Death Never Lies

by David Grace

  “What?”

  “How do you answer your phone? ‘Hello’, ‘Special Investigations’, ‘Rosewood’?”

  Danny paused for a second. “I guess I just say, ‘Hello’ I mean, it’s ringing at my desk so they already know who I am.”

  Like a half-remembered melody something was nagging at Kane but he didn’t know what.

  “I want you to think hard.” Danny straightened in his chair. “I want you to repeat your conversation with Bellingham word for word, starting with ‘Hello.’“

  Danny looked confused, then closed his eyes and began to speak. “I said ‘Hello’ and he said ‘Agent Rosewood?’ and I said ‘Yes’ and he said ‘I understand that Agent Kane is out of the office today’ and I said, ‘Yes, can I help you?’ and he said, ‘I was wondering if I can give you any more help with that list of proscribed substances’ and I said ‘I don’t think so but I’ll ask Agent Kane when he comes in’ and he said ‘I hate to think that this is all about drugs. Drug addicts are a scourge on this country. I’ll give you any help I can to stop them’ and I said–”

  “That’s fine,” Kane interrupted and seemed lost in thought. Why and how could Bellingham have known Danny’s name?

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You said ‘Hello’ when you answered the phone.”

  “Is that wrong? Should I have answered ‘Agent Rosewood’?”

  “How did he know your name?”

  “Well, I guess the receptionist–”

  “Receptionists don’t give out personal information. If someone calls for me they either get me or they leave a voice mail or they ask for someone else. They’re not supposed to say, ‘Agent Kane is out of the office. Would you like to speak to his partner, Agent Rosewood?’“

  “Maybe she made a mistake,” Rosewood said, trying to be helpful. Kane just looked away. Someone at HS was talking to Ryan Munroe. Someone at HS had told Bellingham the name of Kane’s partner. Was it the same someone, Kane wondered, and if so how did Elliott Bellingham fit in?

  “I want you to track down everything Professor Bellingham has ever published – scientific papers, commencement speeches, press releases for his company, letters to the editor, everything. Get it to me ASAP. I need to read it before I leave this afternoon.”

  “Uhhh, OK,” Danny said. “Why?”

  “Because I’m going to take your advice.”

  “What advice is that?”

  “I’m going to ask Professor Bellingham to help us with our case. With any luck he’ll have dinner with me tonight and I think it would be a good idea to know as much about him as possible. Don’t you?”

  “Sure. I guess,” Danny said though he didn’t have a clue what Kane was getting at.

  * * *

  At twelve minutes after eleven Kane got a call from Leonard Franks.

  “The U.S. Attorney has approved the deal,” he said instead of ‘Hello.’

  “Which is?”

  “Farber serves twenty-five years in a medium-security federal prison under another name. In return he takes us to the two bodies and he helps us get Ryan Munroe.”

  “When’s he going to do that?”

  “The paperwork won’t be finished until later today. He won’t give us squat until everything is signed.” Franks was clearly irritated by the delay.

  “You know he probably has a safe word set up with Munroe. If he doesn’t use it you’re SOL,” Kane said as if talking to a slow child.

  “I have done this kind of thing before, Kane. We told him we’d trim three years off his sentence if he gets us Munroe. He won’t deliberately screw us.”

  “Keep me posted.”

  “You’re on the top of my list. . . . Don’t fuck this up Kane.”

  “You too,” Greg said and hung up.

  Kane spent the rest of the day trying to concoct a true but misleading report of yesterday’s activities then he began plowing through the pile of printouts Danny had dropped on his desk. Bellingham’s academic papers were mostly composed of acronyms scattered across sentences apparently designed to torture the English language. After scraping away all the jargon, compound clauses, graphs and statistics, the science generally seemed to follow the path Bellingham had outlined in their first meeting.

  As far as Kane could tell the research had been broken into several phases: (1) find crucial links in the reproductive process of the target species; (2) discover the proteins whose presence or absence was vital to the functioning of that targeted process; (3) locate the genes that either produced those proteins or produced other proteins that suppressed hostile factors; (4) determine an effective method for deactivating or removing those vital genes.

  Bellingham had produced separate papers describing each stage in the process via a series of experiments. He had started with simple bacteria then advanced to fruit flies and had lastly moved on to mice. A year after the mouse studies were completed he took a leave of absence from the university and founded Eco-Safe Technologies. That was five years ago.

  Kane set the scientific papers aside and leafed through the rest of the pile.

  “Where did he get the money for his company?” Kane asked Danny a minute later.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he funded it himself. He’s pretty rich, or at least his family is.”

  “How rich?” Kane asked as he leafed through the file for Bellingham’s bio.

  “Well, originally it was timber money and then they invested in railroads, to haul the wood I guess. According to Wikipedia, Bellingham’s father was supposed to be worth around two-hundred million and the professor is an only child.”

  “Timber and railroads. That’s old money. Send me the link to his Wikipedia page and see if you can find anything else on his background.”

