by C. G. Cooper
“So, you are human after all,” Childs said.
Knight shot a withering look at Childs. He was in no mood for jokes. Sarah had been special. She had been mysterious. She was smart and witty and fit perfectly into the crook of his arm while she was sleeping. She had been a little unknowable, and Knight had found it fascinating. He was missing her already.
“Can I ask, Alex: Do you know if she was seeing anyone else? Did she seem to have any secrets? Did she take phone calls from anyone when you were together?”
Knight fought through the pain, trying hard to remember.
“Only her mother,” Knight said at last.
“Her mother.”
“That’s it. She said she was a real pain.”
“Her mother’s dead, Alex.”
Knight blinked. “What?”
“She died when Sarah was still in high school. Her father never remarried. He died shortly thereafter.” He paused, to let the revelation sink in. “She was all alone in the world.”
Knight had also been alone in the world and liked it. At least until Sarah showed up. She was exciting and she had been his. At least that’s what he’d thought. But now Knight felt more alone in the world than he ever had before. It was an unusual feeling. Distressing. And infuriating.
Get a grip!
Childs picked up his coffee and held it suspended before him. “Can I ask you a question? Why did you go and see Dr. Scarfe?”
“I just went to ask his about his work, about one study in particular that relates to my current project.”
“Was there anything unusual about the outside of his house when you went?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like odd mounds of dirt lying around? Anything like that?”
Knight realized Childs had been out to see old Dr. Scarfe. “His roses. He probably replanted them. You must have been out to see him.”
“I did go out there, yes.”
Knight dreaded the answer to his next question. There was only one reason why the special agent had brought Scarfe up. “Has something happened to him, too?”
“Yes,” Childs said. “He’s dead.”
Knight looked Childs in the eye, hoping for some sign of deceit. The answer he dreaded was far worse now that he heard it come directly from the agent’s mouth. He had to be joking.
“Dead?” Knight barked. “How can he be dead?”
“He hanged himself, by the looks of it.”
Knight slumped back in his chair. He was stunned. Two people he’d recently spent time with were dead. He’d never known anyone who’d died before. Then he remembered the lab technician. He’d been found dead, too.
People all around him were dying. Who was next?
Then he realized where he was, in a police interrogation room being asked questions by an FBI agent. He suddenly felt a pang of worry in his gut. He was their main suspect. As if he had woken up one day and begun some mad murderous spree. Innocent or guilty, his life as he knew it was over. Knight felt the inevitability of coming death creeping in.
“I’m going to tell the detective to let you go,” Childs said.
“I’m not under arrest?”
“No, Alex. I don’t have any reason to hold you here.”
Childs dipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out a card. He placed it on the table and slid it over, avoiding the large puddle of coffee. “If you remember anything, if anything comes to you about where Ms. Hansen might have been going or who she was meeting...”
Knight slid the card back to Childs, ploughing through the spilled coffee. “You’ve already given me your card. I’ve got your number, thanks,” Knight said, feeling the bitterness in him. He couldn’t contain it.
Childs pulled a dry card from his pocket and held it out to Knight. “In case you lost it,” he said.
“Don’t worry.” Knight stood up. “I’ve got your number.” And he walked out the door.
23
Childs stayed in the interview room long after Knight had left, thinking through every facet of the case. It was true that the good doctor had gotten himself into trouble in the science world. But that evidence was inadmissible in its current tainted form. However, since they’d started watching Knight, people had been turning up dead. There was evidence that Dr. Norman Scarfe had not really hanged himself. Bunches and wrinkles in his clothing suggested that someone may have lifted him and placed his body into position, either unconscious or semi-conscious. Someone had been there, after all, standing on the drive, talking with him before his death. And it must have been someone he knew. Scarfe had presumably been at ease and had carried on with his gardening. There were no signs of struggle.
The only problem was that Knight hadn’t reacted the right way. Or rather, he did react the right way: he reacted the way any innocent man would have reacted.
But what exactly was his involvement? There was something strange going on, and Childs was going to find out.
The door burst open and the Detective Patron walked in snarling. “You let him go.”
“You had nothing on him.”
“I had him in here. I had him talking. He’d slipped up. And you screwed me.”
“You have zero evidence,” said Childs, ignoring the smell of sweat and cigarettes that came off the detective.
“You don’t think he did it?”
Childs stood up and carefully slid his chair under the table. “He didn’t kill that girl.”
“That arrogant bastard is our only suspect, and you let him go.”
Childs laughed. “He is arrogant, isn’t he?”
“What are you, sweet on him or something? Is that why you let him go?”
Childs squared up to the fat detective. “Once again, I let him go because you have no evidence. If there is any evidence on our Dr. Knight, I will find it. And if he killed that girl, I will bring him in and I will personally walk him to the execution chamber. This is about the law. You should know that, Detective.” Childs breezed past Patron and out of the interview room. “Don’t get too close to this one, Patron,” he said over his shoulder. “Alex Knight is mine. Don’t get in my way.”
