Pygmalion Unbound (13 page)

“I only had the vaguest idea of the
purpose
at the time, Doctor. I was beginning my research residency at Pritzker. I thought someday they might be used for cloning, or other life-extension projects. I hit upon the android option when the ESI controversy came up, in the late teens.”

“Which answers ‘how?’ But not ‘why?’”

He looked at her balefully. “You’ve seen my spasms, haven’t you? The way my hands or legs suddenly start shaking?”

“I have.”

“It’s Huntington’s,” he explained in a detached voice. “My mother had it. I saw her die slowly in a hospice when I was a teenager. I took a gene test after that, found out I had it, too. Early onset, when I was thirty, so I figure I’ve got five years before the symptoms render me useless to continue my work here. Or anywhere else, for that matter. It was one reason I was so slow to make anything permanent with Roni. I didn’t want to pass on the gene and curse our children.”

All of a sudden, everything made sense. The knowledge that he was doomed to an early, undignified death since his teenage years drove Crane to enter the medical field, to do research, to pursue immortality and life extension in whatever form possible. To create a perfect form of life, one that wouldn’t be snuffed out twitching and spasming before threescore years were out. He took from his most beloved and gave her life again, and no doubt at some point planned to take his essence and turn it into an android form, minus the Huntington’s gene. Or, Kelly reasoned, go one step further; from reverse-engineering the brain it was a short step to transplanting a brain from a human body to a host android form. Crane wasn’t playing God so much as he was longing to play Methuselah, or Lazarus Long.

“I’m — I’m sorry to hear that,” she said softly, at a loss to say anything else.

“I know you haven’t approved of some of the sources of my support,” Crane said, smiling weakly. “I wasn’t too wild about it, either. But there was no other way, not in the time I have left. No other way to hide the funding, to keep the research under cover, away from the public view, away from the regulators and bureaucrats. If word of this leaked out, that we’re creating androids from human DNA, there’d be chaos. I knew that much at least, after the ESI blowup. Every goddamned ignorant fundamentalist cretin who thinks that evolution is bunk and wants the Book of Genesis taught in biology class would be outside those front gates with picketers. There’s enough violent nutcases in that bunch to put the safety of everyone who works here in jeopardy. Not to mention the actual physical security of this facility — you know what they do to abortion clinics and doctors, we wouldn’t be any different. Their spineless lackeys in Congress would call hearings, ban our research outright, yank our funding. Think about the Manhattan Project proceeding in full public light. It had to be this way.”

“What happens when you find her?” Kelly asked after a silence. She tried to disagree with Crane’s reasoning, but couldn’t.

Crane looked away. “That’s under discussion.” Kelly knew the decision had already been made.

“Then for her sake, I hope you don’t.” She stowed the iPad back into her purse, and stood. “Good-bye, Doctor Crane. I have a plane to catch.”

17

A hundred miles south of Denver, on a dirt road five miles off a U.S. highway, the eastern horizon was a straight line where darkening brown shades of earth met ruddy purpling sky dotted with diamonds; to the west the horizon was still jagged under gray-orange sunset. Silence all around, the lonely far-off drone of the highway lost in the undulation of crickets and chatter of starlings and meadowlarks in the only tree for ten miles. She leaned against the fender of the Tesla Bolt stolen from a lot on the edge of Denver, where she’d ditched the rental Ford she’d taken from Alannah’s house, simple really once you could interface with the lock and ignition system directly. She’d charged it up in town, using the cash she’d taken from Alannah’s pocket, and again in Pueblo and then Garden City with the cards in Alannah’s name. They had cleared both times; Alannah hadn’t called it in. Was she helping still?

No hotel, too risky, even though Alannah wasn’t putting the cops onto Maria’s trail, but that would change. Crane knew by now, would be frantic to find her. So would Danner, eager to recover government property that had simply up and walked away through a secure lab. She could keep running indefinitely without standby, sleep was not an issue. She needed to stay alert, though it was unlike she would be found. The Bolt had a GPS system, standard, but she had disabled that as easily as she had hacked the doorlocks and ignition.

The sun slipped behind the horizon, and she remembered…

a sunset and beach and waves and a man, a tall man young, boyish and warm water all around her, splashing her legs, her back, plastering hair to her head, burning her eyes and tickling her thighs as the surf rolled in the man so tall and handsome and charming telling her of love and the things they could do together, run off and be together the two of them against the world

and in between the broken lives and sometimes bodies she had been tasked to save, sometimes possible, sometimes she could only limit the damage and sometimes it was too late…

a day not long after in a city < location undetermined > where it all ended…

The MO had been perfect, if perverted. Get assigned to handle sex cases, meet with victims, get them to tell their stories in lurid, graphic detail, move on them ever so slowly and gently during the prosecution, spring the trap afterwards, if they complained then obviously it was trauma from the first abuse, and besides, who was in charge of investigating? It was the same MO that priests had tried.
Who’re they gonna believe, kid, you or me
? The more Roni thought about it, the madder she got.

