However, were there ghosts like the ones Mr. Lean, the building’s elderly custodian, claimed? Raphael recalled one night he was working late while Mr. Lean swept his cubicle. A low drawn-out moan had come from somewhere below the floor. The custodian froze, dropped his broom, and put his hand to his heart.

  “Ghosts?” asked Raphael, the corners of his mouth twitching, for the moan was likely nothing more than the building’s old plumbing system.

  “You wait, Mr. Lennon. You’ll see our ghosts one night.”

  “Five years. No ghosts. I doubt that …” He didn’t finish the thought, reluctant to tell Mr. Lean he didn’t believe in ghosts at all.

  “You’re laughing,” said the custodian. “Simple, superstitious Mr. Lean, right?”

  “No, no.”

  “An ignorant old fellow who hears bumps in the night and chains rattling.”

  “That’s not it, Mr. Lean. I’ve never seen or heard them myself. I don’t know, maybe there are.”

  “When they want you to see them, you will.”

  Did troubled spirits linger in the halls and houses where their lives had ended? Something squeaked, like the fall of a new sneaker. Raphael stood up, stepped out of his office, and scanned the quiet floor.

  Nobody about.

  He dropped back into his chair. Could a ghost email him? In this digital age, instead of ruffling curtains or rattling chains, perhaps spirits contacted the living through such medium. Raphael laughed. He had enough problems without digital ghosts haunting him.

  “Boo,” he said aloud. Yeah, funny.

  Raphael returned to the Klaes message, which didn’t return to him. Not in old mail, not in deleted, not in saved. Gone. He tried a few recoveries, all failed.

  Email messages weren’t supposed to simply disappear. Norval’s touted security must have been compromised.

  If Klaes did this, how was less important than why? What was—or is if alive—going on in his head?

  Raphael went back to Klaes’s email box and opened the physicist’s incoming messages. The number of received emails had increased by several dozen from the previous day: store news from Amazon, a few opportunities to meet women, penis enlargement patch. Klaes’s spam filter was slipping. He hovered over one from The Children’s Love Fund. The subject was Your Generous Donation. He rubbed a knuckle across his chin. Children … love. Love … children. Was there a little pedo going on? He opened the email.

  At the top of the message were several photos of children in hospital settings. The ravages of cancer and other diseases apparent.

  Dear Mr. Klaes,

  The children and I want to express how grateful we are for your gift. Without people of your generosity, our foundation and the work we do could not exist.

  I have spoken about you to many of the children who have received medical treatment through your donations. I know of your personal involvement with several of our charges; we will make your generosity and service known to all as a model of compassion.

  Jan Olmstead, Director

  The Children’s Love Fund

  Below were several more photos of children and a link to the organization’s website.

  Raphael’s cheeks burned, having sure as hell called that one wrong. Out of courtesy, he would contact Jan Olmstead and inform her of Klaes’s death.

  Raphael let the cursor hover over Sent Messages.

  Click.

  The second message Klaes had sent after his death went out on January 13 to trojanwarrior@xxxmail.org. The third and fourth messages had gone out on January 15. One to a Dr. Royer—a threat similar to that sent to Miranda—the other to Gerard Van Pelt. He clicked on trojanwarrior.

  Subject: “Small Dead Bodies.”

  Dear Troy-Boy,

  Out of love and loyalty, your dog obeyed your degenerate wish. You rewarded the creature with mutilation. From that humble beginning, you went on to mutilate history. Prepare to meet your maker.

  JK

  Two heavyweight threats. One recipient dead so far.

  As with Miranda’s email address, he typed in Troy-Boy’s email and searched. Nothing. The address was deep-masked.

  He wanted to return to the message Klaes had sent him personally, but after several tries to bring it back from the dead, he accepted that the text remained only as an afterimage in his mind’s eye. Klaes—or someone masquerading as Klaes—was baiting Raphael to search, simultaneously warning him off. He couldn’t dig deep enough to find the body.

  What body? They’d cremated the physicist. Or so Stull had claimed.

