Throwing open the panel, he felt the full fury of the wind and heard an avalanche of water thud onto the coral beach below. “Sandra, for God’s sake!” he pleaded as he started across the thirty feet separating them.
Her skin bathed in moonlight, she seemed white as marble and just as impenetrable. Whether she heard his approach above the noise of the waves, he never knew. Before he could grab her, she flexed her knees, arched into the air, and disappeared over the edge in a perfect dive.
“You were damn lucky he didn’t spot you hiding behind that big easy chair,” said the detective in charge.
“I know,” replied Kathleen Sullivan, her voice barely audible.
The cop continued to scowl down at her, holding open the rear door of the patrol car in which she sat and looking not at all happy with the explanation she’d just given about why she’d been there in the first place.
Unable to think of anything useful to add, she pressed herself into the interior of the vehicle and tried to stop shaking. The difference between the gunman seeing her and what ultimately happened had been a passing cloud obscuring the moonlight during the seconds he had turned to run from the room. Finally she asked, “What were they doing here, and why did they kill Mr. Hacket?”
He sighed heavily. “It looks like you walked in on a particularly vicious home invasion. They were probably trying to rob him—people get killed for less than a hundred bucks these days—and old folks living alone are a prime target. Everybody around here knew him, including us. Rumor had it he’d come into some money lately, after he gave up farming well over a year ago and bought a snazzy new truck. Some of the local gossip went as far as to suggest he kept a small fortune hidden in this old place. I don’t buy that story—it pretty much looks like he lived from hand to mouth, from what we can see inside. But I guess tales of a secret stash were enough to attract his killers. They certainly took him by surprise. He never even got to that shotgun of his—it stood cocked and ready in the front hallway. They were probably trying to frighten a nonexistent bundle out of him when you showed up at the party. So they broke his neck and came after you, to leave no witnesses.”
She shuddered, remembering the ghostly head she saw snapped to one side in the window. “But they had silencers,” she said, still trying to rein in her trembling. “If they had silencers, why didn’t they shoot him?” In her state of shock she initially had no idea why that particular incongruity should matter to her. Except as a scientist, if something didn’t make sense, however trivial, she reflexively saw it as a void that needed filling.
“Who knows?” replied the detective with an impatient wave of his hand. “Maybe the creeps liked wringing necks.” He turned to watch a large black van marked HPD pull into the yard.
His callous remark made her shiver. “Officer, let me explain something to you,” she said, getting his attention again. “I’m a woman in a profession where my whole life is predicated on a simple notion that if I find the reason things happen, I can control what happens. A person like me gets particularly rattled when the random luck of a passing cloud determines whether I live or die. So my way of coping with an event like this is to understand the how and why of it. Maybe then I can kid myself into thinking I could spot it coming, if there ever is a next time. Otherwise I’m liable to end up scared that I’ll get jumped for no reason and with no warning every time I go out. So for my sake, please, humor me.”
By the vehicle’s interior light she saw his face squinch into a puzzled frown as he studied her. “I don’t really know why they didn’t shoot him,” he said after a few seconds, his voice all at once hesitant. “It looks like they intended to torch the place afterwards—we found some cans of gasoline in one of the front rooms. Maybe they didn’t want a bullet in his body, to try and make it look accidental. But it would never have worked. A coroner might attribute a broken neck to the guy falling a couple of stories as a burning house collapsed on him—charred remains wouldn’t tell him much else— but no way could the arson squad miss a fire set with something as crude as gasoline.” He straightened up and arched his back, stretching it with a grimace. “Hell, doped-up hotheads who kill these days—they often don’t make sense. One thing you can be sure of,” he added, giving her a dour smile while the troubled expression in his eyes deepened, “we’ll be going after these two in a big way, whoever they are or wherever they’re from. In paradise we don’t take kindly to anyone importing this league of viciousness.”
Parked haphazardly around them sat a half dozen police cars, their overhead lights making the night pulse red, white, and blue. He looked up as a second wave of vehicles, station wagons and RVs with media logos on their doors, began pulling into the yard. “You understand, you’re not to talk about this case, even though the media are going to have a field day about you being here,” he ordered, glowering at these latest arrivals.
She nodded.
A young officer ran up to them from the direction of the barn. “Here’s her phone and purse, sir,” he said. “We found it just where she said it would be, full of weeds. And the door there is exactly the way she described as well, broken boards and all. There’s not a sign of the two killers though, but we traced bloodstains to the field in back. We’ve got lots to sample for DNA of the one she got in the hand, and the pickax should have the prints of the other guy who likely helped pull it out.”
The chief detective’s frown grew as he received the articles. “Have you put out an APB?”
“Already done, sir!” said the younger man. He stooped down to peer in the door and said, “Ma’am, my family and I, we always watch your program. I’m so glad you’re all right.”
She looked up at his youthful face and thought he didn’t look much older than the boyfriends Lisa brought around these days. Wondering how long it would take to mold that eager expression into the hardened mask caked with fatigue and cynicism of his superior, she replied, “Thank you, Officer.” When he left, she all at once wanted nothing more than to hear the sound of her daughter’s voice.
