by Jan Coffey
She had a million questions about how much of Juan’s abilities could be tied to this and what his prognosis after the episode would be. If the shaded areas that they’d seen on the MRI were indeed mechanical, what was to be done about them? Was there any way to remove the nano-particles without doing any long-term damage to his brain? Had irreparable damage already been done?
Bryan had warned her before even starting that he couldn’t answer any of questions that she would surely have. The next source of information was a physician and scientist named Orrin Dexter. He’d been flown in to Buffalo from Cornell to oversee Juan’s progress. Bryan promised that she’d have a chance to speak with him.
“When are we leaving? How are we going to get to Buffalo?” Lexi asked, already impatient to get there.
“We’re flying. And I’ll know when as soon as they call me and let me know there is a plane and pilot ready.” He got up and took her cup, too. He dumped the contents in the small sink and poured them both fresh cups of coffee.
Lexi appreciated his thoughtfulness. “I guess this is no commercial flight.”
“Bradley Airport is shut down because of the weather. All commercial flights are grounded on the East Coast from Washington to Logan. A military plane is being requested. That’s our only chance. Even at that, I wouldn’t build up any hopes for leaving too soon.”
“Maybe we should drive,” she suggested, already knowing what the answer would be. It was crazy to try to do four hundred miles in this weather.
“Maybe we shouldn’t,” he replied. “Even if we need to wait three hours, we’ll still get there sooner if we fly.”
His cell phone rang. Cell reception was much better here in town.
“Maybe this is the call about the flight.”
He looked at the display and Lexi immediately knew this had to be a personal call. The frown immediately disappeared, and his face actually relaxed. The transformation in him was subtle and priceless.
He answered the call. “Good morning, beautiful.”
Lexi picked up her cup, trying to decide if she should walk out and offer him some privacy. At the same time, she was curious about whom he was talking to. Maybe a girlfriend. His voice was much gentler, full of affection.
He leaned a hip against the kitchen counter by the door, facing her. “No school today?”
The caller had to be one of his daughters.
“No snow where I am. It’s absolutely beautiful here.” His gaze moved over Lexi’s face.
It was stupid, totally her imagination. Still, Lexi couldn’t stop the heat from rushing into her cheeks. She got up and made a pretense of topping off her coffee cup, even though it was already full. She looked inside the fridge, knowing there was nothing edible left in there.
“I’m in Connecticut,” he said into the phone. “Okay, fine. There’s probably a couple of feet of white stuff outside.”
She darted a glance at her escape route. Bryan’s outstretched legs were blocking the doorway. Lexi didn’t feel very comfortable going past him. She decided that he could always walk out if he needed some privacy. She walked to the stack of mail, still tied up with a rubber band, sitting on the counter where she’d put it when she came in.
“I was going to come down on Sunday,” he said into the phone. “I miss you both. It’s been too long.”
All the mail was from yesterday. No one had gone through it, yet.
“When is Andrea coming back?” he asked.
His daughters’ names were Andrea and Amy. Lexi remembered that one was fifteen, the other seventeen, but she didn’t recall which was the older and which the younger
“No, I haven’t been there for years,” he said into the phone. “Is it an all day thing?”
Lexi sorted the mail into piles. She couldn’t stop herself from listening to the conversation. It was that father-daughter thing, endearing in a way. She thought about her own father, a hardworking, old-style country doctor who’d never been able to bounce back after her mother’s death. Despite his problems, the two of them have been very close.
“I’m definitely going to try,” he said into the phone. “In fact, if you two can drag yourselves out of bed early enough, maybe we could even try to do breakfast before the museum.”
Lexi tried to shake herself off Bryan’s conversation and focus on the pile of letters before her. Something kept nagging at her. Something obvious that she wasn’t able to see. She couldn’t figure out what it was, but she kept staring at the letters.
She heard Bryan end the call, and she took a sip of her coffee.
He came and stood next to her. “That was my younger daughter, Amy. She’s fifteen.”
The same age as Juan, she thought. All of a sudden, everything cleared in her mind. The phone call, the email, the fax. Mail.
“Mail,” she whispered.
“What did you say?”
“Mail,” she repeated, looking up at him. “He’s tried everything else. That guy could have sent me mail…from Reno.”
“Who’s collecting your home mail while you’ve been at the hospital with Juan?”
“It was piling up in my mail box until my brother’s visit a couple of days ago. I called and had the post office hold the rest for me.”
She looked at the clock on the wall. It was 8:05 a.m. “Do you think anyone could be at the post office?”
“I haven’t been listening to any news or even looked outside lately. It could be the weather is so bad that they haven’t opened.”
“I’ll give them a call.”
“What about other types of packages?” he asked before she could reach for the phone. “What happens if you got a Federal Express or a UPS package?”
