MIND FIELDS (24 page)

Paul was offended.  “Where the hell are you going with this, Detective?  Surely you don’t think...Look, Sandi left me a long time ago, but I never stopped loving her.  If you think I had anything to do with her death, or that I even would have considered stealing her research, you’re way off track.”

Kincade wasn’t expecting much cooperation.  He suspected that Hingston was just a spurned lover, that he was likely the inside source of the data theft at BNI.  But the sincerity in his voice, in his eyes...

“I’m sorry.  I don’t mean to open wounds.  I was just going to say that although she did think you had stolen her data, she was also sure you never would have been involved in any kind of project that included hurting people.  She refused to believe that you could have had anything to do with this.”  He handed Hingston the file describing the four BNI employees with prior brain injuries who had met with strange and untimely consequences.

“What’s this?”

“Just read it and then give me a call.  Here’s my card.  Call me at home or on the cell anytime.”  Kincade stood to leave.

“That’s it?”

“I think you’ll feel better about talking to me after you’ve read that.”

Paul Hingston looked down at the file in his hand.  His curiosity was definitely piqued. 

Kincade nodded and walked out the door.

Paul Hingston took the elevator at Poe Towers up to his penthouse apartment.  The elevators ascended the outside of the thirty-seven story building overlooking the harbor.  The lights of Harborplace Mall, the Museum of Science and the Baltimore Aquarium lit up the periphery of the waterfront; it was a beautiful sight.  Paul looked out over the harbor, but barely saw a thing.  All he could think about was Sandi.

  He walked into his apartment and tossed the folder onto the counter.  The bar adjacent to the balcony was well stocked; this was going to be a Dewars kind of evening.  He poured himself a glass of scotch.  The ice cubes rattled against the glass as he swirled the amber liquor over them.  Paul loosened his tie, picked up the file and plopped down on the over-stuffed brown leather sofa across from the glass doors to the balcony.

  “Jackass,” he mumbled as he read about Lester Hanes smashing his car into a highway lamppost after de-chipping his car.  “Serves him right.”  He flipped to the next folder, the case of Helen Jensen.  “Pathetic,” he said, shaking his head as he read about her history of childhood seizures and the life threatening episode of severe seizures that she suffered shortly after coming to work at BNI, which left her a mental vegetable.

  He laid the file down and took a sip from his glass.  “What in the hell did you give me this for, Detective?  Did you figure I wasn’t quite depressed enough yet?”

  Paul put his glass on the end table and turned to the third file.  He remembered Billy Jackson.  Billy was a high school football star from Harford County, heavily recruited by several top universities. He had NFL prospect written all over him.  When he was blindsided in the state championship game and suffered a severe concussion, it made the headlines of all the local papers.  Paul remembered the case well.  Jackson had suffered a right frontal lobe injury.  Thanks to extensive rehab at Sinai Hospital, he made a nearly complete recovery except for some slight weakness in his left leg that dashed any hopes of a pro football career.  He came to work at BNI as a programmer right out of college.  Paul had met him at the interview; the next news he heard about Billy was when his car slid off an icy bridge into the Middle River.

  Paul flipped back over the first two files again.  “Shit,” he muttered.  “Right frontal lobe, all three of them.  What are the odds?”  He looked at the dates of employment and the dates of the accidents. They all occurred within a two-year period of time, the same two-year period when the Phase Two neuronanobot program was in the testing stages.  Each accident occurred within a few months of the victim being hired at BNI.  “Now you’ve got my attention, Detective.”

  Turning to the fourth case, he immediately noticed that Janice Saint-Martin had suffered a minor right frontal lobe injury in college, when she was beaten by a boyfriend.  Although she was still alive, her case was even more puzzling.  She swore to this day that she had no recollection of hiring a mechanic to de-chip her car, even though the mechanic had a video of the transaction on his security camera.  She also had no recollection, when questioned after her arrest, of having driven her car at one hundred and twenty mph, and everyone who testified at her trial described her as demure and conservative. 

  Paul put the file on the coffee table, got up and stretched.  He grabbed his glass and walked over to the window.  As he stared out the balcony trying to make some sense of the four strange cases, his thoughts again turned to Sandi.  He took a long, slow sip of scotch, hoping to dull the pain. As he stared out into the night, he remembered his last conversation with her and the packet she had sent him, the one containing the supposed evidence proving that BNI had been stealing her work.  It was still unopened in the bottom file drawer of his desk at the office.  He had forgotten all about it until this moment.  A terrible thought occurred to him.  “My God, could I have been responsible for her death?”

___

  Paul was at work earlier than usual Thursday morning.  After pausing to pour himself a cup of coffee, he pulled his leather chair up to the old oak roll-top desk and leaned his elbows on the padded armrests.  Staring down at the file drawer, head resting on his interlocked fingers, he sighed, half hoping that the packet within was only a figment of Sandi’s imagination.

