Chapter 18
"Grandfather?" Kara exclaimed, astonished. "The man Zach called Grandfather is your father?"
"Dr. William Edward Lerwick, Senior. I'm Junior." Eddie watched for Nyler's reaction.
Agent Nyler unfolded his arms and nodded slowly, remembering. "Suspicious acquisitions of specialized medical equipment. How did he know I was investigating him?"
"Bill Lerwick," Craig breathed, "not Bert."
"Grandfather—your father—took Zach?" Kara repeated, still trying to process the thought. "But he's dead!"
"That's what Zach thought, because that's what the nanny told him," Eddie explained, "because that's what I told the nanny—so that Zach would go to you."
"So that Zach…?" Craig's eyes shot fully open. "You, Eddie? You sent him to us?"
Eddie glanced toward Officer Garrenton, who still blocked his only escape route at the door. "I swear I didn't know my father had Zach," he defended himself, "not until I heard his voice on the phone."
"That voice was your father?" Kara demanded. "And you didn't tell us?"
"I thought he was still in Japan giving speeches! He's not supposed to be back for another month. I track his purchases, I know when he buys his plane tickets. He always reserves a rental car with the same company when he's about to come back—"
"Why, Eddie?" Craig cut him off. "Why did your father kidnap our son?"
"I don't know. I can't believe he did it. Zach's been with you so long, I figured that when he returned, he would give up on Zach and let him go… I made arrangements, I was ready to stop him…"
Kara blinked. "Ten years, and you knew Zach was ours the whole time?"
Eddie leaned heavily against the solid balcony railing as if suddenly exhausted. "I've known what my father was doing to Zach all along, ever since I was a kid. I never told anyone before now. When I heard his voice, I couldn't say anything because—you know—the cops were there." He made a small wave with his hand. "I'm an accomplice to the crime, more or less."
Kara watched as Craig worked the problem in his mind. "Your father took Zach as an embryo?" he concluded.
Eddie nodded. "Your embryologist lied to you. There was an extra embryo. He sold it to my father."
Kara glared at Eddie as leaned there against the railing. "Tell us why," she demanded in a hushed voice. "Why did he take our son? I want to know why, and I want my son back."
Eddie rubbed his neck. "My father wants Zach because…he's one of a kind, the first… There's no one like him."
Craig ran a hand through his hair. "What do you mean? He's just a normal kid."
"That's the point." Eddie seemed to fight himself, glancing at Agent Nyler and Officer Garrenton, uncertain what to say. Finally, he spoke again, almost to himself. "My mother was a good woman. She always said Zach needed to be with his own family. She told him you were good people, that she'd met you, Kara, and you would be a wonderful mom for him someday. She used to argue with my father—she insisted that he give Zach to you. She said Zach had the right to have a real family. But my father wouldn't do it. He claimed he needed Zach for testing."
"Testing?" Craig inquired darkly. "He ran tests on Zach?"
"I don't think he ever actually did. At least, Zach never mentioned any. But my father always said he had to keep him just in case tests were needed… He's a medical researcher, my father, the best in the world in human reproduction. And Zach is his greatest accomplishment."
"He took Zach as an embryo to run experiments on him?" Kara growled.
"Not to experiment on him. Zach was the experiment. My father bought that embryo from your embryologist and tried to use it. He bought a few, actually. One survived. With him, the experiment worked. He was born almost normal, and he turned out healthier than anyone could have expected, despite being sick a lot those first few years."
"What did he do to Zach, Eddie?" Craig asked with some trepidation. "What was the experiment?"
The cool morning breeze gusted across the balcony for a moment. Eddie turned his face into it and let out a slow breath before meeting Craig's eyes. "My father is obsessed with making an artificial human womb. No one has ever created one that works. Years ago, a Japanese guy figured out how to keep a premature goat alive in a sort of artificial womb, but not from conception, and certainly not a human child. My father was furious. He always wants to be the first. But to make a human baby grow in an artificial environment from the beginning—it's enormously complicated, like trying to stack a card tower with your eyes closed. Hormones, temperature, how the mother's body triggers every step of the developmental process at just the right time—you have to mimic all these things perfectly, or the baby doesn't survive. It's risky. They just don't know enough about how all this works. It's essentially impossible… Or it was."
The young man shook his head slowly as he continued. "My father was twenty-five years ahead of his time, maybe fifty, maybe more. He came up with a new way to approach the whole process. Then he tested his approach using a new artificial womb. He kept it quiet, though, until he could try it out. Some investors he found financed it—rich types, some local, most of them foreign; he promised them a share of the profits when he perfected and sold his technique. My father hid his new system in a top secret section of his lab and didn't let anyone in except his senior research staff—the people he trusted to keep it quiet. He let me go in there and see it once—only once. I was fourteen. I didn't understand any of it. I still don't. But it all made sense to him. He's a genius, my father." Eddie paused, his eyes locking onto something in the past. "That was the first time I saw Zach—when he was born. It was strange. My father just said it was time and…lifted him out."
