Regenetine was going to be a blockbuster. A lot of people were going to get rich.
“Jerry, bring up the whole series,” Alex told him.
He obeyed. The screen exploded with small before-and-after pictures. I could see that some of the study subjects—both men and women—showed a noticeable improvement. Some did not.
“Not going to be hard to tell the treatment group from controls,” I said.
“Probably not,” Alex agreed icily. “You had enough?”
“Almost,” I said, and walked into the hallway. When we were out of earshot of the suspicious Jerry, I turned to Alex. “You have no bad feelings about Regenetine?”
“It’s not my project—”
“Doesn’t matter. Do you have any reservations about it?”
“No,” she said firmly.
“Did Paul have contact with the Regenetine group?”
“None that I know of.”
I thought hard. I felt as though I were back in residency, confronted with some baffling patient, ordering test after test and coming up with nothing. You know something’s wrong—the patient has a fever, her blood tests are a little screwy—but everything diagnostic comes up negative. So you begin to scramble. You order tests for every virus under the sun, you order a repeat of that X-ray. You cross your fingers that you find your answer before you have to throw in the towel, before you punt and tell your patient the last thing she wants to hear: We just don’t know what’s wrong.
“I need to talk to Bly,” I told Alex.
She scowled at me. “I told you, Jonathan’s not here.”
“HR won’t know where he is?”
“You think he told HR where he was going?”
“If he’s the director of research, yeah, I expect he did.”
She was silent.
“Paul Murphy and Tom Bukowski are both dead, Alex. Peter Yee is dead. And you’re telling me no one knows where Jonathan Bly is. How—”
I shut up. Two white-coated women appeared at the end of the hallway, walking toward us. Alex said hello to them and they passed us, resumed a conversation about someone’s bat mitzvah and the exorbitant cost of flowers.
“I’m going to have to call the police on this,” I said, lying to increase the pressure.
“Don’t,” she said. “Let me think for a second.” She cut her eyes to the floor for a moment, then looked back at me. “Don’t call the police. Give me today, I’ll find Jonathan.” She pulled out a business card and wrote something on it. “This is my cell. Call me before you do anything.”
I agreed.
“And, really, don’t call the police. If something is wrong—if, Nate—calling in the police will just alert people here that they’re being looked at.”
“They already know they’re being looked at. I’m here. They know I’m here. Even your damned CEO knows I’m here.”
“But you didn’t find anything, did you?”
I smiled at her when I saw what she was driving at. “No. I didn’t find anything.”
103
I DON’T KNOW WHAT I expected when I returned to Alex’s suite. Maybe Ty bouncing a giggling Tim on his knee. Maybe Ty reading from The Hobbit, doing funny dwarf voices, Tim guffawing and eating it up, escaping for a time from the darkness that engulfed his little life.
But what I saw was not the Romper Room scene I’d hoped for. What I saw was Tim sitting in a chair, his elbows on his knees, head in his hands. Ty had pulled his office chair around to face him, and spoke in low tones. He raised his face to me.
“No one told him about Dr. Murphy,” Ty said. “So, I…I didn’t know,” he faltered.
“That’s okay,” I said quietly, not meaning it.
I felt Alex move away from me. I heard the door to her office close.
Slowly, I walked to Tim. “You lied to me!”
“I know,” I said. “And lying is a very bad thing and I’m really sorry I lied to you. Let’s—”
“I’m not going with you!”
“Tim…”
“Why did you lie? You can’t lie. You can’t.”
“I told you I’m sorry.”
“We were going to be a family! And now we’re not. And my mom’s going to die, too, isn’t she? She’s going to die!”
Unable to think of anything substantive to say, I offered more grape juice.
“I don’t want juice!” he screamed.
I extended my hand toward him, trying to be gentle, avuncular, contrite, whatever would get through to him and give him comfort. He wanted none of it.
“Get away from me!”
Before I could figure out another lame attempt to mollify him, he hopped off the chair, shoved me back, and ran.