  He searched for Donato’s of Glendale and went to their website. Donato’s offered a range of services including cremation and rated four out of five stars. Mortuaries didn’t close on weekends. A man answered the phone on the second ring.

  Raphael introduced himself and Norval, which seemed to carry some weight, for he was transferred to the funeral director himself.

  “Hello, Mr. Lennon. This is Mark Lowe,” said a monotone voice. “How may I help you?”

  In the ten-minute phone call, Lowe confirmed that Dr. Klaes was indeed cremated, the funeral arrangements made in advance by Klaes himself. There was a courtesy video of the actual cremation. Lowe would email a copy of the video to Raphael as an attachment. “You’ll receive it by Monday.”

  Proof of Death Certificate: Dead.

  Emails: Alive.

  Cremated: Dead.

  Knowledge of Raphael: Alive.

  JK Rules and the Wall came again to mind. When Raphael was younger, he attempted to master the Wall countless times, but its angle was such he had never successfully skated it. Tried a hundred times and always fell, always failed. He thought of that wall as he sat there, feeling as if whatever he did, he could gain no traction with the Klaes case.

  He turned to the Physicists Commons.

  He wanted a second read of Klaes’s bio on the website, which offered little more detail than his anonymous obituary. He wondered if information had been deleted.

  Just to check, he surfed through a dozen biographies of physicists from Berlin to Tokyo. All were longer and more detailed than Klaes’s.

  One stopped him in his tracks, Lily Faraday’s, the person managing the Klaes celebration. He read it from first to last word. It finished with an odd declaration.

  I refuse to answer any more questions on this site. Some users don’t comprehend a scientific answer, so they downvote, rather than ask the poster for further explanation. My knowledge is being distorted and wasted. Before I am removed, which seems to be the common fate of those who don’t march to the drum of grand poohbah Maisie Sparod, I will no longer take part.

  Similar to every other forum, there were dissenters, feuds, and backstabbing.

  He definitely needed to speak with Lily, but so far she’d snubbed him. He needed someone else in Klaes’s orbit. He opened Klaes’s saved email. There were tens of thousands, as if he never deleted a damn one. He spent an hour rolling through the emails, opening a few. One name came up many times. Jonathan Mirsky. Their email conversations comprised mathematical exchanges—mostly formulas several lines long with various annotations—enough text though to understand they disagreed on the size of infinity.

  He copied Mirsky’s email address, opened his Norval email client, and clicked compose. He pasted Mirsky’s address, typed Jason Klaes in subject, and then sat motionless for several minutes, deciding how to word the question. Once satisfied with the query, a delicate request to discuss Mirsky’s colleague and friend Jason Klaes, he piloted the cursor over send as if balancing his skateboard on a rail, psyching up for a tough grind.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  Twenty minutes after Raphael returned home from the office, his phone rang with Mirsky’s call.

  The voice was gruff, impatient, and intimidating. “Mirsky here. What kind of scam you working, Lennon? You one of those séance kooks? Getting messages from Jason Klaes, huh?”

  Seated at the kitchen table, Raphael ran a knuckle across his bottom lip. “Nothing of that sort, Mr. Mirsky. I work for the Norval Corporation. We process information on the deceased. Frankly, we’re trying to determine if Jason Klaes is alive or dead.”

  “Well, should be simple, shouldn’t it?”

  “So far it hasn’t been. As I mentioned, the message—”

  “Yes, yes, a missive from the dead,” Mirsky snapped. “Well then, we better meet.”

  Raphael set his glass saltshaker on its side and spun it. “Couldn’t we discuss this over the phone? Perhaps, Zype?”

  “No, not something I do, Lennon. It was Lennon, right?”

  “Yes. Raphael Lennon.”

  “How well do you know Pasadena?”

  The saltshaker came to a stop. Raphael’s stomach tightened. “I don’t think I can make it to Pasadena. I don’t drive.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Mid-Wilshire.”

  “North Hollywood then? Take a cab,” suggested Mirsky.

  With the heel of his hand, he flipped the saltshaker. Mirsky was a stranger. What difference would it make? “I’m somewhat agoraphobic.”

  “Somewhat, huh? Like a little bit knocked up? Where can you go, Lennon?”

