Courage Stolen

by R. Scott Mackey

  “Doesn’t make it easier. I still see what happened vividly in my mind. Sometimes I swear I can even smell the lingering gunpowder.”

  “Have you had any physical symptoms?” Dr. Nelson looked at me closely.

  “Sometimes. My heart speeds up when the images come. Not every time but when I let myself dwell on it. A couple of times I felt myself hyperventilating, and I had to lie down to calm myself.”

  When he finished writing, he looked me in the eyes. “What you went through would trouble anybody. That’s a normal reaction to that kind of trauma. We all process something like that in our own way. Your mind is doing that now, trying to put into context something alien to your psyche.”

  I nodded. He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know, but it was good to hear it from him anyway. Somehow that made me feel better.

  “My concern,” he continued, “is the persistence of these visions, and the emotions they’re arousing, might be a sign of post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD.”

  “I’m usually pretty strong about facing things, even unpleasant things—”

  He held up a hand to quiet me. “PTSD is not a sign of weakness or anything like that. It’s your mind’s normal reaction. Your mind might be able to deal with things in a few weeks, and you’ll move on and be fine. Or these visions could haunt you for months or years. Or they might never go away.”

  “So I’ve got that going for me.”

  “Yes, you do.” Dr. Nelson granted me a smile. “In cases like this, however, we don’t like to take chances. It’s best we treat you for the PTSD symptoms earlier rather than later. How long ago did you say the events took place?”

  “November.”

  “So it’s been about three months.” Dr. Nelson looked at me with evident concern.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.” He pulled out a prescription pad from his shirt pocket. “First of all, I want to get you started on Zoloft. We’ll start with twenty-five milligrams and see how it works. It’ll take a couple of weeks for you to start feeling the effects.”

  “An anti-depressant?” I didn’t want to go on medications.

  “This is a low dose,” he said, detecting my reticence. “Given what you’ve told me, I think this would be helpful for you.”

  “I don’t know,” I protested, but I took the prescription when he handed it to me. “I don’t want to start down that path, you know, of taking medicine for every little thing ailing me. At my age, the meds could add up pretty fast.”

  “I don’t consider PTSD to be a little thing. Please get the prescription filled and begin using it, today if possible. As I said, it will take a couple of weeks before it starts to work.”

  “Will this help me sleep better?” I held up the prescription.

  “Yes. I’m also going to give you a referral for a psychiatrist. You can use anybody listed on our HMO website, but I recommend you consider Dr. Frank Beckly. He specializes in PTSD. I’ve had several patients see him, and they all swear by him. He utilizes trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy. Therapy combined with the Zoloft should start to help you.”

  “What is trauma-focused, whatever it is you said?”

  “He’ll explain it in detail to you, but it’s basically getting you to open up and express what’s happening to you and to develop strategies for dealing with it. It’s an interactive treatment model. He’s used it a lot with war veterans.”

  five

  After my doctor’s appointment, I called Jerry Langford to get an address for Jack Cassidy, Candace Symington’s fellow researcher on the Monarch project. I was surprised the Sacramento address belonged to an establishment called The Zoo that, according to its sign, opened at six in the morning and closed at two in the morning, enabling customers to take full advantage of the state’s legal drinking hours. At eight at night, the bar’s parking lot was full. A look inside revealed The Zoo catered to a middle-aged crowd that long ago exited the fast track for a barstool planted on Cirrhosis Island. To call the place a dive would have been a compliment, as stretched as calling Danny DeVito a hunk.

  A dozen or so men and maybe five women sat at the bar while another ten to fifteen customers drank in the booths lining the wall a few feet behind. The place was no bigger than a storage shed and just as dark, the decorating motif “beer signs of the 1970s.” It smelled of Lysol and sounded like dashed dreams—laughs too loud, voices too slurred, opinions of others too ready.

  “I’m looking for Jack Cassidy,” I said to the bartender. There was no room at the bar, so I stood at the station where the cocktail waitress ordered and retrieved her drinks.

  “Yeah, what do you want?” The man was pushing sixty years old and two hundred fifty pounds. He was bald, with a drinker’s nose and a cigarette smoker’s voice. The white apron he wore had been unlaundered since Richard Nixon’s presidency.

  “You’re Jack Cassidy?”

  “Like I said, what do you want?”

  “You’re the PhD student at Granderson University?”

  I felt a jab in my back, not hard but insistent. “Out of the way, pal.” It was the cocktail waitress reclaiming her station. She wore frizzy blond hair, a clownish amount of makeup, a low-scooped white shirt revealing most of her breasts, and silver hot pants so short and tight they could have been painted on. All of this might have been fine had the waitress not been about seventy, missing two top teeth, and weighing about ninety-five pounds, her flesh fish belly white.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am.” I moved to the side behind a large guy sitting at the last barstool next to the workstation.

  “Don’t worry about it, sweetie. Can I get you something to drink?”

  “Sure,” I said after a pause. “Gin and tonic.”

  “Want to make it a double? Double’s only a buck more if you order from the well.”