The boy ran the wrong way. Wrong way, because the hall dead-ended in the direction he was going. He saw this, too, and wheeled around. His eyes met mine and I have no doubt that this furious, grief-stricken child would have come at me swinging if he’d had a few more pounds on him. As it was, he didn’t have a few more pounds and he didn’t swing. He did have legs, though, and he ran past me. I ducked back into the office, grabbed his book, and ran after him.
Tim punched through a door marked Exit. I chased him down the five flights of stairs, across the lobby, to the parking lot, through the vehicles shimmering like scarabs in the late afternoon sun. He was running without direction, as if pushing himself to exhaustion would exorcise the too-powerful emotions. As I trailed behind him, I couldn’t help but think of myself at the hospital, screaming as I waded through the fountain. I couldn’t help but sympathize.
Eventually, Tim could keep it going no longer. He slumped to the asphalt at the tail end of a green SUV. He sat rigidly, staring straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge me. I sat cross-legged in front of him, saying nothing.
We held that pose for ten minutes. A few people passed us, leaving work for the day. I smiled; they either forced a smile or asked me if everything was all right. I assured them all it was fine.
“I shouldn’t have lied to you,” I told Tim.
He didn’t reply.
“It was wrong of me. But I wanted to protect you. I knew you would be upset. You have a lot to deal with, for anyone, really, a kid or an adult. Your mom and…I just didn’t think you’d want to know about Uncle Paul.” The words seemed to evaporate in the heated air.
Tim brushed off his pants and got to his feet. He was a good kid—a very good kid—and it was killing me that he was going through this. It killed me that he’d been forced to put his trust in someone who kept breaking faith with him.
And because this kid was with me, because I’d lied to him, I thought about a change in tactics. I balanced risks and benefits; I balanced getting someone found versus the risk of getting them killed. I made my choice.
“Want to take a little hike?” I asked.
As we retraced the steps I’d taken with Alex just an hour before, I punched numbers into the cell.
Evidently, Jack Tang had finished picking through the burnt-out shell of Spectacular Nails, since I was able to reach him at the Bryant Street station. He barely got through his salutation when I blurted out, “They have Dorothy Zhang.”
The unflappable detective was…flapped, I guess you could say. “The newscaster? Who does?” he asked irritably. I guessed the explosion at the nail salon had, indeed, fucked up his day.
I told Tang everything I’d been holding back from him: the clinic, my being there, Beautiful Essence and the stem cells, Regenetine and the stem cells, Dragon East. Tang drank the information silently. When I mentioned Uncle Tony, Tang stopped me.
“Uncle Tony, you said.”
“Yes. You know him?” I asked.
“Sure. Tony is the name of a big cheese in the Chinese community here. Real name’s Garheng Ho. He’s one of the elders in a tong called the South Chinese Merchants’ Association. Businessman with a couple shops on Grant Avenue. Go on. Finish your story.”
As I finished, Tim and I made our way past the bench where Al
ex and I had stopped. He was leading me now, along a path through the mulch and into a parking lot for the next building. A hundred yards in front of us, the black granite fountain was framed perfectly by the corners of the two silver buildings, backgrounded perfectly by the mirrored face of the third. The fountain itself sputtered six inches of water that fell and spread out over its broad, flat surface before falling to a trough below. Tim headed for its clean lines, maintaining a distance close enough to hear my words. His steps were careful and unhurried.
It’s going to be okay, I wanted to say to the boy. We got Bard the Bowman with us now. I did my best, but it wasn’t enough. I know when to ask for help, kid.
It’s going to be okay.
“What do you want me to do about it?” Tang asked.
For a moment, I could not speak; this was not what Tang was supposed to say.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You’re the police. Go find Dorothy Zhang.”
Tim stopped and turned.
“I’ll put the word out,” Tang said.
“Good.” I expected him to offer something else, but he didn’t. I helped him. “Go after Dragon East. Go after the owners of Dragon East. I’ll give you something else: it’s a front company. It’s owned by another company called Sino Sun.”
