Gregg Loomis - The Sinai Secret

Peachtree Road

Atlanta, Georgia

Twenty Minutes Later

Lang had dropped Francis off and was within blocks of his high-rise condominium when the BlackBerry in his pocket chirped.

Has to be a criminal client, he thought. The foundation pays its staff way too much for someone to call me at night.

He fumbled in his pocket for the Bluetooth earpiece before remembering leaving it on the dresser in the bedroom. With a regretful sigh he thumbed a button, wedged the phone between cheek and shoulder, and gave a grudging, "Hello."

"Mr. Reilly? Langford Reilly?"

The voice was familiar, yet Lang couldn't quite place it. He downshifted as he approached a red light. The arm movement sent the phone slithering into his lap. Modern cell phones and classic stick-shift transmissions didn't mix. He plucked the phone out of his lap.

"Yes."

"Det. Franklin Morse, Atlanta Police, Mr. Reilly. Maybe you remember me."

Lang wished he didn't. More than once the detective had been summoned to Lang's home after some deadly misadventure. "Swell to hear from you again, Detective, but it's been a quiet night. Nobody's tried to kill me so far."

"Early yet. 'Sides, ain't you, Mr. Reilly. It's Dr. Lewis."

Lang drew a total blank. "Who?"

"Lewis, professor over to Georgia Tech."

The name finally came up in Lang's mental Rolodex just as the elusive phone slipped free again. The foundation had made a rare exception to its policy of endowing medical causes in the third world. It had provided funds to persuade a professor at Oxford to move to Tech his research on a promising alternative to fossil fuel. Lang had deviated from the norm at the request of Jacob Annueliwitz, a personal friend of both men in London. The results had been sufficiently promising that the foundation was currently sponsoring parallel research both in the United States and abroad.

He retrieved the phone before it could make its escape under the seat. "What happened?"

There was a pause. Lang could hear other voices in the background. "Too soon to know 'xactly, Mr. Reilly. 'Cept Lewis is dead. Since you th' man pays his research grant, thought you could maybe help. You come on, see fo'yo'self."

"Dead? But how…?"

"Tell you what, Mr. Reilly; I'm at the man's laboratory right now. Know where that is?"

Lang had overseen the installation of some very expensive equipment there just a month or so ago.

"Yeah. Just off Hemphill Avenue."

"Right."

Georgia Tech liked red brick, a fact evident in buildings as diverse as its signature semi-Victorian bell tower and the newest ultramodern box of a classroom structure. Despite a few desperate trees, the campus looked just like what it was: an urban school in a shabby part of town. Unlike its neo-Gothic-styled, verdant rival, the University of Georgia, Tech had a blue-collar, hard-work ethic about it that included Saturday classes and a very high job-placement rate. Its only real failure was its football team, which had to play schools where three-hundred-pound tackles could major in athletic education and were not required to pass calculus.

A gaggle of police car lights sprayed a symphony of red, blue, and orange across the face of an otherwise anonymous brick building. The squawk of radios roiled in the night air.

Lang showed his driver's license to the cop blocking the door. The man murmured into the radio pinned to his blouse, and Morse appeared.

The black man's slender, athletic build made it hard to guess his age. Lang guessed he was somewhere in his forties, an assumption based more on his rank than his appearance. He reminded Lang of one of those East African runners who dominated marathon competitions. The detective was also far brighter than his lazy drawl indicated.

They shook hands.

"When did you transfer to this part of town?" Lang asked.

"Figgered this'd be a quieter beat, since you wasn't on it."

Lang grinned in spite of the circumstances. "Now who's wise-assin' somebody?"

Morse held lip his right hand. "No wise-assin', true." He became serious again. "Reason I axed you down here was to see if anythin's missin'."

"How'd you know I had any connection to Dr. Lewis?"

"I'm a detective, remember? I detect stuff."

Perhaps a quick check of the school's records had revealed Lang's name on the grant.

Morse headed down a short hall. "This way."

The room they entered was filled with people. A woman and a man Lang took to be crime scene technicians were using what looked like an artist's brush to sweep shards of glass into small plastic bags. A man sat in front of a computer. Another, this one in police uniform, interviewed a man in the uniform of the school's security personnel. A woman was using her flashlight to study the pages of a loose-leaf notebook.

When Lang had last left the place, it had resembled a modernized version of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory. Now it looked like it had hatched Hurricane Katrina instead of a humanoid monster. The only things in place were two long tables that would have been too heavy to move without a crew. Loose pages, perhaps from the notebook, were scattered on the floor, which crunched with broken glass as Lang walked. Microscopes and tools he didn't recognize were thrown about as though shaken in some huge blender. He saw a spectrophotometer lying on its side. The thing had cost the foundation as much as a pair of Ferraris.

"What the hell…?"

Morse pointed to yet another man, who was photographing the chalk outline of a body sprawled across the floor. "We found him there. The rent-a-cop heard sounds like somebody was tryin' to take the place apart, came in, took one look, an' called us."

"Any idea who…?"

"This ain't Law 'n' Order, where we solve the case in half an hour so the prosecutor can have the other half for a conviction between ads. Fact is, we don't even know yet what time the vie died. We're assumin' it was 'bout the time someone was trashing the place."

"Any motive?"

"That's why I called you, Mr. Reilly. Other'n the fact that you're involved in half the mayhem in this town, I figgered you might have an idea, since your foundation funded this operation."

It had been the grant. How had Morse gotten that information in the middle of the night?

"I only met the man two, three times."

"Awful lotta money to give a stranger."

"Dr. Lewis wasn't a stranger," Lang said stiffly. "He was an internationally respected physical chemist." Or was it a chemophysicist? "He was doing research on non-fossil fuels."

"You mean like gas substitutes, like ethanol to run cars?"

Lang's knowledge of chemistry and physics stopped at the composition of water and the law of gravity.

"I'm not sure."

"Not sure? You're mighty careless with a whole lot o' money, Mr. Reilly."

"The foundation hires people to manage how the money's spent, Detective, as well as how much each project legitimately needs and the qualifications of the people running those projects. I assure you, the foundation watches its money a lot closer than your employer does."

A safe guess. With ability to pay bribes being the former administration's only apparent qualification for selecting city contractors, and a tax department that could not be more incompetent if operated by Moe, Larry, and Curly, both the city and county were perpetually curtailing an ever-diminishing list of services. Those most in need of those services were, of course, those who didn't pay for them.

The only true beneficiary of the system was, or had been, Lang's client, the former mayor.

Morse held up his hands in surrender. "I'm just an employee doin' my job. Think I wouldn't like to see the mayor crucified for what he stole?"

Hopefully Morse would not be on the jury panel.