Fatal Reaction

all right for you to ask all of us to lie to the police? Even if we were all willing, how do you think you, Dave, Carl, Michelle, Lou, and I will keep our stories straight? The only way is to do the right thing and tell the truth.”
    “What difference will it make if we call the police now or if we call them at five o’clock?”
    “I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer,” I snapped, suddenly losing patience. “I am an officer of the court and I won’t be a party to any deception. I’m willing to do everything in my power to see if we can’t get this handled as quietly as possible. If we can get the local cops to play ball, there’s a chance we can keep it from Takisawa. But the only way you’re going to keep me from calling the police is to lock me up with Childress right now.”
    Stephen fixed me with such a murderous look that for a moment I honestly thought I was going to be spending the day with a dead man.
    “Just handle it,” he said finally. Then he turned and walked away, leaving me alone in the basement with the body.
     
    I called 911 from the phone in the crystallography lab and told the dispatcher to direct the police to the back of the building by the loading dock. Then I called Elliott Abelman and told him what had happened. He said he was on his way. That done, I went outside and waited for the police.
    As I shivered on the loading dock I found myself wondering, not for the first time, whether it was Elliott’s inquiries into Childress’s past that had frightened him into suicide. Coming on the morning of the Takisawa visit, it might have been just the kind of dramatic “fuck you” to Stephen I imagined Childress to be capable of.
    Unburdened by serial killers and afflicted with no crime more serious than shoplifting, the Oak Brook police responded quickly to my report of a dead man in the freezer. Two incredibly clean-cut officers who looked like they’d just graduated from bible college arrived within five minutes of my call.
    As succinctly as I could I told them what had happened. I also explained that the building had been closed over the weekend with the power shut down for the new transformers. I described how the temperature had been turned down in the cold room and about its being taped shut in order to help keep cold air from escaping.
    “Did anybody check to make sure there was nobody inside before it was taped shut?” the older officer asked.
    “I don’t know if they checked,” I replied, “but I was there while it was being taped. Believe me, if there was somebody inside who wanted to get out, we would have heard them.”
    “And nobody missed this guy Childress over the weekend? Not even his wife?”
    “He wasn’t married. Besides, we all thought he was in Boston attending a conference.”
    “What kind of work did he do here?” the younger of the two officers asked while the older one pulled on some sort of plastic gloves that looked like baggies with fingers.
    “Dr. Childress was a chemist,” I replied, balking at the prospect of trying to explain X-ray crystallography under these circumstances.
    “You want to show us where the body is, ma’am?” the one with the gloves asked with a nod.
    I led them to the cold room. They opened the door and stepped inside. Through the open door I watched as they squatted down beside the body. The younger officer pulled a set of plastic gloves from his pocket as the other uniform briskly touched Childress’s neck, no doubt making sure he was dead.
    “You’d better get on the radio and call it in as an accidental death slash possible homicide,” he said to his partner. “Then you better page Jerry and tell ID to get the hell out here. Tell them we’re going to be needing the morgue wagon.”
    As he talked I took another look at the dead crystallographer. I’m not sure that even in life Childress had been much to look at naked, but the cold certainly hadn’t helped. He was a skinny little man with pale skin and pubic hair that had begun to turn gray. The skin on his face was a dusky shade of red, and even though his arms were folded over his chest, I could tell that, like his knees, they were badly bruised.
    “What’s all this in here with him?” asked the younger officer, pointing to the bulky Styrofoam containers that lined the shelves and were stacked up on the floor. “They’re research supplies,” I replied.
    “No food? Nothing to eat or drink?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    He got up and