Tim began walking again, into the lonely courtyard, toward the lonely fountain.
“We know that,” Tang said. “I have someone working that up for me.”
“Good.”
“My next question is: how do you know that?”
I didn’t think it appropriate to involve Miles Pikar with the police. “I have someone working that up for me,” I evaded. “But that’s not important. The important thing is that Tony—Garheng—is involved somehow.”
“You know that for sure?”
Sure I was sure, but I didn’t really want to tell him an eight-year-old was the source of the information, or that he was with me, leaning into the trough of the black stone fountain, fishing something out of the clear water.
“It’s your job to figure out how he was involved, right?” I asked, hearing the annoyance in my voice. “I’m telling you this much: he’s involved. Go out there and get him.”
“We can’t just ‘go get him,’ Doc.”
“Why not? He’s a kidnapper. He kidnapped Dorothy Zhang. Don’t you people freak out with kidnapping?”
“Look, Dr. McCormick, you’ve given me some valuable information. I am going to talk to Mr. Ho, I will talk to the people at Tetra—”
“What about Ms. Zhang? Kidnapping, remember?”
“According to your story, Mrs. Zhang went willingly with someone you presume to be Mr. Ho. She never actually told you that’s who she was going to meet, correct?”
“Ms. Zhang. She didn’t tell me, no.”
“And you have no indication other than some gut feeling that she didn’t go with him willingly. Correct?”
I saw that what Tim had fished from the fountain was a collection of pennies. He tossed them, one by one, back into the water: I wish, I wish, I wish.
“Correct.”
“And,” Tang continued, “if we’re going to talk about missing persons, I don’t even want to get into the possibility that you have something to do with an eight-year-old who might or might not be missing—”
“Arrest me, then.”
“I would if you were here. Then I’d shoot you for all the trouble you’re giving me. The boy still with you?”
I sighed. “Yes, he is.”
Tang’s tone changed, and if you could hear a man smiling, I heard it. “I’m not going to arrest you or shoot you, okay? The Tim Kim missing persons report had some problems with it, basically that they couldn’t get in touch with the family and were going only on the word of the principal at his school.”
“So you want me to bring him in?”
Suddenly, Tim spun from the water, three pennies sitting wet and glistening on the black stone.
“Sure. Bring him in. We’ll contact Child Protective Services; they’ll stick him in some facility for a few days or weeks until someone picks him up or they find foster care—”
“Forget it.” To Tim, I said, “You’re staying with me.”
“I want to see my mom,” he said. I could hardly hear him over the splashing water.
“The police are going to help us find her, sport.”
“You can’t lie,” he said.
“I’m not lying.” Speaking into the phone, I said, “Inspector Tang, would you mind telling Tim here that we’re going to find his mother?”
“Look, I can’t guarantee—”
“Here’s Tim,” I said.
I pushed the phone to the boy.
“Yeah,” he said, his eyes on me. “That explosion was big.” Then, “I just want her to be okay. He can’t find her,” he said. “She went with Uncle Tony.” Then, “Okay.” He handed the phone over to me, then went back to tossing the pennies, retrieving them from the water.
“I don’t appreciate you making me say that to the kid,” Tang told me. “I don’t want to get his hopes—”
“And I don’t appreciate the foot-dragging. Remember the Mings, Inspector? We don’t have any time—”
“There’s no we here,” he said. Now he was irritated. “There’s just the SFPD. So, Inspector Dr. McCormick, since you have it all figured out, why don’t you tell me how to do my job?”
“Go find this Tony, bring him in. Question him and…and arrest him. I don’t know.”
“And if he’s threatened Ms. Zhang, what exactly do you think he’ll say to us? If he has something to do with this clinic blowing up or the Mings’ deaths, what’s he going to say?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “He’s going to insist on getting a lawyer. And let’s not even consider the kind of shit I’ll catch for hassling a prominent member of the community when all this proves to be crap.”
