Malice

by Jennifer Jaynes

  The house was quiet for several minutes. Then Mia heard the front door open and Bruce’s claws scrabbling on the hardwood.

  Daniel was home.

  And the intruder was somewhere in the house.

  “This . . . can’t . . . be . . . happening!” she shouted inside her head, sweat dotting her forehead. She swore silently at herself for not bringing her phone into the room with her. She could be calling 911 right now. Getting help.

  It all happened so quickly. The sound of Bruce bounding up the stairs, the bedroom door slamming. Bruce’s whines, then Daniel and another man’s muffled voices in the hallway. Then . . . the horrific sound of a gun going off.

  She began to shake.

  No.

  She buried her face in her hands and tried to block out Bruce’s howls.

  No, no, no!

  She sat in the dark, cold space, listening to the man moving around the house. Then what seemed like hours later, she heard footsteps receding down the stairs and the front door open and close. She quietly unlocked the deadbolt and pushed on the door. It slowly yawned open, and Bruce hobbled into the closet, panting, worry in his big brown eyes.

  She stepped down into the closet, then tiptoed into the bedroom. Soft light streamed gently through the bedroom window. Morning. She glanced at the alarm clock and saw it was 5:55 a.m. The man had waited for her all night. She listened to the other side of the bedroom door for a long while, making sure no one was still there. When she felt fairly certain, she opened it and peered down the dimly lit hallway. The door to Daniel’s office was closed.

  The odor of gunpowder filled Mia’s nostrils, and fresh tears burned her swollen eyes. Bruce pushed past her, down the hallway and whined at Daniel’s office door.

  “Daniel?” she whispered.

  There was no answer.

  She drew closer, chills chasing up her spine. Bruce whined louder.

  “Daniel?” she called again.

  Again, nothing.

  She reached his office and hesitated, not sure she was ready to see what was on the other side of the door. Then finally, with a shudder, she pushed his door open wider and saw him slumped over in his office chair.

  She got a good look at him and stepped backward. She covered her mouth with her hands. Please, oh, my God, no. Daniel!

  A large chunk of his scalp was gone, and blood was splattered on the side of his face, his desktop computer, his desk, and the wall behind him.

  “No, no . . . no!” she sobbed, and the world shimmered in front of her eyes. “Oh, Daniel. No,” she whispered. “No.”

  She didn’t have to search for a pulse to know he was gone. Grief welled up in her so big she thought she might suffocate. She stood there, blinded with the sting of hot tears, sobbing until her rib cage ached.

  She realized that whoever was behind this might want her dead, too . . . and that she had to get out of there. Tears burning a path down her face, she reached into Daniel’s jacket pocket and found his phone. She pressed her lips to his cool cheek and held them there for a long moment, knowing it would be her last time to kiss him. Then she ran back to the master bedroom and threw a bunch of her things into a suitcase.

  Not five minutes later, she and Bruce were in her car, speeding toward the valley. “This . . . can’t . . . be . . . happening!” she screamed over and over inside her head. She didn’t feel safe going to the police. She knew all too well how easy it was to buy off law enforcement. She’d seen Monte and his dealer friends do it several times over the years she was with him. Also, if Hemsworth’s father’s story were true, she knew that medical examiners could be bought, too. The fewer people she trusted, the better.

  Thirty-five minutes later, she turned onto Christian’s street and was startled to find two police cruisers outside and the house cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape.

  What the hell?

  Her blood ran cold.

  What was going on? Was Christian okay? She parked across the street a few doors down and watched as a cop walked out of Christian’s house and climbed into his vehicle. He drove off, leaving the other cop car in Christian’s driveway and the front door wide open.

  Mia’s hand froze on the door handle. Her first instinct was to jump out of the car and run up his sidewalk to find out what was going on, but after what she’d just witnessed, she was afraid.

  Was it possible this was connected to what just happened to Daniel?

