by F J messina
As Sonia continued to sit on the couch, turned sideways so she could face Mariana, Jet got up and moved around, finally leaning against the wall near a window that looked out over the farm.
Sonia reached out and gently squeezed Mariana’s hand. “C’mon, sweetheart. Help us understand.”
58
Mariana put the water glass down on the coffee table in front of her. “Okay. I’ll explain. But you’ve got to believe me.” Her eyes darted quickly between Sonia and Jet. “When this all started, we never thought anything bad would happen. We never thought we were doing anything wrong, not really. This was all for the horses. We were using the latest scientific breakthroughs to create a new, better life for the horses.”
She shrugged. “Oh, we knew we were breaking some rules, not following the normal scientific protocols for experimentation.” The pace of her speech quickened. “But damn, those things slow everything down so much. It might have been years and years before we would have been allowed to even begin trying the things we knew would work. He just wasn’t willing to wait.”
Sonia interrupted, her eyebrows raised. “He?”
“Professor Andersen,” Mariana leaned toward Sonia, “he’s the genius.”
Sonia’s eyes whipped over to Jet, whose mouth was open.
Mariana seemed not to notice. “He’s the one who knew that we could do so many wonderful things for these beautiful animals if we were allowed to make a few tiny changes in their genetic structure.” Her eyes rose momentarily to the ceiling. “It’s so simple, so small. Just a few changes and all those problems with nocardioform placentities would be gone, and cerebella abiotrophy, and a whole lot of other diseases.” She shook her head quickly. “But no, the scientific community wouldn’t hear of it. They said we had to follow all the rules of scientific experimentation.
“And the breeders, most of them, they said we would be messing with nature, and that it wasn’t right, or even legal.” She was animated, almost angry. She picked up her glass and took a quick sip of her water. “Hell, I think they just didn’t want to give up their special place in the world as the grand wizards of horse breeding.” She nearly spit the words out. “They wanted it to stay all mysterious as if their intelligent breeding of the animals was the only thing that could improve things. But it’s not. There are better ways─scientific ways.” She put her glass down with a tiny thump.
Sonia stood up and began walking around the room, sensing the need to put a little personal space between Mariana’s energy and herself. “Okay, I’m starting to get a little bit of a picture, but I still don’t understand. What is it that you all were doing?”
Mariana had settled down a bit. “Listen, I know this is going to sound crazy to you. But it’s true; every bit of it is true.”
Sonia glanced quickly at Jet, giving her a “here we go” look.
Mariana took a deep breath and began. “So, here’s the deal. While we were at Mayweather─”
Sonia put her hand up. “We? Who we?”
Mariana rolled her eyes as if Sonia and Jet should have already known. “Me, LaKeisha, Penny Rae. That’s who.”
Sonia swallowed hard. “And . . . and do you know─”
Mariana’s eyebrows lifted. “And do I know what happened to them?” Her anger flashed. “Of course, I know what happened to them. They’re dead.” She took a long, slow breath. “First, I heard about Keisha, about her being killed in a hit and run.” She looked up at the girls, pleadingly. “I mean, who gets killed by a hit and run driver in their own parking lot?”
She took another deep breath. “Then, when I tried to call Penny Rae, I couldn’t get in touch with her. All I could get from the folks she worked with was that she had disappeared. They had all kinds of ideas about what had happened, where she might have gone, but I knew in my heart something bad had happened.” Mariana’s eyes settled on Sonia. “That’s when I knew I had to run, I had to get away before something happened to me.”
She reached out and picked up her water glass again, taking a long, final, drink. “Since I’ve been hiding out, I’ve kept checking the local news up in Saratoga Springs. At first, they didn’t know much. But since they found Penny’s body in Vermont, they’ve figured out a lot. They’re pretty sure she was strangled to death right in her barn, first thing in the morning, right on the farm where she worked. They know the guy who did it drove her car to the national forest there, and they even have an idea about how he got back to New York─on a damn bus.”
