wasn't planning to. But the parents were clearly frightened.

"When I heard that, I told my husband Nic that he had to talk to you." She turned to him. "Nicky. Please."

Glisando wiped his hands on his trousers, then glanced at the tape recorder in the center of the table. "That's not on, is it?"

"No," I said. My heart was pounding. I didn't know what I had stumbled into.

"What I have to tell you is in the strictest confidence. I could get fired for revealing this to anyone."

This was good. I pointed to the chairs. The wife sat, and then her husband. I sat too. "I'm not really in the business of keeping confidences."

"If I tell you something, and I give you doc.u.mentation, will you promise me you won't say where it came from?"

"Why would you do this?" I asked.

"So that you don't charge my girl. She's dying as it is." Glisando said that as if he'd had practice, but his wife looked down. They traded strengths in this family.

I sat still for a moment, thinking. Then what Glisando said registered with me. The parents thought that my charging Melanie with Dudich's murder was a foregone conclusion.

I sighed. I had already made up my mind about Glisando. She wouldn't be killing anyone else, not in her condition, and what she had already done would soon be taken up between her and her maker. I didn't have to tell these folks that, of course, but I didn't have to leave them hang either.

"Tell you what," I said. "If I think the information you have is compelling, I won't charge your daughter."

"And you won't tell anyone where you got this?"

"No."

Glisando nodded and then handed me a computer disk.

I took it and slapped it against my palm. "You want to tell me what's on it?"

His eyes met mine. They were a pale blue, almost clear, and the whites around them were lined with red. "I used to work at Columbia. Meteorology. Then I got hired by-"

"Nic," his wife said warningly. He nodded to her.

"-I got hired by a private company that has a defense contract. We've been working on this project for years, but we've been doing field work since January."

I waited. I didn't see how this fit in.

"Experimenting. In Manhattan." He stopped then, as if I should understand. I didn't.

"How does this relate to Melanie?" I asked.

"No one's been murdered in the city in three weeks."

"Yes," I said.

"It's the heat."

"Beg pardon," I said, "usually heat causes people to go crazy, not to stop going crazy."

"I know," Glisando said. "But we've been studying the effect of weather on the human killing impulse."

"It's a defense contract," his wife said softly, as if I hadn't heard it the first time. It was all I could do not to snap at her. She apparently thought public servants didn't have the intelligence of a gnat.

"As a rule, human beings don't kill each other when the temperature goes below zero," Glisando was saying, "even if they can't leave the house for days. It just doesn't happen. But if the mercury is above ninety degrees for a long time, murder rates climb. We thought if we could isolate the impulse, we could negate it."

"We?"

"We," he said. "I can't go into all of this. I don't understand much of it myself. I was there to be the forecaster, and the predictor, and to help develop computer models on weather patterns. But to make a long story short, we thought we'd isolated the impulse- we had in lesser mammals- so we field-tested on Manhattan."

That woke me up. "Manhattan?"

He nodded. "It's an island, which means it's controllable, and it's got fairly predictable weather patterns. We knew, for example, there'd be a long heat spell this summer. We just didn't know when."

"So you're not causing the heat?"

He laughed, a mirthless sound that was more a reaction to my ignorance than any amus.e.m.e.nt on his part. "No. Of course not."

"You're causing the murder rate to go down?"

"Actually, my colleagues are. They're biologists and psychologists. I simply worked on the weather aspects of it." He'd said that already. I just hadn't understood it before. Maybe I did need Mrs. Glisando as an interpreter.

"And they do this through-?"

"A combination of chemicals and hormones that have to do with the brain. I don't understand much of this myself, but it's on the disk."

"So they're spraying the city with some kind of chemical?"

"It's not that simple, Detective," he said. "Like I said, it's on the disk."

"The disk is in my hand, not the computer. You can explain it to me."

Glisando shook his head. "I'm not here to talk science. I want to get my daughter cleared."

The man was loony, and his wife wasn't much better. I wanted them out of the precinct. I wanted the case closed.

"In order to clear her, you have to tell me how all this science is relevant," I said.

Glisando glanced at his wife. "We had to test our theory," he said, "in all kinds of weather. Take the fourteenth of February, for example."

The night Dudich had died. The night of the cold spell. The night of all the homicides. I remembered that even before Melanie Glisando had mentioned it to me.

"We had to see if we could make people behave contrary to our a.s.sumptions," Glisando said.

"People don't usually kill on cold nights," his wife said, as if I hadn't understood.

I had. I was just in shock. I couldn't believe they'd haul this out to protect their daughter. I couldn't believe anyone would believe I'd believe this.

"If what you're saying is true," I said slowly, "then all the deaths in the city that night could be laid on your doorstep."

"The company's," he said, as if he'd already thought of that.

"And the government's."

He shrugged. "They said it all balances. No one's been dying all summer."

I stared at them. They stared at me. I had nothing to say to them. If his theory was true, then this was something as big as the atomic-bomb tests with human guinea pigs at ground zero, the ones that happened in the fifties. If it wasn't true, it was the strangest story I'd ever heard anyone make up to get someone else off the hook.

And The Silence lent just enough credence to it. More than enough.

There were b.u.t.terflies in my stomach.

It was my turn to clear my throat. I did, and swallowed hard. "So your program works," I said, trying to keep my voice calm. "And since it does, is it going to spread from city to city? Are you going to cover the countryside with this- chemical?"