  An elderly woman was walking a small dog on the sidewalk next to her. As she started to pass Mia’s car, Mia lowered her passenger window. “Do you know what happened?” she asked, pointing to Christian’s house.

  “The young man who lives there was shot yesterday.”

  A shock wave rolled through Mia’s body. “Wha-at?” She worked to catch her breath. “Is he . . . is he okay?”

  The woman shrugged. “I don’t know. But a couple of my neighbors saw them bring him out and said he didn’t look good.”

  The old woman’s words stabbed Mia’s brain like an ice pick.

  “Is he a friend of yours?” the woman asked.

  Mia ignored the question, her gaze flickering back to the house. “Do you know where they took him?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’d imagine Valley Presbyterian.”

  Mia nodded. She took one last look at the house, then threw the Jetta into gear and sped off. Bursting into tears, she headed east, leaving a bloody wake behind her.

  After putting a hundred miles between her and the San Fernando Valley, Mia stopped at a gas station and dipped into her stash of waitressing tips to fill up her tank. Her cheeks stained with tears, she slid the nozzle into her gas tank and set it to automatically pump, then reached back into the car and grabbed Daniel’s phone. She checked the call log and jotted down the last several numbers he’d called, then removed the battery in both of their phones so the devices couldn’t be traced.

  A few hours later, running on pure adrenaline, she crossed the Nevada state line and stopped at a Walgreens drugstore to purchase some supplies, including a disposable prepaid phone, hair dye, a screwdriver, and dog food.

  At nightfall, she exited the interstate again and pulled into the parking lot of a seafood restaurant. In the lot, she switched her license plates with those on an old pickup truck. She tried to call Christian, but she got his voice mail. Then she called the last few phone numbers Daniel had dialed in hopes of talking to someone who could help her make sense of Daniel’s murder.

  In the last thirty-six hours, there’d been several calls from the office, Teddy, Billy, and someone named Gail Whitman. She ignored the calls from both the office and Teddy and called Billy. She received his voice mail as well and left him a message to call her back, saying it was urgent and that something had happened to Daniel. The next number she called was Gail Whitman’s. The woman answered on the second ring.

  “My name is Mia Winters,” she said, trying to keep fear out of her voice. “I understand that you spoke with my husband recently.”

  “Yes. Hi, Mrs. Winters,” the woman on the other end of the line said. “Is everything okay?”

  Mia debated how to answer the question. Finally, she said, “No. It’s not. It’s not okay at all.” She asked Gail who she was, and Gail explained she was a medical journalist and filled her in on the conversation she’d had with Daniel, explaining to her how he had agreed to go public with Respira. She asked if Mia was calling because Daniel had been hurt.

  “He was . . . shot, Gail. Killed,” she said, tears spilling down her cheeks.

  “Oh, my God,” the woman said. “What happened?”

  Since Daniel seemed to have trusted the journalist, Mia decided to tell her everything. She told her about the break-in and everything she’d heard while she was hiding in the panic room. Then about the gunshot and finding Daniel’s body.

  “I am so sorry,” Gail said. “Are you in a safe place?”

  “I . . . I think so. I’m on the road.”

  “You need to be very careful.
They are probably looking for you right now.”

  Bruce whined from the passenger seat.

  Gail told her she had no doubt that Daniel’s murder was connected to Respira—and that she believed the people behind it were also connected to the Hemsworths’ murders and maybe even Andy’s.

  Mia told Gail about Christian. Asked how Gail thought he might fit into everything. Gail said she had no idea. Daniel hadn’t mentioned him during their conversation. Gail asked what she could do to help. Mia told her how concerned she was about Christian, and before getting off the phone, Gail promised to find him. She said she’d call Mia tomorrow with news.

  At 11:00 p.m., Mia checked herself into a roadside motel. She told the desk clerk that she’d lost her driver’s license. When he said he couldn’t rent her a room without identification, she slipped him a fifty-dollar bill. He pocketed the money, jotted something into the computer, and gave her a room key.

