Jan Coffey Suspense Box Set: Volume Two: Three Complete Novels: Road Kill, Puppet Master, Cross Wired

by Jan Coffey

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’re talking about the United States, not some developing country.” She shook her head. “By law, everything is listed on those adoption medical records, whether it’s AIDS or colic. If this was a corrective procedure for some kind of neurological disorder, they wouldn’t hide it.”

  He didn’t answer. Another positive step, she thought.

  “But there was something there on those MRI images.”

  “Hank agrees with you.”

  Lexi thought about her attorney. She’d forgotten to mention anything about what she’d seen in the MRI lab to Judith. That was another phone call that she had to make before getting on the road to Baltimore. They actually had a defense. She could feel her energy picking up. She just had to get Juan healthy.

  “We’re not ignoring anything as a possible explanation,” he told her. “We just want to find out what happened and what caused your son to go into that high school and start firing that gun.”

  She nodded and told him where to make a turn. The side road hadn’t been plowed at all. The SUV followed the tracks of another vehicle, however, that had passed through not too long before.

  There was at least a foot and a half of the white stuff on the ground already. The schools would be closed today, for sure. The thought of Juan on days like this grunting with satisfaction as he rolled over and went back to sleep made Lexi look out the side window and choke back a tear. She had to keep telling herself that he’d be okay.

  “After the winery, make the next turn and you’ll be on my street.”

  He nodded.

  “I can’t thank you enough for what you’re doing, driving me all the way here. In this weather.”

  Before he could say anything, his cell phone rang. He answered.

  “We just pulled into Wickfield…Real bad…What did he say?”

  As the agent continued to talk, Lexi found every inch of her body straining with tension. She waited, listening to every word, trying to fill in the gap of every pause. With each comment, she tried to decide how it might have something to do with Juan.

  “Did you get the specifics?”

  Lexi was impressed when he turned where he was supposed to.

  “You’re breaking up.”

  This was one of the last streets that Wickfield Township plowed. Seeing the tire tracks of another car on the road ahead was surprising. Her neighbors were the kind that didn’t go anywhere for two days before or two days after each snow storm. Even the newspaper delivery ceased to exist on days or nights like this.

  “How did that get missed before?” he asked into the phone.

  Lexi turned to him. He was all concentration as the SUV slid and balked at going up an incline.

  “Did they involve one specific agency? One nonprofit organization?”

  They had to be talking about Juan. He was adopted through a nonprofit organization.

  “I didn’t hear what you said. Let me call you back. We’re almost there.” He turned to look at her.

  She nodded and pointed to her house straight ahead. Lexi’s house sat far back from the road, but with the leaves on the trees gone, she could see it was in darkness. Atwood ended the call.

  Lexi pointed toward her property. “Someone has driven up my driveway since the snow started.”

  The tire tracks led directly up the driveway and disappeared around the side of the house by the garage. Each two-plus acre lot had its own driveway. There was no reason for anyone to have gone there. Even the newspaper deliveryman only drove by and threw the paper onto the end of the driveway. She noticed that perhaps only an inch of snow had filled in the tracks. From this angle, she wasn’t able to see the front of her garage.

  “Has anyone checking on the house for you while you’ve been gone?” Bryan stopped the car by her mail box. “Didn’t you have family here to help you after the shooting?”

  “Yes,” she said, glancing at the house. “My brother Allan was here from New Jersey. He stayed overnight a couple of days ago. He checked on things for me. But that was it. I even had him call and cancel the woman who comes in to clean the house once a week.”

  Other days that she and Juan went away, their neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Myers, would be keeping an eye on the house. But with Juan stealing the gun from their basement, Lexi figured that was not too likely at present.

  “You’re sure he didn’t come back?”

  Lexi was perplexed. “No, I talked to him earlier. He’s back with his family.”

  “Does anyone else have the key to your house?”

  Lexi thought about that for couple of seconds. “It’s not matter of having a key. Anyone can get into the house if they know the code to the garage door opener. I think a few of Juan’s friends know it. One or two of my friends have it, too. And the neighbors. And there are doors to the house that have never been locked,” she added.

  The agent was looking intently at the house. There were no lights or visible movement.

  “You know, I’m getting wound up about nothing. It could have been anyone. It might even be the police keeping an eye on things,” Lexi said.

  “That’s possible.”

  “Seriously, with the exception of some lunatic who was running cars up and down on the green a couple of years ago by remote control, Wickfield is a pretty safe town,” she said. “I don’t think anyone around here even locks their doors.”

  Neither of the neighbors on either side had any lights on. And the single streetlight on the cul-de-sac had been out since a lightning storm last summer.

  “Okay. Let’s go inside and look.” Bryan turned the SUV into her driveway.

  “The phone call you just got. Has there been any news from Agent Luna?”

  “You do have a visitor,” he said, slowing down the car before coming to a full stop.

  Lexi stared ahead at a black Escalade that was parked in front of her garage. The car was facing out. The headlights were off, but the vehicle was running. She could see the exhaust coming from the rear of the SUV.

