In the rearview mirror, I could see Daloia beaming. “You bet. You pay Uber for this leg. Then I’ll sign out of Uber and you can pay me in cash for the rest of the day.”
“Deal. How much?”
“How far are you going?”
“Around the city. And MCI–Cedar Junction.”
“You mean the Walpole prison? That’s a cruise. How’s two hundred sound?”
“Like a plan,” I said.
Daloia dropped me at the Harvard Book Store and went to a nearby Dunkin’ to await my call. I entered the store, imagining Tull wandering the aisles, dreaming of being a writer and pulling book after book from the shelves.
Then I thought about Tull becoming aware of Emily Maxwell, one of the store clerks, a recent divorcée and the fourth victim in his first book, Electric.
How often had they spoken before she died? Did he know Emily had a broken heart before she was murdered?
These questions and others swirled in my mind as I sought out Martine Harris, the store manager. She remembered Maxwell and was saddened.
“Emily was a special, special person,” Harris said. “Customers were constantly asking her what they should read next.”
“She had a broken heart.”
Harris nodded. “She did, but she was coming out of it. I mean, getting over a divorce takes time, especially when you didn’t see it coming. I told her that a lot.”
“Was Emily friends with Thomas Tull?”
She hesitated and looked at the ceiling. “I’ve thought about that. I mean, how well he knew Emily. He says they spoke three or four times, just exchanging pleasantries when he was checking out. But I think he was shaken by her death and that triggered his interest and everything else—the book, the television series, all of it.”
“And yet I sense a little conflict in you.”
“Well, I’ve always wondered if there was more to their relationship than Tull let on. Something that would have explained the passion he brought to that case and to his book. What’s this all about, anyway?”
“Just wrapping up some loose ends for the Bureau,” I said. “Thanks for your time, Martine. I think I’ll walk around town and try to orient myself to where it all happened.”
“Do you have the map with you?”
“Map?”
“It’s in the back of the paperback edition of Electric. Shows where everything happened and when. People come here just to walk around and see it all. Like a tour, you know?”
“I have the book with me, and I’ll look at that map,” I said. “But I can’t imagine Herman Foster’s old haunt is hard to find.”
“No,” she said. “It’s where most people either start or end their tour.”
I thanked her again for her time and left, digging in my roller bag for my copy of Electric. Sure enough, there was a map at the back showing Cambridge and the surrounding towns and cities involved in the case.
I was interested to see that, with the exception of Emily Maxwell, all the victims lived outside of but close to Cambridge: in Boston’s Back Bay, Watertown, Somerville, Newton. With the electrocution scenes all identified on the map, I could immediately see a rough oval pattern with Cambridge and Harvard University slightly left of center.
Maxwell had lived seven blocks from the university. I decided to see a few places on campus and then walk to her old apartment before getting driven to the prison.
The wind had slowed but it was drizzling when I left the store and I hurried toward Harvard Yard, glad for the umbrella I’d thought to pack. I found a security guard and asked the way to Lyman Laboratory.
He showed me on a map where I’d find the physics research lab. I walked north through Harvard Yard, which was crowded with students hurrying through the light rain to their next classes or chatting about their looming final exams.
I crossed Cambridge Street and passed the university’s music hall on my way to the brick-faced laboratory on 17 Oxford Street. Remembering how Tull had described the place, I looked up at the window of the second-floor office on the right, where acclaimed theoretical physicist and Harvard professor Herman Foster had gone mad and plotted the electrocution deaths of seven innocent women.
CHAPTER 37
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.