  After walking Bruce, she grabbed her things from her car and found her room. It was small and smelled of stale cigarette smoke. Cigarette burns pocked the carpet. She threw her backpack on the queen-size bed and unpacked her items from the drugstore, then got to work cutting and dyeing her hair.

  While waiting the thirty minutes for her hair to bleach, she tried calling Christian again. She checked the local crime section of the Los Angeles Times online and saw that they’d reported a shooting in the 300th block of Reseda Drive, but there was no news on the status of the victim. She checked Christian’s social media accounts and saw nothing had been updated for over a day, and no friends had posted any news. She hoped Gail was having better luck.

  Her adrenaline beginning to wane, she closed her eyes and listened to her neighbor watching Jeopardy! on the other side of the wall for a little while, then she pushed herself off the bed and went to the window and looked out. Everything looked just as it had when she’d arrived. No new vehicles. No one wandering around looking as though they were searching for someone.

  She picked up her phone and placed a call to her friend Sam.

  CHAPTER 50

  TEDDY

  Two Days Later . . .

  TEDDY SAT AT home, nursing a bottle of scotch.

  His thoughts circled back to Rachel Jacobs killing herself in one of the examination rooms in his clinic, and he shook his head. The suicide had forced him to close the practice for a few days. The police had needed some time to conduct a quick investigation, and the cleaning crew had needed time to clean the woman’s blood and brain matter from the walls and furniture.

  Margy and Deepali had also asked for a couple of days off to recover from witnessing the carnage. He planned to give them a generous bonus, considering what they’d gone through. Hell, he’d be more than generous. He sure as shit could afford to now.

  It still gave him chills to wonder how differently things would have gone down if he had been in the clinic when Rachel arrived. He knew he’d just narrowly dodged a bullet with that one.

  He was in one of the guest bedrooms right now, waiting for the news to come on. As he waited, he grabbed a vial of OxyContin, screwed off the lid, tossed two to the back of his tongue, and chased them with the scotch. He glanced around the room. The curtains were closed tight, and the large room was dark and cool. His wife constantly complained about how cold he kept the house and was always turning up the temperature while he was at work, but he was uncomfortable sleeping with the air at anything above 62. To remedy this, he kept a separate floor AC unit in this room, and right now it was blowing out highly chilled air to the tune of 50 degrees.

  The news came back on. A young Latina woman was reporting outside of Immunext’s headquarters. The caption Talks Underway on Respira Being Added to Shot Schedule was splashed across the bottom of the screen.

  Teddy strained to get his eyes to focus on the screen.

  “Immunext’s shareholders are celebrating a major windfall today as Respira shares jumped sharply from its open of $69.96 to a closing price of $78.96 per share, representing a gain of almost ten percent in a single day—something not seen often in even the most volatile of trading.”

  Teddy’s pulse sprinted, just as it had when he’d heard this news the first and second times. But he couldn’t fully enjoy his win yet because there was still a loose end. Teddy hated loose ends.

  “The jump came on the heels of an announcement that discussions are underway about the corporation’s new pharmaceutical Respira being added to the CDC’s shot schedule as early as next year. Pediatric clinics and chain drugstores across the country have been administering this drug to children as a part of an important nationwide public health campaign.”

  The news cut to a prerecorded interview set in front of the California Department of Education headquarters. The same reporter asked a spokeswoman, “What exactly does this mean for parents in California?”

  The DOE spokeswoman answered, “If Respira is added to the schedule, children will be required to get their full complement of Respira before they can be admitted to day care or public school.”

  “No injection, no school, or are there exemptions available? Religious? Philosophical?”

  “No injection, no school. The State of California no longer offers exemptions. It’s a move other states are sure to follow.”

  The reporter continued, “Respira could be added as early as ten months from now, despite parent protests against the drug around the country. What do you say to these parents’ concerns?”