Sonia and Jet exchanged quick glances.
“He killed them. He wants to kill me. I had to run. I had to get away from him.”
“Who? Who killed them?” Still standing, Sonia leaned down toward the girl.
Mariana looked up into Sonia’s eyes as if wondering why Sonia was so slow to understand. The words exploded out of her. “Andersen. Professor Andersen. He killed them. I’m sure he did it. It must have been him.” Anger seethed in her eyes, her body was literally shaking.
Sonia’s mind reeled as she stood taller. Gentle, almost goofy, Andersen. According to Mariana, he was some kind of a genius and willing to bend the rules of scientific discovery. But a murderer?
The women remained silent. Jet walked aimlessly around the room, expending her pent-up energy, occasionally looking out the window. Sonia took a seat on the couch. She reached over and took the empty water glass from Mariana, placing it on the coffee table. “So, you and LaKeisha and Penny Rae, you were working with Professor Andersen?”
“Yeah,” she spoke softly, calmly this time. Her eyes drifted away from Sonia. “He had gotten all that money to do research on nocardioform placentities, but he didn’t use it all for that. He bought some equipment and material that he could use for the research he really wanted to do, research on improving the actual genetic structure of the horses. He was going to make their lives better.”
Sonia asked gently, “Okay. Then what?”
Mariana’s gaze returned to Sonia. “Well, he’d developed the protocols he wanted to use, but he wasn’t allowed to try them.”
“And?”
She shrugged. “We decided to do some embryo transfers.”
“With horses?”
“Look,” Mariana lifted her eyes and her shoulders, her voice a little impatient, “embryo transfer has been done in horses for years, just not with Thoroughbreds. If a mare with good bloodlines is too old or not in good health, we can still impregnate her, then transfer her embryo to a healthier mare, one more likely to carry the foal to term. The biggest problem is trying to get a recipient mare to be in the perfect part of her cycle right at the moment you’re taking the embryo from the donor mare. That has to be done seven or eight days after impregnation.”
Sonia looked at her, squinting her eyes a bit. “Is this for real?”
“Yeah.” Mariana smiled almost condescendingly. “It’s done all the time. We just follow all the sterile procedures necessary, use a special wand to flush the donor mare, then collect the fluid from the procedure. We use ultrasound equipment to make sure we’re getting exactly what we need. After several filtering steps to reduce contamination, we put the embryo in a pipette so that we can insert it into the recipient mare.”
Still leaning against the wall, arms crossed, Jet shook her head.“Sounds crazy to me.” She lifted her shoulders. “But if it’s so normal, what’s the big deal?”
Mariana smiled gently, condescendingly. “You don’t get it, do you. It’s not that we were doing embryo transfer, hell that’s done more and more, and with newer and newer treatments like intracytoplasmic sperm injection. It’s that we did it with Thoroughbreds, which is not allowed, and after we genetically manipulated the embryo.”
Sonia and Jet exchanged a glance.
Mariana cleared her throat and continued. “It’s how we interrupted the process.” Sonia could tell that pride was starting to accompany Mariana’s description of what they had done. “You see, before we started dealing with real horses, on real farms, Professor
Andersen had figured out ways to manipulate equine genes in order to improve a horse’s performance on three indices: strength, speed, and endurance.”
Jet walked to the middle of the room. “Now wait a minute. You guys were messing with the genes of horses? You can’t do that. That’s wrong.” Her voice rose. “It must be wrong.”
Mariana gave her a knowing smile. “Oh yeah? Talk to the folks at the Horse Genome Project. It’s a big international effort to define the DNA sequence of the domestic horse. In fact, the University of Kentucky is a part of the whole thing. They’re just doing the most fundamental research, but still . . . .”
Jet’s head rocked back. “Damn.”