  He took another gulp of coffee, and then reached into the drawer and pulled out the envelope.  As usual, Sandi’s notes were both detailed and well organized. Methodically, Paul made his way through the notes.  Nearly an hour later there was little doubt that the work completed in his lab at BNI, the work he had so proudly patented, had been derived directly from Sandi’s research at Hopkins.  Every detail, every gene sequence that he had programmed into the nanobots was precisely identical to the corresponding one documented in Sandi’s notes.

Paul went back through his own notes on the computer.  He searched for instances where they had encountered problems with the gene sequencing of the nanobots, and cross-referenced these instances with Sandi’s notes.  He was shocked to discover that in each case, the solution that he had found to the problem was identical to the one found by Sandi, and in each case, his own discovery had
followed
the identical breakthrough in Sandi’s lab by a matter of days.  There was no way this could be coincidental; someone at BNI had been stealing her work on a regular basis and feeding it to Paul. 

He thought back to the hundreds of hours of research, trying to remember where these answers had come from.  The intense work of the past two years blended together to the point where he was convinced that some of these ideas had been his own.  He knew, of course, that
he
had not been stealing the research from Hopkins.  The most likely prospect was Sean, but as bright as Sean was, Paul rarely remembered him solving any of the major gene sequencing problems; Sean’s strength was always in the physical construction of the nanobots. 

He sat back in his large, cushioned desk chair, struggling for answers.  And then he remembered.  “Of course,” he muttered, “the meetings.”  Once a week, during the project, he and Sean would meet with JT Anderson to review the progress.  Paul had often admired the astuteness of Anderson to scan the data and come up with seemingly impossible solutions.  He had always attributed it to JT’s genius. After all, JT was one of the pioneers of nanobotics, and still considered one of the leading experts in the field.  But now it all made a lot more sense. JT wasn’t solving the problems; he was merely giving Paul and Sean the solutions that he had stolen from Sandi.  He certainly had the wealth and power necessary for industrial espionage. 

“It had to be JT.”  Paul thought about how he had chided Sandi for accusing him of stealing her work.  “And all this time I just thought she was a paranoid fool, a sore loser,” he mumbled under his breath.

  “What’s that, lad?”  Sean was standing in the doorway behind him.  “You’re a loser?  Man, quite an evening you must have had.”  He laughed.  “What’s that you’ve got there?” he asked, spotting the packet of files on the desk.

  Paul gathered them up and tossed them in the trashcan.  He wasn’t sure just how much Sean had seen or heard.   “Ah, just a bunch of crap.  More letters from those geeks over at Hopkins saying we stole their work.  Must have been sent before Sandi died, God bless her.  I loved that girl, but she was a sore loser.”  He turned to Sean.  “Did you run the probability studies on those new gene sequences we worked out yesterday.”

  “I’ll get right on it.” Sean smiled. “Sorry again about Sandi.”

  “Thanks.”  Paul watched him walk away, then gathered the papers out of the trash and put them in his briefcase.  Much of the remainder of the day was spent checking into the employee files of Lester Hanes, Janice Saint-Martin, Billy Jackson and Helen Jensen.  There was not much to be found, and the absence of information was the most disconcerting evidence that Paul could find.

___

By Saturday night, Richard Kincade still had not heard from Paul Hingston.  He paced back and forth across the living room floor, and prayed that he had not made a mistake.  If Hingston was the NSA’s inside man at BNI, it wouldn’t take them long to discover that Richie knew too much, and they would be certain to make sure he didn’t tell anyone else what he knew.  Everywhere he went, he began looking over his shoulder.  He was furious at himself for putting Lara’s life in danger.

“For God sakes, Richard Kincade, you’re going to wear a hole in my new carpet.  Take me out to dinner. I’m in the mood for some steamed crabs.  You can take your frustrations out on those claws.”

The crabs were running small, but it was still a good idea.  After a mug of beer and half-dozen steamed crabs, Richie was feeling a lot better.  Lara was relieved to see the tension melting away from her husband’s face as he pounded the claws with a wooden mallet and artfully scooped the chunks of meat out with his knife.  By the end of the meal, they were reminiscing about the annual department crab feast, and the antics spurred on by the Chesapeake Bay ritual of good friends gathered around bushels of steamed crabs and a keg of draught beer.  Lara left the beer drinking to Richie tonight; she played designated driver.  They finished up and washed the sting of Old Bay seasoning off their lips and out of the narrow crab-shell cuts that stung their fingers.

Richie fought to stay awake on the ride home, and by eleven they were both in bed, drifting off to sleep.  At eleven-thirty, the phone rang, startling Richie from a dream state.  He reached out in the dark and knocked the phone off the receiver. 