  “I say we appreciate and understand parents’ concerns for any new drug,” said the DOE spokeswoman. “But these drugs are rigorously studied and have been proven to be very safe. Parents need only to talk to their pediatricians for assurance.”

  “Reporting from Immunext Corporation’s headquarters, this is Carmen Flores for KTLA Channel Five News.”

  Teddy picked up one of his burner phones and texted his broker again.

  The sale went through, right?

  His broker replied: Yes. All the shares have been unloaded.

  “Good, good,” he whispered. The gamble had paid off, and now he could breathe again.

  The stock would only continue to rise, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. After all, Respira was bound to be pulled from both the shot schedule and the market at some point. Although it would probably take several months, maybe even years, before it happened, he was done taking risks.

  In fact, the faster he could extricate himself from this drug and the people involved, the better. This whole ordeal was giving him an ulcer, and he was glad it was almost over with. If any of the others got caught, he sure as hell wasn’t going down with them. He was a highly respected physician, not a criminal. He’d just done this one thing so that he could save the practice. After all, this drug was going to be forced on kids whether he made money from it or not. The people who wanted it to succeed were much too powerful for it not to. But now he was done. Respira could go to hell for all he cared.

  When he’d first become involved with Respira, he’d had no clue it would injure so many children. But by the time he understood what he’d gotten himself into, it was too late. He had already dumped the practice’s money into it, and he needed the drug to fly under the radar at least for now . . . to do well enough to be considered for a coveted spot on the schedule. If Respira went down, he went down.

  He swallowed another mouthful of whiskey, rubbed his puffy eyes, then switched the television off. He sat in the dark, the only sound in the room his shallow breathing.

  His burner phone rang.

  He accepted the call.

  “I’ll make this short and sweet,” the caller said. “It’s about Mia Winters.”

  The loose end.

  Teddy had been furious at the caller’s incompetence when he’d first heard that Mrs. Winters was still alive. Now not only was she still breathing, she was unaccounted for.

  “What do you have?” Teddy asked the caller.

  “We got a lead on Mrs. Winters’s whereabouts. She’s in M
obile, Alabama. We have guys heading there now.” The caller paused for a moment. “As promised, there will be no additional mistakes. She’ll be taken care of immediately.”

  “Taken care of?” Teddy asked.

  “Eliminated.”

  “Make sure you get rid of the body. We don’t need any private investigators meddling or goddamn pathologists conducting private autopsies.”

  “Don’t worry. There won’t be a body once we’re done with her.”

  “Call when it’s done.”

  “Will do.”

  “And the Jacobs girl?”

  “The medical examiner’s office will be releasing Suzie Jacobs’s autopsy report in the morning. It’s going to say she had a mitochondrial defect that no one knew about. A combination of different medications caused the respiratory arrest. Hell, the girl could have just sneezed the wrong way, and it would have happened.”

  “Perfect.”

  “I’ll keep you updated.”

  Teddy hung up and took another long swig of scotch, even though his stomach was turning a little. He picked up the handgun on his nightstand and twirled it. The dead kid had been a little difficult for him but certainly survivable. And while Ms. Jacobs’s suicide had brought some negative attention to his practice and Respira, they were able to easily explain her actions away by painting her as an understandably distraught but misinformed mother. But Danny. Dammit, what a waste. Teddy had really liked the man. Had begun to see him as the son he’d never had.

  “Shit, Danny,” he whispered now. “How many times did I try to warn you?” But the younger doctor had been so naive. He thought by speaking up he’d make a difference. He had no clue just whom he had been dealing with. How big all of this was. This industry was a machine . . . and a very powerful one at that.

  Teddy tried to redirect his thoughts back to his recent win. He’d just made a ridiculous amount of money. Much more than he’d ever had before. He’d never have to worry about money again. Not in this lifetime. But the adrenaline was quickly dying off, leaving a dull numbness. He wondered how difficult it would be to get to sleep tonight.