Triple Cross

I GAZED AT THAT window for four or five minutes, wondering what had set Professor Foster off on a homicidal spree and what he’d gotten from electrocuting the women.

Tull claimed in Electric that Foster as a young boy had seen his mixed-race mother treated terribly by a white female clerk in a high-end store on Newbury Street. Foster also had a history of train-wreck relationships where he so alienated his girlfriends, they dumped him, often in a humiliating fashion.

Police had discovered damning evidence in the professor’s office. They found Foster’s diary, which contained glued-in photos of the victims he’d taken without their knowledge, unaware of the camera and the danger of the man behind it.

They also discovered e-mails and writings on Foster’s computer that were deeply and violently misogynistic. In one of those writings, the professor fantasized about kidnapping women, bringing them to his lab at night, stripping them, then shooting them with the proton-beam machine that had made his academic reputation.

I tried to go inside the laboratory, but a security guard turned me away due to an experiment going on in the lab. I wanted to ask if it involved kidnapped women and a proton beam, but I held my tongue and left.

It began to rain. I walked to Cambridge Street and called Vic Daloia, who found me and drove me to Perry Street in Ward Two and the triple-decker building where Emily Maxwell had lived in an apartment that took up half the second floor. He pulled over opposite the house.

“How did Tull think Foster got up to her floor?” I asked.

“Picked that door there, the middle one,” Daloia said. “All triple-deckers have them, you know, a door to the upstairs?”

“Picking it is a brazen act,” I said. “He could have been spotted by all sorts of people, and yet he wasn’t.”

“The professor was kind of a nondescript dude, remember?” Daloia said. “Not handsome, but not butt-ugly either. Tull described Foster as the kind of guy no one notices unless he’s at work in his lab.”

“Let’s go see if that’s true,” I said.

“Walpole?”

“Walpole.”

Around forty minutes later, Daloia parked near a low white building set near the high wall of the maximum-security facility. On the arch above the blue front doors were the words MASSACHUSETTS STATE PRISON.

FBI special agent in charge Ned Mahoney had called ahead to alert the warden that I was coming to talk to Herman Foster. After the guard checked my identification and credentials, I surrendered my phone, pistol, waist holster, and belt.

I passed through a metal detector and two hydraulic stainless-steel gates, then crossed an inner yard to the cell blocks. Ten minutes later, I was sitting before a pane of bulletproof glass in a small room set aside for police and legal visitors.

The door in the identical room on the other side of the glass opened and Herman Foster shuffled in. Even in his orange jumpsuit, the medium-height, medium-weight former physics professor was indeed rather nondescript.

With his dull brown eyes, thinning gray hair, and prison-issue glasses, Foster was the kind of man who could easily be overlooked outside of a laboratory setting. The physicist’s face displayed neither interest nor fear as he picked up the phone.

“Who are you? And what does the FBI want from me?”

“Hello, Dr. Foster. My name is Dr. Alex Cross. I’m a psychological and investigative consultant to the Bureau. And I’m just interested in talking to you.”

“About what? My inner noggin? Theoretical physics? This hellhole?”

“Thomas Tull,” I said.

The prisoner’s face softened. “Ahh, Thomas. Where is he these days?”

“Right now he’s in Washington, DC, researching a series of murders down there.”

“It’s what he does so well,” Foster said. He looked at his lap and then stared at me, hard. “Wait, why are you here? What’s Thomas done?”

“As far as I know, he’s done nothing,” I said. “But there have been allegations made against him by his former editor.”

His expression soured. “Suzanne Liu. I’ve talked to her. Well, over the phone, anyway, when she was fact-checking. She struck me as vindictive and opportunistic. What does she claim Thomas did to her?”

“Not to her, and I can’t get into details. What’s your take on Tull?”

“Thomas is a friend, a dear one,” Foster said. “One of the few I have left. He has treated me decently from the start and never wavered in his support. He just wanted to know me and my side of things.”

“You think the way he portrayed you in the book was fair?”

“Fair? Yes, I suppose so. I mean, Thomas doesn’t really tell you what he thinks. He lets other people take all the shots at you. But he did quote me accurately more than ninety percent of the time. And if he comes across evidence that exonerates me, I know he will do the right thing and fight to free me.”

I cocked my head, studying the scientific genius. “You still maintain someone else electrocuted those women?”