4 Blood Pact

by Tanya Huff

  Where was she going? She stared down at her coffee, then set the mug firmly down on the filing cabinet, the fingers of her other hand already taking a white-knuckled grip on the door handle. Thank God no one around the office expected her to smile. “I just remembered, I had a grad student running a program last night and I promised I’d check it this morning. Don’t know why I bothered, he keeps getting it wrong.”

  Mrs. Shaw smiled and shook her head. “You bothered because you always hope they’ll get it right. Oh, my.” The smile disappeared. “Marjory’s daughter will be coming by this morning.”

  Marjory Nelson’s daughter, the ex-detective, the private investigator, was the last person she wanted to talk to right now. “Give her my apologies and . . . No. If she comes while I’m gone, ask her to wait. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Better to know the direction Ms. Nelson was heading in the search for her mother’s body. Information was knowledge; ignorance, a potential for disaster.

  “There was a young man killed on campus last night. Do either of you know anything about it?”

  Donald spun around so fast he nearly threw himself off the stool. “Dr. Burke! You startled me!”

  She took another step into the lab, a muscle jumping in her jaw and her eyes narrow behind her glasses. “Just answer the question.”

  “The question?” He frowned, heart still racing, and sorted the words out of the fear. There was a young man killed last night. “Oh, fuck.” In his memory, number nine staggered out into the light while screams sounded behind a building. “What, what makes you think we’d know anything?”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Donald.” Dr. Burke used the voice that could command attention from the back row of a seven hundred and fifty seat lecture hall. Donald tried not to cringe. “There was a witness. Her description drew a pretty accurate picture of number nine, and what I want to know—” her palm slapped down on the table, the crack of flesh against metal echoing like a gunshot—“is what the hell was going on down here.”

  “He didn’t do it on purpose.” Catherine rose gracefully from behind number nine’s isolation box and stood, both hands resting lightly on the curved lid.

  “I was wondering where you were.” Dr. Burke turned, nostrils flaring, the younger woman’s calm acting as a further goad. Her gesture toward the box had a cutting edge. “As it has no purpose, being dead, it needs no defense. The two of you, however, have no such excuse. So let’s begin with an explanation of why the experiments were taken from the lab.”

  “Uh, they weren’t.” Donald cleared his throat as she directed her basilisk gaze back at him but continued. He had no intention of being blamed for something that wasn’t his fault. “They left on their own.”

  “They left on their own?” Her quiet repetition was less than reassuring. “They just decided to get up and go out on an evening constitutional, did they?” A sudden rise in volume slapped her words against the walls. “What kind of an idiot do you take me for!”

  “He’s right.” Catherine raised her chin. “We locked the door behind us. When we came back, the door was unlocked, from the inside, and they were gone. We found number nine wandering on campus.” Her fingers stroked the box comfortingly. “We found number ten just outside the apartment building she lived in when she was Marjory Nelson.”

  “She went home,” Donald added.

  Catherine sighed. “She merely followed old programming.”

  “You didn’t see her face, Cathy.”

  “I didn’t need to. I know the parameters of the experiment.”

  “Well, maybe they’ve changed!”

  “Shut up, both of you.” Gray eyes suddenly snapped open, widening with an instant of recognition. Dr. Burke closed her own eyes for a moment and when she opened them again, muttered. “Maybe this has gone too far.”

  Catherine frowned. “What has?”

  “All of this.”

  “But, Dr. Burke, you don’t understand. If number nine killed that boy, he acted on his own. It wasn’t anything we programmed in. It means he can learn. He is learning.”

  “It means he—it—killed someone, Catherine. That boy is dead.”

  “Well, yes, and that’s too bad, but nothing we can do will bring him back.” She paused, weighing possibilities, frowned, and shook her head. “No. It’s too late.” Her eyes refocused. “But we can explore and develop this new data. Don’t you understand? Number nine must be thinking. His brain is functional again!”

