The Rebuilding Year

by Kaje Harper

  The rest was just… annoying. A scattering of superficial burns across his shoulders and the back of one hand, making the crutches even more of a pain. It was almost familiar. He’d taken a handful of ibuprofen, for what that was worth. Mostly to please John. The cough came and went, but his chest no longer felt so tight. And Mark was doing really well. They’d been so damned lucky…

  The doorbell rang, and Ryan got up, taking time first to peer out the sidelight by the door. Patrick’s identity had hit the news, and cameras had caught his parents arriving at the hospital last night, as footage of the fire played over and over on TV. So far, either Mark’s status as a minor, or simple luck, had kept the press from their own door. But Ryan figured it was only a matter of time.

  The longer, the better, though. John had sent Cynthia a brief e-mail— There was a fire on campus. Ryan and Mark were in the building but got out by the door with no injuries. Mark was checked by an MD, just to be sure, and he’s fine. He’ll call you in the morning.

  Then this morning, Mark had made the call to her, under protest and as uncommunicative as Ryan had ever heard him. John had chatted with Torey, keeping it casual. Hopefully, by the time other details got out, the story would have become old local news and Cynthia out in LA would never hear about how close their near miss had been. Luckily, the spectators with cell phones hadn’t caught their rope descent, and only had dark and unidentifiable footage of people running out of the building. If Cynthia ever found out the whole truth, she would probably try to drag Mark home to safety by his hair.

  So Ryan was on watch for the approach of news vultures. The two people on the porch now weren’t accompanied by lights and cameras, though. This was a different kind of annoying. John, coming from the workshop, was just behind him as he reached for the door.

  “Quit getting up. I would have got that,” John scolded.

  “I needed to move around a bit.” Ryan pulled the door open. “Detective Carstairs. Would you like to come in?”

  “No, I planned to just stand here on your porch in the snow,” she said sarcastically. She indicated the man behind her. “Detective Francis. He’s working on the Crosby case with me. Hey, I brought you something.” She held out Ryan’s cane.

  John reached around and took it for him. “That’s pretty beat up,” he said, examining the deep gashes in the wood where broken glass had scored it. “I was planning to make you another one anyway. You overpaid me the first time.”

  “No such thing as overpaid for that cane,” Ryan said. “Don’t you dare lose it.”

  John gave him a quirk of a smile, and stood it in the usual corner.

  Carstairs was watching them. Ryan swung the door wide. “Come on in. Coffee?”

  “I wouldn’t say no.” The detective’s eyes looked bloodshot, and her clothes were creased. Ryan led the way to the kitchen, and balanced on one crutch to fill the kettle.

  “Is Mark around?” Carstairs asked John.

  “Upstairs.” John nodded at the staircase. “That’s him playing.”

  They were silent for a moment. The sounds of a guitar piece, fast and complex, drifted down.

  “He’s not bad,” Carstairs said.

  John’s lip twitched. “I’ll tell him you said so.”

  “Sounds like he doesn’t need my applause,” she said. “Anyway, I have a tin ear. Can you ask him to come down for a minute? It’s important.”

  “Yes. I’ll get him.”

  While John disappeared up the stairs, Ryan set the coffee dripping into the thermos. He kept his curiosity under control, and opened the fridge for milk, balancing awkwardly. Carstairs glanced at him. “How’s your leg?”

  “Mostly annoying,” he said. “It’ll heal.”

  “Good.” She tilted her head. “Are your roommate and his kid doing okay too?”

  Ryan smiled. “My boyfriend and his kid are fine, Detective.”

  John, coming back in with Mark, caught the remark. The brightness of his eyes was reward enough for that deliberate statement. John pulled out a chair at the table, and Ryan eased down off his crutches.

  Carstairs turned to Mark. “Can you sit down too?” she asked. “We want to show you a set of photos, and see if you can pick out the man you saw in the lab.”

  He sat obediently but looked doubtful. “I can try.”

