Dr. Bodyguard

by Andersen, Jessica

  But instead she walked through the thinning crowd toward the dull brown car, aware of Peters and Sturgeon falling in behind her, Nick following them.

  “YOU’RE SURE?” Though he’d already asked her the question twice, Sturgeon still didn’t like her answer.

  Genie nodded and rubbed her temples, wishing she hadn’t turned down the aspirin Nick had offered an hour ago. Wished she hadn’t told him to go away, that she’d be fine without him and he should go back to his own life. It would’ve been nice to know he was waiting for her outside.

  “I’m sure. I can’t think of a single person I would consider my enemy, certainly nobody who would care enough to hurt me.”

  “What about George Dixon? You took out a temporary restraining order against him last year,” Peters said, referring to a neatly typed page of notes that stood out in stark contrast to his partner’s pile of torn notepaper.

  Genie shook her aching head. “I know it looks bad, but he’s really quite harmless. I took out the order to make a point, not because I was afraid for my life.”

  Peters glanced at Sturgeon. “We’re sure his alibi checks out?”

  The older detective shrugged, shuffled a few pages and said, “Seems to. He got coshed in a racquetball game and went to the E.R. for stitches. He’s a little less clear as to his exact whereabouts when Dr. Watson was attacked. There’s a twenty-minute gap in his logs, but apparently that’s not unusual for him. We’ll keep working it, though.”

  Peters turned back to Genie. “Anyone else? Think hard,” he suggested, and she resisted the urge to snarl at him that she’d been doing nothing else but think hard her entire life, and if she couldn’t come up with the name then there probably wasn’t one.

  “I’m just not the kind of person who inspires strong emotions,” she tried to explain. “I can’t imagine anyone wanting me dead.”

  Peters referred to his notes. “But you said that you finished high school by the age of fourteen, college by seventeen and a combined medical degree and a Ph.D. in molecular genetics by twenty-two. Wouldn’t that cause some jealousy among your peers?”

  Genie laughed. “What peers?” Though she’d outgrown the ache, her defenses were low and she felt tears scratch at the back of her throat. “I was so far outside of the curve that they didn’t even grade me. I was a freak, a circus act that the others pointed to and said, ‘Wouldn’t want to be you!’ They didn’t hate me. They didn’t like me. They didn’t really care one way or the other because I wasn’t relevant to their lives. I can hardly see how something like that could lead to…”

  She couldn’t say the word murder, it stuck to her tongue like an old peppermint. “Someone trying to hurt me.”

  Peters looked as though he wanted to argue the point, but Sturgeon stepped in, referring to his own notes. “Then let’s focus on the lab since the incidents seem to be centered there.”

  Genie liked the word incident. It was easy and nonthreatening and removed the need to say words such as bomb, rape and murder.

  “Okay.”

  “As of yesterday, we were going under the assumption that your attack was random, not necessarily related to your lab or Dr. Wellington’s, but this puts a whole new spin on things. It seems as if you are the target.”

  “Gee, thanks.” Genie’s attempt at humor failed before it was born and she dragged a plastic cup of water across Sturgeon’s desk and sucked it down, trying to pretend she was chasing four ibuprophen.

  If her brain was lying to her, she was damn well going to lie to it.

  “What, specifically, does your lab work on, Dr. Watson?”

  Yeah, as if she could explain positional cloning in two minutes flat. But she tried. “We’re primarily involved right now in what’s called ‘linkage analysis,’ which means using stretches of DNA called ‘markers’ to follow the inheritance of chromosomes in families that carry a disease.”

  Both of the detectives had gotten a glazed look in their eyes. She sighed and tried again. “We take families that have, say, Fenton’s Ataxia, and look at the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes in each of the family members. If we can find a section of a chromosome that is always identical in family members with the disease and that exact copy is never inherited by people who don’t have the disease, then we can say that a gene for Fenton’s Ataxia is located on that chromosome. Get it?”

  Peters nodded more quickly than Sturgeon, who still looked at her as though she was speaking an obscure dialect of Aramaic.

