The Green Trap Read Free Page A

there.
    â€œIt’s the truth!” Cochrane insisted.
    â€œWe can check it out easy enough,” said Purvis.
    McLain seemed to think it over, his baggy eyes studying Cochrane all the while. At last he nodded to Purvis. “Okay, that’s it. For now. Let’s go, Ty.”
    Purvis got to his feet, then fetched a card from his shirt pocket. “You think of anything, anything at all, give me a call.”
    Struggling to his feet, Cochrane accepted the card, his hand still trembling. “I’ve got to get back to Tucson. My job….”
    â€œWe can’t keep you here,” McLain said, sounding disappointed about it. “Just don’t try to leave the country.”
    Cochrane shook his head. The two policemen left, closing the door softly behind them. Cochrane went back to the bed and sat on it. He sank his head in his hands.
    Mike’s dead. Murdered. Somebody killed him while I was in the fucking lobby of the building asking for him. Who in the name of Jesus H. Christ would kill Mike? Why?
    He fell back on the bed, his unbuttoned shirt crumpled against his back.
    Irene! he thought. Mike’s wife. Where is she? Where was she when Mike was killed?
    Sitting up again, he reached for the phone on the bed table, then realized he hadn’t memorized Mike’s number. He opened the drawer and fumbled for his cell phone, pressed buttons until his brother’s home number came up in the tiny screen.
    Irene’s patient schoolteacher’s voice said mechanically, “We’re not home at the moment. Please—”
    Cochrane snapped his cell phone shut.
    Mike. Cochrane saw in his mind the redheaded kid he’d playedbaseball with. The older brother who’d lorded it over him all his life. The grown man with the wise-guy grin and the endless enthusiasm for everything he did. And the hair-trigger temper. He’s dead. Somebody bashed his skull in while I was standing a couple of hundred feet away like a stupid idiot
    On an impulse he tried Mike’s cell number again. He can’t be dead. This is all some kind of mistake. He’ll answer the phone and—
    â€œHey, I can’t take your call right now. Leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you pronto.”
    Cochrane shook his head. No, Mikey, you won’t get back to me. Not ever.
    He clicked the phone shut and wondered why he couldn’t cry. He wanted to. But the tears would not come.

Melvin Calvin
    A member of the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley from 1937 until his death in 1997, Calvin received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for identifying the path of carbon in photosynthesis, which led him to a lifelong interest in adapting photosynthetic techniques for energy production. In his final years of research, Calvin studied the use of oil-producing plants as renewable sources of energy. He also spent many years testing the chemical evolution of life and wrote a book on the subject that was published in 1969.

TUCSON:
STEWARD  OBSERVATORY
    C ochrane sat behind his desk wondering if he was sinking into paranoia. His office had only one window; it looked out on the campus, mostly concrete with a few trees offering scant shade to the students who walked or bicycled along the paved paths between buildings.
    He’d gotten back to Tucson late Saturday afternoon, after spending most of the day in the San Francisco airport waiting for an available flight. By the time he’d reached his apartment building just off the campus, he was exhausted. But there was something subtly wrong about his living room, something that sent a chill of anxiety up his spine.
    It wasn’t that the place had been ransacked; the apartment seemed as neat and orderly as when he’d left it. But he didn’t remember leaving the newspapers on the sofa like that, and he
never
stacked his journals in the bookcase flat on their covers, he always stood them up, spines facing out.
    Somebody’s