Crime Zero (17 page)

Pamela Weiss smiled but said nothing for a moment. She looked down at her notes, then up at Madeline, and finally back to Alice. Her clear blue eyes rested on each of them for some seconds. Alice thought she was going to ask one of her difficult questions. For a horrible moment she wondered if Pamela had somehow found out about Crime Zero or the San Quentin deaths. But she needn't have worried. A beaming smile suddenly lit up Pamela's face. "Well done," she said. "We've all taken some risks, I know, but I promise that if I become President--"

"You mean when you become President," corrected Todd Sullivan with a smile.

Pamela laughed. "Then I will make sure we realize this vision of a gentler society, a society with a conscience."

Todd Sullivan stood up. "Sorry about this, but we're going to have to run."

"I'll see you both at the dinner tonight in L.A. with Bob Burbank," said Pamela. "It's a celebration of the Conscience announcement tomorrow and a chance for me to brief the President on the latest. It's going to be a good evening."

Chapter 14.

San Bruno Mountains, San Francisco Bay Area. Thursday, October 30, 5:25 P.M.

Alice Prince loved the way the afternoon sun filtered through the tall branches of the surrounding trees, dappling the grass and earth of the broad forest clearing. This was a private enchanted place full of happy memories. She often came here, only a brisk fifteen-minute walk away from home, with her two golden Labradors. She liked to smell the sweet air, watch the sun move over the swaying treetops in the valley below, and be alone with her thoughts.

After the meeting at ViroVector with Pamela Weiss she had been driven the eight miles home. She'd gone straight out into the garden and called the dogs, put on their leashes, and walked them over here for a quick walk before taking the company Gulfstream to LAX and dinner with Pamela and the President.

Alice wished that they could have persuaded Kathy to see their point of view. In many ways their objectives were the same. Alice admired the fact that Kathy had stood up to Madeline. But she was frightened that Madeline would do more than just keep Kathy quiet until the election. She knew how far Madeline could go. Alice loved her friend, but Madeline was never happy with doing only what was necessary. She always had to go further.

Alice sat on a tree stump in the middle of the thirty-yard clearing and tilted her face to the sun, enjoying the warmth on her skin. Around her she could hear the trees whispering in the breeze and the dogs barking as they played together. If she closed her eyes, she could even hear Libby's voice.

Alice used to come here often with Libby. Her husband, John, and Madeline would sometimes come too. Even Pamela Weiss had come once or twice with her husband, Alan, and their three boys.

After Vassar College Pamela had become a successful lawyer in the Los Angeles district attorney's office and then married one of the partners of the law firm she most often opposed in court. Her marriage had remained strong, and she now had three sons; the youngest, thirteen-year-old Sam, was Alice's godson. Pamela's husband, Alan, was one of the few men Alice was genuinely fond of.

Madeline, who had also gone on to study law before joining the FBI, married next--despite her increasingly obvious ambivalence toward men. She said it would be good for her career, and she wanted children. Unsurprisingly the marriage failed, and there were no kids. Still, divorce aided her real marriage, the one to the FBI, which blossomed spectacularly.

Alice's marriage had been a disaster. After a Ph.D. at Stanford and a spell with GeneCell Industries she started up ViroVector. It was then that she met John Prince, and at first he seemed to live up to his name, especially compared with her father. She soon learned that John was far from being a prince, but he did contribute to the single most wonderful thing in her life, Libby.

Even now, if Alice squeezed her eyes shut and listened hard to the wind, she could hear Libby's laughter in the clearing from happier times.

Of course she was no longer there. Plucked away as if she had never even been here.

As Alice sat there, she allowed her mind to fold in on itself. The present no longer existed, only the past and the future. An acid pain burned in her chest, the anger and grief as intense as when Libby was first taken. What had the monster done with her? How had she died? If only Alice knew these answers, she could bury her daughter and grieve for her properly.

But her anger and grief were no longer impotent. Madeline had seen to that. Soon no other Libby would ever again fall prey to the evil that stalked every street in the land.

Suddenly the warmth left Alice's face, and through her closed eyelids she could tell the sun had disappeared behind a cloud. The dogs barked. She shivered involuntarily and opened her eyes.

Then she saw the tall man standing at the edge of the clearing, his car parked on the dirt track. He was looking directly at her.

She looked so peaceful sitting in the sun that he was loath to disturb her. But Luke Decker's course was set. He had no choice but to carry this through to its conclusion. Dr. Alice Prince was the mother of Axelman's thirteenth victim, and to find where the bodies were buried, he had to ask her the location of the Snake Tree.

He had driven to Dr. Prince's house, but she was out. After some persuasion her maid said she was walking the dogs and had given him directions. He had come straight here.

Prince looked the way she did in the case file photographs, older but otherwise unchanged. She wore flat shoes, a pleated skirt, and a navy cardigan over her cream blouse. She didn't look like the founder of a major multinational corporation. Just over five feet tall, she had a moon-shaped face, short black hair streaked with gray, and thick, round eyeglasses. Her small mouth seemed pinched into a permanent frown. She wore no jewelry except for an unusual teardrop amulet around her neck. Only her gray eyes flecked with gold made her stand out. They scrutinized Decker with a ferocious, unblinking intellect.

He walked toward her, introduced himself, and showed his badge. "Dr. Prince, my name is Special Agent Luke Decker. I run the FBI's behavioral sciences unit, which specializes in serial crimes. I wish to talk to you about your daughter, Libby."