  “Then,” she continued, “we narrow the search interval further and further until it’s time to look at individual genes and see if we can identify the exact mutation that causes the disease. If we do that, then there’s a chance we can cure it, or at least design a better treatment.”

  Genie laughed inwardly. It sounded so easy when you put it that way. In reality it could take a lab ten years to find a single disease gene, though the first run completion of the Human Genome Project as well as recent high tech breakthroughs had cut that time down considerably.

  Sturgeon nodded with his pen poised over a clean sheet of paper. “What diseases are you working on right now?”

  “Fenton’s Ataxia, Gray’s Glaucoma and Humboldt’s dystrophy are the three biggies. I’m part of international collaborations for Fenton’s and Humboldt’s, but the Gray’s project is all mine. It’s a fairly new family that we just enrolled.” Which made her think of that strange phone call. What was Richard after?

  “I’m going to need a list of all your collaborators, as well as your current staff, Dr. Wellington’s current staff and your employees going back about five years, particularly anyone you’ve had to fire or had a bad parting with. Any names come to mind?”

  “I’ll have Steph put a list together for you.” Genie’s mind raced, selecting and rejecting the people she’d employed since she finished her post doc and started her own lab with the big grant she’d landed on her first application to the National Institute of Health. “As for people I’ve fired, there have only been a few. I had to let Pansy MacIntyre go because her notes were sloppy and she made bad solutions, but she’s five-foot-two and I’m pretty sure she lives in Nebraska with her husband and three kids.”

  She tried to picture pretty, ineffective Pansy doing something to endanger her manicure, and failed.

  “And then there was Derek Joliette. I canceled his post doc when I caught him falsifying results. That’s a big no-no. He was pretty angry, and I heard later that he dropped out of the sciences all together because nobody would hire him.” The detectives nodded and Sturgeon wrote the name down. “Hey! I don’t think he’s trying to kill me. You don’t have to write his name down!”

  Sturgeon continued to write. “Everyone’s a suspect until we say otherwise. Anyone else that you fired or fought with in the lab?”

  Genie shrugged. “The only two men I’ve had words with at this institution are George Dixon.” She felt a sort of guilty pleasure at seeing George’s name underlined in Sturgeon’s book. “And Wellington.”

  “Dr. Nicholas Wellington?”

  Genie nodded and felt her face heat. Her whole body flared hot, then cold. “He’s not a suspect.”

  “Everyone’s a suspect,” Sturgeon repeated. “What did you two fight over?”

  She shrugged. “Lab space. Equipment. Personal styles, you name it, we fight about it.”

  “You seemed pretty cozy in the parking lot,” Peters commented, and Genie wondered if this was some lame version of good cop, bad cop.

  Or maybe she’d been watching too many police dramas again.

  “Yeah, well. I think he feels some sort of misguided responsibility for me since he found me in the darkroom yesterday.” She heard her own words and paled even as the detectives perked up.

  He found me in the darkroom. Had he known to look there? Perhaps because he had done the deed? Her tired, aching brain reeled with the possibility.

  Foolishness. No way. Nick had not attacked her and he certainly hadn’t blown up her ca
r. Why would he bother? She was nothing to him.

  “Where was Dr. Wellington this morning?”

  The parking attendants had moved her sedan several times the previous evening and early that morning as they shuffled cars around the lot. The bomb must have been planted sometime during the day, probably in the late morning when Roach, the other young valet, and Randy had taken an unauthorized break together, leaving the lot unattended for fifteen minutes or so according to a badly shaken Roach.

  “In the lab.”

  “What about before that? We saw him come in just about eleven, when the others were downstairs because of your radioactive spill. Where had he been?”

  Genie shook her head, suddenly sore and tired and close to tears. “Errands, I guess. I don’t know. He didn’t say. You’ll have to ask him yourself.”

  Nick’s name went beneath George Dixon’s on the suspect list and Sturgeon nodded. “Don’t worry. We will.”