“In the old days, they used to leave it in between the front door and the storm door,” Lexi told him. “But Wickfield is too small a town for those drivers not to know what’s going on with my family.”
“They’d hold on to the package and leave a delivery slip.”
Lexi grabbed the phone book, looking up the numbers. “I’ll give both places a call.”
Bryan’s cell phone started ringing again. This time, rather than eavesdropping, she dialed the number for the post office. The phone kept ringing. No answer. There was no way of knowing if they were closed or too busy to answer the phone.
“Have you called Agent Geary yet with this information?” Bryan asked whomever he was talking to.
Lexi decided that she might have dialed the wrong number and started all over again. After four rings, she gave up on that and started dialing the delivery services.
“I was coming out there, but we’ll definitely reevaluate the Reno leg of the trip,” he said. “We do need to send in some of our own people.”
They were talking about her. Lexi made no pretense of not listening to the conversation. She turned around, the phone still stuck to her ear, watching Bryan taking some notes on a piece of paper.
Someone at the UPS depot in Watertown answered, and Lexi quickly came up with a story of not knowing if they’d tried to deliver anything to her address from Reno. Due to the bad weather, she explained, she was afraid the slip they usually left behind might have blown away. She gave her name, address, and phone number.
“Do you have any witnesses?” Bryan asked.
The person she was speaking to was checking the computer. Lexi hoped whoever had called Bryan wasn’t reporting another school shooting. Based on what he’d told her, they had no idea how many children might have been involved in this experiment or how widely they were spread across the country…or the world, for that matter.
“I don’t care if it’s a long shot. We have to pursue it,” Bryan said sharply. “Also, I need the time of death.”
There was a killing. Lexi leaned against the fridge. The person who’d been on the phone with her came back on the line. “We do have a letter-pack that was scheduled for delivery to your house this morning. But I don’t think our trucks will be getting out for a while. We’re short on drivers, and the
roads are not that good.”
“Check all the recent credit card receipts at the store, just in case,” Bryan was saying.
“Do you have a counter open where I can come and pick up the package?” Lexi asked.
“Yes, with proper identification, you can pick it up here at our Watertown Customer Center location.”
She knew where that was. Twenty minutes drive in good weather. She didn’t want to guess how long it would take her on a day like today.
“Were there any surveillance cameras?” Bryan asked.
Most of Lexi’s attention was on what Bryan was saying.
“Can you read me the name of the person who shipped this to me?” Lexi asked, wanting to make sure that the trip would be worth it.
“I’m sorry. I can’t give that information out over the phone.”
They both ended their calls about the same time. He spoke first.
“You’re not going to Reno tonight.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“There was a homicide in the same copy store where someone was trying to send you a fax,” Bryan told her. “The killer or killers tried to make it look like a robbery.”
“That’s horrible.”
Bryan looked down at his notes.
“What time did it happen?” she asked.
“The police there think it was a little after ten, their time. That’s about one here.”
“About the same time the fax was aborted.”
“You starting to sound like a cop,” he said. “The two might very well be related.”
“And someone was hurt,” she said quietly, already having heard that much. “Someone not involved?”
Bryan nodded. “The clerk who worked the third shift was killed. A man in his late fifties.”
“But he couldn’t have been the one that was sending me the fax, could he?”
“We really don’t know, yet. It could be that someone showed up at the store and dropped off the job and left,” Bryan said. “Preliminary reports say there was only one person there. But they’re just starting to dig into everything as we speak. Also, there are witnesses who still need to be interviewed. And paperwork that they have to sort through and surveillance videos to look at. There’s a lot to do.”
She rubbed her arms. “But you’re sure that this was a cover up.”
He shrugged without answering.
“Maybe it really was a robbery,” she said, “and the timing of it just happened to coincide with that fax. Maybe we’re trying to make more of it than it is.”
She didn’t want everything to be so complicated. She didn’t want anyone else getting hurt. No more murders. Someone wanted to get her involved, but Lexi didn’t know if she was strong enough to take it right now. She didn’t know if she could be of any use.
She put the coffee mug down and took a deep breath, forcing herself to recognize the bunch of crap she was telling herself.
She was strong enough, and she would get involved. And she was doing this for Juan and herself and for other teenagers who might be victims of the same thing as Juan. Kids who were still alive but might not be tomorrow or the next day. This was who she was. This is who she and Juan both were. They wouldn’t get knocked down easily, and if they did, they didn’t stay down for long.
Someone had chosen her to make a difference. She wasn’t going to disappoint.
Lexi looked up and found Bryan watching her. He hadn’t answered her. He didn’t have to.
“How are you holding up?” he asked gently.
She nodded and grabbed her mug of coffee off the counter and drained half of it in one gulp. “I’m fine…and I’m ready.”
“I haven’t heard anything about a flight to Buffalo, yet.”