Childs sat at his desk reading through Knight’s internet search history. An application to the court for a record of websites visited in the last month had been granted.
A pattern emerged quickly: Knight was reading everything he could get his hands on regarding vaccines. He had been an eminent young biologist working in a well-funded government laboratory. Why, Childs thought, was he sitting in a crappy little office reading about vaccines?
A small message box popped up on his monitor. It was Mina, his online informant. Although Childs had only recently come into contact with Mina, he had received loads of useful information from her. The material she’d sent Childs was gained illegally and Childs could never use it, but as with any information from an informant, whether it was from a high-ranking gangster or a low-level hood, information gave him leverage. Childs had a high winning percentage. More often than not he scored a conviction. Another criminal down. Another notch in his gun belt. Another reason for his fellow agents to call him The Vise.
Childs clicked the box. Text appeared on the screen. It read, “I have a recording you might be interested in.”
He clicked a link and was taken to a plain web page with a single sound file embedded in the middle of the screen, along with a time stamp. He clicked on the play button and switched on his speakers. It took him a few moments to realize what he was listening to. Childs glanced at the time stamp. The morning Sarah Hansen went missing.
Was this the voice of Sarah Hansen?
The chilling recording was a muffled mess, but three things were clear: Hansen (if it was Hansen) had met someone she knew. Childs listened carefully as she entered a vehicle, and then been strangled to death shortly after getting in the car.
The recording of the young woman being choked to death was grisly and disturbing. A fresh text popped up.
“That’s all there
is.”
The special agent sat back in his chair. He hadn’t learned anything the coroner hadn’t already told him, but one thing was clear: she had been killed by someone she knew, just shortly after she had left Knight's apartment.
Childs was once again of the opinion that Alex Knight was not the man behind the murders, but he was involved in some way. Knight probably knew more than he was letting on. Childs needed to find out what it was before anyone else got killed.
24
Knight couldn’t ride away from his pain no matter how far and how fast he gunned his bike. Eventually, he had to return to work. He’d learned over time how to bury himself in his job as a natural antidote to whatever ailed him. This, however, was going to be a challenge. Depression and frustration weighed on him like a lead sheet.
The office seemed even more miserable, even more gray now. No sooner had he dropped into his chair than he found himself in an internet chat room full of anti-vax activists, all sharing information and their online research about the dangers of vaccines. There was an active discussion about government involvement in the deliberate tainting of vaccines.
Knight logged on as a guest user and joined the conversation.
He’d come looking for more arguments against vaccines so he could better pinpoint the answers he needed to find. This chat room was full of people telling each other what they knew to be the truth, but there was no evidence. That there was evidence available somewhere was taken to be a given. The scarcity of proof, in these people’s minds, confirmed its existence—somewhere.
Knight decided to go for broke.
Anyone here, he wrote, have any experience with paralysis from vaccines?
As Knight was reading the long and bizarre list of conspiracy theories, with not a single post addressing his question, the thread disappeared. And then the web browser closed by itself. In its place, a line of text appeared at the bottom of his screen: Click here to restore.
Knight hovered his cursor over the text and hesitated, then clicked it.
Immediately a new browser and chat room opened. There was only one topic: “Why you shouldn’t talk about your work online.”
He opened the topic and read the only post that had been placed there. It was almost as if it had been written specifically for him, and then he realized it had been. It told him his study into the safety of vaccines was getting him into areas where the biggest secrets lay. He was warned not to discuss the topic with anyone online, as the government and the controlling agencies were monitoring web traffic looking for the people who knew the truth.
A new message popped up underneath the first from the same user. It went on to say that the vaccines were contaminated in various ways and that he should look at the following links. A list of links appeared in a fresh reply.
Knight typed a message of his own, expecting it to be read right away: But you just told me not to talk about this online.
A reply came back immediately. Welcome to the Dark Web, Dr. Knight. Message me in here when you’re ready to talk some more. –Mina
Another piece of text came up below that: Contact Darla Newman. [email protected]. Just write your name in the subject. She’ll know.
Knight’s palms were sweaty as he typed an email to Darla Newman on his phone with the subject line “Dr. Alex Knight.”
A moment later, he got a response:
Dr. Knight,
Are you available to meet in fifteen minutes at Lane Park by the plastic slide?
DN
He typed his response. Yes.
No other messages came through.
He told Mrs. Blunt he’d be out for a little while, he didn’t know how long. The woman appeared taxed beyond capacity. News of Sarah’s death reverberated throughout the office. The absence of Jeffries, lollygagger that he was, had transferred a great deal of burden onto the old office manager. She’d managed to hold things together, but the toll had already been taken on her limited emotional reserves.
But Knight had other things to worry about at the moment. His staff would have to wait. Besides, it was looking more and more likely that his job was simply a threadbare blanket trying to cover deadly government secrets.
