The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries Part 41

"I thought he was my friend," he continued with quiet intensity. "He used to meet me at the door every day. I'd hand him his mail and he'd give me the cards to post for him. Then one day he caught me reading one of Charles's postcards. I guess he must have been suspecting it for a while. He wouldn't open the door after that. He'd just stand on the other side and taunt me, telling me over and over again that everyone would find out that I really wasn't perfect. I had to kill him. Don't you see? I am perfect. The perfect postman!"

He lurched toward me, the blade upraised. As he crossed the doorstep and stepped onto the rug, I gave the line hidden in my hand a tug. His feet went flying out from under him. The knife fell from his hand. He cracked his head against the doorjamb and sagged to the floor, unconscious but still very much alive.

"Well, that's one ghost laid to rest," I said to myself. I reached behind a pile of boxes and switched off the tape recorder. Then I phoned the police.

Karen came over that night, long after they'd taken the raving postman away in a strait-jacket. I felt sorry for him but not all that sorry. He'd tried to kill me, too. I'd told her all about it on the phone, rubbing it in just a little when I reminded her about restless ghosts and hauntings by mail.

I wasn't surprised when she showed up with a peace offering. "Housewarming gift?" I asked, accepting the brightly wrapped package.

"Open it up," she smiled.

I did just that. "But I don't need a chess set," I protested. "I don't know how to play and I'm certainly not going to learn now. I don't believe in chess."

"What about ghosts?"

"I don't believe in them, either."

"Then what do you believe in?" Karen demanded.

I looked around me, taking in the endless stacks of cartons and crates, untouched since the movers had left them there except for the addition of a faint coating of dust. "The scarcity of good apartments in New York City," I said firmly. "That's what I believe in . . . I think."

Murder in Monkeyland Lois Gresh & Robert Weinberg Robert Weinberg (b. 1946) is a renowned collector and specialist in pulp magazines and pulp art who turned to writing, starting with a series featuring occult detective Alex Warner in The Devil's Auction (1988). Lois Gresh (b. 1956) is a computer programmer and systems a.n.a.lyst. Their skills came together on the techno-thriller The Termination Node (1999). Their other collaborations include The Science of Superheroes (2002) and The Science of Supervillains (2004). Lois tells me that she once worked in a research establishment very similar to the one described here, but to say any more would spoil the story.

1.

Once upon a time, after returning from the bank where I had the pleasure of making a six-figure deposit of the week's earnings, I casually asked my boss, Penelope Peters, what special talent made her so incredibly successful. After all, Penelope, due to a genetic imperfection in her cells, suffered from extreme agoraphobia. She was unable to leave her home without suffering major panic attacks that left her a total mental and physical wreck. Yet, working from her office deep in the heart of Manhattan, she earned astonis.h.i.+ng sums week after week solving problems that stumped the highest and the mightiest throughout the country, and sometime even the world. Having served as her a.s.sistant; chief bottle-washer; and eyes, ears, nose, and legs for the past five years, I had witnessed her genius so often I had become inured to her working miracles. I just wondered how.

"Brains and personality," answered Penelope, with the barest twinkle in her green eyes. It was the punch line to one of the oldest and dumbest jokes around, and she loved using it.

"Yeah, right," I countered, "save it for the newspapers. Tell me the truth. I've devoted the past five years of my life running errands, going to used book stores, attending board meetings, and catching crooks for you. It's time I learned the secret handshake." Then, to show that I wasn't actually annoyed with her, I added, "Please."

"Oh, well," said Penelope, rising from behind her imposing ebony desk in the center of her office. "You won't believe using the Magic 8-Ball, I a.s.sume?"

"Nope," I replied. "Nor the ouija board explanation or the sack of old bones in the closet. I want the real stuff. So I can finally make my own way in the world, starting with a big advertis.e.m.e.nt on the internet: 'Sean O'Brien, Investigations; formerly employed by the notorious Penelope Peters, World's Premier Problem Solver. '"

Penelope frowned. "You're not really thinking of leaving?" she asked. "It would take me years to train another a.s.sistant."

"Decades," I replied, with a grin. "It would take you decades. If not lifetimes."

"Besides," she said, "I haven't sent you scouring used book stores for years now. I buy everything off the internet and have it delivered by Fed Ex."

"There was that time I took the ferry to Hoboken-" I began, but she cut me off with the wave of a hand.

