Doctor's Orders

by Jessica Andersen

  Off to the left of the four-room apartment there was a small kitchen nook with a dorm-size refrigerator, microwave and electric range-top. A few dishes sat in the drainer, but the nook, like the sitting area, was almost sterile in its neatness.

  “Cleaning crew come recently?” Parker asked.

  “Nope.” Stankowski paused and shook his head. “According to the building manager, Durst stopped having them clean the place a couple of months ago. At some point recently, he changed the locks, too. The manager just noticed last week, when he wanted to do a walk-through with his contractor and get an estimate on some upgrades. He said he left a few messages on Durst’s machine, and was planning on having a locksmith out, but never got around to it.” He gestured to the first of two rooms opening off the main room. “Bedroom’s there, lab on the other side.”

  “Lab?” Parker frowned at a heavy-built door that clearly wasn’t part of the apartment’s original design. If anything, it looked like the door to a meat locker. “He built a lab here?”

  Mandy was already ahead of him, hurrying toward the heavy door, which was blocked open with a bulletproof vest, no doubt to keep others from contaminating any prints on the handle. She stepped through—

  And stopped dead just inside the threshold.

  “Oh, God,” she breathed. “Oh, no.”

  Parker moved up beside her and his heart shuddered in his chest at the sight of a pretty blonde in her late twenties, maybe early thirties. Her features were eerily similar to Mandy’s with one exception.

  This blonde was very definitely dead.

  Parker cursed, his words coming out on a puff of white courtesy of an open window that let in the winter air. The chill was augmented by a freestanding cooling unit in the corner. It hummed softly and emitted a faint mist, which rose past the white-painted walls to collect up against the laminate-coated ceiling. Condensation clung to every surface, forming beads of moisture on the chrome of a self-contained sink unit and a series of microscopes and centrifuges.

  There was a high-lux fluorescent lamp set into the ceiling, and its cone of light shone down on a stainless steel table set in the dead center of the room…and the blonde who lay on it.

  Her hair was fanned out away from her head in an artful halo, and her face looked almost peaceful in repose. A Y-incision had been carved into her torso and then stitched back up again, and tissue samples had been taken from her hands and feet.

  “He autopsied her,” Mandy breathed. “He injected her, tagged her and then used the transmitter to pick her back up later. Then he cut her open so he could figure out where his system was going wrong.” She turned to Parker, looking seriously ill, like she was going to lose it. “The sick bastard’s still doing his research, isn’t he?”

  “Not anymore,” Stankowski said from the doorway. When they turned toward him, he jerked his head in the direction of the other room. “Durst is in the bedroom. He’s dead, too.”

  Parker froze, then pinned the detective with a look. “Suicide?”

  He got a slow headshake in reply. No other words were necessary: They’d gotten their guy, but he wasn’t the end of the line. Someone else was involved—a partner maybe, or a boss. But who? Why?

  “I’ll stay here and look at—” Mandy began.

  Parker cut her off, “No. You’re coming with me.”

  The knee-jerk insistence was foolish, perhaps, but he didn’t like the idea that there was more than one killer involved, and that he’d murdered his partner to prevent them from discovering…what? What was the next layer to this?

  Mandy looked like she wanted to argue, but she acquiesced, following him away from the woman’s body and out of the cold room.

  As the crossed to the second bedroom, she said quietly, “She hasn’t been dead long.”

  “I know,” he acknowledged. The blonde’s corpse hadn’t begun to decompose significantly. Even given the cold temperature in the room, she couldn’t have been dead for multiple weeks, which meant either it wasn’t Missy Prieta—though it sure looked like her—or else she hadn’t been injected right away. She’d been tagged during the mugging, then he’d taken her and kept her instead, using her as a human guinea pig.

  On that grisly thought—and the burn of anger it brought with it—Parker paused at the threshold to Durst’s bedroom.

