CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I’m not sure what you expect to learn from me. He was barely here during the last six months of his life.”
David smiled sheepishly at Dr. Abigail Wilkerson. Faith called it his “aw, shucks” grin and said it made him look gentle and harmless, like a plushie in the shape of a smiling donut.
Dr. Wilkerson was the dean of the Arlington Veterinary College, the school where Dr. Fenniman worked prior to his death.
“We can start with that,” he said. “Why do you think he was barely here?”
Abigail sighed, realizing she couldn’t end this conversation before it began. “He had other work.”
“And do you have any idea what that other work was?”
“It was a research project that involved direct work with canine subjects,” she replied.
David waited, and when it became clear she wasn’t going to expand on that, he asked, “Do you know what sort of project?”
“No. He and I weren’t close. Richard wasn’t close with anyone. He was reclusive, even before he started splitting his time.”
“But do you have any idea at all? Clearly it was important since it took so much of his time.”
Abigail lifted her hands just off the surface of her expensive mahogany desk and let them fall again.
“I don’t know how to say this any more clearly.
I have no idea what he was working on. I know that he was barely here, and when he was here, he did little more than grade research papers and occupy a chair during meetings.
Frankly, if he didn’t have tenure, the board would have let him go. ”
“What was the nature of his research here?”
Abigail glared at him. “That’s public information.”
“Was he working on anything that wasn’t public information?”
Abigail’s eyes narrowed. “Who did you say you were again?”
“Dr. Gabriel Allen,” he replied smoothly. It was becoming so easy for him to lie.
“And you’re working for who?”
He shifted uncomfortably. He hadn’t thought that part through. Way to go, expert liar.
“Let’s just say I have a personal interest in the case.”
“A personal interest.”
“Yes.”
Abigail stared hard at him. David met her eyes, still wearing his aw, shucks grin and trying to calm the pounding in his chest.
After over a minute, she sighed. “Richard was researching the impact of dog ownership on human psychology. It was his lifelong crusade up until about three years ago.”
David knew about Richard’s research already. What he was trying to get to was everything that happened after that. “What happened three years ago?”
“He stopped crusading. Started phoning in his work. Contributed the minimum to joint papers and projects, stopped seeing patients, barely taught his class… Burned out. It happens a lot to academics. We pour all of our passion into something, and when it fails to yield the results or the satisfaction we want, we stop caring. It’s a defense mechanism.
It allows us to keep existing in a world that doesn’t value the knowledge we have or doesn’t work the way we thought it did, or…
” She flipped her hand. “Well, anyway, the point is that he just shut down. I thought he was sick, to be honest.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He was losing weight,” Abigail said. “Not a lot of weight, but enough that it looked unnatural. His eyes were bloodshot a lot, and he started losing his hair. We thought he might have come down with cancer.”
“Who’s we?”
“The staff at the Veterinary College.”
“And no one thought to ask if he was actually sick?”
Abigail’s face flushed. She scoffed and looked down at her desk. Her hands came together, and when she found no convenient stack of papers to shuffle, she interlaced her fingers instead. “I… believed, as I’m sure everyone did, that he preferred to keep his private life private.”
David felt heat creep up his spine. “This man was a colleague of yours for eight years—”
“Seven.”
He stared at her. Her cheeks flushed further, and she looked away again. “I’m sorry, Dr. Allen, or whoever you are. I don’t have any information that can help you.”
She lifted her eyes to him and added, “I would advise that you abandon your personal interest in this case. It’s clear that you’re insinuating foul play in Richard’s death. Perhaps you should ask yourself if it’s wise to tempt those responsible for that alleged foul play.”
David nodded. He got to his feet and said, “I wonder, Dr. Wilkerson, how you would feel if you were murdered, and everyone you knew preferred to forget about you rather than be inconvenienced by the circumstances of your death?”
Abigail’s flush deepened to crimson. “Get out of my office.”
David did so.
Greg and Jeff met him in the Suburban. As Jeff pulled out of the parking lot and headed for home, Greg looked at David’s face and asked, “Nothing, huh?”
“Nothing useful. It seems Dr. Fenniman wasn’t well-liked. When he began showing signs of stress and paranoia, they assumed he had cancer.”