  Kane flipped through the remaining printouts and sorted them in chronological order, oldest to newest. The first was an interview published fifteen years ago in the university’s alumni magazine – advancing science, unlocking the mysteries of life, making the world a better place, blah, blah, blah. After that the sources became increasingly less prominent – an article in a short-lived science-for-the-masses magazine Tech & Science Frontiers, a letter to the editor of Modern Biology and six years ago an opinion piece titled “Overpopulation & Species Collapse” in the on-line magazine The New Patriot published by the Save America Foundation.

  In it Bellingham had argued that treating diseases suffered by the carriers of “defective” genes would result in wide-scale genetic contamination that would, in the end, lead to a wave of epidemics and the potential collapse of humanity itself. Bellingham’s thesis was that diseases arising from genetic causes should not be treated but rather the genes responsible should be deleted from the host population or the carriers should be sterilized or the carriers should be allowed to die from the disease as a way of ridding future generations of the defective genes.

  “Feeding fertile people who cannot feed themselves,” Bellingham wrote, “only results in increasing the population of people who cannot feed themselves and thus exacerbates the famine condition instead of solving it. Similarly, treating a genetically-caused disease that would otherwise kill the host only results in even more people being afflicted with that condition. In both cases common sense dictates that the subjects should either be allowed to live or die in accordance with the laws of natural selection or, at minimum, should be rendered incapable of spawning a new and larger generation suffering from the same ills.”

  Kane tried to imagine the representatives of a charitable organization telling a starving village in the Sudan they could only be fed or given typhoid medicine if they volunteered to be sterilized. He was pretty sure that Bill Gates wouldn’t be on board with anything like that.

  And now I understand why Bellingham’s no longer teaching classes at Yale, Kane thought.

  * * *

  Kane’s dinner with the professor was at a fish restaurant called “The Shorebird” about five miles south of Richmond just off the I-95. It was neithe
r particularly fancy nor a chain outlet featuring a Wednesday-night special of all-you-can-eat popcorn shrimp. Bellingham was waiting near the hostess desk when Kane arrived.

  “I’m sorry we couldn’t meet closer to your office,” Bellingham apologized once they were seated, “but we’re at a crucial phase in our work right now.”

  “It’s not a problem. It gave me an excuse to leave early.” Kane flipped through the menu then looked up. “What’s good here?”

  “You can’t go wrong with the crab.”

  After the busboy had delivered their drinks and a basket of fresh bread and the waitress had taken their order Bellingham glanced around and then asked softly, “How can I help you, Agent Kane?”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure you can. I’m probably grasping at straws here but I was wondering if there’s been any, I don’t know, chatter in the scientific community about any new designer drugs?”

  “Designer drugs?” Bellingham asked. “I’m in the insect-killing business. Wouldn’t the DEA or FBI know more about something like that?”

  “You’re probably right. As I said, I’m grasping at straws.” Kane focused on buttering a piece of bread then looked up at the professor. “I was thinking that you must subscribe to all those scientific journals and that maybe there were some articles about, I don’t know, people figuring out what part of the brain responds to what kind of drugs or that someone has noticed that some new drug stimulates the brain in some new way. You see what I’m getting at?” Kane asked, seeming both hopeful and confused.

  “Well,” Bellingham began, then paused. “I think I understand what you’re asking but that’s a question that should be directed to a grad student or a research house. It’s more or less a standard process. You have an idea for a line of research and you institute a publication review to see if anyone has done something like that already and what they found and if they’re still working on the problem. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel after all.”

  “Could you refer me to someone who could do that kind of a study for my office?”

  “I’ll email you a list of names and a few commercial firms that do that sort of work.”

  “Great. You see, that helps me already,” Kane said smiling. “Who knows. Maybe someone’s published something that might lead us back to one of the chemicals on the new HHS list. At least that might give us a place to start.”

  Bellingham began to say something but stopped when their dinners arrived. “How is your investigation going?” he asked once the waitress had left.

  “We’re not getting anywhere on the drug end of things. If we were I wouldn’t be asking for your help.” Kane looked around as if concerned that someone might overhear. “But we’ve made some progress on the missing HHS administrator.”

  “You’ve found him?” Bellingham asked, leaning forward.

  “No, nothing like that, but we’ve got a good lead on a person of interest. Of course, I can’t get into any details but we may be getting very close to grabbing him up.”

  “Do you think he can lead you to the body?”

  “Officially, the HHS administrator is only missing but, well, who are we kidding? Nobody thinks that he’s on the beach in the Bahamas. As for leading us to him, I think we can apply enough leverage to our target to get his cooperation. Of course, we have to catch him first.”

  “Are you close? When do you think you’ll be able to find him?”

  “Two days? Three?” Kane wiggled his hand from side to side. “You can’t be sure of anything in my business. You just take it one day at a time.”

  “But you have a good lead?”

  “Let’s just say that I’m very optimistic about our chances.”

  “Well that’s good news.” Bellingham held up his glass as if for a toast.

  “Yeah, but that’s only step one. We still have to find out who hired him and then figure out what chemical they’re interested in and then keep them from getting it, though that’s going to be the DEA’s problem not mine. They’re welcome to it.”

  “You’re not interested in stopping drugs?” Bellingham asked.