  The room was sparsely furnished with a bed, end table and small dresser. The bed was up against one wall, beneath a framed picture of flowers and children that had probably come with the furnished apartment. A pair of windows was no doubt intended to make the room feel open and bright, but now they let the cold winter light in to shine down on death.

  Durst, a large man with short dark hair and an angry look on his face that persisted even into death, lay on the bed in the same position as the dead woman in the other room, flat on his back with his arms at his sides, palm-up, and his legs slightly apart.

  Unlike the woman, though, he was clothed, wearing jeans and a plain navy sweatshirt that seemed jarringly normal after the scene in the other room. The pair of bullet holes in his temple, however, was anything but normal, at least in Parker’s world. He shifted his body slightly as Mandy moved up beside him, trying to block her from the grim reality, but she pushed past him into the room, crossed to the bed and looked down at Durst.

  “He can’t tell us where the antidote is, and whoever killed him cleaned this place out,” she said, her voice hollow. “It’s a dead end.”

  “Maybe,” Parker said, though in his gut he feared she was right. He crossed to her, careful not to touch anything more than necessary, and pressed his cheek to hers so their gloves stayed relatively sterile. “I’m not giving up, though.”

  “None of us are,” Stankowski said, moving to join them. “We’ll—”

  A terrible explosion cut him off, roaring to life and flinging Parker into the nearest wall.

  The bed was suddenly ablaze, the rug, the walls, the corpse—everything.

  “Mandy!” he shouted as he struggled to his feet, his voice hoarse with the need to get to her, get her out of there.

  “Parker!”

  He turned and saw her staggering toward him, her hands outstretched, her body wreathed in flames. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward the door as Stankowski gained his feet and shouted, “Incendiary grenade, everyone out! There’s going to be another—”

  A second explosion obliterated his shout.

  Chapter Eleven

  Mandy screamed, but her voice was lost in the whoop of the alarm system and the roar of the fire, which was suddenly all around her. The heat, the terrible, awful heat made her skin feel crisp and her clothes burn where they touched her. She coughed, her lungs seizing on the smoke. Her mind cleared fractionally, and she realized she was pressed flat with something heavy on top of her. Trapped!

  “Help!” she screamed, beginning to struggle. “Help me!”

  “Quiet,” a voice ordered from right beside her ear. “I’ve got you.”

  Parker, she thought, only then realizing that he was the heavy weight atop her. He’d used his own body to shield her from the second blast.

  There was no time for gratitude, though. The fire was too hot, the smoke too thick. Squinting through the thick air, she could see flames, but she couldn’t make out the door or windows, couldn’t see anyone else.

  “Where’s Stankowski?” she asked, coughing the words like a longtime smoker.

  Parker rolled off her, grabbing her arm and pressing down to keep her flat on the floor, which was growing warmer by the second. “Stank’ll take care of himself. Let’s get you out of here.”

  She didn’t need to see his eyes to know it cost him to leave without looking for his friend. That knowledge was enough to keep her from arguing. “Lead on.”

  “Stay low, keep moving and don’t look back, no matter what,” he ordered, then levered her up and pushed her ahead of him in a hunched-over run. “Go!”

  Somewhere up ahead she heard the rushing sound of water, then shou
ts. Moments later, there was a heavy thump and water rained down around them as the sprinklers cut in. The small streams did little against the inferno that was quickly engulfing the apartment.

  Coughing, Mandy stumbled forward, tripping on something and nearly going down. The only thing that saved her was Parker’s iron grip on her arm and the momentum of his big body pushing her along. Staggering and sliding on the increasingly wet carpet, she made it over what proved to be a piece of the coffee table.

  “We’re in the sitting room,” she yelled, squinting against the smoke and flames and feeling as though her hair was on fire, her skin, her clothes, everything. “Where’s the door?”

  “That way!” He shoved her along a tangent and she complied, only to trip and nearly fall again.

  This time, she’d stumbled over a person.

  “Go!” Parker shoved her toward a patch of lighter air up ahead. “That’s the door. And for God’s sake don’t look back, just run!”

