I got the “Thanks” out about the same time I clicked off and ran out to the curb.
Luis was still waiting in the Miata. “Now where are we going?”
I told him the address.
He raised his brows. “You want me to take this car into that neighborhood?”
I smiled brightly. “You paid for damage coverage, didn’t you?”
Long-suffering Luis rolled his eyes and put the car into gear.
I bit my lip. I was really going to have to do something nice to thank him later on tonight.
The address turned out to be a tenement building, about forty years old, in dire need of a coat of paint. Or maybe a wrecking ball. Flemming was waiting by the front door, arms crossed, looking around nervously.
His frown turned surly when we pulled up.
“I’m sure there’s no need for this,” he said as I hopped out of the car. Luis left the engine running.
“You’re worried, too, or you wouldn’t be here,” I said.
“He’s on the third floor.”
The elevator didn’t work, of course. I ran, quickly getting a full flight of stairs ahead of Flemming.
“What room?” I shouted behind me.
“Three-oh-six.”
The door was unlocked. I pushed it open.
The place smelled like it hadn’t been cleaned in a long time: close, sweaty, dank. Too warm, like the heat was turned up too high. The door opened into a main room. Another door led to what must have been a bedroom; a kitchen counter was visible beyond that.
Stacks of newspapers lined all the walls, folded haphazardly, as if Fritz had read them all, front page to back, and had meant to throw them out but never gotten around to it. Some of the piles leaned precariously. In the middle of the room, an old sofa sat in front of a TV set that must have been thirty years old, complete with rabbit ears wrapped in tin foil. It sat in a corner, on a beat-up end table. A static-laden evening news program was playing.
Something was wrong. Something in the air smelled very wrong—coldness, illness.
Dr. Flemming entered the room behind me, then pushed past me. I’d stopped, unable to cross the last few feet to the sofa. Flemming rushed to it, knelt by it, and felt the pulse of the man lying there.
Fritz lay slumped against one arm of the sofa, staring at the television, perfectly relaxed. His face was expressionless, his eyes blank.
Flemming sat back on his heels and sighed. “If I had to make a guess, I’d say it was a heart attack.”
“So he’s—he’s dead.”
Flemming nodded. I closed my eyes and sighed. “It couldn’t be something else, something someone did to him?”
“You said it yourself. He’s old. Something like this was going to happen sooner or later.”
“It’s just when he called last night, he almost sounded like he knew something was going to happen to him.”
The phone—a rotary, for crying out loud—sat on the table next to the TV. He’d hung up and put it back before this happened.
“Maybe he did.” Flemming stared at Fritz’s body, like he was trying to discover something, or memorize him. “I’ve seen stranger things happen in medicine.”
I bet he had. He claimed he wanted his research to be public, but he sure wasn’t sharing. My anger, the shock of finding Fritz, was too much. Words bubbled over.
“Which is it, Flemming? Medical applications or military applications? Do you have dreams of building a werewolf army like the Nazis did?”