Last Shot (2006) (53 page)

"So where would the hard data be?"

"Well, you said Dean Kagan had a paper shredder working overtime at the house. Let's assume he followed similar protocol at the office and threw all key printed evidence in the circular file. What remains--for future corporate number crunching--are probably digital files hidden behind ten firewalls. But you know what a bitch it is getting warrants for corporate computers and getting to those computers before they've been processed in-house. Plus, our probable cause is wobbly. All we have are Tess's murder and a disquieting document, strung together by a lot of talk."

Tim's Nextel rang, clattering across the table. He caught it before it fell off the edge. "Rackley."

Thomas said, "I'm at the hospital switchboard, waiting to put through a call to Sam's room from a Dr. Norrath. None of the docs called for a referral from this guy."

Tim half smiled at the name, lifted from one of Sam's video games. "Put it through and patch us in."

Tim clicked the speakerphone button, set the Nextel on the table, and pressed a finger to his lips. Bear and Freed waited excitedly through two rings. A nurse picked up.

Walker's voice said, "Dr. Norrath for Sam Jameson."

A rustle as the phone was handed off.

Sam sounded hoarse and tired. "Yeah?"

"This is Dr. Norrath calling. Do you understand?"

A hesitation. "Yeah, I understand."

"How are you doing?"

Sam coughed a few times, then said, "If I'm a saint, doesn't that mean I get to go somewhere after this?"

"A saint?"

"Mom said I was a saint. She woke me up this one night. A few days before she died. She asked me, just for pretend like, if I could get a new liver but that meant that tons of other kids who are sick like me couldn't get better?" Sam took a few seconds to catch his breath. "Would I want it anyways? I told her I wouldn't feel so hot about that. So no. She said I was a saint. She cried and everything. Mom did. So I knew she meant it. She said she wouldn't be able to do it either and she hoped I'd know it wasn't because she didn't love me more than anything in the world." More labored breathing. "So what's that get me? Being a saint?"

"I wouldn't know about that," Walker said, "but don't worry. I'll make it right. I'll make it right for you."

In a quiet, hopeful voice, Sam said, "Promise?"

The pause stretched out to maybe ten seconds. Walker said, "Promise," and hung up.

Tim, Bear, and Freed remained silent, poleaxed by what they'd just heard, processing the implications.

Tess and Sam had walked away from a life guarantee, close at hand but questionably obtained, and they'd done it to bust Lentidra out of Big Pharma captivity. Dean's words returned as an echo in Tim's head: bear in mind, once a patient begins gene therapy, he is removed from the organ-donor list. Tess had to drop Sam from the trial to position him for the liver when she'd thought she could go through with it. But clearly, even with the Xedral trial no longer an option, the implications of saving her son's life had sat too heavy with her. Tim wondered if he'd be able to live with himself, choosing Ty's well-being, even if that meant tens of thousands of other children would die. Maybe more. He wondered if he could live with that knowledge. He wondered if he could live with Tyler's growing up under the weight of a secret that would crush him were it ever revealed.

Thomas came back on the line and told them to hold while he and Frisk sourced the call's origin. His voice jarred them back into the present.

"The kid's circling the drain," Freed said. "How's Walker think he's gonna make it right?"

"Just comforting him, maybe," Bear said.

"Not his style." Tim worked the inside of his cheek between molars.

Call-waiting beeped. Tim clicked over, catching Dray on the tail end of a vicious yawn.

When she recovered, she said, "I went out to a three-mile radius from the airport parking lot. There was only one car stolen that night. A red 2004 Honda Accord, registered to Brehanda De LaSalle, license number three-Nora-Charles-Sam-six-eight-four."

Tim thanked her and switched lines just as Thomas picked back up.

Thomas said, "He's still fucking with us. He routed the call through the Vector switchboard, like before."

Tim felt a stab of excitement. "No, he's at Vector this time. He's getting Sam the Xedral shots."

Freed was already dialing. He racked the cordless on its base so he could use speakerphone and keep his hands free. He maneuvered through Vector's automated phone system, reaching the ranking security guard on duty. The guard reported no breaches. Freed gave him the Honda's identifiers and asked him to radio his men and ask if anyone had spotted it.

"There's a red Accord parked right across the street here. Got a bigass Cal State Northridge sticker on the back window?"

Freed grabbed his laptop from the kitchen counter. "Can you check the plate numbers?"

The guard huffed outside.

Bear said, "Walker would've switched the plates out."

With Tim peering over his shoulder, Freed Googled Brehanda Delasalle. The search engine delicately inquired, Did you mean: Brehanda De LaSalle? Indeed he did.

The guard said, "Nope, it's got dealer tags. Keyes Toyota Van Nuys."

Bear said, "What's an Accord doing with new-car plates from a Toyota dealer?"

Brehanda's search page loaded. The top entry read classof04.alumni.csun.edu.

As Freed scrambled back to throw on clothes and Bear ran to the door, keys jingling in his hand, Tim alternated between Thomas and the Vector guard. "Lock down the building. Call all local units. Assemble ART. Have LAPD set up a perimeter. I want the whole block flooded."

Freed jogged from his bedroom, ducking into the sling of his MP5. He called back over his shoulder, "Be back in a few, babe."

The elevator operator shrank against the back wall, so Freed knuckled the button himself. Tim flicked open the wheel of his .357 and gave it a spin, his ritual ammo check. As the elevator doors opened, Bear skidded to the front of the building, one tire popping up on the curb.

They hopped in, and he took off. They were a half block up the street before Tim managed to get the door closed.

