Mutant (19 page)

Five minutes later Martha returned, acting as if she’d never been anxious at all. “Ah, it’s nothing. Imagine dragging us down here for that little scratch.” Smiling at a very relieved looking Chet and giving him a hug, she glanced at her watch and added, “On a school night as well. Come on, young man, you and I are heading home.” To Sullivan she whispered, “Dr. Steele’s got to lie around here for a while the nurse told me, to make sure the anesthetic’s worn off.” She gave a chuckle. “Apparently it’s his own rules, and he’s fit to be tied.”

“I’ll drive you home,” Sullivan quickly offered.

“Not at all. You go in there and tell him what you’ve been so patiently waiting to say. He’s got nothing better to do but to listen, and besides, if you don’t get him now . . .” She leaned in as if about to impart a terrible secret. “He doesn’t return his phone calls, you know.”

With a wink and a parting grin, she hustled out the door. Chet, following behind her, called out over his shoulder, “Good night, Dr. Sullivan.”

“Good night, Chet,” she said, remarking again how much the boy’s eyes resembled his mother’s. Except for one difference. While hers had the look of someone well loved who knew it, the boy had an uncertain gaze, the kind that suggested he didn’t know for sure.

Steele flushed with embarrassment as soon as she entered his curtained cubicle. He lay on a stretcher, the head of it elevated almost straight up, and his hospital gown drawn tightly around him. She couldn’t tell for sure, but it seemed he’d lost a few pounds since Honolulu. “Dr. Sullivan,” he greeted her gruffly. “Thank you for bringing my family over, though I have to say I’m surprised to see you here.”

“I do apologize for barging in on you like this, but it’s important we talk, and Martha said it would be okay.”

“Martha said—”

“Yes, she’s such a dear woman. She obviously dotes on you. And let me add what a fine young man Chet is. He must make you proud.”

“Why, yes, he does. But—”

“And please, call me Kathleen. May I sit down?” she added, pulling up a folding chair and plopping herself in it before he could answer. “Martha said you were all right?”

“Yes, I am.”

“What happened, anyway? The hospital told us only that a pair of German shepherds attacked you. Had they escaped?”

“Look, Dr. Sullivan—”

“Kathleen, remember.”

“Yes, of course, Kathleen. I wanted to say if it’s about the mess I made of things in Honolulu that you want to discuss, I’m deeply sorry for all the trouble I caused you—”

“No, Richard,” she said sternly, “you definitely don’t have anything to apologize for to me. It’s the media that should say they’re sorry. They behaved atrociously in how they treated you. And they wrote barely a word about poor Dr. Arness. That in particular turned my stomach!”

Steele looked startled, as if he’d expected another reaction out of her altogether.

Poor man, she thought. He’s probably been beating himself up for not picking up on Arness’s being suicidal. “And you aren’t to blame for her death, Richard, you hear me!” she added, looking him straight in the eye.

His jaw loosened a little on its hinge. Even the tightness around his mouth slowly disappeared. “Thank you, Kathleen,” he replied. “It helps to be told that.”

Seeing how her reassurance had made his expression soften so, the last thing she felt like doing was to hit him with the real reason behind her visit. “Tell me about the dogs,” she repeated, wanting to postpone as long as possible the unpleasantness of warning him that his career hung by a thread. Perhaps she should wait until tomorrow after all.

His jaw tightened again. “Some maniac set them on me.”

“What!”

“You heard me. The guy just stood there smoking a cigarette while his beasts tried to rip me to shreds. He only called them off when a passerby saw me and phoned 911. He’s got to be a psychopath.”

“Oh, my God! Was he trying to rob you?”

“He was trying to kill me, period. He never said a word about money. No ‘Give me your wallet!’ or ‘Hand over your cash!’ I presume the other guy with him was in on it, too.”

“Other guy?”

“Yeah. There were initially two of them. His partner went ahead to lock a gate so I’d be trapped.”

The fact that there were two attackers made her come up with a ridiculous idea. She tried to pass it off, but the thought persisted. I’ll humor it, and then maybe it’ll go away, she told herself. “What language did they speak?”

“They never said a word.”

“What did they look like?”

