Genesys X

by B. J. Graf

  I parked in front and walked inside. The walls of the ski chalet were made of pine stained dark from wood-smoke. A walk-in fireplace dominated the wall to the right. A huge stuffed Grizzly reared on its hind legs by the front desk opposite the fireplace.

  Heading towards the man behind the desk, I asked to speak to Dick Logue. He gestured to an old bulldog of a guy carrying a stack of towels towards the kitchen off to the right.

  Logue wore Levis, a plain white tee shirt and baseball cap with a grizzly bear embroidered on it. The jeans bagged around his scrawny legs, but Logue carried fifty extra pounds, all around the gut. It was as if somebody had picked him up by the legs and shaken all his muscle and fat to the middle like the filings in an Etch-a-Sketch then set him back down before it reached his chest and arms. A small silver cross hung from his neck.

  “Officer Logue?” I could smell the beer on him from six feet away.

  “Just Dick Logue now,” he said. “I’m retired.”

  “Some things never leave you.” I badged him. “Eddie Piedmont.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.” Logue’s rheumy eyes searched my face with the puzzled look of somebody trying to remember how they know you. “I never made detective,” he replied, barely glancing at the gold shield. “I liked the street. What house?”

  “Homicide Special.”

  His smile twisted into a smirk. “The golden boys in the glass house.” Logue gestured me into the kitchen. Then he stopped and pointed at me. “You’re the one with his face plastered all over the city a few years back. What can I do you for?”

  “I’m hoping you can help me out with some information. About your partner, Miguel Fuentes-Obrador.”

  Logue’s dismissive stare instantly became wary.

  The kitchen was thirty years out of date with its aqua subzero fridge and grey granite countertops. There were chips in the granite and nicks in the tile floors, but it was clean, and the air smelled of lemon scented Lysol. Logue set the pile of towels down on the counter and opened the fridge.

  “You want a beer?”

  I shook my head no.

  He grabbed a can of Coors for himself and lumbered over to a wooden table with a couple chairs on either side.

  Logue lowered himself onto the hard wooden chair with a thud and gestured to the chair opposite with a tilt of the head, simultaneously popping the top on his beer.

  “About your partner,” I said, taking the seat.

  “What about him?” Logue lowered heavy-lidded eyes.

  “I was wondering why a twenty-something guy with no prior drug use or health issues suddenly keels over from heart failure due to overdose.”

  “I’m not a doctor.” Logue stared at me through those heavy-lidded eyes. “I’d say Mikey just had bad luck.”

  “What kind of bad luck? The kind the wrong friends bring? Like the AzteKas, for instance? What was he mixed up in?”

  Logue’s voice immediately bubbled up with defensive anger. “He was my partner, Detective. Let him rest in peace.”

  I set my fedora on the wooden table top and smoothed my hair. “I lost my partner too. Frank Waldron, know him?”

  Logue shook his head, no.

  “Somebody took out Frank a couple weeks after you lost Fuentes. I know how it feels to want to do right by him.”

  Nodding, Logue shifted around in the chair.

  “I need information about an old case,” I said. “Remember the Nieto collar five years back?”

  “What’s that to you?” Logue said with a deep sigh. “You weren’t the detective on the Nieto case.”

  I pulled up copies of the two reports – Miguel Fuentes-Obrador’s original from five years ago stating that Nieto was the only suspect spotted at the scene. The second was the supplemental, the report he’d filed after Nieto’s conviction, in which Fuentes had suddenly added a false account of an additional unidentified man leaving the scene. Reasonable doubt in black and white – and the grounds for the killer’s appeal.

  “According to the file, your partner swore up and down he’d forgotten that key bit of evidence,” I said. “But I think he falsified that supplemental report and got the scumbag sprung. From his jacket he reads like a good cop. So why would Fuentes do that? Unless Nieto or one of his crew got to him. What did they have on him?”

  I’d expected Logue to bristle again. Instead, his defensive posture collapsed like an old boxer in the ring who suddenly gives up and accepts the blows.

