Adverse Effects

by Joel Shulkin

  A shadow moved into her field of vision.

  She blinked. The shadow took form. She gasped.

  Jerry Peterman stood in the rain, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. His face was pale, deathly. Blood smears covered his cheek. A scarlet stream trickled from a hole in the center of his forehead.

  “I remembered everything, Doctor.” Jerry grinned down at her like a shark. “Thanks to you.”

  “Jerry,” said Cristina, unable to tear her gaze away from the trail of blood between his eyes, “how could I have known?”

  “Oh, you knew.” He spat a wad of blood. “You just forgot. We all forget, but eventually we remember again. That’s what Quinn wants.”

  “What does he want me to remember? What’s so important?”

  “You’re the expert.” Jerry threw back his head and laughed, blood spraying between his teeth. His eyes glittered like icicles as his form dissipated. “Move fast. He’s coming for you.”

  A hand grabbed Cristina’s shoulder.

  She slapped it away. Snatched the gun off the ground. Somersaulted onto her back. Squeezed the trigger again and again.

  The gun responded with a series of hollow clicks.

  “Dr. Silva! Drop the gun!” A white-haired man in an overcoat shouted at her, pistol trained at her head. She’d seen him in the subway. But his face looked familiar for another reason. Why?

  “Do it now,” he yelled.

  Ice pellets bounced off the gun barrel and splattered against her cheeks. Slowly, as if resurfacing from a deep dive in the ocean, she remembered where she was. “Who are you?”

  “Detective Rick Hawkins. I work with Gary Wilson.”

  “Wilson?”

  “I was there after the attack in your apartment, remember? Lower your gun. I’ll show you my badge.”

  Her hands trembled. She kept the gun aimed at him even though it was empty. “How do I know you don’t work for Zero Dark?”

  “Zero what?”

  “The ones trying to kill me.” Cristina swallowed hard. It hurt to speak, as if saying it aloud made it real. “The ones who shot Stacey.”

  “Stacey? Stacey who?”

  “Stacey Peterman. But that’s not her real name.”

  “Peterman? You mean the subway shooter’s sister?”

  “She only pretended to be his sister, so they could use me as a scapegoat.”

  “Why?”

  “I—I don’t know.” The harder Cristina tried to organize her thoughts, the more jumbled they became. “All I know is she’s hurt. I was chasing the man who shot her before I fell and blacked out.”

  Hawkins studied her, as if trying to decide whether to shoot her or not. “Did you get a good look at him?”

  The killer’s gray eyes burned like hot coals in her mind. “Yes.”

  “All right, I’m going to show you my badge. You hand over your gun, okay?”

  Cristina breathed slowly and nodded.

  Without wavering his aim, Hawkins held up his wallet to display a gold shield.

  The gun seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. With a sigh, Cristina twisted it around and held it out, butt first. She didn’t resist as he plucked it from her grasp.

  “Good.” Hawkins stuck Stacey’s gun in his holster. “Now, put your hands behind your head.”

  “What?”

  He leveled the gun at her chest. “That wasn’t a request. I have to bring you in.”

  Run.

  Cristina’s mouth went dry. Her body tensed, eager to follow the voice’s commands. But could she outrun Hawkins’s bullet?

  “Dr. Silva, put your hands behind your head.” His brow furrowed. “Please.”

  “Right. Sorry.” She squeezed her eyes shut.

  He was following police procedure. He didn’t work for Zero Dark. This wasn’t a trap. She wasn’t seeing dead patients or hearing voices. She clasped her hands behind her head.

  Keeping his pistol trained on her, Hawkins lowered one of her arms behind her back and slapped a cuff over her wrist. He repeated with the other. “Let’s walk.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to read me my rights?”

  “I’m not arresting you. Yet.” He lowered his pistol. “Where’s Ms. Peterman, or whatever her name is?”

  “By the bridge. She’s in bad shape.”

  He activated his walkie-talkie. “Dispatch, this is Hawkins responding to the ten-ten by the Longfellow Bridge. We need an ambulance assist.”