“Could I have my things, please?” she asked the older detective. “Then I’d like to go. I’ve got to get my samples to the genetics lab at the university, and I’m due to fly home to New York at noon. If you want, I’ll make myself available for any additional dispositions you’ll need through the NYPD.”
He hesitated, then handed her purse to her. “You know, I watch your program, too, Dr. Sullivan.” His voice was all at once gentle and, to her astonishment, his weathered face shedded its weariness as he broke into a smile. “My oldest daughter’s a real fan, and is in the biology undergraduate program here in Honolulu. She’d be thrilled if I could give her your autograph.”
Sullivan scrawled her name on the back of an evidence envelope, marveling at how misleading the cop’s gruff exterior had been. She’d barely finished when the radio in the front seat crackled, “All cars in the Kailua vicinity. We have a 911 call by a man reporting a suicide at 205 Kaliki Road. Please respond.”
“Jesus Christ, that’s just a few minutes from here,” muttered the detective, reaching to grab the microphone from under the dashboard. “Must be the full moon,” he said, clicking the TALK button to take the call.
Steele raced from Sandra’s bedroom after calling 911 and peered over the edge of the balcony, desperately searching for a way to reach the ocean. A story below and fifty feet to his left, he saw steps leading down the cliffs from a small yard. Not bothering to dress, he ran inside, raced to the ground floor, and found another set of glass doors opening on what must have once been her son’s play area. In seconds he reached the stone staircase he’d seen from above and started down it, desperately scanning the churning waters for any sign of Sandra. Each time the moon emerged he saw white surf curling around large black knuckles of coral amid open sections of frothing water. Maybe she landed in a deep tide pool, he prayed, but as he watched the thundering breakers and hissing foam of their aftermath, his hopes plummeted.
He reached a small cove a
nd started scrambling over the rocks, slicing his palms and soles yet paying the cuts no mind. “Sandra!” he screamed, barely able to hear himself over the roar of the ocean. Occasionally a swell rose enough to engulf him, and he ended up clinging to spiny outcrops as the water surged back out to sea, threatening to suck him in with it. At one moment he lost his grip and felt himself being swept away until an incoming breaker slammed him back toward shore. He managed to get his legs up to break the impact between himself and the jagged surfaces waiting for him there, then screamed as the entire length of his body scraped over their projections and into shallower water.
Scrambling to his feet, he found himself on a flat rise where the surf only occasionally reached. He peered into the maelstrom around him, vainly trying to catch sight of her, and had all but given up hope when he spotted what looked like a patch of seaweed caught in a tide pool. A breaking wave parted the black strands to reveal the white roundness of her face and breasts as she floated on her back, seeming to stare at the stars with sightless eyes.
In seconds he was down to her, cradling her neck in his arm and covering her cold lips with his in an attempt to blow into her lungs. But he’d no sooner begun when he felt his arm covered in some sort of sludge. At first he thought it had to be a kind of pollutant, perhaps from a sewer outlet. Then he realized that it had the consistency of toothpaste squeezed from the tube, and that strands of the stuff were streaming out the back of her skull.
He instantly retreated into the familiarity of technique, diligently providing her with two puffs of air followed by fifteen compressions on her chest—exactly as he’d always taught his residents in cases of a solitary rescuer—rather than face the reality that her lungs would never breathe again.
That’s how the paramedics, the police, and the accompanying media found him—naked, methodically doing CPR on her corpse, and oozing blood head to toe from his abraded skin.
Chapter 10
His story would normally have appealed only to the local appetites with a taste for the lurid. But because he’d been on the national networks the previous evening calling for the regulation of naked DNA, the media swarmed all over the tragedy. By noon local time he’d become the lead item on all the major evening news broadcasts back East. Images of him draped in a blanket, looking dazed, and still smeared in blood while being led to a police car began to fill television screens across four time zones as commentators read out seamy story leads.
“Yesterday’s outspoken critic of naked DNA, Dr. Richard Steele, is himself found naked, early this morning, in a suicide’s love nest.”
“The naked truth! DNA expert now questioned in doctor’s suicide.”
“From triumph to tragedy: Credibility of advocate for regulating naked DNA ends up on the rocks. Details after a word from our sponsor.”
No one bothered to mention that the cops released him later that same morning. Neither did the announcers show any qualms about smearing the concerns of an entire scientific community in their eagerness to get him. But that they reduced Sandra’s death to little more than a titillating aside he found the most disgusting of all.
“Bastards!” he screamed, hurling his remote at the TV in his hotel room, then wincing with the effort. His many scrapes and cuts had been tended to in the ER of Honolulu General, but they still burned like hell.
The television survived his assault, only to show some media stud with blow-dried hair who proceeded to gleefully report what Kathleen Sullivan had been put through last night.
“My God,” said Steele, having heard nothing about it. Aghast, he tried to phone her, only to be told that she’d already checked out and left for the airport. She may not even know what a circus I’ve made of things, he thought, wondering if she’d caught the bulletins about him before getting on her plane.
Next he called home and got Martha on the line. “I’m all right,” he quickly reassured her. “The police let me go—”
“Just come home, Richard,” she interjected. “Now! Chet needs you here. He’s too ashamed to go to school in the morning.”