Kara stared at Eddie. "What did Zach do?" she asked in an oddly small voice.
Eddie raised his hands palms-up. "He breathed. Then he cried. My father was so excited, he almost cried, too. After that, it was my mother's responsibility to care for Zach—and secretly, because what my father had done was illegal. He wanted to avoid going to prison at all costs. He said you can't make great discoveries in prison. His research was his life. Not me, not my mother…not even Zach, really. The research, the experiments, the discoveries—they're everything to him."
Nyler crossed his arms again as he listened.
Craig cocked his head to the side and narrowed his eyes skeptically. "This is impossible, Eddie," he said flatly. "An artificial womb? You haven't said one thing here that proves you're doing anything but making all this up."
Eddie shrugged. "Don't ask me to explain the medical part. I'm not a doctor. I was just a kid when he did it. I know he had other doctors working with him, but I don't know how they managed it."
"Where are those doctors now?" Nyler inquired.
"My father paid them off with the money from his investors. I think most of them moved out of the country and kept quiet. They know that if they say anything to anybody, and if my father goes to prison, he'll disclose their names to the FBI. It's a federal crime to grow an embryo artificially for more than fourteen days. So none of them wants to draw attention to themselves."
Craig shook his head doubtfully. "Where did he get all the equipment, all the…I don't know, the chemicals and stuff to do this?"
"Most of it was a normal part of his research, the studies everyone knew about. There were a few things he needed more of, or that he wouldn't usually need if he were only working with embryos. Those were the suspicious acquisitions of medical equipment. He bought them from companies that he knew wouldn't ask awkward questions. He might have stolen some of it or bribed some people, I don't know. He found ways to get what he wanted. He's quite the criminal mastermind, my father."
Agent Nyler spoke up. "It must have been right around that time that he sold his lab."
"Yes. He sold it after Zach was born and moved all his equipment to another country so he could focus on repeating the process ther
e. It was too risky to continue that kind of research here. Once his investors saw how he had succeeded with Zach, they poured a lot of money into his work." Eddie rubbed his forehead with both hands.
"That's still not proof, Eddie," Craig stated flatly. "This is all just a story."
He looked to Kara. She gazed back, unfocused and open-mouthed. She wondered whether she really believed all of this. It was so far-fetched.
"You know how Zach doesn't like to be touched?" Eddie offered. "My father thought that came from being born in an artificial womb. He didn't really know; it surprised him. He tried to simulate a real womb in some ways—he set up a recording of a mother's heartbeat and everything a baby would hear in the womb. He even made the womb so it would jostle sometimes, as if the mother were moving around. But the actual being inside the mother—he didn't have a way to replicate the feel of it."
Kara considered Eddie a moment. "Why did Zach get sick so much?"
"A weak immune system. Newborns get a lot of their immunity from their mother. But Zach wasn't with his mother—you—so he obviously didn't get that. My father anticipated that illnesses would be a problem for him. He gave him every inoculation he dared once Zach was born, but he couldn't keep him from getting sick, the poor tyke. That first year, we didn't think he was going to make it. It seemed like my mother was taking him to the doctor every week."
Craig and Kara stared at one another, dumbfounded. Kara tried to absorb Eddie's unbelievable story—unbelievable except that Zach really was their son somehow… Why would Eddie make up such a bizarre story if it weren't true?
"Once Zach started kindergarten," Eddie resumed, "my mother demanded that my father take him back to you. He adjusted to school so well that she gave my father an ultimatum: if he didn't give you Zach, she would leave him. She said Zach didn't need him anymore. My father still wouldn't do it, though, and my mother was too terrified of going to prison herself to turn him in. So she divorced him and moved up to Mount Vernon. She had always drunk a little; after the divorce, she was so torn up about Zach that she drank more and more until—"
"The accident," Craig finished. Eddie raised his eyebrows, surprised. Craig gave him a wry smile. "We found the obituary."
"You always seemed to really care about Zach, Eddie," Kara said, "like your mother did."
Eddie dropped his gaze. "He's like a little brother to me. My father bribed somebody in the school district to get me my job at Briar Point when I was nineteen, the year Zach went to kindergarten. That way I could watch him there and take care of details like permission slips and phone numbers and such. It wouldn't do to have the school calling you about Zach. But my father wanted your names on all of his records so that if anything went wrong, he could dump Zach on you and disappear, and there would be no paper trail to him."