  The walkie-talkie sputtered. “Copy that, Detective.”

  Hawkins nudged Cristina’s elbow. “Let’s go.”

  They trudged along. Together, they descended the path leading under the bridge, taking care to avoid ice patches. Cristina recognized her footprints in the snow.

  As they approached the underside of the bridge, Cristina’s heart sank. It can’t be possible.

  Hawkins said into his walkie-talkie, “Dispatch, cancel the ambulance assist.” To Cristina, he said, “Do you want to try explaining again?”

  She barely registered the question. She could only stare at the damp ground where, minutes ago, she had watched Stacey dying.

  Except Stacey wasn’t there.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Honey, what’s going on with you?” Andrea asked as she drove Cristina home from the police station.

  The sleet had stopped, but the roads were still a mess. Andrea kept to the speed limit, a snail’s pace compared to how she normally drove.

  “Detective Hawkins said you were talking to yourself and acting crazy. Thank heavens the Esplanade was empty. You could’ve hurt someone. Where’d you get that gun, anyway?”

  Pressing her fingertips against her forehead, Cristina avoided her friend’s gaze. The questions hadn’t stopped since Andrea picked her up, and Cristina found it increasingly difficult to come up with answers. “I told you. It was Stacey’s.”

  “Right, Stacey’s. The dying woman who walked away, leaving behind no bloodstains.”

  Cristina stared out the window, too rattled by her earlier ordeal to care about being in the front seat of a car. “Hawkins said I was knocked out for at least twenty minutes, from the time someone reported gunshots to the time he found me. That’s enough time to hide a body and clean up.”

  Andrea slammed the brakes sending her Miata into a skid as the car in front of them took the exit without using its turn signal. Andrea steered out of the skid. She rolled down the window. “Asshole!”

  When she’d settled back into the lane, she said, “I’m worried about you, mami. You hit your head pretty hard. Maybe what you think happened didn’t happen.”

  “I didn’t imagine it.” Cristina pounded her fist against the armrest. “Damn it. I need a friend right now. Don’t patronize me.”

  Spreading her fingers as if she could ward off Cristina’s ire, Andrea said, “I’m not patronizing you. I’m saying that with everything that’s happened with the lawsuit and Jerry, it’s enough to push anyone over the edge. And it all started with that Santos guy getting into your head. He hasn’t contacted you again, has he?”

  “No.” Cristina squeezed her fists. How long could she keep lying to her best friend? What good had it done so far? “Yes, but—”

  “Cristina.”

  “He needs help finding his daughter. And he’s the one who got Stacey Peterman to retract her accusations.”

  Andrea’s fury hung between them like a swarm of hornets. Cristina couldn’t blame her. Even as Cristina defended Santos, she questioned his intentions. The extra book she’d found confirmed he’d been stalking her long before their first meeting. Could she trust anything he said? There was so much more Cristina had hidden from her friend. And now, after everything that happened, how could she convince anyone she wasn’t losing her mind?

  “You don’t find that at all conveni
ent?” Andrea asked in a controlled voice. “I still think he’s the one who broke into your apartment, not Francisco Martins.”

  “The man in the ski parka broke in.”

  “So, the man in the ski parka is Francisco Martins?”

  “No.” Cristina sighed. “Santos is Francisco Martins.”

  Andrea’s face reddened. “Are you kidding me? You’ve been skulking around with the guy who burned down your parents’ house?”

  “He was following the orders of Zero Dark.”

  “Oh, yes, this mysterious organization who supposedly hired Stacey to discredit you. The ones who stole your memories. Do you even hear yourself?”

  Andrea’s bitter tone burned a swath through Cristina’s heart. She stared out the window. “And you wonder why I don’t talk to you about this.”

  Her friend jammed the shift stick and veered onto the exit for Somerville. “Okay, let me ask you this. If a patient came to you with delusions of being someone else, having violent nightmares, growing careless and disorganized, and insisting someone was trying to destroy their life . . . What would you think?”