  “I always knew somebody’d walk through that door someday,” Logue said, but instead of explaining, hauled himself out of his chair. “I got a delivery coming. Let me make a call and get Art to handle it.” He lumbered over to the front desk and said something to the hired hand standing there. Art nodded.

  With his back to me, Logue made a call on the land line. After a few minutes he hung up the phone and retrieved an envelope from a safe behind the counter. Slowly he made his way back toward me.

  “Come on out to the dock,” Logue said when he got closer. “I don’t want Art involved in this.” He cocked his head in the direction of the employee still standing behind the front desk.

  I stood and followed him as he headed out onto the dock, Logue’s steps heavy and hollow-sounding on the wood.

  “Did I pass?” I asked. I figured Logue had made a couple of calls to check me out. I would have.

  “Word is, you’re an arrogant prick, but everybody liked Frank.”

  What they say about you is you took a lot of sick days. Coors flu. “About your partner,” I pressed.

  Logue took a while to start. Even though I felt like taking a cattle prod to the old guy to speed things along, I let him take his time. He wanted to tell me something. The sun was just beginning to set, the air cooling off fast. We watched in silence. As the dark lake slowly started to swallow the light of the sun, the sky bled a reddish pink. The horizon was a smudge of dirty brownish-black.

  “The thing you have to understand about Mikey,” Logue said finally, “is that his wife Maria was everything to him. They grew up together, and outside of her and the kids he didn’t have any family. He would have done anything for her.”

  Logue activated his glove phone and brought up a picture of Fuentes-Obrador and a pretty, young, Hispanic girl-woman still in her teens standing against the backdrop of Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Long waves of dark hair framed her delicate face as she hung on Miguel’s arm and smiled a mischievious smile.

  “I took that picture of Miguel and Maria in 2034,” Logue said, before sliding another photo forward on the glove phone. “This one’s from last week when I stopped by.”

  In this shot twenty-four year old Maria perched on the edge of a chair in what seemed to be a nursing home. Her little bird wrists hung out of an orange plaid shirt two sizes too big and pillowed out over purple polyester pants several patterns too loud. Somebody must have brushed her dark hair too and pinned it back with butterfly barrettes appropriate for a little girl of six. No one home in those vacant eyes.

  “Alzheimer’s X?” I said.

  He nodded. “She was diagnosed in 2037. She’s been in the nursing home since 2038.”

  2038 – the year Miguel filed the supplemental report. “What did your partner get? Money? For his wife’s treatment?”

  “No.” Logue handed me another slip of paper. “Not money.”

  He opened the envelope and pulled out a slip of paper. It was Maria Fuentes’s admittance slip for a clinical trial. On the back Fuentes had written May God forgive me in Spanish. The admittance slip was stamped approved with GEN-333-1110, the corporate logo and a barcode. GEN for Genesys - Lee’s company, and the patent number of the drug he’d pioneered.

  There it was – the missing connection between Lee and Nieto that led straight through Fuentes-Obrador.

  “Nieto got Dr. Lee to put Miguel’s wife into a clinical trial for an experimental Alzheimer’s X drug,” I said.

  Logue nodded. “At first Mikey lied to me, said he’d really f
orgotten to file that supplemental. You know. He only came clean after his wife’s clinical trial was discontinued - about a year ago. Finally admitted they’d come to him with a deal three years or so back. They promised to slip Maria into the trial and give her the real meds, not the placebo.They were getting good results from that trial.”

  “Who approached Miguel about filing the report?

  Logue shrugged his shoulders.

  Nieto himself had been in prison at the time. I brought up my glove phone and showed him a digital snap of Lee. “Is this the guy?”

  His face showed no sign of recognition. “I don’t know.”

  “What about this guy?” I flashed to a shot of the Azteka lawyer who repped Salazar and Pink after they’d assaulted me. When Logue shook his head again, I flashed him a shot of Sandy Rose.

  “I don’t know who approached him, Detective. I just know they said if Mikey would suddenly remember this other bit of business, file the amended report and say that it had allegedly been “mislaid,” they’d put his wife into the clinical trial and make sure she got the real drug, not the placebo.”