Chapter
76

Timing his approach to dodge overlapping security patrols, Dolan arrived short of breath at the proximity reader guarding the back entrance above the parking-lot ramp. His own access-control card had been disabled as he'd predicted, and so had Chase's, but not Chase's generic guest pass, which he'd pulled from the G-Wagen's glove box. Just as the guard's footsteps rounded the corner, Dolan eased the door shut behind him and stood quietly inside the Beacon-Kagan Building, breathing in the darkness.

The rear of the floor was unfamiliar to him. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark, then eased slowly down the corridor. His sneakers padding quietly on the tile, he moved through the sliding glass doors into the test suite, passing beneath the oil portrait of his father. Agitated at the movement, the monkeys rattled their cages, flailing and screaming, the sound reaching a madhouse pitch. Dolan jogged through the heated production room, roller bottles filled with Xedral grinding all around him, and to his own bench. One of the junior researchers had left a champagne bottle, bow around the neck, on Dolan's chair. The attached card hung open, the note reading Congrats on the IPO! Your hard work finally paid off!

Working rapidly, he logged in to the system as his brother, using the code he'd pulled from Chase's cell phone. The monkeys' continued shrieking did little to settle his heartbeat. He waited, a held breath burning in his chest.

The log-in screen blipped away, leaving him with unrestricted access.

He searched the drives for key words, clicking past the reports teed up for public consumption and locating the data he was looking for--a set of files buried three folders deep on the C drive. Trial data, study databases, and finally, Lentidra's raw data. The true data. Most damning were interoffice memoranda circulated by Dean himself. Dolan gathered up an assemblage of key documents, compressed them into a neat packet, and attached them to an e-mail. He found Deputy Rackley's business card in his wallet and typed in the e-mail address.

His finger hovered above the mouse for maybe a full minute.

Lentidra had been ready for Phase I human trials months ago, but Dolan had slept through the backstage machinations that had removed it from the production line and sealed it behind a wall of secrecy. The cost of its delay was paid in human lives, as would be the cost of its continued captivity. All because Dolan had acted feebly, even in the face of his own suspicions.

He thought about Tess Jameson, with so much less to her name and more on the line. Up against vastly more powerful corporate muscle, she'd done everything to orchestrate her son's survival. And just when she'd gotten it within reach, her conscience wouldn't let her seize it. She'd fought to bring a cure to others, even knowing that Sam could die as a result. And now here Dolan was, Vector's principal investigator following the case laid out by a mother with limited resources, education, and opportunity.

The monkeys still hadn't calmed in the test suite, jungle cries echoing around the hard lab surfaces. The din ringing in his ears, Dolan clicked the mouse, sending the e-mail.

The icon spun as the data uploaded. Biting his thumbnail and waiting for the chime, he heard instead the sound of glass shattering in one of the accompanying suites.

A jumble of fears coalesced. Likely Dean had installed cameras inside the lab. So either Dolan had been spotted or soon would be. Maybe Chase's guest access card had called up an alert on some remote security computer.

Slowly, he eased away from his bench, passing back through the production room, the heat of the incubator making his neck sweat. He groped around on the wall, finding the light-switch panel and disabling the motion-sensor feature before stepping fully into the test suite. The monkeys hopped around, their cages banging on the lab counters, but there was no sign of any guards. And no shattered beakers to explain the noise he'd heard.

The access card failed to open the exit in the back of the test suite. Numb with disbelief, Dolan tried again. The proximity reader gave him another flashing red light. Security had locked down the building.

The fire-escape door toward the end of the corridor was by law manually operated. Guards might be waiting for him outside, but he'd rather risk a public confrontation than wait in the dark for whoever broke the glass and was likely stalking him. He now had concrete evidence of what he'd sensed all along--his father was capable of anything.

Dean's painted face stared down as Dolan slipped through the sliding glass doors. Before proceeding up the corridor toward the exit, he turned off the motion sensor on the overheads. The window at the end of the corridor, normally lit by passing headlights, was a black square. Plotting each footstep, he crept along the tile. The monkeys had finally silenced, but the quiet was proving equally sinister.

A faint rustling in the vector-storage room stopped him dead. Through the vast internal window, he caught a partial view of the room. A refrigerator door hung open, casting a faint light across the floor. The freeze-dried Xedral vials, normally neatly lined on the shelves, had been pulled down. A few lay shattered on the concrete. A number of Styrofoam shipping containers had been knocked over, dry ice misting up from the floor.

Why would a guard ransack the vector-storage room?

Before he could flatten to the wall, the door kicked open and Walker solidified from the dark, shrouded in wisps of vapor.

The gunmetal, when pressed to Dolan's neck, felt like ice.

Chapter
77

Using his left arm to cradle twenty or so vials of Xedral against his stomach, Walker pressed the Redhawk to Dolan's throat. Calmly, he stuffed the vials and needle kit into his pockets.

Dolan said, "Listen--"

"Turn around."

Dolan pivoted haltingly. His spread fingers trembled.

"What did Tess get on you?" Walker said.

"She found out about a second viral vector I designed for AAT. More effective but less profitable, so my father and brother buried it. They lied to me about it, told me it was less viable than Xedral, and covered the trail with false data."

"Get on your knees."

"I just figured out--"

From behind, Walker kicked out Dolan's leg, and he hit the floor hard, his kneecaps knocking tile. Walker pressed the gun to the back of his head. He expected Dolan to cry, to plead, but he didn't. He just sat there, sagged over his folded legs, shoulders slumped.

Walker thought about Kaitlin in the apartment, steering his gun to her own belly so he couldn't aim at the deputy pounding on the door. He summoned his anger. "You were there. When Tess was raped."

"Yes." Dolan didn't move. His voice was quiet, resigned, almost peaceful. "And I did nothing to help her. I'm sorry."

Walker's finger tightened on the trigger, but then a spotlight struck the window at the corridor's end. Squinting through the glare, he made out a row of incoming flashing blue lights.

He hit the floor.