Last to Die

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 in 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