He shook his head. "It didn't work."

I frowned. "You just said it did work. No one died."

"But the violence continues. That's what we missed. We didn't change people's basic nature. We just muted it."

"Or made it quirkier," I said, thinking not of this heat wave and The Silence, but of all the bizarre deaths all winter long.

His wife bowed her head. He closed his eyes and turned away from me. I waited, but that last shut them up. They seemed to have nothing more to say.

"I'm keeping the disk," I said finally.

Glisando turned back to me. "Illness makes people think irrational thoughts."

"And drugs make them act on it," I said. "That's never really been an excuse before."

I don't remember that night, Melanie Glisando had said to me. G.o.d's truth. I woke up unable to remember going to bed.

G.o.d, I was in the wrong place to hear this conversation. Too many strange things had happened. Too many strange things were still happening.

"I'm not going to charge Melanie," I said. I stood and opened the door. "But that's only because I can't do anything worse to her than is already being done."

"She's not a bad person," Mrs. Glisando said.

I turned to her. "Let's say for a moment that I believe your husband. Let's say that he did something to this city to make the murder rate climb in cold weather. Whatever he did wasn't one hundred percent effective, or we'd all be dead. It only allowed those with a predisposition to murder to commit the act."

Glisando shook his head. "You don't understand," he said.

I looked at him. "Yes," I said. "I'm afraid I do."

That night, I watched the weather on television. The first hurricane of the season was blowing up from the Carolinas, and the heat wave, so stifling and oppressive, was at an end. I kept my windows open and, sure enough, about 3 A.M., the wind howled through the building canyons and the rain pelted the streets and the air got cool.

Blissfully cool.

That morning, a man jogging despite the rain (or maybe because of it) through Central Park was mugged and beaten to death. A drug runner for one of the local gangs was shot on 42nd Street, and a broker was found strangled near the Exchange. By the time I got up, the news was already blaring on the radio.

The Silence was over.

Within days our caseload filled back up. But that didn't stop Bob from finding the evidence he needed to pin the murder of the neighbor on the husband and wife. Nor did it stop Weisburg from identifying the man who'd swallowed the finger as the head of a smuggling ring that had double-crossed the mob. The finger still had prints, and it belonged to the man's wife, who was alive and willing to talk if she was sent to witness protection.

Only Hawkins didn't solve his crime, which was no surprise. It's hard to make a case with just a torso and part of an arm for evidence. All the other body parts floating around the city didn't match.

The team thought I'd failed too, and I let them. I didn't say anything about Glisando or her nutty parents, at least not to the other wagerers. I did some double-checking, found out where Nic Glisando worked, found out, too, that he'd been there all night the night Dudich had been murdered. So Nic Glisando hadn't killed his daughter's lover, and neither had the wife. She'd been out of the country, visiting relatives in Europe.

Maybe it was that news that made me make three copies of the disk on the department's computer. Or maybe it was my innate caution. I gave one copy to my captain and the second to the Daily News. The Daily News apparently read the disk and printed the speculation that Glisando had laid on me, but by then, The Silence was long forgotten. The story ended up on page ten, bottom, a two-inch column that no one seemed to notice.

My captain thought the information on the disk as strange as I did and wrote it off to the flakiness some people could exhibit when under stress.

That's what I told myself too. But I keep the third copy of that disk in my desk and the original in a safety-deposit box because I'm as superst.i.tious as the next guy. Maybe more so. And I'm keeping a graph now too. On one line is the ambient temperature in Manhattan, on the other, the number of homicides. I tell you, if things start looking strange, or we get some more Silence, I'm marching up to that farm upstate and getting more information, like what the government is really going to do with the knowledge if the experiments succeed.

What I'll do with that information, I haven't a clue. And at this moment, it's not really an issue. Things are back to normal. I'm overworked, overloaded, and suffering from stress. When a car backfires, I duck like I always have, knowing that random gunshots are happening again, and that people are dying at the hands of other people, just like they have from the time Cain had it in for his hapless brother Abel.

Hard to believe, even for myself, that I'm praying there won't be another Silence. Statistics experts say there won't, that this was just one of those anomalies that happen from time to time, something strange for the record books. The religious nuts blame the millennium, as they always do, and the change back to man's inherent evil nature. The alternate-timeline folks say that we'd been in a bubble, and now we're back on track.

I like those ideas a lot better than Glisando's. Glisando's means that human mind-control is possible, and that would put people like me, people who know but aren't affected, under an obligation to stop whatever's going on. And I don't like moral conundrums like that. I don't want my mind controlled any more than the next guy, but I also don't want the guy next to me to haul out his daddy's hunting knife and carve me into Sunday dinner because he's sick of sweating too much for the eighth day in a row.

So far my chart has shown nothing, and I doubt it ever will. People will say anything when their kid's dying, and could be up for murder at the same time. People'll say anything.

But what crosses my mind, usually at night, usually before I fall asleep, is that little thread of guilt that showed itself in Nic Glisando's face every time he frowned, the way he wouldn't quite look at me, the way he protected his soul. I believe his daughter killed Joel Dudich. Glisando believes it, too. Only he thinks that she did it because he was working on some strange government experiment.

I think she did it because, at home, she'd never learned how to take responsibility for herself.