Tess Gerritsen - Last to Die

“Where their farmhouse blows up.”

She nodded. “This whole thing’s starting to look very big and very bad. Which is why I want Frost along, to help me sort it out.”

After a moment, he nodded. “Okay, you got Frost. I’ll give you three days on this.”

“We’re on it. Thank you.” She stood up.

“Rizzoli?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Keep it quiet. Don’t tell anyone in the unit, especially Crowe. As far as the public is concerned, the Ackerman case is closed.”

“YOU KNOW HOW THAT old saying goes, It doesn’t take a rocket scientist ?” said Frost as they drove through the Goddard Space Flight Center campus. “Well, now we’re going to be hanging out with real rocket scientists! That’s so amazing. I mean, look out the window and just think about the average IQ of these guys you see walking around here.”

“What does that make us, birdbrains?”

“All that math and chemistry and physics they’ve gotta know. I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to launch a rocket.”

“You mean you never shot up one of those toy rockets with vinegar and baking soda?”

“Yeah, right. Like that’s how we got to the moon.”

She pulled into a parking stall in front of the Exploration Sciences Building, and they both clipped on the NASA visitor badges that they’d picked up at the entrance gate.

“Man, I hope I get to keep this,” he said, fondling his badge. “It’d be such a cool souvenir.”

“Can you dial down the geek worship a little bit? You sound like a Trekkie, and frankly, that is so embarrassing.”

“I am a Trekkie.” As they stepped out of the car, he raised his hand in a Vulcan salute. “Live long and—”

“ Don’t do that while we’re in there, okay?”

“Hey, look at that!” He pointed to the bumper sticker on one of the cars in the parking lot. “BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY!”

“So?”

“So these are my people !”

“Then maybe they’ll keep you,” she muttered as she stretched the kinks from her back. They had caught an early-morning flight to Baltimore, and as they walked into the building, she glanced around hoping to spot a coffee machine. Instead she saw an enormous man waddling their direction.

“You the folks from Boston?” he asked.

“Dr. Bartusek?” said Jane. “I’m Detective Rizzoli. This is my partner, Detective Frost.”

“Call me Bert.” Grinning, Bartusek grabbed her hand and gave it an enthusiastic shake. “Big-city homicide detectives! I bet you folks have really interesting jobs.”

“Not as interesting as yours,” said Frost.

“Mine?” Bartusek snorted. “Nowhere as cool as hunting down killers.”

“My partner here thinks it’s way cooler to work for NASA,” said Jane.

“Well, you know what they say about the grass on the other side of the fence,” Bartusek said with a laugh as he waved them down the hall. “Come on, let’s go sit in my office. The guys upstairs gave me full clearance to talk to you. ’Course, what else am I going to do, when a cop asks me questions? If I don’t answer, you might arrest me!” He led them down the corridor, and Jane imagined she could almost feel the building shake with each ponderous step he took. “I’ve got a lot of questions myself,” he said. “Me and my colleagues, we all want to know what happened to Neil and Olivia. You speak to Detective Parris yet?”

“We’re meeting with him this evening,” said Jane. “Assuming he gets back from Florida in time.”

“Parris seemed like a smart cop when I met him. Asked me just about every possible question. But I don’t think he ever came up with an answer.” He glanced at Jane. “Two years later, I’m wondering if you’ll be able to.”

“You have any theories about that plane crash?”

He shook his head. “Never made sense to any of us, why anyone would want to kill Neil. A good guy, a really good guy. We talked about it a lot here, and we went down all the possible reasons. Did he owe someone money? Did he tick off the wrong people? Was it a crime of passion?”

“Is that a possibility, a crime of passion?” asked Frost. “He or his wife having an affair?”

Bartusek stopped outside a doorway, his massive girth blocking any view into the room. “I didn’t think it was possible at the time. I mean, they were such regular people. But then, you never know what’s really going on in a marriage, do you?” He gave a sad shake of the head and stepped into his office. On his walls hung a gallery of stunning photos of galaxies and nebulae, like multicolored amoebas.

“Wow. The Horsehead Nebula,” said Frost, admiring one of the photos.

“You know your night sky, Detective.”

Jane glanced at her partner. “You really are a Trekkie.”

“Told you so.” Frost moved on to another photograph. “I see your name here, Dr. Bartusek. You took these?”

“Astrophotography’s a hobby of mine. You’d think, after spending my day studying the universe, I’d go home and take photos of birds or flowers. But no, I keep my eye on the sky. Always have.” He squeezed in behind his desk and sank into a massive chair, setting off a loud groan of the springs. “You might call it an obsession.”

“Is that true for all rocket scientists?” asked Frost.

“Well, technically speaking, I’m not really a rocket scientist. Those are the guys who light the candles and blow stuff up. They’d tell you they have the fun jobs.”

“And your job?”

“I’m an astrophysicist. In this building, we’re focused on the research side. My colleagues and I, we formulate a scientific question, and we figure out what kind of data we need to answer it. Maybe we want to sample dust from a passing comet, or we want to do a wide-field infrared survey of the sky. To get that data, we need to launch a special telescope. That’s when we turn to the rocket scientists, who help us get that scope up and into position. We define the purpose of a mission. The rocket engineers design a way to do it. Truth is, we kinda talk different languages. They’re gearheads. They think of us as eggheads.”

“Which was Neil Yablonski?” asked Jane.

“Neil was most definitely an egghead. He and his brother-in-law Brian Temple were the smartest guys around here. Which may be why they were friends. Such good friends, in fact, they were planning a joint trip to Rome with their wives. That’s where Neil and Olivia first met, and they wanted to visit their old romantic haunts.”

“Hardly sounds like a romantic trip if you’re bringing another couple along.”

“Not just any other couple. See, Lynn and Olivia were sisters. Neil and Brian were best friends. So when Lynn and Brian got married, presto, they turned into the four amigos. Brian and Neil had to go to Rome for a meeting anyway, so they thought they’d bring their wives. Man, was Neil looking forward to that trip! Tortured me with all his talk about pasta! Pizza! Fritto misto!” He looked down at his bulging stomach, which suddenly gave a growl. “I think I gained weight just saying those words.”

“But they never made it to Rome?”

Bartusek gave a sad shake of the head. “Three weeks before they were supposed to leave, Neil and Olivia took off for their weekend cottage on the Chesapeake. Neil had a little Cessna he liked to fly down there. Their son, Will, had a science project he needed to work on, so the boy stayed with the Temples. Lucky for the kid, because three minutes after takeoff that Cessna went down in flames. The weather was perfect, and Neil was a very careful pilot. We all assumed it was mechanical. Until Detective Parris and the FBI showed up here a week or so later and started asking a lot of questions. That’s when I realized there was more to the crash than we thought. Parris never came right out and told me, but I read about it later in the newspaper. That the crash was suspicious. That there may have been a bomb aboard that Cessna. Since you folks are now asking about it, I assume it’s true.”