The Killing Harvest

by Don Donaldson

  IT WASN’T LOUD enough or of sufficient duration to allow Jackie to pinpoint her location, but he now knew he had more work to do. He never carried an extra clip for his gun. If he couldn’t resolve a situation with thirteen rounds it was so out of control that thirteen more wouldn’t do him any good. But he’d never anticipated a deal like this.

  Unless there was a dramatic change in the situation, it wasn’t likely the two rounds he had left would accomplish any more than the others had. He needed to flush her out of there. But how?

  He surveyed the area.

  Between the two entrances to the room, an asphalt berm about six inches high ringed an area where greasy puddles glistened in the dim light. Hanging on the wall inside the berm was a coiled hose tipped by an insulated metal wand.

  Slipping his automatic back into his shoulder holster, Jackie ran to the hose, hefted the coils onto the floor, and triggered the wand. As billows of steam poured from the tip, he grinned.

  The game was now over.

  The coiled hose was more than long enough for him to carry the wand back to where Sarchi hid. At the cleft where she’d disappeared, he poked the wand deeply into the darkness and pulled the trigger.

  SARCHI HEARD THE scrape of the hose on the floor, but had no idea what it was. Suddenly, the maze was filled with an explosive hiss that could only mean a new kind of trouble. She was out of range of the initial attack, but a wave of wet heat surged around the corner of her niche and washed over her.

  She was three drums deep, lying in a side passage, her body parallel to the first row of drums. Her legs, upper chest, and head were protected from a frontal steam assault, but her midriff lay in a crawlway directly accessible to a wand thrust from where Jackie was working. So if his next stop was one drum to his right, she’d be broiled. She needed to get deeper into the maze. But with her back to the desired direction, a turn that way was physically impossible. Despite that it would put her weight on the side where she’d been shot, she had to turn over.

  Still in agony from the cramp in her calf, she pushed against the floor with that foot and humped her shoulder forward, trying to get her hips to the widest region of the passageway. This brought her head into a space that led directly to the front, meaning that if Jackie skipped two drums to his right and steamed that crawlway, she’d take it in the face.

  IF JACKIE HAD thought about the way Sarchi had been facing when she went into the hole, he’d have realized how unlikely it was she’d gone to his left in the maze of drums. But it didn’t occur to him. As a result, he adopted a systematic, but poorly conceived, approach that sent him down the front line of drums in the wrong direction.

  Hearing the hiss of steam growing more remote, Sarchi stopped moving and tried to think how she might take advantage of this.

  JACKIE WORKED HIS way to the left, sterilizing each crawlway he encountered. When he reached the last drum on the front row, he turned the corner and began working the openings down that side.

  SOON AFTER THE steam hiss moved away, Sarchi heard it directly behind her, but not very close to where she lay. Following a short interval, a dissipated wave of wet heat rolled over her from that direction. If he kept to this pattern, she could use that predictability.

  JACKIE MOVED STEADILY along the side of the drum cache until he reached the end. Believing that if Sarchi was still mobile she’d probably be crawling toward the back or the other side, he dropped the wand and crept as quietly as he could, gun drawn, along the back of the cache, ready to fire the instant he saw her.

  AS SOON AS she felt the latest steam head disperse, Sarchi humped and shoved herself backward so her midriff lay across a crawlway Jackie had already steamed. Then she waited, worrying that if he abandoned any pattern in his attempts to broil her, there’d be no way to evade him. With the sudden cessation of the steam, she worried even more.

  JACKIE CREPT QUICKLY along the entire back row of drums, turned the corner, and came rapidly forward, disappointed that he hadn’t been able to make a verified kill. But she could simply be too hurt to move. This in turn meant that if she wasn’t already dead or dying, a methodical approach with the steam that covered all the areas he’d missed so far and revisited those where he’d already been, followed by a thorough but unpredictable sweep in which he’d come in from above, would surely finish her. Eager to get out of this place, he returned to where he’d dropped the steam wand and resumed work.

  BY SOUND ALONE, it was hard for Sarchi to tell exactly where Jackie was working. But she also had heat to help her. Shortly after the hissing had resumed, her feet grew warm, then her back, followed a few seconds later by her head. Knowing now that he was working along the back row, which was too far away to hurt her, she decided that her best hope for survival, if she could manage it, would be to sneak out of the maze unseen, hide somewhere else, and hope he’d believe the steam had killed her.

  Helped by the heat, the knotted muscle in her calf had relaxed. So at least she wouldn’t be hampered by that. The quickest and best place for her to emerge was the side Jackie had just left. But this meant she’d be coming out blind, feet first. With no other choice available, she began inching backward.

  She soon discovered that the used oil leaking from the overhead drum punctured by Jackie’s first shot had turned the floor so slippery it was almost impossible to get any traction. With a little experimentation, she found that by pushing against the drums with her hands she could move through a combination of sliding and squirming. As she passed under the leaking drum, used oil filled her ear.

  Shortly after she’d made the decision to leave the drums, and at the precise moment Jackie reached the last crawlway on the back row, her feet emerged. Slicked down like a duck caught in a tanker spill, the rest of her quickly followed.