“The usual ‘adult, male Caucasians of medium height’ you so often hear described,” he said, a lopsided grin on his face. “But these two both wore pretty recognizable outfits, and the smoker had a big distinctive feature.”

“Oh, Caucasian,” she replied, absently feeling a tightness release from somewhere deep inside her as a crazy notion that they might have been the same pair who’d attacked her scuttled back into the nether region of nightmares where it belonged.

“Yeah, they were dressed as security guards, and one had an incredibly bad set of acne scars, what we call in medicine a real ‘pizza face.’ ”

She felt her throat tighten.

“With a mug like that there may actually be a chance the cops will find him. . . .”

His voice faded away as she heard a ringing in her ears. It can’t be, she kept telling herself. Can’t goddamn be!

“. . . they better, or that creep will end up murdering someone . . .”

I won’t have it! No more conspiracy theories! Yet the possibility paid her no heed. It persisted in her head, swirling through her thoughts until she felt dizzy with it.

“. . . Kathleen? Kathleen, what’s the matter? Are you all right?”

The sound of his voice cut through her inner tumult. “Yes,” she quickly reassured him. “I’m okay.” She only then realized that he’d sat up and grabbed her wrist with his fingers on her pulse.

“You went so pale that I thought you were about to have a vasovagal episode. Here, put your head down.”

“No, I’m fine—”

“Put your head down!”

She obeyed. “What’s a vasovagal episode?” she asked from between her knees.

“A faint.”

“I don’t faint!”

“Good. But you better stay in that position a bit, until your pulse picks up, or you will.”

“Are you always this bossy?”

She heard him chuckle. “Around here we call it ‘taking charge.’ ”

“This is embarrassing.”

“It’ll only be embarrassing if you don’t do as you’re told and end up clunking your head on the floor.”

They spent a minute more arguing; then abruptly he declared, “Your heart rate’s fine now. You can sit up again.” But he continued to bend over her and keep his fingers on her pulse.

“Well, it’s about time—”

The sight that greeted her as she raised her head made her stop in midsentence. Springing to her aid, he’d loosened the ties of his hospital gown, leaving his rear end hanging out the back in full view. She started to giggle.

“What?” Steele asked, truly puzzled.

Her giggle became a laugh—a loud, wonderful redemptive laugh. It fleetingly overrode her shock at hearing his would-be killer’s description. Not even her incredulity that the attacker could be the same pock-faced security guard she’d seen at Agrenomics stopped her from giving into it. For a second, the dread, anger, and fear she’d been carrying washed away.

“What’s the matter?” he repeated, still not getting it.

In response she guffawed so hard she couldn’t speak.

Wearing a puzzled look, he began to chuckle, clearly having no clue as to why.

Tears running down her face, she marveled at how wonderfully infectious laughter could be, especially after what must have been a long drought for him with none whatsoever. That the noise coming out of his mouth sounded like a dry cough made his responding at all seem even more a miracle.

“What?” he managed to ask yet again.

This time she pointed at what she found so hysterical. When he turned to look, the shocked expression on his face sent her over the top, and she broke into gales of full-force, unable-to-get-her-breath shrieks.

He made a grab at the open flaps. His face seemed to strain against the grip of sadness that had encased it for so long, then fought its way into as glorious a smile as she’d yet seen on the man, and his feeble chortle erupted to life.

“Hey, keep it quiet in there!” called one of the nurses.

They tried as best they could to stifle their howls, but no sooner did one settle down than the other let out a half-smothered snort, and they’d start again.

“God, that felt good,” she managed to gasp during one of their tenuous intervals.

“Better than a thousand psychiatrists,” puffed Steele.

It all ended abruptly when a massive, ebony-colored hand parted the curtains and admitted the rest of the man it belonged to. “Which one of you clowns is the attempted murder victim?” he thundered, flashing a badge and identity card that identified him as Detective Roosevelt McKnight, Homicide, NYPD.

Any afterglow from their zany moment together soon vanished as she listened to Steele describe the attack on him. When Detective McKnight asked if he had any reason to suspect why someone might want him dead and he replied, “No,” she studied the floor in grim silence, thinking of a pockmarked face illuminated by a match.