  “Cathy!” Donald jumped down off his stool and came over to her, incredulity written across his face. “Don’t you understand? Some guy is dead. This bit of your experiment,” he whacked number nine’s box, “is a killer and the other is, is . . .” He couldn’t find the words. No, that wasn’t exactly true. He knew the words. He just couldn’t say them. Because if he said them, he might have to believe them. “Dr. Burke, you’re right. This has gone too far. We’ve got to close down and get out of here before the police track number nine back to his lair!”

  “Donald, be quiet. You’re hysterical. The police do not now believe, nor are they likely to, that a dead man is out roaming around committing homicide.”

  “But . . .”

  Dr. Burke silenced him with a look, her own crisis of conscience pushed aside in the light of new information. She hadn’t actually considered the incident from the perspective of experimental results. This could indicate a giant step forward. “If number nine is thinking, Catherine, I don’t like what it’s thinking about.”

  Two spots of color appeared on Catherine’s cheeks. “Well, yes, but he’s thinking. Isn’t that the important thing?”

  “Perhaps,” the older woman allowed. “If it is actually thought and not merely reaction to stimuli. We may have to devise a new series of tests.”

  Donald swallowed and tried again. “But, Dr. Burke, that kid is dead!”

  “Your point?”

  “We have to do something!” caught his gaze

  “What? Give ourselves up?” She caught his gaze with hers and, after a moment, half smiled. “I didn’t think so. Terminate the experiment? That wouldn’t bring him back to life.” She squared her shoulders. “That said, I am very annoyed about your carelessness. You will make certain it doesn’t happen again. Remove them from their boxes only when absolutely necessary. Never leave them alone and unconfined. Have you run an EEG on number nine since it happened?”

  Catherine’s color deepened. “No, Doctor.”

  “Why not?”

  “Number eight died in the night, and we had to begin . . .”

  “Number eight has been dead for some time, Catherine, and isn’t going anywhere. Run the EEG now. If there’s a brain wave pattern in there, I want it recorded.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “And for heaven’s sake, keep them under control. I will not have my career destroyed by premature discovery. If anything like this happens again, I will not hesitate to pull the plug. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Doctor. ”

  “Donald?”

  He nodded toward the second box. “What about her? What if . . . what if . . .”

  What if we’ve trapped Marjory Nelson’s soul? She read the words off his face. Heard them whispered in the silence. And refused to share his fear. “We’re here to answer what ifs, Donald; that’s what scientists do. And now,” Dr. Burke glanced at her watch. “I have an appointment with Marjory Nelson’s daughter.” She paused at the door and turned to face the lab again. “Remember. Anything else goes wrong and we’re cutting our losses.”

  As her footsteps faded down the corridor, Donald drew a long and shaky breath. Things were getting just a little too deep for him. Maybe it was time he started thinking about cutting his own losses. “Can you believe that, Cathy? Some guy gets offed and she’s annoyed.”

  Catherine ignored him, her full attention on the muffled pounding coming from the box in front of her. She didn’t like the way things were going. Surely Dr. Burke realized the importance of number nine acquir
ing independence and how vital it was to protect the integrity of the experiment. What did careers have to do with that? No, she didn’t like the way things were going at all. But all she said was, “He doesn’t like being confined.”

  Daughter.

  The word filtered through the hum of machinery and the sound-deadening properties of the box itself. She used it to pick an end of thread from the tangled mass of memory.

  She had a daughter.

  There was something she had to do.

  Eight

  Unable to remain still, Vicki paced the outer office, uncomfortably conscious of Mrs. Shaw’s damp and sympathetic gaze following her every move. She didn’t need sympathy, she needed information.

  All right, so she hadn’t reacted particularly well to being presented with a box of her mother’s personal effects, but that was no reason for Mrs. Shaw to assume anything. If the last notation in the date book hadn’t been, Call Vicki, she would’ve been fine.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee, dear?”

  “No. Thank you.” Actually, she’d love a cup of coffee, but she couldn’t face using her mother’s mug. “Will Dr. Burke be long?”