  OUTSIDE THE CHINATOWN police station, Nick stretched his legs, leaned his elbows back on the granite step behind him and took his mind off the burning ache in his shoulder by glaring at the people walking by, trying to figure out if any of them could be him. The foot traffic was a mix of commuters and tourists, with the suits on their cell phones galloping past camera-toting visitors who dutifully followed a red stripe painted on the sidewalk.

  Nick wondered whether the tourists ever looked up from the Freedom Trail long enough to see the sights that the red line passed near, or whether they just hunted that stripe from end to end and patted themselves on the back when they finished and told their friends back home that they had followed the Freedom Trail while they were in Boston.

  A thin, pale, sickly looking man with cornrows in his greasy orange hair and needle tracks on his arms, squirmed and swore as a pair of uniforms wrestled him into the station. After the door shut on the junkie’s scrawny behind, Nick watched an expensively clipped poodle urinate on the Metro Police sign while its owner stared off into the distance, whistling.

  Nick relaxed a fraction. Genie was safe inside, and when she emerged he was going to be waiting for her whether she liked it or not.

  He’d never experienced anything quite as terrifying as the noise and the heat and the stench of that car exploding, and he only thanked the fates she hadn’t been in it. It was terrible that a young man had been in the car, but it underscored the new truth.

  This wasn’t random. Someone was after Genie and Nick was darned if he knew why or who. But he knew for sure that whoever it was had just declared war, and that the former opponents in the Battle of the Thirteenth Floor were going to have to join forces to meet their new enemy.

  And damn the consequences.

  The door to the police station banged open and Nick looked up quickly, half expecting to see the junkie come flying out with an empty handcuff dangling from one wrist. But it wasn’t an escaping prisoner. It was Genie.

  Something tightened in his chest with an almost audible click, and Nick swallowed hard. She looked weary, almost transparently pale, and her gray eyes practically dominated her face. The bruise on her cheek was a violent purple-black and her stitches looked angry, as though she had frowned so hard she had pulled them apart.

  He stood while she descended the stairs slowly, as if each step was an almost inconceivable effort for her tired body. “Genie.”

  She jerked at the word and whipped her gaze to his. He stepped forward, hands outstretched. “It’s me. Nick.”

  Backpedaling, she caught her heel on the next step up and would have fallen and hit her head on one of the granite pillars that flanked the station doors, but Nick lunged up the stairs to catch her around the waist. She was stiff in his arms. Trembling. And her gray eyes were full of grief and anguish and…fear? Of him?

  When she was steady on her feet, Nick took his hands away and held them up. “You’re okay. It’s okay.”

  He tried to make his voice soothing when he really wanted to punch something. Hard. What had Sturgeon done to her? “What’s wrong?” Stupid question, but, if it were possible, she seemed more upset than she’d been when Sturgeon escorted her into the station. “What did they say to you?”

  “Why are you here?” Her voice was brittle, close to cracking, and she flinched when the door opened right behind her and a trio of laughing women in bustiers and short skirts brushed her aside to make their way down the stairs.

  “Genie, let’s go somewhere.” Nick held out a hand, willing her to take it. She looked as though she needed a friend. Badly.

  The girl at the back of the little group turned and pursed her lips in his direction. “Honey,” she said to Genie, “you got a man like this wantin’ to go somewhere, you take that hand and go.” She winked at Nick and blew him a kiss. “I would.”

  Great, just what he needed. Help from a Combat Zone working girl.

  He sighed when Genie made no move in his direction. “Come on, let’s sit down out of the doorway, at least.”

  She complied, sitting tensely, as if ready to bolt at any moment. “Why are you here? I told you to go home.”

  Nick grinned and leaned back on the stairs again, trying to seem relaxed and nonthreatening when he was seething inside. He could picture his little sister Shelly sitting on the mansion steps in a similar pose, telling him to run before the Senator got home.

  But Genie’s attacker wasn’t the Senator, and Genie was absolutely not his sister. And Nick wasn’t leaving this time.

  “I didn’t listen to you. Big surprise, huh?” He forced a chuckle, but she didn’t smile back. He sighed. “I was worried about you and I didn’t want you to deal with this alone. I would’ve come inside, but Peters wouldn’t let me.”