Roni had been assigned as lead caseworker for a ten-year old girl making allegations of rape against her mother’s lesbian live-in lover. Magruder had the case for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, and Roni had testified at the preliminary examination. Magruder took an inordinate amount of interest in the lesbian angle, licking his fleshy lips and repeatedly asking for details. Defense counsel, a seasoned attorney, continually objected that the questions were repetitive, and the judge sustained the objections, but Magruder kept asking. It was a disgusting, voyeuristic performance.

Two months later, on a home visit, the girl had confided in Roni. Laney was beautiful, blond hair and green eyes and a big smile, but the teeth rarely flashed in happiness and the green eyes were filled with worry and doubt and self-hatred. Roni had connected with the girl, in a way she rarely did with her clients, and they began sharing secrets.

“Dana’s not the only one,” Laney said. They were at an ice-cream shop, where Roni had stopped after taking her on a visit to the counselor at the crisis center.

“Who else?”

Laney got scared in her eyes. “You promise not to tell?”

“I might have to, honey. So they can’t do it again.”

“I don’t know if you can protect me,” Laney said.

“It’s my job to protect you, baby,” Roni said, easing into that lazy voice that lulled children into trusting her.

“But
he’s
supposed to protect me,” she said. “And he said that means no one else can. And he’d hurt me if I told.”

“Who did?” Roni’s gut knotted itself.

“The man at the hearing.”

“Who? The policeman? The neighbor?”

“No. The lawyer. Mister Ma — M something.”

“Magruder?” Laney nodded solemnly. Stephen Magruder was the DA assigned to prosecute the mother and her friend for the sexual abuse. Roni hid her shock well, reassured Laney and kept from jumping up in the middle of a chocolate chip cookie dough cone and running to the police and then to the DA, but she kept her cool, just barely, and dropped off Laney at her foster parent’s home in Joliet, and raced back to the office.

Roni made some phone calls, found out that Magruder had left a similar job downstate ten years ago under a cloud, after a rape case involving a young woman who had accused her police officer boyfriend of raping her twelve-year old daughter. He washed up in Kankakee, then left after the State’s attorney there was disbarred. Magruder had cut a deal with the ethics office in order to save his own hide. He landed in Chicago four years ago, to work for his old law school classmate and friend who was State’s Attorney in Chicago, and was promptly assigned high-profile cases — murder, rape, robbery — which he routinely lost. A year ago, a fifteen-year old victim had killed herself after a not guilty verdict in one of Magruder’s miscarriages of justice. A call to an old classmate in the office revealed that there’d been some hint that Magruder had taken an untoward interest in the girl.

By then it was nearly three, and she was due in court to testify in another case. She gathered up the file, hurried to the courthouse, and met Magruder in the rush outside the courtroom.

“Roni — ” he began in his oily ingratiating voice.

“Ms. McVicker to you,” Roni corrected him coldly. “In there,” she pointed to an interview room used for attorney-client conferences. Magruder followed her in, and it was all she could do to keep from slamming the door behind her. “I know what you are, Magruder. Laney Fairchild told me.”

His ruddy face flushed, mustache began to twitch, and then he recovered, all innocence and oily charm. “Told you what?”

“About you showing her the difference between how boys do it and girls do it,” Roni hissed. “God, you are so fucking low, Magruder. A ten year old girl, already needs therapy for what her mom did, and you add to it?”

“It’s a fabrication — ”

“Like Kelly Mackson in Wayne County?”

Magruder blinked rapidly; she was hitting home, too close, with the downstate suicide.

“You’re done for, Magruder. If you’re lucky, all they’ll do is take your law license.”

Magruder had to call her in the hearing, but kept her on as briefly as possible, and released her from her subpoena. She walked back to her office from the Daley Center, head spinning with a thousand plans, things to do, had to get on a report immediately to the police and to the bar committee.

18

< roni roni Roni Ronette McVicker and it all comes flooding back to her now: a little girl laughing riding on daddy’s shoulders giggling as a lab puppy licks her face helping mommy in the kitchen like a big girl making cookies then crying at mommy’s funeral wondering what a OD is while daddy sits not in mourning but anger school friends studies her first crush on the blond boy in 6th grade unrequited then the next year fulfilled the pain of a bursting hymen at fourteen and a broken heart at fifteen the slog through academia high school then college then a job working in a clinic with the poor and cast off, society’s trash throwaway people < just like me > and then the man who

who killed Roni.

He was still alive. Had never been punished. Had walked away because he ran the investigation…

The Bolt had a Wi-Fi, usage time under thirty seconds was untraceable back to the source but that was all she needed with the crude jack she’d fashioned from a USB cable, hooked right into the unit. < locate public access database search magruder stephen w. dob 090472 lna < 897 results found > < sort by relevance > greater albuquerque metro search new mexico legal directory 2026-2027…< search new mexico driver’s license registration >

< found >

The high from the X was wearing off, she was coming down, the I-can-fuck-the-world high sliding down to a mellowness and bottoming out in shades of black and gray saying the world’s fucking me. The wind from the open window cooled her body, dissolving the sex-sweat into the air to mingle with greenhouse gas and last breaths, hardening the nubs of her breasts. Through the open window the glowing sprawl of Albuquerque assaulted her eyes and senses, a metropolitan obscenity sprawled at the foot of the Sandia range, cut through by the large interstate arteries and capillaries of major throughways, the heart visible as dots of bright color, reds and yellows jutting to the sky.