by Nancy Holder
Catherine’s phone rang. “Chandler,” she said as she put it to her ear. Vincent could hear the conversation on the other end:
“This is Dr. Lewis from Vanek Memorial. I met you earlier today when I attended Detective Wilson.”
“Yes.” Catherine squared her shoulders, listening hard, in full detective mode. Vincent could practically see her shifting her weight onto the balls of her feet, ready to spring into action.
“Aliyah Patel is missing. The orderlies did bed checks forty-five minutes ago and we’ve been looking for her ever since.”
“Have you caught anything on your surveillance cameras?” she asked.
Vincent grabbed up Cat’s coat, hat and gloves and laid them on the coffee table beside her, then went into J.T.’s bedroom and plucked J.T.’s heaviest coat off the rack. He was putting on his gloves when Catherine met him at the door, ready to go.
“Aliyah’s been taken,” Cat said to the group. “They don’t know who did it.”
“How?” Wilson blurted. He began to rise. “They have six layers of security. Who signed her out?”
“We’re going over there now,” Cat said. To Tess, she added, “I’ll call in, keep you informed. We’ll probably have to use landlines until the storm clears.”
“But it’s snowing like crazy. You can’t go out in that,” Wilson said, and the New Yorkers all smiled patronizingly at him.
“I checked and there’s no Snow Emergency Declaration,” Cat said. “Public transportation’s still running and we can get there by subway.”
Wilson was agog. Tess said to him, “We’re going out in that. To the nearest hotel.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He started to get up, then caught his breath and sat back down.
Tess said, “Dr. Forbes, do you have any juice? Maybe some crackers? My officer needs to get a little something in his stomach.”
“Sure, Captain Vargas. I’m sure we can find something in my kitchen. If you’ll follow me?” The two moved quickly across the room.
“We’ll stay in contact,” Cat promised. Then Vincent opened the door into the blizzard. A little girl wouldn’t last in this. If Aliyah had snuck out on her own, she was probably already dead.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Considering what she’d already been through, the few steps from the subway to Vanek Memorial would have taken a debilitating physical toll on Catherine if Vincent hadn’t been there to carry her and blur. No one was around and the snowfall would surely cloak them from any video cameras.
They were expected and their entry was expedited, which in one way was ironic, since a gap in their security had resulted in the loss of one of their patients. It would have been useful for Cat to take notes on their procedures when they were being demonstrated at their best. All that was moot, however, because Cat had brought the world’s best tracker with her. And while she discussed the situation with James Farris, head of security, and they laid out a strategy, Vincent walked the oppressive corridors of the facility alone. She could barely contain her impatience; she wanted him to text her his findings as soon as he had the answer, but their cell phones weren’t working.
So she went through the motions of lining up interviews with the staff and requesting footage—she wondered if there would be a sparkling monster on it—reminding herself that it was possible that Vincent would return to her empty-handed.
She was sitting in the otherwise deserted cafeteria with a cup of tea and a candy bar, across from the night orderly who had done Aliyah’s bed check and discovered her missing—her second interview in the cavernous, dimly lit space—when Vincent poked in his head. She could tell by his expression that he knew what had happened.
“Excuse me one moment,” she told the man. It took her an extra beat to push back her chair and walk over to Vincent because her injuries were beginning to make her stiffen up.
Vincent shepherded her over to the double doors that swung out from the industrial kitchen. He kept his voice low.
“It was an inside job,” he said. “Lena Mueller used a coded passkey that hadn’t been assigned to anyone to get into Aliyah’s room. She knew exactly where to move to avoid being caught on camera. Her timing was perfect. She’d been planning this.
“She walked Aliyah out the back entrance into her car. I haven’t quite figured out where the parking garage guard was. He wasn’t in on it. I asked him straight out if he was and he was telling me the truth when he said no.”
Cat took everything in. She said, “That’s it, then. Do you know the motive? And where she took her?”
“Not yet. But it makes more sense for me to start looking by myself.”
“Agreed. I’ll steer everything toward that scenario without revealing that we know. If you find anything call the chief of security’s landline or J.T.’s, and I’ll do the same.”
He pushed open the double doors and eased her into the darkened kitchen. He held her very gently but she could feel the passion in his taut muscles, the way his breath caught. He studied her face with the intensity of a man who was leaving on a long journey, and never wanted to forget what his beloved looked like.
He kissed her, softly at first and then with more urgency. He ended the kiss with a sigh against her hair.
“I don’t want anything to happen to you,” he murmured. “Ever.”
“I feel the same. But these are the cards we were dealt, Vincent, and we both have to play them.”
“Then I’m doubling down because the joker is wild.”
“Every time we turn around, the stakes are raised,” she agreed. She kissed him twice more, and then the real world rushed back in and they were two protectors on a mission once again.
They returned to the cafeteria and Vincent left. Cat sat down at the table where the orderly waited. He was playing with a ring of keys.
“So how well do you know Lena Mueller?” Cat asked him.
Blasé, he leaned back in his chair. He looked tired, maybe even bored. It was unimportant to him that a pediatric inmate was missing.