  “Why not?” By now Jack had moved to the other end of the bar. I figured it might be a few minutes before he’d make his way back and we could talk. Besides, I felt bad about encroaching on the waitress’s territory. Ordering a drink was the least I could do.

  She lifted a leaf in the bar and went to the bartender side. She poured me more than a double, added a lime wedge, and slid the drink my way. I had to reach around the big guy to retrieve it.

  The gin and tonic tasted mainly of gin. After the first few tentative sips, I managed to power through half of it.

  “Let me make sure I’m clear on this,” I said. “You work and study at the university?”

  He laughed as he was pulling two beers out from the refrigerator underneath the bar. “No, I never said that. Do I look like I work at the university?”

  “I was given this address for Jack Cassidy. I guess they gave me the wrong Jack Cassidy.” I silently cursed Jerry Langford.

  I finished my drink, put a ten on the bar and started to leave.

  “Why you looking for Jack Cassidy?” the bartender said over the din.

  “University business.” I walked back closer to the bar.

  “He in trouble or something?”

  “No. Not that I know of. I’m trying to help him and his colleagues with a little problem.”

  “You’re not a cop?” He looked me up and down and his manner changed from brusque bartender to something else—curious, maybe protective.

  “No.”

  He continued to look at me, taking inventory. “He’s upstairs. Jack’s my son. I didn’t catch your name.”

  I introduced myself and told him I had talked with Candace Symington earlier in the day and now wanted to follow up with Jack. He still seemed suspicious, but he gave me directions to the stairs outside leading to the apartment above The Zoo. I thanked him and left, feeling his eyes follow me until the door closed behind me.

  Cassidy opened the door before I’d finished climbing the stairs, no doubt given a heads-up by his father. He stood maybe five ten and weighed a hundred seventy pounds or so. His straight light-brown hair fell over his ears an
d forehead almost to his eyes, a hairstyle you might expect to find on a middle-schooler rather than a PhD.

  “Ray Courage?”

  I nodded. “Nice of your dad to give me an introduction.”

  He smiled. “Candace called earlier, too. Said you might come by. I’d be glad to talk, but I don’t have a lot of time.” He stepped away from the door to let me enter.

  It was a studio, about what you’d expect to find above a place like The Zoo. A single bed, a couch covered with a bed sheet, a flat screen television, and an old kitchen table with three unmatched chairs comprised the furnishings. There was room for little else except a tiny kitchen with a sink, stove, and a mini fridge. The muted voices of the customers at The Zoo wafted up through the floorboards, as did the unmistakable aroma of stale beer.

  We sat at the table, and I declined his offer for coffee.

  “Candace says you’re a private investigator. What makes you think you can help us?”

  “I’m not sure I can, to be honest.”

  Because of the inadequate heat inside his apartment, he wore a white hoodie and a black baseball cap emblazoned with a T.

  “Cal Tech baseball,” he said, noticing me puzzling over his ball cap.

  “I couldn’t figure it out. I thought I knew the designs and logos of pretty much every pro and college team around. I didn’t know Cal Tech had a baseball team.”

  He laughed. “If you could call it that. Worst team in all of college baseball. In my four years we didn’t win a single game. Never even came close. A bad high school team could have beaten us.”

  “School like Cal Tech, it’s got to be hard to recruit good athletes. No offense.”

  “That’s just it. They don’t recruit athletes at all. But the administration wanted us to be well rounded, so we were required to play a varsity sport. I picked baseball because I was an okay left-handed pitcher in Little League. In college? Not so much. But you aren’t here to listen about my glorious athletic career, and I do need to leave pretty soon.”

  “Hot date?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Let’s get to it then. What can you tell me about the theft of your project?”

  “Candace probably told you everything I can tell you.”

  “Why’s it called Monarch? Just curious.”

  “That’s our working name for the project. When we file the patent and publish the paper the name will be about as long as my arm, so for simplicity we called it the Monarch Project. That is, if we ever recover the damn thing.” His words came fast, though I didn’t know him well enough to attribute that to nerves or his normal speaking style.

  “But why Monarch?”

  “Didn’t Candace tell you something about it?”

  “A little. Something about microbial genomes and biofuel cells.”

  “So you have a basic idea of at least the elements of the project. Two of the three microbes that will power my biofuel cell come from the waste matter from the species Danaus plexippus, better known as the Monarch butterfly.”

  “Clever,” I said, sounding more dismissive than I’d intended.

  “We’re scientists and engineers, not ad copywriters.”

  “Sorry.”

  He fidgeted, picked up the cell phone on the table, glanced at a message or the time or something, then got up and went over to the refrigerator. He pulled out a bottle of water. “Want one?”

  “Thanks.”

  He handed me a plastic bottle as he returned to his seat at the table. He took a long drink of water from his own bottle and set it down next to his phone.

  “Who do you think took your work?”

  He shrugged. “From the note Candace got, it sounds like the Stone Creek Saviors. Whoever they are.”

  “What about S-SOP?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. But nobody outside the project and our investors knew what we were working on. We were a small, tight group. I don’t see how S-SOP or these Stone Creek Saviors would have known what we were doing. Even if they did, I don’t know why they would take our project. It’s an environmentally positive technology.”