  “That’s all we’re asking.”

  “Is Patrick okay?”

  Carstairs hesitated, then said, “He’s off the critical list, which is all I can tell you. Here, have a look at these guys.”

  The other detective laid six photos out on the table in two rows of three. All showed pictures of middle-aged men with dark hair and glasses. Mark pored over them intently. After a minute he pulled out three. “Those are wrong. The two guys are too fat, and the other one has that big bald forehead. But I don’t know about the other three. He might be one of those, or even someone else that’s not in the pictures. I’m sorry.”

  Carstairs nodded, and at a flick of her fingers, her associate picked up the cards. “Pity,” she said. “If we ever get him, we’ll try a lineup. Maybe when you see him move, it’ll ring a bell.”

  “If you get him?” John asked.

  “Yeah.” She shrugged. “Listen, I’m sorry for getting on your case so much over the deaths. You understand, it was nothing personal.”

  Ryan kicked John before he could be all polite and accept the apology. “You do know you caused nasty rumors all around campus about John. Murder. Drug dealing.”

  She had a great poker face. “He might’ve been guilty.”

  “But he wasn’t.”

  “No. I’ll make that clear in my reports.”

  “That’s good. But I think you at least owe him an explanation.”

  “About what?”

  “The case. What was going on with Crosby.” What the fuck was all that about?

  She rubbed her eyes. “You’ll find out plenty on the news tonight. Half the details already got leaked to a sneaky reporter.” She was clearly not happy with that.

  John said urgently, “Mark’s name?”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe? I hope not.”

  “Us too.” Ryan said. “But then, even more, you owe Mark an explanation. It would be wrong for him to know less than the damned journalists.”

  Carstairs eyed him a long minute, then sighed. “Give me and Detective Francis a couple big cups of that great coffee, and I’ll tell you what I can.”

  “Done.” Ryan’s curiosity was killing him. He’d refused to spend the night in the hospital, and John had finally consented to bring him home. For the first time since Mark’s arrival, they had spent the night together in the big bed, just holding each other.

  They hadn’t talked much, a few short sentences about mundane things. Like, we need to run by the grocery store tomorrow. The important stuff was all said with touch, in the darkness. Mark had woken twice with screaming nightmares, and John went in to reassure him each time. Ryan hadn’t slept deeply enough to dream. He’d been aware of his own new and better nightmares hovering. Now he was totally beat, and desperately curious.

  John poured the coffee, doctoring Ryan’s with milk to cushion the pain meds. Carstairs took a long swallow from her mug, and gave a sigh of satisfaction. “My candidate for sainthood? The guy who invented coffee,” she said. “So. Dr. Crosby. We’ve been going through his computer, and talking to his coworkers, and I think we have most of the story. I can give you a rough outline.”

  “Outline away,” Ryan said.

  She eyed him over the rim of her mug, making him wait, but then said “About seven years ago, Dr. Crosby was a little-known researcher in an obscure medical school. Then he found a new antibiotic inside ticks, if you can believe that.”

  Ryan shrugged, fatigue making him run his mouth. “Lots of weird places we’ve found them. I mean, bread mold, right? Sorry, go on.”

  “I guess. Anyway, this new antibiotic seemed to work on some disease-causing bacteria. Crosby did animal studies, a
nd got a big drug firm interested, but only enough to fund him a nice grant. He probably had million-dollar signs flashing in his eyes.”

  I bet. The payoff could be huge. Ryan glanced at Mark, who sat with his arms crossed, hugging himself. Did he almost die for that money?

  Carstairs said, “Things went wrong with the first human studies, which I gather was safety testing in healthy volunteers. If they’d panned out, he was all set to move into the private sector and really cash in. But it didn’t work out that way.

  “His test subjects got dizzy, or disoriented on his drug. Not at first, but by ten days out, they said it made them feel confused, and a couple were hallucinating. Crosby tried lowering the dose but he couldn’t make it work without the side effects. The ethics board shut down the study. The drug company bowed out. All that money, down the drain.”