"Which explains why he never told Zach his name," Craig postulated, "and why Zach's birth certificate is a fraud."
Agent Nyler raised his eyebrows thoughtfully at that suggestion.
Eddie nodded. "My father paid a lot of money to have the birth certificate filed. And the nannies—he wanted nannies who were in the country illegally and only spoke Spanish. That way they were less likely to figure out something was wrong and report it to the authorities. He paid them well so they wouldn't cause any trouble."
"And you were the go-between," Kara guessed, "between them and your father. You were the nanny company."
Eddie's jaw dropped. "How do you know about the company?"
"We met Rita," Kara said.
"Rita? She came back from Mexico?"
"A few months ago. She recognized Zach."
Eddie shook his head in amazement.
"So that's why you're an accomplice," Officer Garrenton spoke up, "because you helped your father keep Zach hidden."
Eddie nodded sadly. "When Zach was little, I helped my mom take care of him. But when he turned two, my father made me move out so Zach wouldn't remember me. He got me my own apartment, taught me some…skills I would need to help him keep Zach secret. But I missed the little tyke—missed him a lot until I got that job at the school." Eddie hung his head again. "I always thought my mom was right." He looked up at Kara. "She gave him the name you chose."
"That was a cruel thing to do," Kara replied.
Eddied gave a helpless half-shrug. "She meant it as a gift. She wanted him to be yours."
Kara sniffled once and looked away from Eddie for a moment. "Why now, Eddie? Why did you send him back to us last spring?"
Eddie's face grew dark. "Because I promised my mother I would. I was with her when she died. I drove up to see her that day, saw the wreck where she had hit the tree, and rushed to the hospital."
Craig narrowed his brows. "But the newspaper said the police didn't know who her relatives were."
"Because I didn't stick around to tell them who I was," Eddie responded. "I stayed with her until she died, and then I left." He paced himself with a deep breath. "She was in shock, and she was drunk. She had been thinking about Zach again. She made me promise I would take Zach to you before he grew up."
"And you waited five more years!" Kara said.
"I had to find a way to do it without revealing myself and without my father being there to interfere. It was impossible. But then this year he planned to be gone for six months, doing his research and speaking at conferences—and I saw my chance. I slipped a little information to the nanny to convince her that my father had died and the money had run out, and at school I suggested to Zach that he look up your address…"
"In the phonebook," Craig recalled.
"And he did great, except for getting completely lost. I followed him the whole time, in the rain, until he found you," Eddie nodded to Officer Garrenton. "After that, I could only hope for the best. And, well"—he looked back to Craig and Kara—"you kept him. And you loved him. That was all I could have hoped for."
Kara looked down at her fingers, unconsciously intertwined. She looked up and saw Craig mulling over Eddie's story. She wasn't sure she believed it, the part about the artificial womb. It sounded too much like science fiction. But everything else made sense, making her doubts seem almost silly.
"Eddie," Kara asked softly, studying her hands again, "is Zach in danger with your father?"
"He won't hurt him," Eddie replied just as quietly. "He needs him healthy so he can show him off—that's how he gets his investors. He shows them Zach and explains where he came from. When they see that he's been successful before, they believe he can be successful again."
"Why would they invest in an artificial womb?" Kara wondered aloud. "Do they really think they're going to make money with it?"
"They'll perfect the system and then make a little money selling it to hospitals to save premature babies. And they'll make some on women who can't have children on their own. But for the real money—my father thinks there are thousands of wealthy women out there who would pay dearly to have a child without having to carry it and give birth themselves. Actresses, fashion models—women who want to have a child but keep their youthful figure, too."
"Eddie," Officer Garrenton asked with a glance at Kara, "will your father bring Zach back to his parents?"
Eddie locked eyes with her. "No. He will keep him hidden somewhere. Zach is too valuable for my father to risk losing him."
Kara looked intently at Eddie. His eyes betrayed no falsehood. Her breathing shallow, she stepped to the other end of the balcony to gaze out toward Puget Sound. "How do we find your father, Eddie?"
"I don't know," Eddie shook his head. "It won't be easy. He could go anywhere, and he won't leave many clues behind him."
"Help us, Eddie." She turned back to him and held his green eyes. "I know he's your father, but please—"
"I promised my mother," Eddie replied. "I'll try."
Eddie's assurance that Zach would be safe with Dr. Lerwick brought Kara no comfort. Perhaps the man wou
ld do Zach no physical harm, but if anything Eddie had told them here was true, the man had stolen away her son—and she wanted Zach back. More than she had ever wanted anything, she wanted him back.
*****
The Boy Who Appeared from the Rain Page 97