Despite the risk, I had to take a look. I pulled to the very end of the line, parked my car, and got out.
Some people were standing at the railing, so I simply joined them and tried to act like a curious onlooker. From what I could see, the road made a broad curve with a steep drop-off. Looking downward, I spotted a number of policemen doing something on the side of the hill. As I watched, I realized they were taking measurements—and then I saw it, the crushed and mangled motorcycle.
Swallowing hard, I refused to allow myself to cry. Still, the sight was shocking. If Bobby had been riding that motorcycle when it crashed, then surely he was dead or at least severely injured. If he was dead, then where was his body? If he was still alive, then how had he managed to get away? On the other hand, was this some sort of setup? Had he made it look like a motorcycle crash but walked away unhurt? I just didn’t know, though forensic evidence—such as the existence of blood—should answer at least one of those questions.
Running a hand through my hair, I gazed farther down the hill to see a farm. Surely, if Bobby had survived the accident, he would have had the sense to go there for help. The answer was obvious to me, yet none of the cops seemed to have even noticed the nearby structure. Pulse surging, I decided to walk down there myself, even if it got me seen by the reporters. I knew my brother, and I knew if he survived that crash, then that is where he would have gone.
From where I stood the hill was too steep to climb down, so I made my way to the other end of the parked cars, beyond the clump of reporters and past most of the curious onlookers. As I went, my stomach churned when I saw the point of impact, a concrete retaining wall marred with thick, black tread marks exactly the width of motorcycle tires.
About twenty feet beyond that things leveled out a bit, and it looked as though there might even be a path there, leading down. Keeping my eyes to the ground, I made my way past a tall man in a charcoal grey coat and started down the hill.
“I wouldn’t try that if I were you,” he called after me.
“I’ll be fine,” I replied, not looking up. If he was a reporter, I didn’t want him to get a good look at my face.
“I’m sure you will,” he persisted, “but there’s a cop at the bottom who’s just going to send you straight back up here again, like he did to me.”
“I’ll take my chances,” I replied, wishing the guy would leave me alone.
“Whatever you say, Annalise. You always were stubborn.”
Maybe it was the way he said my name. Maybe it was the deep tones in his voice. Whatever it was, I knew instantly that he wasn’t a reporter.
He was Reed Thornton.
Stunned, I turned to see him standing at the top of the path, hands in his pockets.
“Reed?”
He nodded, and then a smile broke out on his handsome face. “I knew it was you,” he said softly, walking down to meet me. “You look so different but exactly the same, if that makes sense.”
“Reed?” I asked again, feeling like an idiot, but all other words escaped me. What was he doing here?
When he got to me, he opened his arms for a hug, and I slipped into them as easily as if I belonged there. He was taller than I remembered, and the years had been incredibly good to him. Something about him was also different but exactly the same. Unbelievable.
“How are you?” he whispered into my hair, holding on to the hug a little longer than necessary.
“I’m okay,” I replied, pulling away. “I’m here to find Bobby. What about you?”
“Long story. Let me buy you a late breakfast and I’ll tell it to you.”
I glanced down the hillside path toward the farm house and told him I’d have to take a rain check.
“Look, I know you want to investigate down there, Annalise, but we need to talk first.”
His expression was so intense that I finally agreed.
“But no food for me, thanks. People have been trying to feed me all day.”
He tilted his head back and laughed, and I realized that the motion was so familiar I had practically memorized it. Who was I kidding? I had dreamed about it. Longed for it.
Missed it.
Together we climbed to the top of the hill, and then Reed led me toward his car. Part of me was regretting my decision, feeling that I really did need to talk to the cops about the farmhouse as soon as possible. As if he could read my mind, Reed took my elbow as we neared the car, pulled me a little closer, and spoke softly into my ear.
“Trust me, the cops know what they’re doing.”
He continued to hold my elbow until he led me around to the passenger side of his car, a beautiful dark gray Lexus.
I lowered myself onto the soft leather seat and watched as he closed the door and walked around to the driver’s side. Something about the entire scene was so surreal, so bizarre, that for a moment I wondered if I was asleep and this was just a dream.
“I go by Anna now, by the way,” I said to him as he got in and started up the car.
“That’s right. I had heard that. Okay, Anna. I’m not really hungry, either. Let’s just drive instead.”
He eased past the parked cars and the people as I leaned forward to shield my face, pretending to dig through my purse. Once we were in the clear, I settled back and turned to my companion, studying him in profile. His black hair was shorter than it used to be, though it was still straight and just the slightest bit spiky. The line of his jaw was firm, his eyes a sparkling blue under thick lashes.
Amazingly, he was even more handsome than I had remembered. I couldn’t help but wonder what he thought of me.
“I’d love to play catch-up with you,” he said, glancing at me, “but before we do that, I think I should jump right in and tell you what’s going on. I talked to Haley last night, and she said you were in town at Lydia’s request, trying to find your brother.”
“Yeah, he sort of vanished off the face of the earth. Do you know anything about that? Is someone targeting the Dreiheit Five?”