It was a school holiday, so the Lane Park playground was busy. The grounds teemed with exuberant children and was lined by parents, venti lattes in one hand, cell phones in the other, one eye up and one eye down, keeping a safe distance. Some parents—the newer ones, thought Knight—paced the perimeter of the blacktop like football coaches, trying desperately to track the whereabouts of highly-mobile progeny.
One mother, however, stood by the plastic slide, one hand on a stroller, the other at her side, her thumb hooked into the front pocket of her skinny jeans. She was the prototypical modern young mother—hip, aware—dressed to be seen and standing confidently, and somewhat defiantly, by herself. She wore aviator sunglasses as she scanned the playground, presumably for him.
As he approached, she locked onto him. She gave a slight smile. Her child said something unintelligible. She responded with a hushed word.
“Darla Newman?”
“Dr. Knight,” she said.
They shook hands.
“And who’s this?” he said, looking down at the child. It was a little girl of about four years of age. Just a hair too old and grown to be in a stroller.
“This is Jocelyn.”
“Hello, Jocelyn,” he said, offering a smile. The girl, one finger in her mouth, regarded him suspiciously.
“She... can’t walk.”
Jocelyn looked up at her. The child’s grin was the kind that people of resilience get when they’ve been dealt an unfair hand. Strong and sure. Knight wasn’t sure what to say to this.
“I’m sorry,” was his feeble attempt at empathy. He hated himself for this sudden awkwardness.
To his chagrin, she ignored the remark. “She was vaccinated against whooping cough when she was two. I swear it wasn’t a month after that when she started to show signs of weakness in her legs. Her pediatrician was baffled, as was a specialist in California. And I was stumped… as a scientist.”
He scrutinized the face, ran her name through the database in his mind. Darla Newman...
“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’ve heard of you.”
She looked down at her feet, a modest smile on her face.
“Darla Newman,” he said. “You spoke at a conference on epigenetics—” He stopped himself, as the rest of the story came to mind.
“Yeah,” she said by way of confirmation. “You remember the next part of the tale.”
“There were problems.”
“You might say that. They got a hold of some photos of me hugging the chairman of the bioethics committee, and they doctored them to look like...”
He held up his hand. “You don’t have to explain. I remember.”
“Then you remember how it didn’t matter how much I protested. Because every time I did so, there was another Twitter pile-on calling me everything from a slut to an adulteress, with more and more photos. Well then, all I had to do was go into seclusion, right? You might think that. I tried.” Her voice was tinged with bitterness. “I should’ve changed my name and moved across the country. Try having people take your work seriously after you’ve been dragged through the muck like that. You’d think I’d just have to wait until it all blew over, right? Well, I waited.” Her grip on the stroller tightened. “My grant money dried up. There were the jokes about me online. I may have gone dark, but the rest of the science world hadn’t. All you had to do was Google my name and there I was. ‘Newman. A new man every night,’ and so forth.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” he said softly. “But I’m confused. That kind of publicity should have had no bearing on your work as a scientist. I don’t see the connection between that and being denied grant money. I’ve seen others do much worse.”
“You and me both, Dr. Knight.”
“So, you think someone had it in for you?”
It took him a second to remember. “Cancer genes.”
“I put forward the idea that there was no such thing. It’s my theory that although cancer is the result of changes at the gene level, more specifically, induced by exterior influences—carcinogens—a process can be introduced at the cellular level to override whatever it is that’s telling the gene to prevent the effects of carcinogens to switch off.”
“Of course,” he said. “I used some of that as the groundwork for my own... research.” He still had to be careful, he realized, about allowing his history with stem cells to go public. Besides, he didn’t know this woman and everything he’d been privy to up to this point could all be pure bogus.
“Bet you had trouble accessing the paper,” she said.
“I just thought you hadn’t published it yet.”
“Oh, I did. It was scrubbed from the internet entirely.”
He stared down at the child. Jocelyn was amusing herself with a Barbie doll, making it talk, softly, to her.
“I was married and pregnant with Jocelyn at the time,” Darla said. “The scandal put a strain on my marriage. He left me soon after.”
Knight shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Fast forward,” she said, ignoring the platitude. “A couple years later when I realized that Jocelyn’s legs were failing her. I happened to stumble upon an article written by Dr. Norman Scarfe. He called the syndrome Sudden Onset—”
“Hereditary Paralysis,” said Knight.
“That’s right,” she said. She stopped, her eyes reflecting the experience of reliving those awful times.
And there was something else in those eyes. It was everything that Knight hated about his job. Here was a woman, a doctor and an ethical scientist like him, suffering and soldiering on with a child who might be paralyzed for life.
And here was the beautiful child. Jocelyn looked at the other children with a quiet, dignified longing. Perhaps she too had caught a glimpse of everything wrong with the world at that moment. Or maybe he was just projecting. All he knew was that his heart was breaking for her. And for her mother. And then, the thought came. It began as a tiny speck of light that grew until it eclipsed everything he knew to be true. The vaccines were safe, he’d said time and time again. And they were... when it came to autism. But not when it came to a child’s legs…