Shadowfires

extremely important investigation involving at least two
murders and the possible leak of top-secret defense documents.”
    “Do you mean Eric's death might not have been accidental?”
    “No,” Julio said. “That was definitely an accident. But there are
other deaths… the details of which
I'm not at liberty to discuss. And more people may die before this case is closed. So Detective Hagerstrom and I hope you'll
give us full and immediate cooperation.”
    “Oh, of course, of course,” Easton Solberg said, waving one pudgy
hand to dismiss the very idea that he might be uncooperative. “And
although I don't know for a certainty that Eric's emotional problems
are related to your case, I expect-and fear-that they may be. As I
said… he had a dark side.”
    However, before Solberg got around to telling them of Leben's dark side, he spent a quarter of an hour praising the dead geneticist, apparently unable to speak ill of the man until he had first spoken highly of him. Eric was a genius. Eric was a hard worker. Eric was generous in support of colleagues. Eric had a fine sense of humor, an appreciation for art, good taste in most things, and he liked dogs.
    Julio was beginning to think they ought to form a committee and
solicit contributions to build a statue of Leben for display under a
fittingly imposing rotunda in a major public building. He glanced at
Reese and saw his partner was plainly amused by the bubbly
Solberg.
    Finally the professor said, “But he was a troubled man,
I'm sorry to say. Deeply, deeply troubled. He had been my student for a while, though I quickly realized the student was going to outdistance the teacher. When we were no longer student-teacher but colleagues, we remained friendly. We weren't
friends, just friendly, because Eric did not allow any relationship
to become close enough to qualify as friendship. So, close as we were
professionally, it was years before I learned about his… obsession
with young girls.”
    “How young?” Reese asked.
    Solberg hesitated. “I feel as if I'm… betraying him.”
    “We may already know much of what
you've got to tell us,” Julio said. “You'll probably only be
confirming what we know.”
    “Really? Well… I knew of one girl who was fourteen. At the time,
Eric was thirty-one.”
    “This was before Geneplan?”
    “Yes. Eric was at UCLA then. Not rich yet, but we could all see he
would one day leave academia and take the real world by storm.”
    “A respected professor
wouldn't go around bragging about bedding fourteen-year-old girls,” Julio said. “How'd
you find out?”
    “It happened on a weekend,” Dr. Solberg said, “when his lawyer was
out of town and he needed someone to post bail. He trusted no one but
me to keep quiet about the ugly details of the arrest. I sort of
resented that, too. He knew
I'd feel a moral obligation to endorse any censure movement against a colleague involved in such sordid business, but he also knew I'd
feel obligated to keep any confidences he imparted, and he counted on
the second obligation being stronger than the first. Maybe, to my
discredit, it was.”
    Easton Solberg gradually settled deeper in his chair while he
talked, as if trying to hide behind the mounds of papers on his desk,
embarrassed by the sleazy tale he had to tell. That Saturday, eleven
years ago, after receiving Leben's call, Dr. Solberg had gone to a police precinct house in Hollywood, where he had found an Eric Leben far different from the man he knew: nervous, uncertain of himself, ashamed, lost. The previous night, Eric had been arrested in a vice-squad raid at a hot-bed motel where Hollywood streetwalkers, many of them young runaways with drug problems, took their Johns. He was caught with a fourteen-year-old girl and charged with statutory rape, a mandatory count even when an underage girl admittedly solicits sex for pay.
    Initially Leben told Easton Solberg that the girl had looked
considerably older than fourteen, that
he'd had no way of knowing she was a juvenile. Later, however, perhaps disarmed by Solberg's
kindness and concern, Leben broke down and talked at length of his
obsession with young girls. Solberg had not really wanted to know any
of it, but he could not refuse Eric a sympathetic ear. He sensed that
Eric-who was a distant and self-possessed loner, unlikely ever to
have unburdened himself to anyone-desperately needed to confide his
intimate feelings and fears to someone at that bleak, low point in
his life. So