She put the cup in the sink. “I’m ready for a drive to the frontiers of Watertown, Connecticut. There’s a package there waiting for me sent from Reno.”
~~~~
Chapter 25
Thursday January 17; 8:00 a.m.
Phoenix Union Magnet School
Leslie sat at the back of the school bus, her head down as she pretended to fiddle with her iPhone. She was glad they were going on this field trip to the Hopi reservation today, even though she was exhausted.
She and her sister had been up all night. Doreen might be older, but that didn’t make losing a boyfriend any easier.
As she stared down at the iPhone she’d gotten for Christmas, Leslie thought about her own boyfriend. She had hoped to see Josh today. She would have liked to have seen him waiting for her outside the front entrance, to have him hug her and tell her that Doreen would be fine.
So where was he? He was supposed to be on this field trip. He was supposed to be sitting right here next to her, holding her hand. He never missed a day. Even though he said yesterday that he was still having headaches, it wasn’t like him to miss school.
“Leslie, isn’t that Josh coming across the parking lot?” Her friend Annie turned around in her seat and jabbed a thumb toward the window. “I thought he wasn’t in school.”
Leslie leaned forward and looked out the school bus window. Josh was weaving between the parked cars, bouncing off each one as if he didn’t even see them.
“Jeez, Leslie. It looks like your boyfriend decided to come to school stoned.”
He didn’t look too good. Josh staggered toward the bus.
“No,” she whispered. This couldn’t be happening. He had a silver pistol in his hand.
~~~~
Chapter 26
Watertown, Connecticut
The car was running, and from where Bryan was parked in the snow-covered lot, he had a clear view of Lexi through the sliding glass doors. She was standing at the counter waiting for someone to come out and help her collect the package.
Bryan called his partner. Hank answered right away.
“Are you still working from the hospital?” he asked.
“No, I’ve graduated to a spare desk at the FBI Field Office in New Haven,” Hank answered. “Much better access to everything.”
“Did you get your overnight bag?” Bryan had left that with one of the building security guards before leaving with Lexi.
“Yes, it reached me safe and sound, not that I’ve had a chance to take five minutes and clean up yet,” Hank grumbled.
Bryan could tell that this was a good grumble. His partner was busy and he knew Hank liked it that way.
“By the way, Bryan, good job twisting Geary’s arm. I was really getting into this case, and I was pissed when he called and wanted us off of it.”
“There was no arm twisting. He saw the light.”
“Halleluiah.”
“He did call you back, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he did. And he definitely sang a different tune,” Hank told him.
Bryan gave his friend a short report on what had happened with the fax and the email Lexi had received. He also told him about the break-in at her house and the homicide in Nevada. He finished by telling him where he was and how they hoped their next clue was inside the package she was picking up.
Relaying everything made Bryan uneasy enough to look around the lot again. The bad weather was to their advantage and hopefully kept the others from following them.
“Once she picks up the package, I’m going to call headquarters with the tracking number. The can trace it back and see how it was paid for. Hopefully, whoever this guy is, he used a credit card.”
“A name will make everything so much easier,” Hank said.
“The trouble is that the ones who are trying to stop him from communicating with Lexi already seem to have the name and know where he is.” Bryan preferred not to automatically assume that the caller was already dead.
The timing of the fax and whatever happened at the copy place in Nevada was way too close to be a coincidence. But if he was dead, then where was the body?
“I’ve been collecting information on the adoption circumstances for all seven teenagers,” Hank told him.
&nbs
p; “Find anything?”
“Not yet. The seven of them come from three different states and the paperwork was done by seven different agencies.”
“What are the three states?” Bryan asked.
“Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico.”
“Very convenient, considering how close they’re all together.” Bryan saw Lexi speaking to a woman at the counter inside. “Are they all low volume adoption agencies?”
“Nope. Different sizes. Nonprofits and for-profit agencies, both. All reputable places, by all accounts.”
“These kids have to have something in common,” Bryan said into the phone.
The person at the counter had disappeared again. Lexi turned to the glass door and gave him a thumbs-up sign.
“How about the hospital where they were born?”
“That would be too easy,” Hank told him. “But no luck. In fact, three of these kids were delivered by different midwives on two different reservations.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“Yeah, that clears up everything,” Hank said wryly.
“I hope you plan to keep digging at that,” Bryan said. “There has to be some record of something that sent these kids to a hospital or a clinic, even for a short period of time.”
“You’re assuming that this operation was totally contained to one area,” Hank said. “We haven’t really gone back to look at anything prior to the December 11 shooting. We also haven’t looked at any recent teen homicides that didn’t take place in school. This could be much bigger than we’ve been thinking. It could be that the scope of this investigation needs to encompass different age groups of kids, as well. What we know right now—as far as the numbers and frequency of the shootings—could just be the tip of the iceberg.”