He seemed surprised at my question.
“Why do you think that?”
“Well, Doug’s dead, Bobby’s missing, I was attacked, Haley’s under the protection of a bodyguard. Sure seems like it. Has anyone done anything to you?”
“Well, yeah, I had a break-in at my condo, but I’ll get to that in a minute. You were attacked?”
I explained about the ski-masked intruder and his strange request for rubies. Reed had never heard the term “Beauharnais Rubies,” though he seemed very concerned for my safety—and upset at the thought of someone holding a gun to my head. I wondered if that meant he still cared a little bit for me, or if his concern was more general, as in one old friend for another.
“I don’t know what that has to do with any of this, but I’ll explain things from my end,” he said.
“Okay.”
Reed turned off of the highway and onto a picturesque, winding road. The snow had almost completely melted on the blacktop, though it still remained in large patches on the dormant fields, creating yet another gorgeous winter scene.
“The day before yesterday—around noon Thursday, to be precise—I came home from a trip to find that my condo had been broken into. A glass panel on the back door was shattered, making an easy reach to the lock and the knob from the inside. None of my possessions seemed to be missing, and in fact the only sign of the break-in was the shattered glass. I couldn’t figure out what had happened. I called the police anyway, but it wasn’t until after they took their report and left that I listened to my phone messages. There was one from Doug from the night before, talking about the fax he had just sent. The tray in the machine was empty, though, and that’s when I realized what had been taken in the break-in: Doug’s fax. I looked closely, and there were a few tiny shards of glass on the floor in front of the machine. Obviously, the person who broke in had tracked them there.”
“What did you do?”
“I pressed the memory button and reprinted the fax. Whoever stole th
e hard copy wasn’t exactly tech-savvy. They must not have known I could recover it from the machine.”
“What did the fax say? What was it?”
He turned again, driving us down a road that sliced between two Amish farms, a series of rambling white buildings looming up on both sides.
“First, you have to hear Doug’s phone message, the one that alerted me to the presence of a fax. I recorded it.”
His hands clad in black leather gloves, Reed reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a digital voice recorder. Holding it up, he pressed the play button, and soon the voice of Doug Brown filled the car.
Hey, Reed. Doug here. Listen, man, I’ve been thinking about the fax I just sent, and I wanted to elaborate. I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m selling out my own company. There was a long pause, and then he continued. I think you’ll understand once you read the files, especially that last one. After everything they had already been through that very night—and then they had to suffer and die like they did? Ever since I read that part, I’ve been thinking about my own life, what it’s worth. Again, Doug was quiet, but when he spoke, his voice was firm. Look, I need to do the right thing for once, even if it costs me my job…maybe my marriage…and probably my friendship with Bobby, who might be up to his elbows in this thing himself.
Anyway, I’m rambling. I just wanted to explain. It was great seeing you at the conference. I appreciate the work you’re doing. Call me as soon as you get this. Bye.
The recording ended with a beep, and then the car was silent.
“The fax was sent from Doug’s office at Wynn Industries headquarters in Hidden Springs at seven o’clock Wednesday night,” Reed said finally. “Then his phone message followed about ten minutes later. According to Exton’s coroner, Doug may have died as early as eight thirty the same night, which looks pretty cause and effect to me. He ratted out his company through a fax and a phone call, then he was dead less than two hours later, and the fax was quietly intercepted. Obviously, whoever killed him and stole the fax didn’t know about the phone message or they would have erased that too.”
My eyes wide, I again asked Reed what was in the fax that could have been worth killing over. Without replying, he reached down between our two seats and pulled out a file folder, which he handed to me. Holding my breath, I opened it up and studied the pages inside.
First was a fax cover sheet with the Wynn Industries logo on it. In the comments section, Doug had written a note:
Reed,
As per our recent conversation regarding unauthorized gene therapy, here’s proof positive that it was happening right under our own noses. Talk to me before you act on this!
Doug
After that were what appeared to be pages of old medical files. Judging from the font, the text had been typed on a typewriter, and the first one was dated March 1991. Doug had drawn arrows pointing to the date, the patient’s name, and the very first sentence of the doctor’s notes: Newborn presents with Wolfe-Kraus syndrome. Have enrolled in study.
The rest of that page and the next two pages were simply dated entries written by a doctor that described the newborn’s series of office visits that took place over the next several years. I skimmed the entries, and it looked to me as though the patient had a disorder and was given some sort of procedure that appeared to be moderately successful in treating it. The effects of the procedure seemed to fade, however, because it had to be repeated every few months, something that the doctor did not seem happy about. The final entry, which was circled, said: Patient has been withdrawn from study due to religious objections of Amish parents, who indicate they have been feeling conflicted about “tampering with God’s will” in the matter of their child (i.e., if God wanted this cure to work, we wouldn’t have to keep doing it over and over). Parents have been counseled as to the effects of discontinuance, e.g., WKS symptoms will return in full. Patient discharged on this date, November 12, 1994. All data from this subject has been included in summary reports. File closed, HU, MD.