“Man, she’s like a prison warden or something. Rules, rules, rules. By the book. I don’t even think she has a heart.”
That didn’t sound like someone who might bust Aliyah out of there for altruistic reasons. Signs pointed to abduction, possibly by the beast-maker. Maybe he—or she, or they—didn’t want any witnesses. No one who could explain what the newly evolved beast looked like… or could do.
“I heard Mueller was in the army, you know? Man, she should have stayed there.”
Cat’s face tingled. “The army.”
“Yeah. The battleaxe.” He smirked. “She looks like a guy, you know? Like a sergeant.”
That was ten kinds of sexist, but Cat didn’t have time to worry about setting this guy straight. She stayed neutral, but her brain was already trying to connect Lena Mueller’s army career with the beast activity.
The man went on, “She has way too many friends coming and going here, like this was party central, and I’m pretty sure a lot of them were into some seriously bad stuff.”
Pay dirt. Cat remained neutral. “Like what?”
“I think some of them were mercs.” He waggled his brows, very excited.
“Mercenaries?” she elaborated, and he nodded. Members of FFNY?
“They were hard asses, you know? They had these crazy magazines with tricked-out soldiers on the covers. Camo and Ammo,” that’s what I called them. He grinned faintly at his own cleverness.
“Do you happen to have any copies?” She kept her voice steady and cop-like but she knew, she could feel, that she was onto something.
“Yeah, actually, I saved them.” He pushed back his chair. “I’ll go get them.”
He left and returned with a large stack of magazines with covers featuring a desert landscape and a tank, men in camouflage holding enormous assault rifles, and even a close-up of a grenade, lovingly photographed as if it were a Fabergé egg.
Cat reached in her pocket and slipped on a pair of gloves. She pic
ked up the first issue and flipped the pages. It was chock-full of ads for assault weapons and body armor, and the articles were on subjects such as training non-English-speaking troops and building a homemade drone detector. There were also columns of personal ads in minuscule type advertising mail-order brides from Russia, Thailand, and Cambodia, and “Merc Sought” classifieds consisting entirely of strings of numbers.
“I don’t know what those are,” he said. “It’s been driving me crazy.”
“Usually, it’s a check-in service. You call a number and then input the string of numbers. That takes you into the system. My guess would be that there are a bunch more hoops after that,” she added, in case he might be feeling particularly adventurous and decided to call in.
“May I take these?” she asked. “I’ll bring them back.” That might be soon, or maybe in ten years, if the People of the State of New York developed a strong case against Lena Mueller for kidnapping.
“Yeah,” he said grandly. “Sure.”
She thanked him, pulled out her business card, asked him to call her if he could think of anything that might help her investigation, and left the room.
She went to James Farris’s office and asked to use his desktop computer. He logged her in and left the room to give her privacy. He had aged five years in the last thirty minutes, and Cat sympathized. If he kept his job after this, it would be a miracle.
Cat knew her way around databases—New York City detectives took lots of seminars and classes, and she had spent hours watching J.T. hack into system after system—and in short order she had pulled up Lena Mueller’s personnel file and clicked it open. Lena Mueller had made it to captain in the army, and had not re-enlisted. She had attended graduate school to become a psychiatric social worker. This was her third placement.
Another social worker, she thought, typing furiously, scrolling, and clicking, seeking a connection, a clue, anything that would move her case forward. They were so frequently more than cases: Aliyah was a terrified little girl.
One ear out for a call from Vincent, she drilled down through Nurse Mueller’s addresses and other jobs. She typed multiple searches into Referendia. And then she found a promising court case that Mueller had been involved in. The family of a little boy had sued a private clinic called Grace Hill because their son had died during a round of electroconvulsive therapy—a procedure they had not given consent to. He had been sedated, and then electrodes had been applied to his temples and a current sent through his body. During the procedure, the little boy’s heart had gone into defib and could not be stabilized. The defense argued that the ECT had nothing to do with his heart attack.
Lena had testified on the behalf of the family… and against her employer. A transcript of her testimony also revealed that she had observed “experimental procedures of a classified nature” of which she did not approve while she’d been in the army. But she hadn’t spoken up. This time, she had, and had lost her job over it.
Lena Mueller had left the army well before Vincent had joined up. Had Nurse Mueller observed earlier Muirfield experiments? Or those of some other program?
Cat added these new pieces to her puzzle. Maybe Aliyah had been scheduled for electro-shock therapy or something similar and Lena had kidnapped her to prevent it. The former army nurse would see that as a rescue, not a crime. Could she do it alone or would she need confederates?
A few more keystrokes and Cat had confirmed that Vanek Memorial did administer electro-shock therapy, and that Aliyah had been put forward as a candidate. Her case was under review, but Dr. Lewis herself had recommended that they move forward.
The picture became clearer. It could be that this abduction wasn’t beast-related, even though Aliyah had seen the beast and Lena Mueller had served in the army.