Mariana’s voice reflected her growing impatience. “Look you guys. Can’t you put this together? The Horse Genome Project is a good thing, good for all horses. What Andersen did was figure out how to mess with the DNA of an equine embryo in order to produce a horse that would be faster, stronger, and have more endurance. Doing that for Thoroughbreds is totally forbidden, but it’s a dream come true for anyone who wants to create winning racehorses.”
Sonia’s eyes widened. “And that’s what you guys wanted?”
“No.” Mariana’s voice was strong, her face defiant. “Not me or the other girls. We just wanted to be able to make it possible for all horses to have better lives, to find therapies and treatments for diseases like Cushing’s disease, respiratory diseases, all kinds of problems. But the professor, he said we could work around the whole scientific community roadblock if we just focused on the characteristics that Thoroughbred breeders were interested in.”
Jet had drifted back to leaning on the wall. “Why would that be?”
Mariana looked up at Jet. “Because some of those breeders might be willing to bend the rules if we helped them produce winning horses.”
Sonia sat up straighter, all the pieces were starting to come together. “Horses like Frailing, and Summer Wheat, and Run Lucky. Horses that were racing beyond their breeding, right?”
Now it was Mariana who slumped back in her seat. “Right.”
New clarity was coming to Sonia’s mind, along with new questions. “So, how’d you guys pull that off without anyone knowing? How were you three involved with the professor after you left school?”
Mariana looked tired. This lengthy explanation was clearly taking something out of her. “Listen. All three of us worked with Andersen when he had that grant to solve the nocardioform placentities problem. He took us into his confidence and let us work with him on learning how to manipulate certain genes in equine embryos. After we graduated, he helped us get jobs at three really important horse farms, horse farms where he already had a special kind of relationship, if you know what I mean.”
She took a deep breath and continued. “Then, three years ago, we all worked together to put Andersen’s theories to work in a clinical trial, so to speak. But we had to do it without anyone knowing about it. So just when a certain mare was bred on one of the farms, we’d put a plan in place. Seven or eight days after the mare was impregnated, the other two girls would meet the one who worked on that farm. In the middle of the night, we would do a sterile flush and collect the embryo using portable ultrasound equipment. Andersen would be waiting for us in a nearby motel. He’d have the proper equipment to keep the embryo viable while he worked on it.”
Jet looked directly at Mariana. “You all did this in the dead of night?”
“Uh, huh.” Mariana’s voice had become almost nonchalant. “And twenty-four hours later we came back and reintroduced the embryo into the same mare after Andersen had done his magic.”
Sonia ran her fingers through her hair. “And no one ever knew?”
“Well,” she slipped into the role of the professional that she was, “the mares would all be a bit sluggish for a day or two, but that often happens early in pregnancy, so no one really made a big deal of it.”
Jet’s tone of voice became more accusatory. “You didn’t answer her question. She asked if anyone else ever knew.”
“Well, I’m not saying we couldn’t have gotten away with it without anyone knowing, but there was a significant cost involved, and the money came from the breeders who were willing to let us do our clinical trial. It helped that they owned their own farms, too. That way they could keep anyone who might get suspicious away from us.”
Sonia raised up. “Breeders like Ashkenasi and Masson and the Danecks?”
Mariana seemed totally surprised by Sonia’s ability to connect those names to the plot. She squinted her eyes as she spoke. “That’s right. They gave the professor a bunch of money so he could afford to do all this.”
Jet jumped in, not supportively. “And of course, they would not only get a horse that would outperform, they’d have the inside track on how to produce other horses that could do the same thing. Right?”
Mariana was silent. Her face dropped again.
Jet persisted. “Right, Mariana?”
Her soft answer was sent to the floor. “Right.”
59
The room was silent for a few minutes while Sonia and Jet absorbed Mariana’s incredible story. Sonia took a slow breath. “Okay. So, that’s what you three girls and Professor Andersen were doing with those horses, but what went wrong? Why did he hurt those girls?”
Mariana’s eyes remained glued to her lap. “Like I said. It became all about the money.”