"Enough, enough," she said. Penelope walked to the mahogany floor-to-ceiling bookcases that covered the left wall and laid one hand on the top of a well-read volume. "Everything I know I learned from studying this book. Read it, absorb it, and don't forget it. That's all you need to do to be just like me."

That I doubted. I stand six foot two, weigh two hundred and forty pounds, and made it through college on a football scholars.h.i.+p. I have a degree in accounting, a detective's badge, and a black belt in karate. I'm a fast talker, possess a near-photographic memory, and know how to follow instructions. My hair and eyes are black as coal, and n.o.body mistakes me for a movie star. Any resemblance between me and my boss is purely imaginary.

At five foot seven, 110 pounds, with green eyes and brown hair, Penelope Peters might have made it as a top fas.h.i.+on model if she lost fifteen or twenty pounds and could manage to leave her home on a.s.signments. Since the second option was out of the question, she obviously saw no reason to consider the first. Not that I think she would have bothered. Penelope didn't like taking orders from anyone, which was why she had set up her consulting business years before, when her agoraphobia was just starting to act up. In the time since, she's become the problem solver that other problem solvers come to when they're stumped. Her IQ number is off the charts, and her office is filled with rare trinkets and expensive gifts sent to her from satisfied clients throughout the world. Her brains didn't come from any one book. But, I'm no dummy. I know what my boss is like. Besides, I was curious. I took the book.

"The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle," I read aloud. "Sherlock Holmes? Everything you know, you learned from Sherlock Holmes?"

"Elementary, my dear O'Brien," said Penelope, with a smile.

"He's not a real person. He's a character in a book."

"Real or not, he knew the secret to solving mysteries," said Penelope. "Any sort of mysteries, be they problems with business to problems with murder."

"Which is?" I asked.

Penelope removed The Sign of Four from my hands and flipped the book open to what had to be a familiar page. She read aloud,". . . when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

"That's it?" I said, somewhat doubtful. I must admit I wasn't particularly impressed. Which explains, I suppose, why I'm the a.s.sistant and Penelope is the boss. "That's all?"

"Nothing else," said Penelope carefully sliding the book back into its place on the shelf. "A sharp mind, an attention for detail, and that sentence is all you need to solve the most perplexing puzzles ever encountered."

"I find that hard to believe."

"You'll see," said Penelope.

I did, of course, less than a month later, when Penelope solved the murder in Monkeyland.

2.

Imagine if you will a four-story building in the shape of a square. Think of it built out of concrete and steel, with huge panoramic windows on each of the four levels, with a round information desk on the first floor and two large elevators in a concrete hub in the center of the square. In case of fire or any other sort of disaster, the elevators immediately lock into place in the shafts and can't be used until the "all clear" alarm sounds.

Located in the corners of the square are four sets of emergency stairs. In case of an emergency, your only escape from an upper floor is down and out to the first floor. And, try as you may, there is no possible method of accessing any of the top three floors from the first.

Attached to each of the four sides of the square is a stubby concrete and steel rectangular wing, about twenty feet wide and thirty feet long. There are no windows or openings of any kind in these rectangles, and the concrete/steel walls are over two feet thick.

Located in each wing is a single laboratory. During the day, entrance to the labs is by a security card obtained at the desk. The cards are produced each morning by a random number generator and are only good for one day. They have to be carried at all times on the upper floors. If anyone without a card is detected by the many sensors located throughout the building, alarms immediately blare and the entire building complex locks down until the violator is caught. Each lab, due to the nature of the dangerous work being conducted within, has its own air supply and is powered by its own generator.

Still, Homeland Security deemed that these precautions were not enough. Which explains the huge movable concrete slabs on each side of the lab entrances.

When I first saw the slabs, my jaw dropped and I stood frozen for a minute in absolute awe. They were, without question, the biggest door jambs ever created. Each slab stood sixty feet high by ten feet across and was two feet deep. They were constructed from concrete laid over a metal frame of thin steel rods. Each ma.s.sive slab rested on a motorized block of t.i.tanium steel. When the complex shut down for the night, the two slabs of concrete per laboratory slide together to meet and form an immovable door-one that couldn't be opened by anyone less powerful than Samson or Hercules.

"You expecting an alien invasion?" I wondered aloud.

"Never hurts to be prepared," said Captain Anthony Rackham, my escort for the afternoon. "Better safe than sorry when you're dealing with plague and ebola bacteria."

I shuddered, the full meaning of the complex's nickname, The Slab, hitting home. The less time I spent in this building, the better. Hopefully, Penelope was going to solve this crime quickly.