  I waited.

  “But after he did what they wanted,” Logue continued, “they still discontinued the clinical trial, and well, you saw Maria. How she is now.” He looked out on the lake. “It was all for nothing.”

  A couple of recreational fishing boats cut wakes in the water behind them – coming in from the last catch of the day. Their trails disappeared in the swell.

  “Worse than that,” I said. “Nieto didn’t stop with the murder of that Zeta in ‘36. He’s implicated in at least two more homicides – including my partner Frank’s. That’s just what we know about.”

  Logue took a deep breath, nodding. “You think he didn’t know that, Detective, at the end I mean? What Mikey did left a heavy wake in his life.”

  He stared out at a slower power boat with deep choppy water trailing behind. The woman, her two kids and the retriever I’d seen out front before were in the boat, laughing. “He couldn’t live with it, could he?”

  “Suicide?” My kid wasn’t even born yet, but I couldn’t imagine offing myself if Jo had what Maria had. And speaking of Fuentes’ kids, where were they now that their father was dead and their mother worse than dead?

  “No,” Logue said. “Mikey threatened to come clean about the supplemental report. And suddenly he turned up dead. I didn’t buy it, but there was no sign of a struggle on his body and nothing in the autopsy to suggest foul play.”

  “And if you raised a stink, and they ruled it a suicide, his widow might not get his pension.” I nodded. “Did he mention who approached him about faking the report to get Maria into the clinical trial? Was it the same person who put her into the trial? Or somebody different?”

  “I don’t know,” Logue replied. “For real. I wasn’t there either day – when he got first got the call, or later when they came to him about the report.”

  I glanced at that Coors can in his hand. “You called in sick.”

  Logue looked away and nodded. I still had a lot of questions but found myself following his gaze. Logue’s eyes kept circling back to the laughing kids in the power boat.

  “Those are Fuentes’ kids,” I said with a nod of recognition. “They live here with you.”

  Logue nodded in turn. “I’m their godfather. After Maria was diagnosed, they made me legal guardian in case anything happened to Mikey.”

  He pointed to the dark-haired woman with them. “That’s Carla, their nanny. None of us thought it would turn out like this.”

  “Yeah,” I said, tucking Fuentes’ paperwork back in the manila envelope. “You know you should have come forward with this. If you had, maybe my partner wouldn’t be dead.” I turned to go.

  Logue reached out and grabbed my arm. “You gotta understand, Detective. Sometimes you take the easy way out, and you don’t know till later how hard it’s gonna make it for you to live your life.”

  “I get that,” I said. “Still doesn’t change things. Fuentes was dirty. You knew it.”

  “You don’t get it. Logue tightened his hand on my arm. “Except for this one time, Mikey was the straight arrow. I was the one who sometimes worked the grey zone, you know, but he always had my back.”

  “That morning I called in sick with the flu five years ago? I didn’t have the flu. I had a hell of a bender the night before. Mikey covered for me and the shit came raining down on him. After Nieto was arrested, the scumbag’s people hit Mikey’s weak spot, and he caved. Two years after that, the clinical trial was discontinued. Maria’s condition deteriorated. Mikey didn’t have the money to keep her in a good place like she was in.”

  His grip tightened into a vise. “And then about a month ago Nieto’s conviction was overturned. Mikey came to me all upset. But when he finally came clean about the whole thing, I told him he fucked up bad. Said what was done was done, and he had to live with it. There’s no going back. Man up, I said to him. Keep his mouth shut. This one time he stepped outside the line, and I let him down.”

  Logue looked out at the boats again, not meeting my eyes. “He died that same night. Mikey came to me for help, and I made it worse. And there’s not a fucking thing I can do to change that.”

  I slowly unpeeled his hand from my arm and started to walk back towards the lodge.

  He grabbed at my arm again. “You still don’t know the worst of it, Piedmont. Why I couldn’t come clean. Not now.”

  I turned my head and saw Logue staring out at the kids in the boat once more. Fuentes’ kids.