  She didn’t question that as he might have expected. Instead she asked, “Where were you this morning after you left my house?”

  “Where was I? I told you, I had a few things—” Comprehension splashed through his gut like ice water. “I did a couple of errands, then I came in to work. Does that make me a suspect? Did Sturgeon tell you to ask that or did you just come up with it on your own? What the hell is with that? I’ve got a hole in my shoulder from a bolt that had your name on it, and suddenly I’m the bad guy?”

  He rose and towered over her, cursing himself as she shrank back against the stonework. “I’m not going to hit you for chrissake. I don’t hit women.” He kicked one of the stone pillars as past and present got jumbled up in his mind and the whole mess shot through with a heavy jolt of disappointment that she thought so little of him. “Not even aggravating ones. And I sure as hell don’t blow up their cars.”

  He swore again as his anger rose and he gave the pillar another kick as pain sang up his leg. Then he noticed that they were attracting attention. More specifically, he was attracting attention. Even the tourists had looked up from the red-painted line to watch the scene on the stairs. He could see the headlines now: Senator’s Son Arrested For Domestic Violence At The Entrance To Chinatown Police Station. Great.

  He forced the anger down to a simmer, turned toward the street and gave a piercing, two-fingered whistle like the gardener in Monterrey had taught him to do when he was ten. A yellow cab screeched to a halt at the curb, almost crushing a pedestrian who gave the cabbie an irate finger before continuing his cell phone conversation.

  “Get in.” Nick hustled Genie into the cab and shut the door before she could protest. He pulled out his wallet and wrote the taxi number on a scrap of paper.

  He leaned in the open passenger side window, rattled off Genie’s suburban address and handed the driver a hundred dollar bill. “Get her home and walk her to the front door. Wait while she lets herself in and makes sure everything’s okay. If anything looks wrong, call the police right away and mention Detective Sturgeon from Chinatown, then get her the hell out of there. Got it?”

  The cabbie grinned at the C-note and nodded. “Got it.”

  “And I’ve got your number. Anything happens to her and you’re dead, got it?”

&nbs
p; Again the nod, this time without the grin. “Got it.”

  Genie spluttered, “What do you think you’re—”

  “Don’t bother,” Nick snarled. “Your car blew up, remember? The last commuter train left an hour ago. I was waiting around to take you home, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea anymore. You might decide I’m going to drive you out to the reservoir and leave you there under a pile of leaves. So I’ll send you home instead and call Sturgeon to have someone look in on you.”

  He leaned farther into the cab and wasn’t proud when she squished herself against the back seat. “I stuck around last night because you looked like you could use a friend. I’m not feeling so friendly just now, so I think you’d better go.”

  He yanked his head out of the window, slapped the top of the taxi and snapped, “Drive.”

  The cabbie drove, and the last thing Nick saw of Dr. Eugenie Watson was a pair of wounded gray eyes and a narrow, white hand pressed against the taxi window.

  FOOL! SHE WAS SUCH A FOOL. What had she been thinking?

  Genie knew the answer to that. She hadn’t been thinking at all. She had reacted like a cornered animal. Unsure of where the real danger was coming from, she had lashed out at the first thing that moved before deciding whether it was friend or foe.

  It was a friend. Or at least it had been.

  Safe in her condo with Galore playing in her lap and Oddjob stretched across the headrest of the overstuffed chair, Genie could admit she had been wrong. She’d let Peters and Sturgeon influence her when in her heart she knew darned well that Wellington wouldn’t hurt her.

  Her heart? No, no. That was wrong. She knew it in her head, not her heart. Her brain was capable, predictable. Logical. It didn’t make mistakes.

  Hearts made mistakes.

  Well, sugah, sometimes your heart knows better than your head anyway. For an instant, hearing Marilynn’s voice in her mind, Genie could almost feel her college roommate’s touch on her hand. It was a firm touch. The touch of strong pianist’s fingers. Untrembling fingers.