  The other detective said, “Nothing like losing huge bucks to make a guy crazy.”

  “And the fame,” Ryan suggested. “No millions of people saved by the miracle of Crosbymed.”

  “Probably,” Carstairs agreed. “But he didn’t give up. Some subjects had told him that their acne cleared up on the drug. So he decided to reformulate it into a skin gel. Just smearing it on the skin surface didn’t work, so he tried it mixed with a penetrating agent, something with a bunch of initials, to make the medication pass deeper through skin.”

  “DMSO?” Ryan guessed.

  “Yeah, probably. But he couldn’t get permission for a human trial. The ethics committee was playing it safe. So that son of a bitch Crosby decided to go ahead on his own.”

  John said sharply, “Drugging students?”

  “Apparently. His notes show he hired four lab assistants with bad acne. One quit early. One turned out to be unreliable. The other two were Alice Tormel and Patrick Remington.”

  “Who both began acting strange,” Ryan realized.

  “Exactly. The stuff in the gel must have acted differently, more slowly. The kids’ skin looked good, and Crosby’s notes show he was really optimistic. But the effects didn’t last. He tried long-term use, and the acne was controlled, but the kids began to act odd. Crosby tried adding a couple of other drugs to the mix, for the side effects.”

  “He was experimenting on those kids.” Ryan felt new anger building. “Without telling them?”

  “Probably, although until we ask Patrick, we can’t be sure what they did or didn’t know.” Carstairs took another grateful swallow of her coffee. “Damn, this is the good stuff. Anyway, it didn’t work out, whatever his reasoning. The kids got acne when they were off the med, and got high when they were on it. Then Alice did her swan dive out of the tree and died.”

  “She wasn’t knowingly taking drugs. It was that gel,” John said.

  “Exactly. And Crosby got scared. It wasn’t exactly murder, but at the least, he’d lose his license for unauthorized human research. At worst, he might face manslaughter charges. He began to think about winding the trial up, but he couldn’t resist one more attempt with Patrick and a new formula. Meanwhile, Alice’s roommate Kristin must’ve said something or suspected something. Crosby decided she was a threat.”

  Detective Francis put in, “It could have been as simple as Kristin going to Crosby and saying ‘I’m worried about this stuff of yours that Alice was using.’ Or she might have tried blackmail, or threatened to report him.”

  “He murdered her?” John asked.

  “We’re not sure. It might have been unintentional,” Carstairs said. “She died of a skull fracture. He could have pushed her, or he could have whacked her over the head. In any case, she was dead. He buried her, cleared out her half-empty room, and left a note about her not being able to handle Alice’s death and going back home. The school didn’t follow up, beyond some form letters. Which was lucky for him.”

  It must have taken some balls to go clean out a dead girl’s dorm space. Ryan asked. “You’re sure it was Crosby?”

  Francis said. “There’s some physical evidence. Yeah, we’re pretty sure.”

  “After no one noticed, Crosby probably thought he was safe,” Carstairs continued, “and he had his trial going with Patrick, and even put out an ad for a new lab assistant. Then you, Barrett, found Kristin’s body. And Patrick started showing the symptoms of the drug again. Crosby’s new formula wasn’t working and the risk was getting too high.

  “He’d transferred money to an offshore account. When things went badly, well, he was prepared to burn and run.”

  Francis said, “We don’t know if it was just chance that Patrick went to the lab the same night Crosby planned to get out. Or if something Crosby said made the boy worried about access. Either way, last night Crosby destroyed his home computer, packed his bags, and went to the lab. He shut off power and water, cut the phone lines and disabled the alarms. Then he went upstairs and started fires, beginning on the fourth floor, where his office was. Then he went up to the lab on the sixth.”

  Carstairs turned to Mark. “There he ran into Patrick, looking for the very thing he was trying to hide. Crosby has a registered handgun. Presumably that was what he had with him, and used on Patrick.”