  Mandy did as she was told, ducking and running for the lighter air and finding the door with her outstretched fingers. Then suddenly there were others there, helping her. A uniformed officer grabbed her and hustled her out into the hall.

  Despite Parker’s orders, she looked back.

  He wasn’t behind her.

  She saw Stankowski nearby in the hallway. His shirt was torn and his face was smudged dark with soot and smeared with a track of blood. She grabbed his sleeve. “Parker’s behind me with one of the officers. He’s—”

  Before she could finish, a figure emerged from the smoke that billowed through the open doorway. Two figures, rather: a civilian dragging an injured cop with him.

  Relief flooded Mandy, nearly painful in its intensity.

  Parker was coughing, his clothes soggy, ragged and smoldering, and he favored his right arm when he passed off the cop. But he was alive. He was whole.

  Not stopping for a second to think, Mandy flung herself into his arms on a sob.

  “Mandy,” he said, and caught her against him, squeezing hard, squeezing the breath out of her as though he’d been afraid, as she had been, that they might never touch each other again.

  She couldn’t have said why that was suddenly so vital, why his safety was paramount now when he’d been her nemesis only days earlier. She only knew things were different now.

  They clung to each other hard for a brief second, long enough to reaffirm that they were both alive, then broke apart as the cops hustled them down the stairs, away from the fire. In the stairwell, they joined a stream of frightened people being evacuated from the building.

  They emerged from the stairwell, out into the small lobby, and from there to the street. The scene was utter chaos.

  Three fire engines were already parked near the closest hydrants, and the wail of distant sirens indicated that others were incoming. People had gathered in loose knots of onlookers and evacuees, standing on the sidewalk or in the street, getting in the way even as additional officers and firefighters attempted to push them away from the burning building.

  Mandy stumbled to a halt, turned and looked back. Four stories up, dirty smoke and flames belched from the window of what had once been Durst’s apartment in a scene that was reminiscent of the smoke bombs in the M.E.’s office, but so much more than that.

  A ladder truck-mounted hose had almost reached the necessary height, and two firefighters were training the streaming water at the windows. On the ground, other firefighters wrestled with thick hoses, aiming gouts of water at Durst’s windows, as well as nearby buildings and trees.

  “It looks like they’ll have it under control pretty soon,” Parker said, his voice gravelly with smoke. “Doesn’t do us much good, though.”

  “No,” Mandy said faintly, almost too overwrought to be shocked anymore. “The apartment is gone, along with the bodies.” She paused. “You know, there weren’t any explosions until the three of us—you, me and Stankowski—were in Durst’s bedroom together.”

  “I noticed.” His voice was deadly flat, and he looked at the nearby buildings. “He must’ve planned it that way. Durst’s partner—or his boss, or whatever—was watching. He wanted all three of us dead and the other two bodies destroyed.” He paused, and the disgust was evident in his voice when he said, “Lucky for us, he didn’t manage the first part. Unfortunately the evidence is toast, which leaves us nowhere.”

  “Not exactly.” Feeling a mixture of shame and pride at her thoroughly illegal action, Mandy reached into the pocket of her jeans and withdrew a crumpled and torn piece of paper. “I—ah—sort of took a souvenir from the autopsy room. It was stuck beneath the confocal microscope.”

  When she opened the paper and smoothed it out, it proved to be part of a page torn from a laboratory notebook, showing part of a molecule schematic.

  When Parker just stared at her, she shifted on her feet and said in a rush, “I know it wasn’t right, but I figured whoever took all the other stuff out of the apartment must’ve missed this, or dropped it. Then I got to thinking that once the crime scene techs got it, it would take time for us to get copies. Maybe too much time. So I just…” She shrugged and looked down at the toes of her sneakers, which were soggy and nearly black with soot. “You know. Completely and totally broke the law.”

  She looked up, and saw that he was grinning.

  He whooped, grabbed her around the waist and lifted her up, spinning her in an exuberant, completely un-Parkerlike display of excitement. Then he let her down again, and kissed her soundly on the mouth. “Nice job, klepto.”