  “I’d think they were having a psychotic break, possibly a manifestation of paranoid schizophrenia.” Cristina glanced at her friend. She didn’t dare mention the voice she’d been hearing or the vision of Jerry, which would only support Andrea’s point. “But it’s not paranoia if someone is after you. And I was attacked. Twice.”

  “Honey, that’s what you believe, but no one else saw either attack. Yes, they found Martin’s prints, but now you’re telling me he’s Santos. So, maybe you invited Santos there earlier and imagined the attack, like you imagined Stacey and the guy in the ski parka.” Before Cristina could argue, Andrea held out her hand. “I’m saying it’s possible. You haven’t been yourself, and I’m worried about you. When were you planning to tell the police Santos and Martins are the same man?”

  Cristina’s cheeks burned. “Eventually.”

  “If it wasn’t for Detective Wilson, you’d be in jail right now. Do you know that?”

  Cristina recalled Wilson eyeing her like a wolf as she left the holding area. Though he didn’t say a word to her, she could tell he knew something. “I’ll send him a card.”

  Andrea opened her mouth, then snapped it shut. With a wave of her hand, she said, “I’m done. If you don’t trust me enough to tell me what’s going on, then I don’t know you as well as I thought.”

  That makes two of us. Either Santos was right, Zero Dark stole her memory and the memories she’d regained were fake. Or Andrea was right, and Cristina was going crazy, like Jerry and Carl. Either way, she needed a friend.

  “Okay,” she said. “I need to tell you something important. Promise you won’t get mad.”

  “Honey, you’re scaring me. You know you can tell me anything.”

  Cristina glanced out the window again. As the snow-covered buildings passed by, she remembered growing up in Framingham, attending college and medical school in Cambridge, suffering through residency in downtown Boston. Those memories that had given her a new life—they felt hollow now. At best, the miracle she believed in so strongly was nothing more than quackery. At worst, Recognate was a curse of insanity.

  Taking a deep breath, she said, “I need to tell you about an experimental drug . . .”

  “Tell me again why we let Dr. Silva go?” Detective Hawkins scratched his chin. “We should send her to the Deaconess psych ward. She’s not playing with a full deck.”

  Detective Wilson paced the precinct’s cramped breakroom. He needed coffee, but the damned machine was broken, and since the station was running a skeleton crew due to the weather, no one had made a run to the local barista. Smoking to calm his nerves had never crossed his mind, especially after his grandfather died of lung cancer, but the way the case was unraveling he was considering taking it up. “We don’t have a body. No one was hurt. What would we charge her with?”

  “Unlawful use of a weapon? Creating a disturbance?”

  “Then, she does community service. Maybe with a lousy lawyer she serves a few weeks in jail. How does that help us? If we want to draw out Martins or Zero Dark, we have a better chance of doing that with her on the outside.”

  “Geez, you don’t actually believe this stolen memory crap, do you?”

  “I told you, I’ve got a witness insisting that woman is not Cristina Silva, and there are too many corrupted records for it all to be coincidence. Besides, you said she used defensive moves you hadn’t seen since you were in Special Forces.”

  “I’ve also seen lunatics do unbelievable things. She had a look in her eyes.” Hawkins’s shoulders trembled. “If that gun hadn’t been empty—”

  “But it was empty. And that’s another thing.” Wilson hefted a baggie containing the compact weapon “You said this is some fancy Soviet design?”

  “Modified Makarov nine-millimeter.”

  “Where would Cristina get a gun like that?”

  “How about online? They’ve been importing these for two decades.” Hawkins shook his head. “Think about it. She rants to you about an international terrorist called the Golem? Her story is ridiculous. Why are you believing everything she says?”

  “I don’t believe everything, but I think someone went to a lot of trouble to cover up whatever happened two years ago when her parents crashed—whether it was Martins or Zero Dark or this Mitchell Parker. If her story is true, there’s a real threat to the public.”

  “So, we’re going to notify Agent Forrester?”