  “I don’t know who that could be.”

  As she glanced at him, he reached across his body, and a pistol appeared in his hand.

  “Take my phone,” he told her. “Call 911.”

  She stared at the gun for a second before taking his phone.

  Just as she did, the headlights of the black SUV lit up, blinding her momentarily.

  “Get out,” he shouted.

  Lexi barely had a chance to react to Bryan’s warning. The Escalade was coming straight at them. She felt her seatbelt unbuckle as she grabbed the door handle. A split second later, she landed on her back on the snow, with Agent Atwood on top of her.

  The sound of the crash was an explosive, jarring bang, accompanied by the screech of metal against metal. She closed her eyes at the feel of the glass showering over them. From the far side of their SUV, the roar of an engine and spinning of tires on the snowy driveway could be heard as the Escalade raced down the road.

  By the time Bryan rolled off her, there was nothing but silence and the feel of the wet snow on her face.

  ~~~~

  Chapter 20

  Buffalo, New York

  With the blizzard having passed, the hospital helipad had been reopened only an hour earlier, which was a good thing.

  Standing inside the glass enclosed receiving passageway with a steaming mug of coffee in his hand, Orrin Dexter watched the lights of the aircraft as the medevac chopper approached the newly plowed landing area and centered itself above. Four feet of snow had been pushed into ten-foot piles surrounding the pad, and his view of the helicopter door was cut off as it slowly set down.

  His own flight from Ithaca to the VA Hospital in Buffalo had been an adventure, so he could only imagine what these guys had flown through. The storm had blanketed the East, from Chicago to southern New England, where it was still snowing. They’d flown from Connecticut, tracked north to miss as much bad weather as they could, but it must have been a bumpy ride. Night f
lying in a storm like this was never fun.

  Still, he was glad they were here. This might be the breakthrough they’d been searching for.

  As soon as the chopper was secure, the crew of orderlies and nurses who were gathered in the outer receiving area moved as a unit down the short, covered path to the pad. They were pros, and though he couldn’t see the transfer of the patient, in a moment they were all moving quickly back toward the hospital.

  A young, long-haired man led the group. His black leather coat gleamed in the overhead floodlights. The sliding doors opened and the cold air hit Dexter. The patient still appeared to be unconscious.

  “Dr. Dexter?” The agent flashed the ID around his neck. “I’m Special Agent Nick Luna, with the New York office.”

  It had been this man’s superior at the FBI office in Manhattan who’d called and told Dexter to get ready to go to Buffalo.

  “Glad to see you, Agent Luna.” The patient and the entourage passed and the two men fell in behind them. “And I can’t tell you how glad I am to see this young man.”

  “My SAC at headquarters told me you’ve been expecting this for some time.”

  “More hoping for it than expecting it. There were rumors of it fourteen years ago. We tried to get in on it, but the whole thing went underground. Vanished.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “Well, it wasn’t for want of trying.”

  They passed through the ER and moved down a corridor to a waiting elevator. A number of the entourage dropped off as they crowded in. In a moment they were speeding toward the sixth floor. They were silent on the elevator. The work Dexter had spent his life focused on at Cornell was not for the ears of just any hospital orderly or nurse. His work on nanotechnology had been cutting edge—and top secret—since his graduate days in the early 1990s.

  Over the past decade and a half, he and his hand selected team had moved the science from the theoretical to the actual, but there were still a thousand obstacles…or rather, a thousand advances still to be made.

  He looked down at the teenager strapped to the gurney. He’d seen the MRI images. It was unbelievable.

  The doors of the elevator opened and the patient was pushed out ahead of the two men. The FBI agent pulled Dexter aside.

  “Doctor, I need to call in and let my boss know that we’ve completed the delivery, but first I have one question. How do you think this could have remained secret for so long.”

  Dexter watched his patient disappear into the waiting room. He didn’t want to lose any time, but he knew it would take the hospital personnel a few minutes to situate the boy.

  “As I said, there were only rumors.”

  “But at that time there can’t have been too many people with the expertise to—”

  “There were only a handful of us. Nanotechnology was only in its infancy, and advances were being guarded as closely as the location of a gold strike in the Wild West.”

  “But if what they were doing was really so advanced—”

  “Advanced?” Dexter frowned down at the agent. “You probably grew up with computers in your home, but you have to keep in mind that it wasn’t until 1989 that Intel brought out the 80486 microprocessor and the I860 RISC/coprocessor chip. If the implant in this teenager’s brain is what I think it is, these guys were doing things that most of us were still only dreaming of…and that’s just on the mechanical side.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The scientist looked at the man in disbelief. How could anyone be so ignorant of the most important biotechnical events of a century?

  “I don’t have time to give you a history lesson, but just consider this. It wasn’t until 1972 that the anti-rejection drug cyclosporine was discovered. It wasn’t until 1992 that the first heart-lung transplant was done successfully in the United States. In the early 90s, the chance of surviving brain surgery, never mind implantation, was only about twenty-five percent.”

  “I see. So what they were doing is pretty amazing.”

  “Yeah.” Dexter started down the hallway. “What’s most amazing, though, is something we never would have guessed.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That these guys, whoever they are, were testing their research on live subjects.” The scientist stopped and looked straight at the agent. “On babies.”