  “I don’t think so. She just had to check on one of her grad students.”

  “Students? What does she teach?”

  “Oh, she doesn’t actually teach, she just takes a few of the grad students under her wing and helps them along.”

  “Medical students?”

  “I’m not sure.” Mrs. Shaw reached for a fresh tissue and dabbed at her eyes. “Your mother would know. She was Dr. Burke’s personal secretary.”

  My mother isn’t here. Vicki tried not to let the thought show on her face, given that the accompanying emotion was annoyance not grief.

  “Your mother really respected Dr. Burke,” Mrs. Shaw continued with a wistful glance across the room at the empty desk.

  “She sounds like a person worth respecting,” Vicki broke in before a flood of teary memories began. “She’s got, what, two degrees?”

  “Three. An MD, a doctorate in organic chemistry, and an MBA. Your mother always said hiring her to run this department was the smartest thing the university ever did. Most academics are not particularly good administrators and most administrators are completely insensitive to the needs of academia. Your mother called Dr. Burke a bridge between two worlds.”

  Why the hell does it have to keep coming back to my mother? Vicki wondered, as Mrs. Shaw fielded three phone calls in quick succession.

  “Yes, Professor Irving, I’ll see that she gets the message as soon as she comes in.” Mrs. Shaw dropped the receiver back into the cradle and sighed. “That’s how it goes all day. They all want a piece of her.”

  “I guess she doesn’t have much time for lab work.”

  “Lab work? She barely has time to grab a bite to eat before someone needs her again.” Patting the pile of memos, already impressive before the addition of the latest three, Mrs. Shaw’s voice grew sharp. “They’ve got her running from meeting to meeting, solving this problem, solving that problem, burying her under forms and surveys and reports, annual this and semiannual that and biweekly the other . . .”

  “And God only knows how I’m going to dig myself out without your mother’s help.”

  Mrs. Shaw colored and Vicki turned to face the door.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, Ms. Nelson.” Dr. Burke crossed the room and held out a hand for her memos. “But as you’ve already heard, I’m quite busy.”

  “No problem at all, Doctor.” Something about that sturdy figure in the starched white lab coat had a calming effect, and Vicki followed her gesture into the inner office feeling more under control than she had in days. She suddenly remembered her mother describing her new boss—just after Dr. Burke had taken over the department—as being so completely self-assured that the urge to question anything became lost in her vicinity. Vicki’d laughed at the time, but now she thought she could see what her mother had meant. She’d felt a bit of the effect herself, earlier in the week. It had been Dr. Burke who’d grounded her and sent her to the hospital morgue and Dr. Burke she’d turned to for a eulogy.

  Before they’d discovered a eulogy would be unnecessary.

  As Vicki settled into one of the almost comfortable wood and leather chairs, Dr. Burke moved around behind the desk and sat down, dropping the dozen or so pink squares of paper into a tidy pile. “I’m not usually in quite this much demand,” she explained, shooting an annoyed glare at the pile. “But it’s end of term and bureaucratic nonsense that could have been taken care of months ago has to be dealt with immediately.”

  “You can’t delegate?”

  “Science and Administration speak two different languages, Ms. Nelson. If I delegate, I end up having to translate. Frankly, it’s much easier just to do it myself.”

  Vicki recognized the tone; she’d used it herself once or twice. “I imagine you’d rather be, oh, fiddling about with test tubes or something?”

  “Not at all.” Dr. Burke smiled, and there was no mistaking the sincerity behind her words. “I very much enjoy running other people’s lives, seeing that each cog in a very complicated machine continues to run in its appointed place.” It might have been more accurate to say, in the place I appoint, but Dr. Burke had no intention of allowing that much insight into her character. Now that we have established I enjoy my job, shall we get on with the investigation, Ms. Nelson? “Mrs. Shaw tells me you want to ask about the tests I ran on your mother.”