“Assumed?” Jeff interjected. “They didn’t ask?”
“Nope. Couldn’t be bothered too.”
“Damn. Poor guy.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“The CIA picked their guys well,” Greg said. “Did you ask if he was always disliked?”
David frowned. “No. Should I have?”
Greg shrugged. “It might have been interesting to know if Fenniman was always antisocial or if that started after the CIA recruited him. When I was with Metro PD, we’d come across domestic violence cases sometimes where the victim’s family hadn’t talked to them in months or years despite living fifteen minutes away. ”
“Yeah, abusers isolate victims from their support groups,” Jeff added. “Not saying Dr. Fenniman’s case is the same as a wife getting beat on by her husband, but it serves the CIA’s interests if their employees don’t have a lot of close friends and family trying to find out what happened.”
David’s shoulders slumped. He hadn’t thought about that at all. He’d assumed that if Fenniman was once well-liked, it would have come up naturally.
It hit him again how utterly in over his head he was. He had interviewed Fenniman’s wife and colleagues and learned nothing he didn’t already know. In the process, he’d made Daisy Fenniman suspicious and inspired Dr. Wilkerson to warn him to back off for his own good.
Did that mean she was involved too?
He opened his mouth to ask Jeff to turn around so he could talk to her some more, but he closed his mouth without asking the question. No doubt Dr. Wilkerson would refuse to speak to him again. And if she was working for them, then David had stuck his neck right into their next trap.
On the other hand, that could explain her caginess. David had known doctors who were disliked before, but not to the point where people wouldn’t know if they had cancer or not. Maybe Abigail was deflecting because she didn’t want to reveal anything and get into trouble with her employers.
Maybe. Possibly. Could be. Damn it, how could Faith live in this world? How could she take uncertainty and find the little threads to pull to make it certain? How could he ever accomplish his goal when he couldn’t even figure out how to talk to people?
He wondered if he could convince Jeff and Greg to interview suspects for him, but dismissed that thought out of hand. They had already risked enough. He didn’t want to put them in any more danger.
Michael then, or Jessica. They were both already committed.
Maybe Faith too. David considered this his investigation, and he wanted to be involved in its resolution, but he was coming to understand that he just didn’t have the necessary skillset to reach that goal.
Maybe it was time to turn this completely over to the experts and place Sierra’s fate in more capable hands than his.
“I wonder if we can get Fenniman’s coroner’s report?” Greg wondered out loud. “It’s going to corroborate the official story, but maybe it’ll have some discrepancies that can help us figure out what really happened.”
David’s spirits lifted. This was something he knew.
He had to write death certificates for deceased animals all the time.
He’d performed autopsies on dogs before.
The mechanics weren’t that different from a human’s death.
He could look at a report and tell if it was faked, or if its conclusions didn’t fit with events.
“If you guys can get me into the coroner’s office, I can tell if the report was faked.”
Greg and Jeff both turned fully around to look at him. “Yeah? You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” he replied. “I’ve conducted autopsies and written death certificates before. I understand the science enough that I can tell if something doesn’t make sense.”
Greg and Jeff shared a sober look. Jeff turned back to the road while Greg met David’s eyes. “Just so you know, what we’re about to do is commit serious fraud. Felonious impersonation. You understand that?”
“This is something the CIA might find out about too,” Jeff said, still watching the road. “If someone tells someone else that some random person looked into someone’s death, and the CIA finds out it’s one of the people they killed, then they’ll know you’re not behaving.”
David’s face fell. That would put Jeff and Greg at risk too. “Oh, never mind. I don’t want you to—”
“Stop,” Greg said and meant it. “We don’t mind the risk. But you need to know what you’re getting yourself into. Are you sure you want to go this far?”
David thought of Turk and imagined the life in those eyes gone, imagined him reduced to a tool to be used and then discarded.
“I’m sure.”
“Okay,” Greg said, turning around. “We’ll make that happen.”
David’s spirits lifted again, but a stone formed in his stomach as well.
They might be willing to accept this risk, but it was a very serious risk.
David wasn’t just sticking his own neck out.
He was sticking the necks of a lot of good, innocent people out with his own.
Were there lives worth less than the lives of the dogs he was trying to save?
He thought the question was unfair, but that was only because he knew the answer.