  With oil draining from her ear, she got into a bear-walking stance and looked for another hiding place. Nearby, she saw the ancient machine the plant used to clean rust from the inside of steel drums. Shaped like a cylinder with the top cut off, it stretched about thirty feet away from her. On its near end it was equipped with a lot of big gears turned by a couple of monster bicycle chains. When it was in use, a dozen barrels filled with chains were lashed into the bed. Powered up, the rollers rotated the barrels on their long axis, and the bed rocked like a cradle. Needing to find cover fast, Sarchi scurried for the far end of the machine.

  The way things had been going, what happened next shouldn’t have surprised her. Halfway to her goal, she kicked a metal bung stop and sent it skidding across the floor, directly toward another stand of drums. Just before it hit, Jackie shut off the steam and started for the next crawlway. The bung stop wasn’t moving very fast, but when it hit the drum, the sound echoed through the building.

  JACKIE DROPPED THE wand and pulled out his automatic. With the echo distorting the sound, he couldn’t tell where it had originated, but its meaning was clear.

  “Very good, Doctor Seminoux. You’re a worthy adversary. All you’re doing though is prolonging things. But I understand. It’s perfectly natural. I don’t hold it against you in the least.” Listening hard, Jackie moved down the back row of drums, turned the corner, and stopped at the end of the drum cleaning machine.

  “Have you ever wondered why people who say they believe in an afterlife better than this one fight so hard for survival? I can understand an atheist doing that, but the other has always puzzled me. Are you a religious woman?”

  FROM JACKIE’S MONOLOGUE, Sarchi realized where he was standing. For the first time in the chase, he was between her and an escape route. She was finished.

  Then, she got an idea—not a great idea, one she wouldn’t even have considered if she could have thought of anything else. Because if it failed, he’d know where she was. This made her hesitate. But if he moved, she wouldn’t even have that chance.

  She decided to go for it. But she needed something to throw.
Groping around the floor, she could find nothing. She looked longingly across the room at the bung stop she’d kicked. She thought of using her shoe, but didn’t want to be rendered that handicapped.

  Her belt.

  She stripped off her belt, coiled it, and pivoted toward the machine. As she didn’t dare stand, this would all have to be done by intuition. There were six sheathed cables snaking from the machine to an electrical box with a switch lever mounted on a two-foot-tall steel bar to her left. After a quick run-through in her mind, she lobbed her belt into the bed of the big machine.

  HEARING THE BELT hit, Jackie whirled to his right, leaned over, and peered into the drum cleaner’s dark interior, his automatic lifted high.

  AS JACKIE LEANED forward, Sarchi pushed up the switch that operated the machine. With a gnashing groan, its big gears engaged, starting the rollers that found no drums to turn. At the same moment, the bed of the machine scooped forward and lifted, beginning its rocking motion.

  AT THE FIRST sound, Jackie jumped back, or at least that was his intent. But his jacket was caught in the chain that drove the roller gears. Dropping his gun, he tore at the zipper, but the chain was pulling him down, feeding his jacket into the gears, which slowly drew his face toward them.

  Jackie believed only in this life, and he wasn’t ready to give it up. He fought the fabric tethering him to the gears, demanding that it tear and free him. But he always insisted on quality goods. This time those high standards betrayed him.

  As his nose and lips were mangled by the gears, and their teeth crunched through the bones of his face, his last thought was what an incredibly stupid way this was to die.

  39

  FILTHY AND EXHAUSTED, Sarchi made her way back through the blackberry bushes, her momentary elation at having survived now muted by the cold realization that she had engineered the death of another human being.

  Jackie had torn the loose boards completely free from the fence, so going through the gap this time was easier. As she slid through, the back door of her house opened, and John came onto the porch. Seeing her, he shouted her name and came running.

  Ignoring the oil and grime on her clothing, he took her in his arms. “What happened?”

  Sarchi briefly gave herself fully into his embrace, washing her mind of everything but the comfort and safety of his touch. Then she looked up at him. “Latham sent a man to kill me. He’s back there in that building—dead.”

  This was hardly a sufficient explanation for what had taken place, but John didn’t press her. “Come on. Let’s go inside.”

  He helped her into the kitchen and put her in a chair at the breakfast table. It was then that he noticed the blood on her sweater. “You’re hurt.”

  “A bullet grazed me. It’s no big deal. It still stings, but the bleeding’s stopped. I can treat it myself.”

  “I’ll get something to clean you up.” He returned with a couple of wet washcloths and some towels, which he used to wash and dry her face and hands.

  “We have to call the police,” Sarchi said.

  “We’ll do that, but when they get here, we’re not going to have a chance to talk alone for a while. If I knew the details of what happened, I might be able to guide things a bit.”

  Sarchi nodded.

  John pulled the nearest chair closer and sat down.

  She began her story with Harry Bright’s appearance at the front door.

  When she finished with the description of how she’d saved herself, John said, “This is clearly a case of self-defense. I can’t see anyone questioning that.”

  “But I killed someone.”

