Fatal Reaction

away from him. “So Michael Childress turned up dead. No wonder he missed his plane. Any chance of it being suicide?”
    “If it is, he hid in the cold room before it was taped shut on Friday afternoon, broke the emergency release handle, took off all his clothes, and then lay down to make snow angels before he died.”
    “You didn’t tell me he was naked.”
    “I was saving the best for last.”
    “Any chance he got locked in there by accident?”
    “I guess it’s possible. No one would think to look for him because we all assumed he was on his way to Boston, but two different people checked the room before it was sealed up.”
    “How do they keep track of people?”
    “It’s a swipe-card system. You have to run your ID card through a magnetic card reader when you enter or exit the building. The information is automatically logged into the computer. Friday afternoon before they locked down the building, the security guards were supposed to make sure that every person who had entered the building that day had also exited.”
    “Maybe they made a mistake.”
    “Maybe they did,” I said. “Do you think there’s some connection with Danny Wohl’s death? I mean, you start poking around Michael Childress’s past, and two days later he turns up dead. That would be quite a coincidence.”
    “You realize this means giving up Galloway to the cops.”
    “I can’t.”
    “Then I’m going to have to do it.”
    “Blades is going to be pissed at me, isn’t he?”
    “I’m assuming that right now Blades is the least of your worries. Why don’t you tell me what it is you want me to do?”
     
    For the rest of the day Elliott ran interference with the police. Stephen’s assistant Rachel acted as his handmaiden, spending the day slipping discreetly in and out of the presentation room delivering whispered summonses. By this method the detectives were able to interview everyone who’d been involved in finding the body or who’d worked with Childress without attracting the attention of the Japanese.
    I ended up spending almost two hours with the detectives, telling them not only what I knew about the discovery of the body, but about Azor in general and the rough outline of the deal with Takisawa. Throughout it all, they were not only courteous and professional but, I came to realize, very sharp. While their questioning of me was painless, it was so thorough that I felt physically drained when it was over.
    I went upstairs to rejoin the group in the conference room and sent Stephen downstairs to take my place. He spent most of Michelle Goodwin’s presentation being questioned, which was not an entirely bad thing. I doubted that even under the best of circumstances Michelle was particularly good at the lectern, but today, struggling with Childress’s slides, she seemed painfully bad.
    Things seemed to pick up somewhat after lunch, with Stephen moderating a question-and-answer session between Takisawa’s scientists and his own. I took the opportunity to slip away to look for Elliott. I found him alone in the modeling room, poring over a computer printout of Friday’s card swipes.
    “Where are the cops?” I asked from the doorway. “Gone for now,” he replied, looking up with a smile. “You look tired.”
    “I feel dead. Speaking of dead, where’s Childress?”
    “They took him away hours ago. I spoke to Joe. He’s going to see what he can do about getting Julia Gordon to do the post. He says he figures she owes him after how Danny Wohl’s autopsy was handled.”
    “What do the cops think?”
    “They’re pros, which means they’re not saying. But I think it’s pretty obvious they’ve ruled out suicide. The emergency escape handle looks like it was deliberately tampered with. The cuts and bruises on his fingers and hands correspond to bloody fingerprints on the inside of the door where it looks like he tried to claw his way out.”
    “Any chance he died someplace else and his body was dumped in the freezer in order to astonish us when we opened the door?”
    “It seems unlikely.”
    “I don’t know,” I mused. “The whole thing is just too bizarre.”
    “You know what puzzles me is this computer log. Granted, it’s difficult to decipher because there are so many different individual entries. With three-hundred-plus people working in this building, it’s amazing the number of times people come in and out. Still, I’ve gone through it item by item twice now and everybody’s accounted