Thursday 19 December 2002
“BANG! Just like that. For an instant, I thought it might have been a gunshot.” Elise was trying not to sob as she spoke. “So I ran over here to see what happened.”
Inspector Mustapha Alawi turned back to look down at Elise, whose pale gamine face was blotched with tears and mascara. “And that’s when you saw his head, Ms. Morgan?”
“Doctor Morgan.” She shook her head. “Never mind. Call me whatever you want. I thought it was the cart. There’s a cart with a Mac and a projector on it, for tour groups… for presentations. We always joked that it was going to roll down the ramp one day. But when I came running up, I almost tripped over it. The head, I mean. His head. Charlie’s head. Just staring up at me. I think I saw him blink one last time.”
Mustapha leaned over the railing from where they stood on the outer edge of the helical walkway to survey the great glass cube that formed the atrium of Atlanta’s City Observatory. The ramp on which he stood wound around the central column that contained the elevator shaft. It stopped just above, at a landing that led to the planetarium proper, before continuing up to the topmost level, where exhibits and photographs lined the way to the rooftop telescopes and the café overlooking Piedmont Park. The grey light of the end of a grim December day filtered through the cavernous room; there were too few giant silver snowflakes suspended from the ceiling for holiday cheer to overcome the gloom.
Elise sniffled, swallowed, controlled her tears. “He was a wonderful man. We had two years together. He was the director of my committee at the university. And now… He’s never even going to get to see his child.” She looked down and rubbed her flat belly through her grey silk blouse, then looked up and saw the confusion on Mustapha’s face. “I just found out today. I took the test.” She fished in her purse and produced the white plastic stick of a home pregnancy test, holding it up so Mustapha could see the blue cross in the window. “He was so excited. Now he’ll never even know!” She dropped the stick, put her head in her hands and gave way to her grief, her body racking with sobs.
Mustapha handed her his handkerchief, then bent down to pick up the pregnancy test and slid it gently into the breast pocket of her jacket. He was surprised to feel a real rush of sympathy for Elise, and blinked back a tear or two of his own. Elise was way out of her league. After twenty-one years in Atlanta Homicide, Mustapha knew that someone who saw their lover’s severed head blinking back up at them had been prepared for this by a life of dismal violence. But little Elise clearly had no such experiences to build on. She was about as familiar with violent trauma as Mustapha was with whatever Elise studied under the late Dr. Charles Bauer, director of the City Observatory, author of half a dozen best-sellers on popular science and perennial fixture on public television.
He took Elise by the elbow and guided her down the ramp and around the curve. This took her out of sight of the crime scene techs kneeling in front of Bauer’s head where it had come to rest against the posts of the railing. “I’m very sorry for your loss, Dr. Morgan, but I have to do my job, and that means asking some tough questions. Can you tell me what happened after you saw, uh, Dr. Bauer’s head?”
Elise blew her nose into the handkerchief, then took several deep breaths before looking up at Mustapha, her eyes red, her delicate nose even redder, her face streaked with eyeliner, mascara and tears. “I screamed. And I kept screaming until Tony, the security guard your partner’s interviewing down there, came running up to see what happened. He called 911 while I went up and saw the body. The rest of the body. There was blood all over the doors to the planetarium.” She wrapped her pipe-cleaner arms around her narrow chest and shuddered. “So much blood.”
“And you didn’t get a glimpse of the person who did this?”
“Nothing. I just heard the noise, that’s all. I’m sure whoever did it ran through the doors and down inside the planetarium to the exit there. I would have heard his footsteps on the walkway if he’d gone up to the top level. I might have heard the door into the planetarium close right after the bang the head made. Charlie’s head. Oh, god.”
“It must have been very quiet in here, for that impact to make such a loud noise.” It was obvious to Mustapha that this poor woman had never heard an actual gunshot in her life.
“It was; the observatory is closed on Thursday afternoons. But sounds echo in here, especially anything on the walkway.” She stomped her foot, driving her heel into the surface of the walkway with every one of her ninety-five pounds. The sharp noise reverberated throughout the atrium. Most of the cops and crime scene techs standing nearby turned to look at her, startled by the volume and sharpness of the sound. “It’s sturdy enough, even though it doesn’t really sound like it is. Sometimes people look a little worried, but we’ve never had a problem.” She began to cry again. “Until today.”
Mustapha patted her on the shoulder while looking down below them on the curve of the walkway, where he could see his new partner, Detective Second Grade Diana Siddall, interviewing the security guard. Assistant Chief Purcell had asked him personally to look after Diana in her first weeks on Homicide.
Looking after someone else’s blonde daughter wasn’t the sort of assignment Mustapha relished after almost two years of working cases solo, but Siddall’s pedigree was hard to beat. She was third-generation cop, and her father Malcolm had only recently retired from twenty years as the elected DA of Fulton County, which encompassed most of Atlanta and two big chunks of the endless suburb that surrounded the city. Diana had risen as quickly as possible through the ranks, was twice decorated and wounded once in the line of duty. And Mustapha had to admit that Diana was real easy on the eyes. If he had to have a partner, this probably beat having to put up with another sardonic middle-aged guy with prostate problems.
Mustapha cleared his throat, sourly. Maybe he was getting old. He had no problem with women on the Job; he just had a hard time considering someone whose first words to him had been “Don’t you think this precinct house radiates negative energy?” as partner material. Of course it radiated negative energy: that was the goddamn point, wasn’t it? But old Malcolm Siddall was the best in the business, and there was nothing like a first murder case, especially one this spectacular, to show what his daughter was really all about. At least the girl seemed to have the right attitude, with none of the usual sense of entitlement that came along with relatives in high places.