  ~~~~

  Chapter 21

  Wickfield, Connecticut

  “They were definitely trying to make it look like a robbery, but it looks like you messed up their plan.”

  Jeremy Simpson stamped the snow from his shoes. He’d been double-checking the house and garage.

  “The door to the greenhouse where they came in has no lock that works,” he said. “They could have just walked right in, but they still broke the window next to it.”

  Bryan nodded. Despite the continuing blizzard conditions outside, two uniformed police patrols had made it to the house in less than fifteen minutes, and the Wickfield detective had not been far behind.

  There was no doubt that Lexi and Bryan’s arrival had surprised those going through the house. The intruders must have seen them when they stopped in front of the house, and made the run to their SUV for the getaway. They’d taken the door right off the car Bryan had been driving.

  The local detective crouched down next to the afghan the intruders had spread on the living room floor and the collection of things they’d thrown onto it. “They gathered up whatever was within arm’s reach. Framed pictures, a clock, a silver bowl, fake fruit.”

  “A real hot item for resale,” Bryan said, frowning.

  “There’s a camera bag on the floor next to the table where some of this stuff must have been sitting,” the detective said, pointing to the corner of the room.

  That wasn’t everything that was on the blanket, but Bryan agreed one hundred percent with the young detective. Petty thieves didn’t drive new Escalades, nor did they destroy valuable electronic equipment instead of taking it…as they’d done in the small office off the front hall.

  “Dr. Bradley’s office was clearly their target,” he told Simpson, leading the way.

  The uniformed officers were outside, collecting evidence. They’d set up screens over the footprints and the tire tracks and were taking photographs. After seeing her office, Lexi had gone upstairs to check what might be missing from any of the bedrooms.

  Simpson had already glanced at the office briefly.

  “The telephone and fax machine were destroyed. Her laptop is missing.”

  “That might have been already gone,” Jeremy said thoughtfully. “Dr. Bradley might not know it, but I believe I saw her laptop on the list of items the FBI took custody of Monday night when they took her son’s computer for evidence. There were a total of three computers taken out of this house that night.”

  The rest of the office was a mess. Everything on the desk had been swept to the floor. The drawers had been opened, files haphazardly pulled out and dumped. The intruders had done the same thing to the file cabinet behind the desk. Even the books on the shelves of her floor to ceiling bookcases were all over the room.

  “We’ve found three set of footprints outside. The State Police have sent an expert to dust for fingerprints here.”

  Bryan guessed they wouldn’t find anything. There was one thing these people were after when they broke in here, and they’d obviously found it. In his gut, he knew it was the fax from Nevada. Why else wait until tonight?

  He’d spoken with Geary about the break-in right after Lexi called 911. Bryan had gotten the distinct impression that the SAC did not believe there was any connection between the Nevada calls and the shootings.

  “Has Dr. Bradley figured out if anything else is missing?”

  “I’ll go upstairs and check with her,” Bryan offered.

  Coming into the house the first time, Bryan had left Lexi by the car and had gone through the house, room by room, making sure there was no one and no surprises left behind. This second time through, he
had a better chance to actually look at everything.

  The spacious house was a remodeled colonial with few new additions and it matched everything he’d seen, heard, and read about the mother and son. It was meticulously clean and organized. Very few knickknacks, no teenage sneakers tossed in a corner. There seemed to be a shelf or a drawer for everything. Upstairs, he poked his head into the first bedroom. Juan’s room. Car and music posters lined the walls. Academic and athletic awards were displayed in a bookcase.

  “You’re up here,” Lexi said, coming up behind him. “Did you have any cuts from the broken glass?”

  He’d been showered with the pebbled glass when the windshield had exploded into a thousand pieces. He had clothes in the car and had changed when she’d gone upstairs.

  “No. Nothing.” He turned around. “Does he keep the room like this himself, or do you have someone follow him around and pick up after him?”

  She stood next to him in the doorway, looking sadly inside. Bryan guessed during the FBI sweep on Monday night, a few things had been taken from Juan’s room, too. At least, they hadn’t left a mess.

  He’d heard the water run downstairs. She’d must taken a quick shower. Her hair was still wet, pulled into a pony tail. The small cut on her forehead was oozing a little blood. She followed the direction of his gaze and patted it with a tissue in her hand.

  “I have a cleaning person who comes in for a couple of hours once a week. But she doesn’t do any picking up after Juan. That’s all him. He’s always been like this. Never messy. Always organized. And that’s not only at home. The same thing is true with his school and sports and other activities. You can ask anyone, and they’ll tell you the same thing. Have you heard from Agent Luna yet?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “Not directly,” he told her. “But he contacted Hank, and they’ve landed. Everything is going per plan. I didn’t have the best connection with my cell phone when I talked to Agent Gardner. Can I use your phone to call him back?”