  “His kids live on his pension and benefits,” I said. “You didn’t want them to lose that.”

  “Especially the medical,” he said, pressing his lips into a tight line of regret. “They’ll need that. They have their mother’s genes.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  The picture of Maria Fuentes with her vacant eyes haunted me as I drove away from Logue and Big Bear, heading back to L.A. in the dark. Maria - and her kids with that genetic time bomb hanging over them, Fuentes, and the desperate steps he’d taken to protect them – all for nothing. So many things could go wrong for a kid, any kid. How would I protect my unborn child from all the bad out there?

  I put the sedan on autopilot and made three calls as the car inched along in traffic.

  Given what Logue had told me about the clinical trial, the first was to the Genesys CEO. Maclaren was in his office when we finally connected. I asked him about the patents to Lee’s work.

  “Dr. Lee’s family owns the rights to the initial test,” Maclaren said, his tall frame leaning against the desk.

  “The test that detects susceptibility to Alzheimer’s,” I said.

  “That’s right.” Maclaren’s pale blue eyes looked tired. “We’ll license the process.”

  “And the treatment for Alz-X itself?”

  “The company owns that,” Maclaren said.

  “So your company benefits from Lee’s death,” I said.

  “Hardly.” As he drew his hand across his face, the skin seemed to sag. “The company has always owned that intellectual property. Dr. Lee’s percentage will go to his family as it would have gone to him. If and when we get to market.”

  “How soon will that be?”

  “Third stage of clinical trials are underway,” Maclaren said, brow furrowing. “But we’ve had some problems.”

  “Like corrupting the results?” I told him I knew about Lee putting Fuentes-Obrador’s wife into the clinical trial and giving her the real drug. He didn’t look surprised.

  “That was a serioius error of judgment on his part,” Maclaren conceded. “As soon as I found out, I suspended the trial. It was one of thirty six. That’s delayed our progress, but not completely derailed it, thankfully.”

  So, Maclaren had been the one to derail the clinical trial, not Lee.

  “But you didn’t fire Lee,” I said. “You sent him on sabbatical.”

  Maclaren didn’t deny it. His face fixed itself in
a flat scowl.

  “How did you find out about the tampering?”

  “Dr. Lee told me himself.” Maclaren ran his hand through his dark hair and sighed. “I thought it better not to ruin a man’s life for a moment of weakness.”

  “Not his first lapse,” I said, referencing the ethical problems he’d had in the past. “You needed Lee to finish the work.”

  “I don’t deny that,” Maclaren said. “But Gabriel Lee has paid for his mistake. If his work doesn’t go forward, millions of innocent people will pay for it too.”

  “Probably,” I said. “But did you ask yourself why Lee let this particular woman into the trial?”

  “I asked him,” Maclaren said. “Dr. Lee said he took pity on her. He told me she had small children and very little money.”

  “She also had a cop for a husband. The husband filed a supplemental report that got an AzteKa enforcer out of jail,” I said. “Nieto and the AzteKas had to have leverage over Lee to make him do what he did. Are you aware, Mr. Maclaren, that your employee was using black market embryos in his research?”

  Maclaren’s face had paled under his tan. “That’s a serious allegation,” he said.

  “Does that mean you didn’t know about it? The black market embryos? You knew about his patient tampering.”

  “Of course I didn’t know. I still don’t believe it.” The CEO was sitting down now.

  “You better start,” I said. “Because the AzteKas play rough. And if they had leverage over Lee, they’ll use it on your company too. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

  Maclaren shook his head. “You’ve given me a lot to think about. I’ll have to bring the lawyers in to sort through liability issues.”

  I cut him off. “Up security first. And the second Nieto or anybody else makes an approach, I want to know about it.”

  “Of course.” Maclaren looked ashen as I disconnected.

  As soon as we’d hung up, I put the second call through to Shin and filled him in on my chats with Logue and the Genesys CEO. Shin was still at his desk in Homicide Special. His suit was so rumpled the wrinkles had wrinkles.