  John reached out and took her hands. “The law imposes no penalty in these circumstances because self-preservation is the most fundamental right there is. Actually, he caused his own death. A thug like that was bad enough when he was able to hurt people directly. To let him continue to affect you now is just giving him more power over you. He’s gone, and the world is a better place. That’s the end of it. We’re not going to ever be concerned about this again, agreed?”

  He’d said nothing Sarchi didn’t already know, but she still needed to hear it. “You’re right. It’s just too bad it wasn’t the one who sent him. I figured out what Latham’s been doing, at least part of it. It was all in Timmons’s papers, which were waiting for me at the library when I got back. All the kids he’s treated—he’s the one who made them sick.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know the details, but he somehow infected them with a virus carrying a gene that makes nerve cells defective. He was causing the disease he alone knew how to cure. The embedded sound in the book he sent each kid was the stimulus that set the gene off.”

  John’s mouth gaped. “I think I know the rest.”

  “What?”

  “The bald guy with the insulated container. He took it to a clinic specializing in experimental treatment for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s disease.”

  Seeing where he could be going with this, Sarchi’s insides shriveled in horror. No. It was too unspeakable. No one could be that immoral.

  “They claim their treatments involve the grafting of brain cells from aborted fetuses,” John said. “But I’m betting the cells came from the kids Latham operated on.”

  “The New York Cord Blood Repository,” Sarchi cried. “He must have accessed their database. He was tissue matching the kids to the recipients who were to get their cells.”

  40

  THE AUTHORITIES ACTED quickly on the information Sarchi and John provided. Within forty-eight hours, Latham’s clinic and the one in Chicago were closed and their records confiscated. Latham and Dr. Gerald Couch, the head of the Chicago end of the operation, were both arrested. That same day, Sarchi learned that the lab tests for seminal products on the swabs from her examination at the sexual assault center had come back negative. The next afternoon, she was informed that the AIDS test she’d requested on Jackie Tellico’s blood showed no evidence of HIV. Armed with this knowledge, Sarchi was finally free of him.

  Wishing to set things right with the Stanhills, Sarchi called their home and talked to Stephanie’s mother for nearly twenty minutes, during which Regina asked many questions. She also cursed Latham at length and thanked Sarchi effusively for stopping him. Despite the role she’d played in Latham’s downfall, Sarchi found little satisfaction in it, in part because the harm he’d inflicted on Drew and Stephanie persisted unchanged. But John Metcalf was right. It was too early to tell how those stories would end.

  Sharon’s parents took her body back to Lexington, Kentucky, where she’d grown up and where they still lived. Before Sarchi could learn when the funeral would be held, it had already taken place. Coming on top of the responsibility she felt for causing Sharon’s death, Sarchi was extremely disturbed that she hadn’t been there. She also felt that she had unfinished business with Latham, that she not only had to actually see him in jail but also needed to confront him. She was, therefore, in no frame of mind to resume her work at the hospital even though Koesler had conveyed through Kate McDaniels that she was welcome.

  Learning of her wish to see Latham, John set up a visit and got Danny LaPlante to fly them back to New Orleans. Figuring that this was between Sarchi and Latham, John let her enter the visitor’s area alone, where, sitting in front of the glass partition waiting for the guards to bring him in, her palms began to sweat.

  Finally, the door opened and there he was, in an orange prison jumpsuit. When he saw her, a look of such animosity appeared on his face that she thought he might try to break through the partition. Instead of being frightened, she reveled in this.

  He stared at her without moving for at least half a minute, then the guard said something to him. He came forward and sat down. Jaw clenched, the muscle under his right eye twitching, he reached for the phone. Finding him smaller and less p
owerfully built than she remembered, Sarchi did the same.

  “What do you want,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “To see you in your new habitat. I hope everything is satisfactory.”

  “You think you’re so damned clever . . .”

  “You’re a disgrace, not only to medicine, but to the entire human race. I just had to tell you that.”

  A dozen emotions flashed through his eyes. Settling again on hatred, he said, “What exactly was so wrong about what I did? All the people we treated with donor cells were accomplished men and women, proven contributors to society. Kids are unknown quantities. Many turn out to be liabilities instead of assets. Some even become dangerous. We were merely preserving our known resources. And where’s the harm? The brains of children are adaptable. In time, all the anomalies they may now be exhibiting will probably disappear.”

  “You’re pathetic. You still don’t see it.”

  “What’s to see? We were producing results unheard of anywhere else in the world, giving people their lives back.”

  “At the expense of children.”

  “The great Doctor Seminoux. Who are you to judge me? What have you ever done that makes any difference—bandage a few cuts, cure a couple cases of head lice. What will you ever do that means anything?”

  Sarchi gave him her prettiest smile. “I put you here.”

  SATISFYING AS HER visit with Latham was, Sharon’s death still sat heavily in the path of Sarchi’s return to a normal life. Wanting to help her over this, and remembering how much she’d enjoyed the day they’d spent at Nine Ponds, John suggested that if the wound in her side and the cut on her ankle permitted, she return there and help him finish putting in the daffodils. The idea was so appealing, and her wounds were healing so well that Sarchi accepted without hesitation.