Her shoulders slumped momentarily, and the pain in her eyes told Decker more about her damaged psyche than any record of her divorce or breakdown in the FBI case file. Time didn't always heal. Alice Prince was still a devastated woman. She stood up and folded her arms in a defensive gesture, barely looking at Decker's badge; instead she kept her eyes locked on his face. For a moment they both stood in silence, listening to the wind blowing in the trees.

"If you prefer, we can talk back at your house," he said.

She didn't appear to have heard him. "Have you found Libby?" she asked.

"Not yet, but I believe I know who was responsible for her murder. With your help I might be able to locate her body."

"Who killed her?"

"A man named Karl Axelman."

"Karl Axelman?" she repeated, her face frowning in disbelief. She said his name as if she were familiar with it. Her right hand moved to the unusual teardrop amulet around her neck, stroking it like a worry bead. She suddenly seemed miles away, her eyes peering off into space at some scene Decker would never see. "How can I help you find where Libby was buried?" she asked him, her voice barely above a whisper.

"As you may be aware, Axelman committed a number of other similar crimes. Something we believe your daughter said to him could identify the resting place of all his victims."

"What? What did Libby say to him?"

"Apparently Axelman gained access to his victims' resting place through an entrance near a tree your daughter called the Snake Tree. Does that mean anything to you?"

Prince's eyes suddenly misted over, and she smiled, the saddest smile Luke had ever seen. "Yes, yes, I know the Snake Tree."

Decker's mouth felt dry. "If you can tell me the location, I'll get it checked out."

Alice Prince gazed at him for some seconds in silence, before suddenly turning away. At first he thought she might be collecting herself, stopping herself from crying. Then she pointed to the other end of the clearing, toward the setting sun. "See the big oak. That's the Snake Tree. That's the tree Libby always used to climb."

Squinting into the dying light, he looked at a silhouetted clump of trees. Slightly by itself was a vast gnarled oak, which looked much older than the trees around it. It had low branches and a thick trunk. Around the base some of the roots were exposed and seemed to coil around the trunk like slumbering serpents.

"Thank you," he said. "I'll get the place checked over. If we find anything, we'll inform you immediately."

She opened her mouth as if to protest, but then said nothing.

"Can I give you a lift home?" he asked. "Can I call anyone for you?"

"No," she said, leashing her dogs. "I prefer to walk. I want to be alone."

Alice Prince was numb as she walked her dogs out of the clearing to the path that led back home. It seemed wrong somehow. She was sure she ought to feel hysterical relief or grief or something. But she could feel nothing. There was a cold void in her soul that robbed her of all sensation, as though she'd just put her hand under a tap of scalding water and were awaiting the pain.

When Agent Decker had told her about Libby, she had been less shocked than she expected. Over the last ten years she had been subconsciously preparing for this day. But the news about Karl Axelman had been a blow to the stomach. She had thought it could be he, as indeed had the FBI. But since none of Libby's effects were among the killer's trophies, it was deemed unlikely. It seemed ironic now that she'd unwittingly used Axelman as one of the guinea pigs to verify TITANIA's projections on Crime Zero.

Axelman's abduction of Libby had been the catalyst for both Conscience and Crime Zero.

When Libby was taken, Alice's husband, John, deserted Alice for a woman he had been secretly seeing for years.

After this betrayal Alice collapsed and was admitted to an upstate sanatorium. Madeline and Pamela visited often, vowing to do everything in their power to help. Alice took great comfort from them, but her science had saved her sanity.

Making them bring the papers and books she required to the sanatorium, she devoured everything she could find on the topic, believing that if she could discover the answer, then she would repair her fractured mind. Just as she was about to give up, she read an article in Nature published by a Ph.D. student from Harvard named Kathryn Kerr. It was an ingenious theoretical model based on primates, and like an epiphany, a sacred message from God, it made sense of everything. It was to be her salvation.

Within weeks she was back at ViroVector Solutions. Taking Kathy Kerr's detailed theories, Alice used her expertise with viral vectors to put them into practice, not only to diagnose violent behavior but modify it. Most science is built on failure and disappointment, but Kathy's theories on gene calibration were rigorously thought through and extremely well documented. Within months of leaving the sanatorium Alice lured Kathy Kerr to Stanford University and, using her expertise on gene calibration, developed a genetically engineered retrovirus that successfully modified chimpanzee genes. Within another three months, without Kerr's knowledge, Alice perfected a viral vector that she was convinced could deliver Kerr's control genes into man.

She laid out her plan to Madeline and Pamela when they next met. If they really wanted to help, as they had vowed to do, then she had found a way to stop crimes like Libby's abduction from happening again. But she would need to conduct criminal tests. And to do this without FDA approval, she would need the backing of her now powerful friends.

Dr. Kerr wasn't told about the criminal trials yet; instead she was given the brief of following the usual painstaking stages of preclinical screenings, primate studies, and human volunteer trials to gain FDA endorsement that the treatment was safe. Once she had done this and won approval, and assuming their secret efficacy trials on criminals had worked, they could go public. The FDA approval would vindicate conducting human experiments years before they should have.

Pamela, who was then being groomed to be the new governor of California, had been difficult to convince. But in time she came aboard, especially when she realized how political correctness and the notoriously conservative FDA were stifling research into this area. Some black civil rights groups even protested against conducting research on black males because they claimed the findings would be used to reinforce white prejudices. Even though these fears were completely unfounded, the National Institutes of Health avoided using black subjects, making any broad-based research meaningless. Pamela eventually realized secret trials would not only speed things up but also get them started. She even approached the new U.S. President, Bob Burbank, and, using her formidable powers of persuasion, gained his broad agreement that curing crime was a good idea. Making no commitments, Burbank made it easier for them to cut through red tape and keep the project secret, while always maintaining a distance should anything go wrong.