Yet another reason to opt for vigilante justice. If you can hack it, if you can stand the thought of going to jail for your efforts.
“You’ve been watching way too much TV, Doc. We can’t break down doors, torture the shit out of people, and get the information we need before the commercial.” His tone softened. “Like I told you, I’ll talk to Garheng Ho, we’re tracing Dragon East. And I’ll speak with the Tetra people about any dealings with Mr. Ho. I will build a case if a case can be built, but it will not happen today.” He waited a beat. “You’re not happy with this.”
“I’m ecstatic. Can’t you hear my giddy laughter?”
For his part, Tang did laugh. “Get yourself some rest, Doc. Take the kid to see a movie. And don’t screw around with this anymore. You could be right. And if you’re right, you’re in danger. Both of you. And worse, you could fuck up my case. You understand me here?”
Yeah, Inspector Tang, I understand you.
I ended the call. It was hot here, entirely too hot. The combination of highly polished architecture and solar migration had, at that point of the day, focused much of the sun’s energy on this courtyard. I didn’t blame the denizens of Hieroglyph and Tenzer for staying cool in their reflective, air-conditioned buildings.
“Come on, Tim,” I said. “Let’s go.”
As he flung the rest of his pennies into the fountain and scrutinized the ripples, my cell vibrated. I punched the Talk button.
“It’s Alex,” the voice on the phone said.
“Alex—”
“Jonathan Bly wants to meet with you.”
104
“I’M SORRY,” TIM SAID.
We were driving west toward Pacifica, a small town along the coast just south of San Francisco, to see Jonathan Bly, the wayward scientist from Tetra. I’d gotten his number from Alex, called him, and set up the meeting.
“Sorry for what?”
“I yelled at you.”
“Yeah, well…I should have told you the truth about Uncle Paul.”
The sun was in its late-afternoon fireball stage—huge, orange, flaring—and gave us an eyeful
as we dropped to Route 1. It was much cooler here, thank God, than it had been a dozen miles east.
“You were trying to protect me,” Tim reminded me.
“Yeah, I was,” I agreed. “I’m happy you noticed.” My smile—rock solid a second before—began to quiver. Taking the boy to a rendezvous with Jonathan Bly was not, I knew, doing a great job of protecting him. But I had nowhere else to take him. Once again, I toggled through my options. Ravi? In a lab across the Bay, and one of the last people Tim would want as a babysitter. Millie Bao? In Atlanta. Jenna Nathanson? Some random teenager at the mall?
Child care is such a bitch these days.
“We’re going to find my mom, aren’t we?” he asked.
My smile completely fell away. “You heard Inspector Tang. You bet we’re going to find her.”
Tim considered this, then turned to his window, dragged his finger across the glass. “Why is the sun so big at the end of the day when it’s smaller in the middle of the day?”
“You have to ask a physicist about that.”
“A physicist?”
“Yeah. Physics. The physicists are a weird bunch, though. They have pointy heads and can’t hold a conversation. Not like the biologists. Biologists are cool.”
“Are you a biologist?”
“Kind of.”
“Well, I think biologists are cool then, too.”
Tim Kim’s charm offensive was working wonders. We were finally bonding. Really, how hard could this child-rearing thing be?
“You hungry?” I asked. We had an hour or so before I was to meet Bly.
“I think I’m pretty starved, Uncle Nate.”
Uncle Nate.
“You like Taco Bell?”
“Oh, yeah,” my charge said.
Pacifica, California, famous for its surfers and its fog and, oddly, for a south-of-the-border fast-food joint located squarely on the beach. The sun was giving its last show over the Pacific; gulls and teenagers cackled and squawked on the broad deck outside the Taco Bell. Tim had his chalupa, I had mine. Sun, sea, hormones, rampant commercialism…I couldn’t help but feel good about a perfect moment in a Californian paradox.
But perfect moments don’t last. The chalupas disappeared; the sun vanished. Darkness ushered in darkness. My mind began to drift to unpleasant things.
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