  He spun the shaker again. “Within walking distance of the Grove.”

  “Do you know Shorty’s Big Top Room?” asked Mirsky.

  “I’m not sure I should—”

  “If you want to know about Jason Klaes, Shorty’s.”

  Raphael’s eyes adjusted to the bar’s interior, dominated by studded black leather booths and walls bathed in red light. The smell of long-extinguished cigarettes hung in the air, along with cannabis, not openly smoked but likely the product of subcut mouth vapes with palate leech lines. Synthesized music stopped just short of thunderous. For four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, Shorty’s Big Top Room pulled in a respectable crowd of drinkers and patrons of the arts.

  The odd spot Professor Jonathan Mirsky chose was on the west side of La Brea Boulevard, Raphael’s eastern boundary. When he was younger, he’d skated in the parking lot where a guardrail made for good grinding. He’d practice until this big dude came out the rear entrance and told him to get lost.

  Once, when the big guy opened the door to chase Raphael, someone pushed away an inner curtain. A glimpse of an inverted woman, legs in the air, sliding down a silver pole. As her long red hair gathered on the stage, men pawed at her body and threw money at her feet. The open door and curtain aligned for only a few seconds, though his fourteen-year-old eyes peered for what seemed an eternity.

  On the living room canvas and years ago, he rendered Shorty’s as a scarlet whirlpool.

  He had not expected to return to the whirlpool, but Mirsky hadn’t given him much of an option.

  “Four p.m.” the winner of the Oerstead Medal for teaching of physics—and twice nominated for a Bogolyubov Prize—had confirmed. “I’ll be wearing a Hawaiian shirt. And you?”

  “Six foot three without my Sketchers. One-hundred and fifty-four pounds with my Sketchers. Long, dark hair—clean. Blue beanie. White T-shirt and drift pants. Carrying a skateboard with Cult Centrifuge wheels.”

  Even in the darkened bar, which smelled of peanuts, standing water, and smoke, Raphael had spotted Mirksy’s bright, tropical shirt and took the empty stool beside him. He’d read the man’s bio, seen his photo on his institution’s website; he looked different without the lab coat, like a bad undercover job.

  Shifting, the physicist gazed at Raphael for a moment, grunted, and ran a finger along his pencil-thin mustache.

  “Taller than I might have thought,” said Mirsky.

  “I said six-three.”

  “Yeah, that’s right, you did.”

  The barmaid strolled over and asked Raphael his pleasure.

  When Raphael tried to order a Stella, the physicist told the barmaid to change it to an IPA, a Voodoo Ranger. While Mirsky focused on the agile pole dancer, Raphael considered his bar mate’s open mouth and quivering nostrils. Someone was fucking with him, hired some lookalike clown to yank his blockchain. “If you’re a physicist, I’m Pope Lucy,” said Raphael above the music. “Where’s the camera?”

  Mirsky gave his moustache a final tap, as if to ensure it would stay on, snatched a bar napkin from the stack, and took out a pen from his shirt’s top pocket. With fluidity and speed, Mirsky wrote numbers and symbols in minuscule script. It took him about thirty seconds to fill the napkin.

  He slid the napkin in front of Raphael, who studied it only long enough to know it meant nothing to him.

  “Schlitz’s equation,” said Mirsky. The physicist launched into the equation’s meaning which, though fluent and convincingly intoned, lay beyond Raphael’s comprehension. Convincing, though, is not convinced.

  “What you wrote could be gibberish. Anyway, I doubt a physicist would try to prove his identity by writing an equation.”

  “Who says? You run with the physicist crowd?”

  “No, I’m not—”

  “Ah, it’s good enough for the B-girls, not for young, agoraphobic”—he gazed at Raphael for a few seconds—“Raphael Lennon.”

  “Mind if I see your ID.”

  Raphael had expected a university badge, something featuring the man’s credentials, but Mirsky took out his wallet, flipped it open, and showed a California driver’s license: Jonathan Francis Mirsky and with a birthdate matching the seasoned face.

  “All right, you’re Mirsky. What’s with this place? Couldn’t we have met at Starbucks?”