  “The idiots want drugs,” Kane said and stabbed a chunk of potato. “You can’t stop them. You get rid of oxy and they start shooting heroin. You get rid of speed and they start snorting coke. It’s like trying to hold back the tide. Prohibition didn’t work for alcohol and it doesn’t work for drugs.”

  “You’d let people buy them legally?” Bellingham asked.

  “If they want to kill themselves then let them. At least that would take the profit out of it.”

  “You don’t mind it if addicts die?”

  “They’re dying now and making those animals in the cartels billions in the process,” Kane said, spearing the last piece of his sole. “Do you disagree?”

  For a moment Bellingham seemed lost in thought. “It’s a serious problem,” he finally answered. “Something needs to be done. I agree with that. . . . More bread?”

  Kane tried to draw the professor out with a couple more gambits but Bellingham seemed to have tired of the subject of drug addicts. He spent the rest of the evening commenting on the wine and the difficulty of finding scallops that hadn’t been treated with STP. For an instant Kane thought about asking the professor why someone who wanted to use genetic tools to exterminate insects had spent a year and a half applying his techniques to mammals but quickly discarded the idea. If his hunch about what Bellingham was up to was correct Greg didn’t think he’d get a truthful answer anyway.

  Kane went home, not sure if his long drive to Richmond had accomplished anything until he showed up at the office the next morning and found Sebastian Wren standing next to his desk, waiting for him.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Wren pulled up a chair and both men sat down.

  “My boss wants an update on the case. What have you got on Farber?”

  “It’s all in my FR-2,” Kane said, pulling a sheet of paper off his desk.

  “Come on, Kane. Cut the crap. You’re too good an investigator not to have something better than just running down calls off the tip line.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  Wren scowled and waved Danny over. Danny looked uneasily at Kane then rolled his chair to the other side of Kane’s desk.

  “Rosewood, your partner was just telling me about your new lead.” Danny shot Kane a nervous glance. “Good work, by the way. What’s your time line on it?”

  “Well, uhhh,” Danny began and looked helplessly at Greg.

  “Jesus, give the kid a break,” Kane said. “OK, fine, we do have something, sort of.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We can’t officially have this information without a warrant which hasn’t come in yet. Once we have the warrant then we’ll have the information.”

  Kane was saying that they’d gotten a lead by hacking into some database without a warrant and that they couldn’t admit that they knew what they knew until the warrant officially arrived.

  “When do you expect to have the warrant?”

  “I’ll make the call right now.”

  Kane pulled out his cell and headed for the far corner of the room. Wren half stood to follow him then thought better of it. He looked at Danny who returned a weak smile.

  Franks answered on the fourth ring.

  “I’ve got a bite,” Kane said.

  “What?”

  “I put my bait in the water and this morning I got a bite. In a couple of hours Farber’s going to get a call on his cell from his boss warning him not to visit his girlfriend.”

  “What girlfriend?”

  “Her name is Giselle. He’s been seeing her for about a year. He’s planning on holing up at her place until the heat dies down. I’ve got her address and we’re going to stake out her place and grab him the minute he shows up.”

  “You made her up,” Franks said.

  “If Munroe asks, Farber met her at a diner. She’s a graphic artist. A little heavy and ve
ry lonely and eager to please. Just Farber’s type. She lives on Glasner Avenue. Make sure he sticks to the story.”

  “And how is this supposed to help me?”

  “It’s going to get you Munroe. Here’s the story. Farber was going to stay at Giselle’s place until things cooled down enough for him to skip town. Since he can’t do that with us watching her he’ll need Munroe to get him cash, a clean ID and a credit card.”

  “We’ve already tried that. Munroe told him to sit tight and he’d see what he could do.”

  “Now you’ve got a reason to try again. When Munroe calls to warn him about Giselle being burned, have Farber say that if Munroe doesn’t come up with the money and an ID then if he gets caught he’ll tell them who Munroe’s employer is.”

  “How would Farber know that? Munroe probably doesn’t even know.”

  “Farber was a cop. He has cop skills. He figured that someday he’d need insurance in case things went wrong so he made it his business to find out who was paying Munroe. How he did it isn’t important.”

  “Why should Munroe believe him?” Franks demanded.

  “Have Farber say that he knows that the boss is ‘The Professor.’“

  “The Professor? Who the hell is The Professor?”

  “He’s Munroe’s boss.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “Attention to detail and superior abilities.”

  “You’ve got a hunch,” Franks scoffed.

  “Just have Farber follow the script,” Kane told him.

  “And then what?”

  “And then I’ll tell you who the professor is,” Kane said and hung up.

  “It took a bit of convincing,” Kane told Wren a moment later, “but we got a telephonic warrant. Why don’t you get a cup of coffee and give Danny some time to legally access the data.”

  Wren frowned then got up. “I’m going to get a cup of coffee.”

  “Now what do I do?” Danny asked once Wren was gone.

  Kane handed him a folded piece of paper.

  “I did some trolling in social media last night thanks to those programs you loaded on my laptop. Type that into a blank screen and print it out for Wren. How you got it is a trade secret.”