“ ‘HU, MD.’ is that Harold Updyke, MD?”
“Yep.”
“I don’t quite understand. What’s Wolfe-Kraus syndrome? What study is this referring to?”
“WKS is a rare genetic disorder, one that plagues some of the Amish in the area. In the late eighties, Dr. Updyke isolated the missing gene that causes the disorder, and from 1991 to 1994 he conducted an FDA-approved study that explored various treatment options.”
“Treatment options. You mean tampering with genes.”
“Yes. For the study described there in the file, he used the same technique that French Anderson pioneered the year before to treat SCID.”
“French Anderson? SCID?” I asked, shaking my head. It was all too much, too fast.
“Sorry, French was another bigwig in the field of DNA research. In 1990, he treated some kids who had severe combined immunodeficiency by removing cells from the patients, growing them in the lab, inserting the missing genes into the cells, and then reinserting them into the patients’ bodies.”
“Is that what’s meant by gene therapy?”
“Yes, that’s the most common approach, replacing a missing or nonfunctional gene with a normal one by inserting it into a nonspecific location within the genome. Geneticists may also choose to swap genes through homologous recombination or selective reverse mutation. Or they can regulate the degree to which an abnormal gene is turned off.”
“Okay. I understood about ten percent of what you just said.”
“Sorry. In plain English, the hardest part of gene manipulation is getting the genes back into the body and making sure that they go to the right place and do the right thing once they get there. It’s a very complex process.”
His words echoed similar comments Melody had made earlier.
“So was the study described by Dr. Updyke in this file a success or a failure?”
“A little of both, I guess. It was a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t a cure. The study was closed out by the end of that year. According to the FDA, that was the last approved study Dr. Updyke conducted. Now keep reading.”
I glanced out of the window at the curvy road in front of us and realized I was starting to feel vaguely carsick. I told Reed as much, asking if he could pull over before I went any further.
“Sure. I think this is what I was looking for anyway,” he said, putting on his blinker and turning onto a gravel road. It led us through a field on someone’s back acreage. When we reached the end, he simply stopped the car and put it in park, though he left the engine running for the heater’s sake.
Hoping it was okay to be trespassing out here, I returned my attention to the pages in front of me, moving on to the next patient file. This one was dated January 1995 and began the same as the previous one, with the notation Newborn presents with Wolfe-Kraus syndrome. This time, however, no study was mentioned. From the series of treatment notes that followed, the child was given some sort of procedure and then seen a number of times over the next three months. Unlike the first file, however, entire paragraphs from this report had been blacked out, so it was hard to tell everything that had been done. Near the end, it was noted that the child had a “significant tumor on the pituitary.” At the bottom of the page, Doug had circled the last sentence: Tumor proved fatal. File closed on this date of April 6, 1995, HU, MD.
“Does WKS cause tumors?” I asked Reed.
“No,” he said, studying the horizon in front of us. “But gene therapy can.”
I took a deep breath, trying to understand. “So you think this file shows that Dr. Updyke tried gene therapy again on another patient, even though the study was finished?”
“Yes.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Unless it’s part of an FDA-approved trial, gene therapy is unethical, not to mention illegal.”
“So why try to skirt around the law? Why not just do another study?”
Reed shrugged.
“Lots of reason
s. The application process is grueling. Once you submit it to the FDA, approval can take forever—if the study you’re proposing even gets approved. All results have to be reported, tons of paperwork has to be done, and on and on. All deaths must be carefully autopsied. With DNA research, human trials are so heavily regulated that every time a researcher wants to modify a treatment, they practically have to start back at square one. I’m guessing that Dr. Updyke followed the rules that one time and then decided that was for the birds and just did it on the sly after that. To be honest, back then a lot of researchers were going that route. It wasn’t until 1999 that the FDA really cracked down, and even then they got serious only because a young man died from a gene therapy procedure, one that had broken all sorts of rules.”
“Yeah, Melody mentioned that.”
Outside, a flock of birds landed in the field next to us and began pecking at the ground.
“So all the heavy regulation on DNA human trials is a bad thing?” I asked.
“On the contrary,” Reed replied emphatically. “It’s absolutely, vitally necessary. We can never, ever underestimate the implications of gene manipulation, especially if modified genes get into the germline. Approved studies are a lot of trouble, but considering the consequences, that trouble is worth it.”
He was getting technical again, so rather than ask what “the germline” was, I looked again at the pages from the file and the words obscured throughout.
“I wonder if there’s any way to recover the text that’s been blacked out.”
“We should find out soon,” Reed replied. “The FBI is working on that as we speak.”
I gasped, putting one hand to my mouth.
“You turned this over to the FBI?” I asked, wondering how Bobby was involved and if he was going to end up going back to jail—if he was ever found. I wondered if maybe that’s why he had wanted to disappear, because he couldn’t take the thought of yet another conviction and sentence.
Shadows of Lancaster County Page 17