  Wilson flinched. Once they involved the feds, he’d lose control over the case. But if terrorists were involved, he couldn’t keep putting it off. “Like you said, we don’t have any evidence yet, except that Martins was in Silva’s apartment at some point. Those prints could even be years old. And if she’s nuts, the FBI won’t be happy we wasted their time. Let’s get something tangible before we call in the cavalry, okay?”

  Hawkins rubbed the bridge of his nose. “We’re devoting way too much time to this case. Don’t make the same mistake you made in Boston.”

  The insinuation cut like a knife in Wilson’s back. “This isn’t like Boston.”

  “Prove it,” Hawkins said. “If we find hard evidence of terrorist involvement, then we are calling Forrester. And if Dr. Silva loses it again, then you need to start thinking like a cop and stop her from hurting anyone.”

  As much as Wilson wanted to punch Hawkins in the face at the moment, Wilson still knew his partner was right. If Wilson kept chasing ghosts, they’d come back to haunt him. “Fine, deal,” he said. “Until there is hard evidence, we monitor her—but we treat her like a victim, not a suspect.”

  “Of course.” Hawkins patted Wilson on the back. “Now go home and get some rest.”

  After Hawkins left, Wilson tossed the baggie into the evidence tray and turned on his computer. He logged in and accessed the NCIC database. As Wilson waited for approval of his password, he squeezed his fists until his knuckles turned white. There was one part of Cristina’s story that could make or break the rest, the missing puzzle piece he’d been seeking.

  The database accepted his password. Wilson cracked his knuckles and searched for any reference to the Golem.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Every morning at dawn, the previous day’s tension dissipated as Quinn stretched and focused on breathing in, out, in, out. He’d begun a strict exercise regimen when he rented this hotel room a year ago. Ambient music poured from surround sound speakers and flowed through his body as he folded his legs into a butterfly position and pressed his knees into the floor.

  The rising sun peeked around the ivy tower across the way, casting a scarlet sheen over the frost-covered park. An average person might pause and admire the beauty of the capital city stretched out below, but Quinn concentrated on his routine. There would be time for pretty scenery later once the proje
ct was complete—after they’d taken care of Santos.

  Sharp pain jolted his right knee. He cursed at his distraction and overstretching. He unfolded his legs and massaged his knee.

  As much as Quinn wanted to deal with the situation in Boston personally, he had to trust his operatives to handle it. Too much was at stake in Washington and his full attention was needed. He closed his eyes, extended his legs and leaned forward to touch his toes.

  The bitter chirp of his smartphone shattered the tranquility.

  Quinn’s eyes flew open. He roared and shut off the music. He stormed across the bedroom, grabbed the phone off the nightstand, and answered it. “What?”

  “You said she wouldn’t remember anything,” said a male voice with a slight Latin accent.

  It took a moment for Quinn to process the statement. The caller wasn’t who he expected. “Why are you calling me? You should be going through your handler.”

  “Fuck that.” The caller’s voice rose in pitch. “The handler said all I had to do was take out the traitor bitch and escape. No one said the other one would try to kill me.”

  “Calm down—”

  “Don’t tell me to calm down. First, she nearly breaks my rib in her apartment when she wasn’t even supposed to be there, and now she tries to blow my brains out. This time, she saw my face. When she remembers who I am, she’ll come after me.”

  “No one’s coming after you.” Quinn fought to maintain his composure. “Just because her training kicked in doesn’t mean she remembers. If she did, I would know.”

  The caller’s breathing rate slowed. “You’re sure?”

  “Quite sure. I have another job for you, unless you no longer think you can handle it.”

  “Huh?” The caller paused. “No, I’m good. You can trust me.”

  “I hope so. Expect a call with details and location.” Quinn gritted his teeth. “But don’t call me directly again.”

  As he hung up, Quinn wasn’t sure how much the caller believed, but soon it wouldn’t matter. If the police started listening to Cristina—or worse, if she believed herself—everything would fall apart. He was lucky he’d had someone else trustworthy enough to clean up the mess under the bridge. Those journal entries alone could’ve unraveled everything. There was no time left to take chances.