  Mirsky shrugged. “What can I say? I enjoy strip clubs, and this used to be a regular hangout.”

  “I thought scientists were beyond such stuff.” Though now that he thought about it, some pretty earthy scientists had come across his desk.

  “Some are, some aren’t.”

  “What about Jason Klaes?” asked Raphael.

  “Oh, Jason went for women all right, only he liked the smart and sensitive ones—women you had to be careful with.” Mirsky glanced at Raphael as if waiting for a reaction. “Me, I lean toward hard women. Treat them nice, and they’ll spit in your face. Not saying a projectile of woman’s spit is a bad thing.” He grinned.

  Oh, hilarious. Raphael grimaced and looked away. “I’m surprised you agreed to meet me.”

  “I was curious, Mr. Lennon.”

  “I prefer Raphael.”

  “You’re one uptight dude. What do you do for fun, aside from your skateboard?”

  Raphael threw his shoulders forward. “I paint.”

  “Ah, an artist. Plain or fancy?”

  “Neo-Depressionism,” said Raphael.

  Mirsky smirked. “I like you, kid.” He raised his drink as if in a toast, downed most of it, and wiped his lips. “You from here?”

  “Born and raised. Why?”

  “Nothing. Just idle curiosity. So, tell me more about this Norval Corporation.”

  Raphael blew through half the beer, its pine-air-freshener odor fading, and rapped the bar, his hand sticking to the wood. Should he tell his tale to this skeevy dude? Bottom line, he had contacted Mirsky, who could have blown him off. Give the devil his due. The physicist listened as Raphael explained the lucrative business encircling death and how he caught criminals trying to outwit the system.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard about that scam—excuse me—forward thinking enterprise. Why is Jason so important?”

  He filled Mirsky in on the company’s policy and the results of his research. “In Jason’s case, the evidence points both ways. On the one hand, the coroner says our physicist is dead. Cremated and scattered to the high seas. On the other hand, a number of people received post-mortem emails from Klaes’s personal account.”

  Mirsky tapped the bar napkin. “Old Schrödinger raises his hoary head. Is the cat alive or dead? Perhaps both—until you open the box.”

  “According to the coroner’s office, Klaes blew his head off with a shotgun.”

  Mirsky’s face scrunched as if he’d just eaten something bad.

  The perfume of the dancer wafted over the bar.

  Mirsky glanced toward the woman and nodded. “A dead cat all right.”

  “For a dead cat, he seems busy. He’s been sending out emails. Someone is erasing his history on the Internet. He threatened a woman with murder.”

  “One hell of an accusation to lay on a dead guy.”

  “Was the Klaes you knew capable of it?”

  “Loathing someone enough to want to murder them? Yes. Actual murder? No.”

  Raphael took a gulp of beer. “What would set him off?”

  “Cruelty. Hurt a child or an animal, and your name went down in Klaes’s black book.”

  “What happened if you got in the book? Are we talking physical retaliation?”

  “Nah, he was too soft. Instagrammed Buddhist sutras on the sacredness of all life. Twitter scolding. Maybe a petition if it was a corporation.” Mirsky’s forehead wrinkled, and he pressed his fingertips together. “Bottom line is he hated the suffering of innocents.”

  Raphael set the skateboard on his lap, turned it deck-side up, and brushed a wheel; sending it spinning. “What would he do about the suffering?”

  The music changed to a Miami Circus-Grind beat. Mirsky glanced toward the dancer as she shimmied to the top of the pole with only the strength of her clamped legs, then whirled about the steel as she descended. Mirsky sighed and regarded Raphael, who too swiveled back to the bar.

  “He’d move heaven and earth to lessen the pain of a child or an animal. And when he couldn’t, it crushed him. Hand to God, he’d physically change, shrink, deteriorate.” Mirsky drew his shoulders inward and slouched. He held the pose for a few seconds, then straightened and motioned to the bartender for two more drinks.

  Raphael waited for the drinks to arrive. The physicist took a thoughtful sip.

  Raphael set a second wheel spinning. “What would be the point of Klaes taking his own life?”