Three hours later he got a standby seat. Before boarding he called Dr. Julie Carr and requested that she inform him when the memorial for Sandra would be.
“Of course,” she replied without hesitation. “But what about you? Are you all right? It must have been awful for you.”
The kindness in her voice nearly broke the tight hold he had on his emotions. “Oh, I’ll be okay.” To his own ears he didn’t sound too convincing.
“Dr. Steele,” she said, “this may be presumptuous, but you probably need to hear someone tell you that you didn’t cause her death.”
Nor did I prevent it! he nearly snapped back. “Thanks,” he said instead. “I appreciate your saying it.”
“Take care of yourself.”
By dawn, New York time, he pulled up to his front door at Thirty-sixth and Lexington. Depositing his luggage in the entranceway as noiselessly as possible, he went directly to Chet’s room, where he tiptoed over to the head of his son’s bed and waited for him to waken. As he sat watching the boy sleep, the sun peeped through the blinds and spread across the youth’s face. Hesitantly Steele reached out and stroked the dark unruly hair. Chet stirred in his sleep, then fell still, accepting the touch with a contented smile.
One Week Later
Morgan stared sullenly over the gray surface of New York’s East River as it surged south toward the tip of Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, and the ocean beyond. The color reminded him of the paint used on his garage floor—glossy and meant to disguise grease or oil, but never quite doing the job. Its rush to depart America made him entertain similar ideas of leaving the country.
He raised his eyes to where, on the Queens side opposite him, a giant Coca-Cola sign bade the water’s flotsam adieu. The Cs towered nearly as tall as the multitude of towers, grimy chimneys, and concrete silos that dominated the industrial stubble of that far shore. Behind him descended the continuous noise of traffic from the overhead Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, the sounds blending with the cries of seagulls. Farther back still, the buildings of New York City Hospital and the protean complex of the medical school, each edifice sporting an insignia that resembled a giant happy-face button, smiled down on him. Over it all fell a glistening drizzle, the droplets too fine to be seen yet substantial enough to make the air feel like a filmy gauze against his face.
“You tell our client that he damn well better not arrange another ‘wrong place at the wrong time’ type of accident for her anytime soon!” exploded the man standing beside him. “It would look too suspicious. As it is, with those idiots of his bungling everything the way they did—I mean, using guns with silencers during what’s suppose to be a home invasion—give me a fucking break! We’re just damn lucky that despite everything the Honolulu cops still interpreted the fiasco more or less the way we intended.”
Morgan said nothing in reply, continuing to stare into the distance as the murk of evening clotted around them. In forty-nine more days, I’ll be fixed for life and safely hiding out in a tropical paradise, he kept telling himself. But the business with Sullivan and the increasing prospects of getting caught had left him so rattled that the promise of unlimited wealth no longer steeled his nerve the way it used to. Nor did the chance to destroy the livelihood of those at Biofeed International, who’d willingly profited by what he’d done and then spit him out when it went bad, fire him up anymore. He’d even begun to fantasize about bolting, except he knew that their “client” would have him hunted down and killed. For the first time in his life, sleep no longer came without the help of pills, and all too often when he did nod off, he’d awaken a few hours later, his heart pounding and his breathing labored.
“Panic attacks,” his doctor had decreed, handing him yet more capsules, red this time instead of canary yellow.
A gust of wind slapped him from behind, pulling him out of his reverie with a dash of cold rain to the back of his head and neck. He glanced sideways, studying t
he man who had recruited him to this madness with the lure of money and revenge as bait. He knew he better choose what he said to him with care, or he’d reveal the extent his appetite for seeing it through had weakened and get himself tagged a security risk. “But if she finds the vectors and goes public,” he began, “someone at Biofeed may panic and decide to come clean. Then it’ll be my name and the connection with Rodez that turns up. You know she has to die before we let any of that happen.”
“I know, goddamnit! I know! But kill her now, and the police will rethink her ‘close call’ in Hawaii. Right off, they’ll suspect that she might have been the target all along, after which it’s not such a stretch to consider somebody didn’t want her snooping around Hacket’s farm looking for genetic vectors related to bird flu. Once they start marching their homicide investigation down that particular path of inquiry, panicky tongues at Biofeed will be even more likely to loosen, and for sure the cops will find the trail through Biofeed to you. I repeat, tell our ‘client’ to call off his dogs!”
Morgan’s sensation of feeling trapped tightened its hold on him, juicing a squeeze of cold sweat from his already damp skin. “And how the hell am I going to persuade him to do that?” he snapped. “Don’t you get it? His team won’t quit. They’re probably already here in New York, still intent on offing her.”
“Get a message to the man. Remind him how little time there is to go. Tell him that it will take at least another three weeks for the lab workers in Hawaii to finish processing her specimens, perhaps longer. Even if they manage to uncover the vector, which is no sure thing given their inexperience, the discovery will be so unbelievable I’m predicting she’ll doubt the result and won’t dare release the findings without first confirming them at the lab here in New York. That could give us a few weeks more. We can stop her then, just before she finally links it all to Biofeed—”
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