She put in a call to J.T. and told him what she had found. She also asked him if he’d heard from Vincent. He hadn’t. Tess had transported Wilson to a hotel and J.T. had taken advantage of the time alone to examine Wilson’s blood as well as the two vials Cat and Vincent had given him.
“And I think I’ve found something pretty amazing,” he concluded. He paused dramatically. Cat wanted to humor him and beg him to reveal his discovery, but she was tired, cold, sore, and worried. So when she didn’t play along, he said in a slightly hurt voice, “The vials are part of a very complicated formula. If we consider multiple alleles at a diploid locus—”
“J.T., please.”
“Okay, all right, jeez. You remember how Mazursky hinted that the first six murders might have occurred while some faction was trying to find the individual ingredients to create the new beast-making serum? The fear-factor special?”
“The Thornton Foundation. Yes.” She waited for him to confirm Mazursky’s suspicion.
“Well, that’s wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“Yes. And I think Mazursky knows it.”
He had her full attention now. “Wrong how?”
“After examining Wilson’s blood and the two vials, I think what we have is two parts of an antidote. Cat, I think those people died protecting that antidote.”
“Why? What’s in the vials? What’s in Wilson’s blood?”
“In the vials, there are two of the chemicals that were present in the serum your mother used on Lafferty and we used on Vincent when he started to have his violent blackouts. In the blood, there are antibodies that look similar to the ones that presented in Vincent’s bloodstream when he was almost cured.”
Cat blinked in surprise but forced herself to remain silent.
“Here’s what I think happened,” J.T. said. “The beast’s blood got into Aliyah Patel’s bloodstream during the attack on her aunt. When she went crazy at the facility, she scratched Wilson, which made him go all fugue and attack you, and then his blood got into the wound on your head when he clocked you in his kitchen. Then you went psycho in the basement. You were all responding to the beast’s biological makeup. In my sample of Wilson’s blood, antibodies began to react against the contamination. His body was attempting a cure. I’ll bet I’d find the same thing in your and Aliyah’s blood, although you’re pretty far down in the contamination sequence.”
“A cure?” She had barely heard anything J.T. had said after that.
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” he warned. “This is the cure for the fear-factor.”
“The fear-factor, or the fear-factor beast?” she pressed. “If this antidote were given to the person who was experimented on to become the fear beast, would they lose their beast side?”
“I knew you’d go there. If I had the entire antidote, which I don’t, and Vincent took it before another encounter with the beast, would he succumb to the fear pheromones? I don’t think so. And then he could kill it.”
“But you don’t think the antidote would…” She licked her lips, too hopeful to finish her sentence. Because yes, she was jumping to conclusions. How could she not?
“Would the serum de-beast him forever? I don’t know. Maybe yes.” His voice dropped as he moved into thoughtful scientist mode. “Maybe the triggers that induce the change could be deactivated. Vincent reacts to stress and threats by beasting out. If, when he began to feel stressed, he had something in his body that shut down response to some of the physiology…”
Cat winced. “Are you talking about some kind of tranquilizer, or a chemical that makes him less… him?”
“A cure would make him less… him.” He cleared his throat. “I do know what you’re asking,” he said more kindly. “But right now, we need to find all the pieces of the antidote before anyone else does. I think the six people on the list each had something, and I think you and Vincent need to find out what the other five had, and collect the items if you can.”
“But first we find Aliyah.”
“Any leads?” J.T. asked.
“They were going to shock her brain, J.T. Because she saw a beast. Because it emitted pheromones that scared the wits out of her, literally. And I know how she felt, bec
ause I felt it too. I think I didn’t succumb because I was able to think logically about what was happening, and as you say, I wasn’t contaminated by beast blood, like she was. But she’s just eight years old. She’s probably still trying to figure out if monsters are real. And Santa Claus.”
“What, what about Santa Claus?” he cut in, and Cat took a second to smile.
“What I’m saying is, she didn’t have any defenses to put up. I did. I think that’s why I could fight the fear away.”
“Then what about Sky Wilson? He is more impressionable. Look at all the woo-woo stuff he’s into. And by the way, what was going on between you and Tess while he was telling us about his boss from hell?”
Cat knew he’d ask, and she’d already known that she would guard Tess’s privacy. She and Vincent had made a promise not to keep secrets from each other, but she did believe in the concept of the kind lie and the harm you could cause in the name of full disclosure.
“You know how it is, J.T. It’s really infuriating when you’re a woman in a traditionally male-dominated field and you’re dedicated to playing fair, but then you see another woman doing all the stereotypical ‘femme-fatale’ maneuvers to get her way.” That much was true. It was just that there was more. “And we knew her at the academy and we were very supportive of her, so it really pissed us off to hear about her behaving that way.”
“Got it,” he said and to her relief, he sounded as if he had bought her explanation and would let the matter rest. “You know, I thought Sky was some kind of a plant. He’s so over-the-top I figured it had to be an act.”
“What I’ve learned is that it’s the nice, normal, friendly ones you have to look out for. People you wouldn’t look twice at. You bump into them at parties or while you’re ordering a coffee.” People like her biological father.