  “Maybe they want twenty million dollars.”

  He snorted. “Good old-fashioned greed. I guess that never goes out of style.”

  “Professor Wiggin, Candace, and you are all on the project. Who else?”

  “I guess you could say we’re the big three. Wiggin oversees the overall project, though his main emphasis is dealing with the administration and keeping our work funded. Candace heads up the biological side of things while I head the engineering. She and I each have several grad students—masters candidates—but we’ve been particular about partitioning their awareness and knowledge of the project.”

  “Partitioning. How do you mean?”

  “We give each of them a specific assignment. So, for example, if I have five grad students, I give each one a small piece of the puzzle to figure out. One student gets puzzle A, one gets puzzle B, and so on. When all the little puzzles are solved, I put them together to assemble the overall puzzle. Candace does more or less the same thing. My explanation is a bit simplistic, but in a nutshell it’s how we do things.”

  Something didn’t sound right about this. I thought about it as I took a sip of water.

  “With all due respect, the way Candace described your team’s work it sounds like you may be creating a new energy future and solving global warming. How can a team of three people, plus maybe a dozen grunt grad students, accomplish that when there are large corporations and research labs around the world who’ve been unable to do it?”

  He smiled. “Candace might have overstated our accomplishment a tad bit. I mean, yes, what Monarch has uncovered—and appears to be on the threshold of introducing—can ease our dependence on petroleum. But that path is a long and slippery one.”

  “Still, you’ve done something scores if not hundreds of researchers have been trying—”

  “We got lucky or we’re brilliant. Take your pick. All those other researchers you’re talking about have been close. What they were missing was the genome sequencing we’ve been holding onto. With the sequencing, I was able to engineer something unique. It doesn’t take a thousand people to do that.”

  There was no reason to debate the point. My job was to get the project back, not to evaluate its merits.

  “Is it possible one of your grad students took it? Or maybe a professor at a different school? Or someone else who maybe guessed what you’re working on?”

  “I doubt the students could have figured it out. Only Candace, Dr. Wiggin, and I have seen the full genome sequences. We’ve been careful about that. And they aren’t sophisticated enough to hack into our security or brazen enough to steal the server. The one possibility I can think of is Truxel Laboratories over in Davis. Dr. Wiggin has a friend there who is doing similar work on biofuel cells. A few months ago, Ken—Dr. Wiggin—said he’d talked to this guy about how we were about to patent our fuel cell design. Ken slipped and told him about Candace’s genome sequencing breakthrough. Candace and I were upset he did that. Ken said it didn’t matter because this guy didn’t have the actual sequence.”

  “Do you happen to know this guy’s name at Truxel?”

  “Corey Truxel. It’s his company. The guy’s been around forever, though he hasn’t done anything groundbreaking since the nineties.”

  “I’m surprised Dr. Wiggin would leak information about Monarch to a potential competitor like that.”

  Cassidy forced a laugh. “You shouldn’t be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dr. Wiggin is a bit, um, different. Not what most people expect from a distinguished professor in his seventies.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  He shook his head. “See for yourself. Ken will be back in town the day after tomorrow. Talk to him and then tell me if you’re still surprised he talked out of turn.”

  “What’s he doing in Germany anyway?”

  “I don’t know. He said i
t was part business, part personal. He was attending some conference. And he has some family in Baden Baden.” His water half-finished, Cassidy stood. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I have to get going.”

  I took a final sip of water, screwed the top back on the bottle, and took it with me as I left. As I headed down the stairs, I heard the firm click of a deadbolt behind me.

  six

  That evening after dinner—beef stew I’d started in the morning and cooked all day in the crockpot—I settled in at the computer. I found three articles about the firebombing the previous spring at Granderson University. The first, a digest item in the Sacramento Bee, consisted of three short paragraphs offering little more than the what, when, and where of the incident. The Rosetown daily paper had a few more details and a photograph of the damage to the exterior of the building, but it offered little insight as to who might have been behind the bombing. The online student newspaper for Granderson University, The Griffin Speaks, was the longest and best story of the three.

  Food Science Building Attacked

  by Katie Johnson

  Early this morning, an unknown arsonist threw a Molotov cocktail through the glass front door of the Food Science Building on campus.

  The fire burned the floor and one wall of the building’s entryway, while smoke damaged three original paintings. Campus officials estimated the damage at about $25,000. Damage might have been worse, according to the Rosetown Fire Chief Tim Nakashima, had the breaking of the front door glass not set off an alarm, alerting campus security, who arrived at the scene minutes later and summoned the fire department.

  Campus Chief of Security Jerry Langford condemned the terrorist attack and vowed to bring to justice those responsible.

  “This is a very unfortunate occurrence,” he said. “Granderson is a safe haven. For an individual or a group of individuals to threaten that sense of security of our students, faculty, and staff is an outrage.”

  Though Langford would not comment further on the subject, he did acknowledge that the “SCS” initials spray-painted on the side of the building near where the attack occurred could be that of an eco-terrorist organization known as Stone Creek Saviors.