Sonia looked to Jet to share another “here it comes” look. Instead, she saw Jet looking absently out the window as she listened.
“You see,” Mariana’s voice became stronger as she looked up, “all three of us were top notch students, but Mayweather is a really expensive school. We all knew we would be graduating with student loans to pay off and how tough it would be to get by.” She shrugged. “Then the professor met with each of us individually. He said that if we’d be part of his plan to create genetically modified Thoroughbreds he would get us good jobs─and give us twenty thousand dollars a year each.” She shook her head apologetically. “That’s a lot of money.”
She looked at her water glass sitting on the table, clearly hoping there was still some liquid in it. There wasn’t. “Then, after three years, when the horses started running in races, each of us would get a bonus of fifty thousand dollars. That meant a huge amount of money and an incredible opportunity to see all the work we’d been a small part of come to fruition.”
“Whoa.” Jet scratched her head doing some quick ciphering. “That’s three hundred and thirty thousand dollars all together. That’s beaucoup bucks.”
Mariana’s energy was rising. “Yeah. That’s where the breeders got involved. They were putting up the money that Andersen gave us and paying for equipment and stuff.”
Sonia shared a sardonic smile with Jet. “Yeah, and I’ll bet there was a little in there for the professor’s personal use as well.”
“Yeah. He even started his own company he never told anyone but us about, Equine Futures Ltd.”
Shock filled Sonia’s eyes; she saw it reflected in Jet’s as well. Shock and recognition. They both remembered the name from the list of registrations for BMW convertibles in the area─black BMW convertibles.
After a moment, Jet kept pushing. “So why did everything suddenly go sideways?”
Mariana’s voice got smaller. “It was Penny Rae at first. She called me, and then Keisha. She said that she had seen that guy Ron Harris talking to Mr. Daneck.”
Sonia sat up taller, focused. “Ron Harris, the broker?”
“Yeah.”
Now it was Sonia’s energy that was rising fast. “So, he’s involved too?”
Mariana shrugged her shoulders. “I guess. He certainly knew what was going on.”
Sonia ran her fingers through her hair. “Okay. Go on.” Her foot was tapping impatiently.
“Penny Rae didn’t mean to eavesdrop.” Mariana turned her palms upward, apologetically. “She was just close enough to hear some things. What she heard was that Daneck was pa
ying a fortune to the professor, big, big bucks, like a million dollars or something. Penny assumed that the same was probably true of the other breeders. And if she was right, then the professor was getting like three million dollars or something and we were getting just a tiny portion of that.” She gave her head a quick shake. “It didn’t seem right.” She stopped speaking.
Jet stood taller, no longer leaning on the wall. Her voice had an edge to it. “Go on, girl. We need to hear the rest.”
Mariana took another deep breath. “So, Penny Rae asks us to get together on a three-way call. We talk about it and she says we should go to the professor and demand more. I was kind of unsure about it, but Keisha jumped right on board. Next thing you know, Penny’s telling us that she’s going to call the professor and tell him that he’d better give us more money than he’d promised─a lot more.” Mariana sat back, holding up three fingers as her tone intensified. “Look, those three horses? We helped him with those genetically modified embryos and now they were three-year-olds and winning like crazy.” She raised her eyebrows and her shoulders. “He couldn’t have done any of that without us. You’ve got to be specially trained to do that embryo transfer stuff and we were. We even figured that the professor might be getting extra money because the horses were doing so well.”
Sonia spoke softly. “And Penny Rae made that call?”
Mariana looked directly at Sonia. “She made it and she said he didn’t seem too upset. He just said he’d have to think about everything.” Tears began trickling down her face again.
Sonia spoke even more softly. “And then?”
Mariana choked her words through silent tears. “I spoke to Keisha the next day. She said to just be cool and let things play out. Then, the morning after that, I tried to call Keisha again. No answer. I’m going out of my mind, so I Google her name and I find there’s some news story about her being killed in a hit and run accident.”