"According to the briefing I received this morning," I said, "researchers are permitted to remain in the labs overnight when working on a project?"

"Whenever they want," said Rackham. "Just because we're military doesn't mean we don't understand the needs of scientists. Each laboratory is equipped with a refrigerator, a microwave, a cot, and a bathroom complete with shower stall. Some of our top researchers spend weeks here without leaving their labs. They're dedicated to the safety of our country."

What Rackham considered dedication, I defined as obsessive behavior. But I was too polite to say so. Especially since the Captain was a good two inches taller than me and looked like he stepped out of a Conan the Barbarian movie. Not that he wasn't all slick and polished, from his sharply pressed uniform to his s.h.i.+ny black shoes. Rackham had been a.s.signed to me when I first checked into the complex a half-hour before. I still wasn't sure if he was my escort or my guard. Not that it mattered. I was here strictly as a recording device for my boss.

The call had come in the middle of the night. A man was dead under mysterious circ.u.mstances. He'd been discovered in a locked and sealed concrete laboratory. No one was positive if it was a crime or not, but if it was, it needed to be solved immediately. The police and FBI were baffled. Contact Penelope Peters. Which meant I was off early the next morning to The Slab, a secret government complex fifty miles outside of Manhattan. Exactly in what direction that fifty miles was can't be stated. Or so I was warned when given directions. And from the tone of the voice of the man on the phone, I knew he wasn't kidding.

"Now that we've gone over the layout of the building," I said, "how about showing me the scene of the crime."

"You're in charge," said Rackham, waving me into one of the elevators. "It's on the top floor."

I noted with my usual efficiency that there were two cameras in the lift. The chances of someone making it upstairs undetected in this building were absolute zero.

"We don't appreciate surprise visitors," said Rackham, as we stepped out onto the fourth floor, in answer to my unspoken question. "The stuff stored in these labs could wipe out half the planet. Think of it as a terrorist supermarket."

"Terrific," I said. "You think Dr Schneider was killed by enemy agents?"

"I'm not a detective," said Rackham, sounding slightly smug, the first emotion evident in his cold tones. "I have no idea who murdered Schneider, if anyone. He might have died from natural causes. Working in his lab would have given me a heart attack in a week."

Rackham steered me across the floor to a lab sealed off with yellow police tape. A pair of marine guards holding rifles stood in front of the door into the wing. They snapped to attention as we approached. The captain pulled open the door to the laboratory and stepped aside.

"After you," he said. The lights in the lab were on. They were always kept on. "The scene of the crime."

I had no idea exactly what to expect, but whatever I might have imagined was immediately wiped away by what I saw upon entering the lab. What I saw and smell and heard.

"Welcome to Monkeyland," said Rackham. The smugness in his voice was much more p.r.o.nounced.

3.

I should have been prepared, knowing that most of the work done in The Slab involved biological and chemical warfare, but I wasn't. The entire back wall of the laboratory was covered from floor to ceiling with monkey cages. There must have been fifty metal pens in total though I never did spend the time to count them. Each cell, which is what they resembled most, held one small monkey-one small shrieking monkey, looking miserable in a boxed environment that barely gave it s.p.a.ce to move. Each monkey wore a skull cap with electrodes protruding from it. With horror, I realized that researchers had removed the tops of the monkeys' heads, stuck electrodes into their brains, and then topped the hideous surgery with what looked like party hats from h.e.l.l. It was no wonder the monkeys were shrieking. The combined noise of dozens of monkeys was nerve shattering.

Adding to the beasts' misery, the cages were arranged in rows, and since each pen had a solid metal floor to keep waste and food from dropping through the bars, the monkeys on the lower levels lived in a perpetual twilight. Those on the top row had the light, but because the fixtures were never shut off, they lived in perpetual suns.h.i.+ne. It was cruel torture either way.

Needless to say, the smell of half-eaten food, waste and urine didn't improve my opinion of the lab. How anyone could conduct research in such a place was beyond me, but then again, I'm not a scientist. I turned to Rackham.

"Aren't there laws about treating lab animals?" I said. "Are we really allowed to remove their skulls and literally torture them to death like this?"

"Yeah, we're allowed. It's how basic research is done: on animals. And it's worse than what you're seeing here. From what I hear, the scientists don't let the animals eat or drink much, and they give food and water to the monkeys only if the monkeys cooperate during experiments. As for the lighting and cages and all that sort of thing, talk to the contractor who built this place for Homeland Security," said Rackham. "They cut corners but got the job done fast. Friends in high places wanted results and if a few laws were broken, no one complained."