  Then, quicker than she could keep up, he pushed her behind his body and snarled, “Hide it.”

  She crumpled the page and jammed it in her pocket just as Stankowski limped over to them. His dirty, battered face wore a thoroughly confused look. “What’s up with you two?”

  “Nothing,” Parker lied. He locked eyes with the detective. “We need to get back to the hospital. I’ll call you when I can.”

  Something passed between the two men, a silent moment of trust requested and received. Stankowski looked beyond Parker to Mandy, and it was clear the detective knew they were hiding something important.

  Mandy held her breath.

  Finally Stankowski nodded. “Okay. Keep me in the loop when you can. I’ll do the same. My team is still working on the minidisk. It’s either ruined or encrypted—they’re making progress, but it’s slow. In addition, after this blast the case will probably be kicked up higher on the food chain. That could mean some delays, whether we like it or not.”

  Translation: You’re on your own for the next few hours. Make the best of them.

  “Thank you,” she said softly. “For everything.”

  He nodded. “See you soon. And good luck.”

  Tears pressed as she turned away and, with Parker sticking to her like a shadow, made her way through the gathering crowd toward the next block over, where they caught a cab and headed first to Parker’s place for a quick shower and change—lest they get too many questions at BoGen—and then to the hospital.

  There, hopefully, they would be able to decipher the schematic and find the antidote before it was too late.

  FOUR HOURS AFTER they reached their commandeered lab space at BoGen, Parker and Mandy were still working on identifying the molecule shown on the stolen schematic. They were close to an answer, though. He could feel it in the tingle just beneath his skin and the pressure in the back of his brain, which were the feelings he typically got just before a patient’s stubborn symptoms lined up into a diagnosis.

  Or in this case, an answer.

  “If it weren’t for the substituted amino acids, we’d have it by now,” Mandy said pensively. She sat back in her computer chair, stretching her arms out behind her and rolling her neck to work out the kinks brought on by four hours of nonstop database searches.

  The schematic had proved to be a polypeptide that could be linked to the UniVax targeting sequence and the Dynastin 402 molecule.

  Together, the three
made up the full drug delivery system: the targeting sequence sent the drug to the proper organ system, the Dynastin protected it from diffusing before it reached its target, and the drug was some sort of miniprotein that caused pain and death.

  Unfortunately, knowing all that still wasn’t enough. In the absence of a way to flush the drug off the target receptor, they needed to figure out how to block the polypeptide itself, and they couldn’t do that until they knew exactly what it was.

  “It’s not in the major databases, or in the UniVax list Arabella Cuthbert gave us.” Mandy scowled at the screen.

  “It’s got to be somewhere,” Parker said under his breath. “Have you tried—”

  “I’ve tried them all,” she interrupted, voice sharp. “It isn’t there.” Then she stopped herself, and blew out a breath. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. But don’t give up on me, either. We’re going to find this thing and we’re going to fight it.”

  The pressure that had been sitting on Parker’s chest all afternoon increased at the sight of her pale, lovely face set in resolute lines as she nodded and entered another query into the online database search engine maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology.

  The NCB databases were comprehensive and contained almost every published gene or protein, save for those protected under the various national and international patent laws. All that information collected together in one place was the upside. The downside was the GIGO factor—garbage in, garbage out. If the researchers inputting the information messed up when transcribing a sequence, it might not show up on the search, or it might yield such a low match probability that the internal search parameters would automatically kick it out as a nonmatch.

  Add that to the inevitable glitches that occurred in any search program handling a database of this size, and Mandy and Parker both knew that “no match” didn’t always mean there wasn’t a match, just that the search engine couldn’t find it for some reason.

  Unfortunately they had to find it.

  As if sensing the weight of his stare, Mandy glanced over at him. “What?” She lifted a hand to touch her hair, which had dried quickly from her shower and was only a little frizzled at the ends from the heat of the fire at Durst’s apartment.