  “That’s right.” An early call to Dr. Friedman had determined that her mother’s doctor had known about the tests, so they probably had nothing to do with . . . with the end result. But they were a place to start. Vicki pulled a pad of paper and a pen from the depths of her shoulder bag. “I assume they had to do with her heart condition?”

  “Yes. Although I haven’t practiced medicine for some time, I am a medical doctor and your mother, understandably upset, wanted a second opinion.”

  “And you told her?”

  “That she had perhaps six months to live without corrective surgery. Pretty much exactly what her own doctor told her.”

  “Why didn’t she go in for the surgery?”

  “It’s not that easy,” Dr. Burke said, leaning back in her chair and lacing her fingers across her stomach. “There are always waiting lists for major surgery, especially transplants, which is what your mother would have needed, and with budget cuts . . .”

  Vicki’s pen gouged through the paper and her voice emerged through clenched teeth. “So Dr. Friedman said.” My mother could’ve died from god-damned fucking budget cuts. “I’d like to see copies.”

  “Of the tests? I didn’t keep any. I gave copies to your mother, who, I assume, gave them to her doctor, but I saw no point in keeping a set myself.” Dr. Burke frowned. “I did what I could for her. Do you doubt my diagnosis, Ms. Nelson?”

  “No. Of course not.” So you were there for her and I wasn’t. That’s not the issue now. “Who else knew about the tests?”

  “Why?”

  The question came as no surprise, and Vicki realized it came primarily in response to her aggressive tone. She’d have asked it herself if someone slammed a question at her with that amount of force. Brilliant interrogation technique, Nelson. Forgotten everything you ever learned? Maybe she should’ve brought Celluci. Maybe she wasn’t thinking clearly. No. I don’t need him holding my hand. I’ve worked through anger before. She’d been one of the best; top of her class; the fair-haired girl of the Metro Police. She took a deep breath and fought for some semblance of professionalism. “My mother’s body is missing, Dr. Burke. I intend to find it and any information you might be able to give me can only help.”

  Dr. Burke leaned forward, both hands flat on the desk. “You think that the body was taken by someone who knew she was going to die?”

  Celluci’d always said she was a lousy liar. Vicki looked Dr. Burke in the eye and decided not to even make the attempt. “Yes. That’s exactly
what I think.”

  Dr. Burke held her gaze for a moment, then sat back again. “Besides myself and Dr. Friedman, I can only be certain of Mrs. Shaw, although it’s likely Dr. Friedman’s nurse knew. I didn’t tell anyone, Mrs. Shaw might have, and your mother could have mentioned it to friends, of course.”

  “She never mentioned it to me,” Vicki snarled and then pressed her lips tightly shut, afraid of what else might slip out. She hadn’t intended to say that.

  “Given that we were using university equipment,” Dr. Burke continued, graciously ignoring the outburst, “I can’t guarantee that no one else knew about the testing, you understand.”

  “Yes.” A single word seemed safe enough. Pity she had to use more; every syllable carried more heat than the last and there didn’t seem to be anything she could do about it. “I need to speak with those members of your department my mother came into frequent contact with.”

  “That would be all of them,” Dr. Burke told her dryly. “But surely you don’t believe that someone in my department is responsible?”

  “They do seem to be the first people I should check, don’t they?”

  Answering a question with a question. Nice try, Ms. Nelson, but I have no intention of surrendering control. “I’d certainly be interested in your reasons for thinking so.”

  As her reasons for thinking so were based solely on a midnight visit she had no intention of mentioning, Vicki found herself momentarily at a loss. “The members of your department are scientists.”

  “And why would a scientist take your mother’s body?” Dr. Burke kept her expression outwardly neutral while inwardly she kicked Donald’s careless butt. She knew Catherine couldn’t be counted on to consider the more mundane aspects of the situation, but she’d expected better of him. It was obvious that last night’s side trip had been observed. Nothing else but the knowledge that a dead woman was up and walking around could logically account for the sudden obstinate certainty that someone at the university had to be responsible. “It could just as easily,” she continued, “have been taken by a spurned lover. Have you looked into that possibility?”