“Shit,” he muttered, as he groped around the nightstand.

“Hello?” he said wearily as he managed to get the phone to his ear.

“Detective Kincade?”

The voice was shaky, but there was no doubt who it belonged to.  “Sandi?” Kincade said incredulously. “Thank God you’re OK.  What in the hell happened to you?  Where have you been?”

“Can we talk?  Is this line safe?”

“Sure, at least I think so.”  As he thought about the car bomb and the NSA, he realized that it probably wasn’t, but if someone was listening, they knew by now that she was alive anyway.

“I’m right out front.  I took Mrs. Flannery’s Camry after Guy ran off, and I drove to a small hotel off I-95 just outside of DC.  I didn’t know what to do.  I stayed there until my money ran out; I figured they’d find me if I used my credit cards.  I’m scared, Detective.”

He decided it would be best to continue this conversation in person. “I’ll meet you by the door.”

Richie hung up the phone.

“Who was that, dear?”  Lara turned toward him, half awake.

“Ah, just my mistress.  Go back to sleep.”

“OK then.”  She smiled and pulled the covers up over her shoulders, laying her head back on the pillow.

Richie threw on some clothes and went downstairs, trying not to wake Lara again.

Sandi was at the front door waiting.

  “Doc?”  Sandi’s thick brown hair was now short, straight and platinum blond.  Her face was worn from the long, sleepless nights.

  “You look like hell.”

  “Thanks,” she smiled feebly.

  Richie looked around quickly and took her by the shoulder.  “Come on in.”

  Sandi limped as she walked in.

Richie motioned her into the kitchen.  “Let me get you a cup of hot tea.”

She was shivering from the cold.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

  She shook her head no.  “Gas station sandwiches aren’t so bad when you’re hungry enough.”

  “What the hell happened?”  He sat down beside her and slid a cup of tea in front of her. 

  “You were right about Guy.”  Tears started to well up in her eyes, but she fought them back.  “I took my shot Friday night from a sealed bottle of Synthulin, not the stuff with the Allohypnol in it.  I waited up for Guy.  When he came in, I hopped into bed, pretending to be asleep.  He woke me and led me into the study.  When he asked me to access my Internet connection and dial into BNI, I played along, hoping to find the name of his contact at BNI, but when he told me to upload my research, I refused.”

  She stopped to take a sip of tea.  “He got real mad.  I’ve never seen Guy like that.  I got up from the chair and backed away from him.  When I told him I knew about the Allohypnol, he pulled a knife on me.  I was pressed against the wall and he kept coming at me.  That look in his eyes…I knew he would do it.” A shiver went up her spine as she relived the terror of that night.

  She paused again and Richie put his hand on top of hers.  “That pistol you gave me, I hid it in the pocket of my robe.  I had my hand on it the whole time.  When he came at me, I pulled it out.  My hand was trembling so bad it was hard to hold the gun straight.  I steadied it with my other hand, just like you showed me. When Guy heard the click of the safety release, he stopped dead in his tracks.  I guess he could see it in my eyes too; I would have pulled that trigger, I…” she sobbed. “I can’t believe that I could really do something like that.”

  “You were only defending yourself, Sandi.”

  “Still…”  She took another sip of tea and composed herself.  “When he saw the gun, he mumbled something and dropped his knife.  He turned and ran out of the room.  I was so scared I couldn’t move a muscle.  I was still standing there pointing the gun at the spot where he had been standing when I heard the truck start.  The window was fogged from the cold.  I wiped a spot clear so I could see out, and just stood there holding the gun; I couldn’t let go.  I watched the truck pull away.  I couldn’t believe he was gone.  All of a sudden I felt dizzy and leaned back against the wall.  My hands went limp and I dropped the gun as I slid to the floor. 

“I just sat there trying to decide what to do, trying to clear my head.  I had to get out of there.  I was afraid Guy or someone from BNI would come back for me and try again.  I rocked forward onto my knees reaching for the gun and lost my balance.  My left leg came down right on that damned knife.  It hurt like a bitch.  I grabbed at my leg; it was bleeding like hell, but the cut wasn’t deep.  It just scraped off a chunk of skin. I got up and ran down to the kitchen where I keep the first aid kit and wrapped it up.  That’s when the phone rang.”

“That was me,” Richie said.  “Why didn’t you answer it?”

“I was petrified.  I didn’t know what to do.  I was afraid Guy would come back, afraid he’d tell somebody at BNI that I was on to them.  All of those people that died…,” she shook her head and paused.  “I knew they wouldn’t be afraid to kill me...   I ran back upstairs, scraped together whatever cash I could find, threw on some clothes and grabbed the keys to the Camry.”