“Gangway, Stoph.” The cigarette-wracked voice of Dave Keller, chief of Crime Scene, jolted Mustapha out of his reverie. He turned back to look over the quietly sobbing Elise to see Keller holding a black plastic milk crate. Mustapha could see the head of Charles Bauer in the box, wrapped in a transparent evidence bag. Bauer’s features were frozen in a look of vacant surprise. Most of the victims Mustapha saw looked like that. It was just his own luck that he’d probably die in bed, knowing full well what was about to happen.
Keller handed the box to his comely assistant, who smiled at Mustapha as she stepped around him to take Bauer’s head to the ME’s office. He swept the paper cap off his own head and shook free his unfashionably long, mostly grey hair. “I think we can make a preliminary indication of cause of death,” he said dryly. “The bloodwork? That’s what they pay us OT for.”
“What’m I looking for?” asked Mustapha.
“A long, medium-thick, very sharp blade. Single-edged. Machete, samurai sword. One smooth stroke was all it took; I don’t think the perp even had to put that much force behind it.”
Mustapha turned back to Elise. “Dr. Morgan, do you know of anyone who might have intended to harm Dr. Bauer? Can you think of any reason why someone might want to kill him?”
She blew her nose again, this time with a great honk that echoed throughout the cavernous atrium. “He had… problems with people: professional rivalries, that sort of thing. Charlie was a wonderful man and a great scientist, but he was used to getting his own way.”
“And this caused him to feel that he was in danger?”
“No, not at all. I mean, he never said anything like that, or seemed very worried. But he had arguments with people. There’s the dark matter and dark energy thing, of course–“
“The what?”
“Oh, sorry. It’s a theory… well, a hypothesis, really, about how the universe is constructed. Do you want me to explain it to you?”
“If you have to.”
“Well, the universe is expanding; the galaxies have all been moving apart since the Big Bang. The question is whether the universe will continue to expand forever, or will gravity eventually slow the expansion and then draw the galaxies and clusters back to a central point? A lot of people really believe that the universe won’t keep expanding, but the trouble is that the amount of observable matter, stars, nebulae and so forth, isn’t nearly large enough to provide enough gravitational force to reverse the expansion.”
Elise was standing up straighter, more animated, in her comfort zone talking about science. “So some astronomers suggest that there’s an enormous amount of non-luminous matter, ‘dark matter,’ out there that we can’t see but that provides the missing mass. Clouds of frozen molecular dust, mostly.”
“Uh huh.” He pretended to take notes.
“Then there’s dark energy, which is a whole different thing–“
“I’ll take your word for it. What’s this got to do with your husband?”
“Well, Charlie was sure dark matter and dark energy were out there, but they’re just about impossible to observe. So he published his book last year, Inertia Within, that used the ideas figuratively, talking about the human spirit, the capacity for evil, that sort of thing.”
“And this made people want to kill him.”
“I don’t think so! But some people were pretty upset. It wasn’t scientific, you see? It was just speculation about ethics, culture, that sort of thing. Some other astronomers didn’t like it: we get a lot of bad press because of astrology, and they thought it just wasn’t doing serious cosmology any good.”
“Anyone in particular?”
“Well, he’s had a long rivalry with Peter Geoffries, spelled the English way, with a G, who used to be a serious astronomer but now spends most of his time running a very silly self-help organization that uses a real jumble of astrological and astronomical metaphors. Dr. Geoffries wasn’t very fond of Charlie or Inertia Within, but kill Charlie? Cut off his head? I don’t think so.”
“We’ll check him out anyway. This may be a difficult question, but what about Dr. Bauer’s personal life? Were there other women, other people he was seeing? Any former lovers making threatening phone calls, that sort of thing?”
“Oh, no; not at all.” A streak of naïve pride showed through her grief for an instant. “He and I… well, his ex-wife sometimes came by the office. She wasn’t happy with the divorce, but she got a lot of money out of it. I mean, Inertia Within was written mostly because she got everything he had. sSo I don’t think she was out to get him or anything. She and I didn’t get along so great, but she usually didn’t make a scene or anything. Her name’s Stephanie. They have a son, David. He just turned sixteen. He comes to stay with us a couple of nights a week. He’s a good kid, but he’s a sixteen-year-old boy, so he’s angry at just about everything.”
“I have a son who’s twenty; I know just what you mean.”
“They live in Buckhead, off West Paces Ferry. I don’t know the number.”
“We’ll take care of that. Anything else I should know about?”
“No… God, I can’t believe this! He was doing the holiday planetarium show all weekend; who’s going to take care of that?” All the momentary control she’d had over her emotions fled her, and she began to weep again.
“I’m very sorry for your loss, Dr. Morgan,” said Mustapha, flipping his notebook shut and handing her his card. “If you think of anything else, or something else happens, please call me at this number. Use the telephone: I don’t do email.”
“But I do!” said Diana Siddall’s cheerful voice from behind him. Mustapha smelled the faint odor of honeysuckle he had grown accustomed to from her in the three brief days of their partnership. “Hi! I’m Diana. Detective Siddall. I love email; here’s my card. We’re so sorry for what happened. You can rest assured that the Atlanta Police Department will make every effort to bring the perpetrator to justice.” She embraced Elise, the two women sharing one of those instant female bonds that had always mystified Mustapha.
Diana then turned to him. “What’s next, sir?”
“Security tapes, if they’ve got’em.” He started to walk down the ramp. Once he and Diana were out of earshot of the grieving widow, he turned back and looked his new partner in her big green eyes. “Looks like you picked a real interesting first day as a Homicide detective, kid.”
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