“What’s bothering you, Kathleen?” Steele asked.

She looked up to see both men staring at her. “Nothing,” she answered much too quickly.

“Bullshit!” said Steele.

“Richard, it’s too crazy to mention. Even crazier than the idea I ran by Stanton today, and he hit the roof—”

“Stanton?” he interrupted. “What’s he got to do with this?”

“He doesn’t. It’s just that I told him something that struck me as a weird set of coincidences, and he went ballistic. He’s already having enough trouble with the board over the flap my speculation in Honolulu caused—”

“Excuse me!” broke in McKnight, the polite words sounding as blunt as if he’d hollered
Shut up!
When he had their attention he said, “Dr. Sullivan, why don’t you start at the beginning, and tell what you have to say in a way that an old flatfoot like me can keep up, okay?” It was an order, not a suggestion.

“Well, I really don’t know if it has a beginning, there are so many parts—”

“Start!” he commanded, pen and notepad at the ready.

She first told him about her visit to Agrenomics before Christmas and the guard with severe acne scars who’d nearly discovered her. When she related her misadventure in Hawaii, pointing out how the timing of the so-called home invasion might suggest that she’d been a target, the attentive silence from the two men stood in stark contrast to the derision she’d gotten from Stanton. The story of Pierre Gaston’s murder, especially his letter to her mentioning the only two areas on the planet where there’d been an H5N1, or bird flu outbreak, brought Steele bolt upright in his bed. The fact that the French geneticist had had his neck snapped just like Hacket’s left McKnight with his pen poised in midair, his forehead furrowed and fertile with worry. Maybe my notions aren’t so crazy after all, she began to think by the time she finished.

“So what master plan links all these isolated incidents together?” McKnight demanded, his voice sounding weary.

“Why, I suppose it could be people in the biotechnical industry trying to keep some catastrophic mistake they’ve made from becoming public.”

“And who might these people be? Do you have names?”

“Of course not. I only just learned—”

“And what’s the ‘catastrophic mistake’ they’re trying to keep secret?”

“Presumably it’s the sort of thing I’ve been warning about all along, but related to the bird flu outbreaks. I’ve never been one to ascribe sinister plots to multinational companies, but in this case I can’t help wonder to what lengths they’d go to cover something like that up.”

“When you were at Agrenomics yourself, did you see or find any evidence that this particular company might be guilty of having caused the sorts of things you’ve been warning about?”

“Well, no. In fact they came up with a perfectly clean set of test results. But that in itself I found suspicious.”

“How?”

She flushed. “It sounds silly, but the possibility that they alone had put in the kind of protective filters I’ve been calling for made me wonder if they already knew vectors of naked DNA could escape into the environment.”

He issued a king-size sigh, leaned back in the chair he’d commandeered from the nursing station, and pocketed his notes. “So? You should have been reassured. They were being good corporate citizens.”

“Or they were using something they didn’t want detected by testing techniques such as mine.”

“It’s all quite a story, Dr. Sullivan,” he said, giving his giant knuckles a crack and his back a stretch as he got up to leave. “Unfortunately it’s got nothing to do with the jurisdiction of the NYPD—except the part about the ‘pizza-face.’ ”

“Wait a minute,” interjected Steele. “You don’t think we should consider the rest of what she’s told us? How can you dismiss—?”

“Doc, we’re sure as hell going to make this wacko who attacked you a priority. Hell, setting dogs on people—I haven’t seen that since I was a kid in Alabama over forty years ago. I’d like you to spend some time with one of our police artists tomorrow, as well as look at some mug shots. Once we have a likeness, if Dr. Sullivan identifies it as the same man she saw at this Agrenomics place, we’ll subpoena them to give us the name of the security firm they use. As for all that other stuff she said, it sounds way out of my league. If she ever does get any real proof, maybe she can interest the FBI, or Interpol. In the meantime, I advise you both to be very careful.”

She wanted to scream at the big detective, not only for his apparent offhanded dismissal of her suspicions, but also for behaving as if she weren’t even in the room. But out of respect for being on Steele’s turf in his ER, she struggled mightily to hold her tongue.