Call me a naive b.u.mpkin. I should have realized that even during a time of war against terrorism or terror groups or radicals of any one cause or another, no-bid contracts and kickbacks never went out of style. And I should have realized that, just because the public doesn't hear about the torture, doesn't mean the torture isn't going on.

"Look at the walls," said Rackham, making no attempt to hide the anger and contempt in his voice. "There are cracks in the concrete due to water seepage and not enough support in the foundation. We've got mice in the bas.e.m.e.nt and bats make their nests in the roof."

"Bats?"

"Bats," repeated Rackham. "Concrete walls are nice and dry, better than most caves. Drive by this complex at night and you'll think you're in Transylvania."

Bats, plague, ebola germs, monkey brain surgeries, electrodes, and a building called The Slab. I was starting to feel like I had walked into a bad horror movie. I looked down at the floor. The outline of a body had been drawn in front of the monkey cages in blue chalk. It served as the last testament to Dr Carl Schneider.

The professor, his degree being in neurobiology, had been found the morning before when his a.s.sistant entered the lab. Schneider was slumped in front of the cages, with one door open and a monkey sitting on the nearby lab table chattering at the cold corpse. The researcher had been working on a hush-hush project involving monkeys and incurable motor function diseases, and he had spent the night in the lab. He had been alone when the slabs locked him in, and there was no record of the concrete blocks moving during the night. In effect, the scientist had been sealed inside a concrete box. n.o.body came in, and n.o.body left.

All the physical evidence pointed to Schneider having just taken the beast out of the cage when a heart attack dropped him down. Both hands occupied with the scrambling monkey, the doctor never had a chance to grab for the phone and call for help. Everything suggested that Schneider had unfortunately suffered from sudden cardiac arrest and died in an instant.

There was no sign of a struggle. No wounds on his body, not even a scratch. The food and drink in the refrigerator had been tested and no poison detected. Gas was similarly ruled out, as polluting the air supply would have killed the monkeys in the lab as well as the doctor. Even the autopsy results pointed to a killer heart attack.

Why then the frantic call to Penelope Peters and my presence in the lab the next day? Because Dr Carl Schneider was thirty-one years old, was in near perfect health and, as far as anyone could tell, didn't have a bad habit in the world. People like that don't usually die from heart attacks.

"Any phone calls?" I asked, knowing the answer.

"Neither incoming or outgoing," said Rackham. "Phone system works fine, in case you're wondering. We checked it immediately after finding the body. He obviously died before he could contact the front desk. Not that it would have mattered. Once this place is sealed, it stays that way till morning."

I walked around the lab, stared at the concrete walls, noted the tiny holes near the top. Big enough for a spider to crawl through, not much more. Attacked by a baby bat, I wondered, then dismissed the idea as beyond belief. A poisonous insect, perhaps? I was reading too many spy novels.

"Any chance the project he was working on caused his death?"

"No," said Rackham. "Anything that would kill a man would kill all the monkeys in the lab. And they're still alive."

Definitely. The beasts screamed continually as I prowled around, trying to look like I knew what I was doing. Bright lights and screaming monkeys, it was enough to drive a man to drink. But murder? I couldn't see how.

"Could he have been scared to death?" I asked, knowing how preposterous the idea sounded. "Was Schneider afraid of bugs? Maybe the janitor drew invisible paintings on the wall that could only be seen when the lights were turned off?"

Rackham snorted. "Dr Schneider was the most rational person I ever met. He had absolutely no imagination. Not the type to be scared by invisible ink. Besides, all of the maintenance crews are Marines with top-secret clearance. Plus the lights in this lab are never shut off."

On the wall over the desk was an award paper in a gold frame. The paper indicated that Schneider had won a prestigious science award and $100,000 prize only last year. A framed photo of a skinny, pale white man with thinning brown hair dressed in a bathing suit standing next to an equally pale blond woman wearing a modest two-piece outfit rested alone on the desk. Some words were scribbled on the bottom of the picture.

"That Schneider?" I asked.

"The one and only," said Rackham. "With Professor Mary Winfree, from the plague lab, down one floor."

"To Carl, with lots of love, Mary." It sounded like the possibility of a motive to me. Love, as the song said, changes everything. "Let's go visit Professor Winfree."

4.