  “I don’t know much about guns. It was small.”

  “Don’t worry about it now. Crosby left Patrick for dead down at the third floor landing, where Barrett later found him. Then the bastard went back up to finish the arson in the lab.”

  Mark said, “Was he trying to burn me to death, you think?” It was clear he was trying to sound calm, but there was a tremor in his voice.

  Carstairs said, “You told us he didn’t clearly see or speak to you? Shoot at you?”

  “No,” Mark whispered. John reached over to rub his knuckles up and down Mark’s arm.

  “Likely not, then.”

  “But why else would he come back up?”

  “Still bent on destroying evidence, or making sure no one could cash in on his work later? He was pretty damned thorough about that. If he’d just meant to kill you, he had the gun.”

  Mark shivered hard, and John glared at her. She had the grace to look a little sheepish. “Which he didn’t use, of course, so odds are, he never even knew you were there. Probably never will know.” She glanced at John. “The boys were lucky you two were close by.”

  “And thank God for cell phones,” Ryan muttered.

  “Yep.”

  “So where is Crosby now, d’you think?” Do we need to worry about him, if he does find out about Mark?

  “We’ve traced him directly from the lab to the airport. By the time we knew who we were after and put out a bulletin, he’d boarded a flight to Cancun. He used a false passport. We’ve contacted the Mexican authorities, but there’s not much chance they’ll lay hands on him. He got off the plane in Mexico, and vanished. He has a good bankroll somewhere out there to live on. He’d even taken out a second mortgage for extra cash.”

  “So you aren’t even close to arresting him,” John said.

  “Not at this time,” Carstairs agreed. “He’s out of the country. Still, the police down there might get lucky.”

  “Do you think he’ll ever come back up here on his own?” Mark asked.

  “I doubt it,” Francis said. “There’s nothing here for him. Out there, he’s free and has his money. Here, he’s at risk of prison, and for what? He’s not some psycho. This was about the cash and the fame, and there’s nothing left.”

  “If you do eventually catch him,” Ryan said, “will you be able to you convict him?”

  “There’s a lot of good evidence,” Carstairs said. “But no smoking gun on some of the charges. Especially if Mark can’t identify him from the lab.”

  Mark muttered, “Sorry.”

  She shook her head at him. “Better you tell the truth than make stuff up. But a lawyer could argue that Patrick’s identification is inadmissible, since he was on a drug that causes hallucinations. I’m sure Crosby would go down for something, but it’d depend on the lawyers and the jury.”

  “You know
what’s ironic?” Francis told them. “We called the pharmaceutical company to get information, and apparently they were becoming interested in the idea of using the drug topically. They might take up Crosby’s research themselves.”

  “Even though Alice and Kristin are dead?” John demanded.

  “Hey,” Carstairs said. “A real acne cure would be a million-seller. A few incidental deaths wouldn’t deter a big pharma company from chasing that kind of profit.”

  “You don’t think they were involved in the secret trials?” Ryan asked. “Maybe they’re just going for deniability?”

  Carstairs said, “Unlikely. I’d love to have someone to arrest, but sadly, I think Crosby was going it alone, and hoping to bring them back in for funding later.”

  “You’ve found out a lot very quickly,” John mused.

  Carstairs nodded. “I’m just that good. Also, it helps that Crosby was a better biologist than computer scientist. He tried to physically destroy his computers, not just erase them, and the stuff that burned in his lab and office in Smythe was a dead loss. But he took an axe to his home computer without knowing what he was doing, and the hard drive was still intact in the middle of the mess. Took our boys a couple of hours to get past his passwords and then we had it all.”

  “Helpful.”

  “Very.”

  “So now you finally have to stop looking at John as a suspect,” Ryan said, only half joking. He realized he was still pissed about that.

  “He was never that serious a candidate.” Carstairs turned to John. “Everyone I talked to says you’re a Boy Scout— helpful, honest, kind, and courteous. It’d be almost sickening, if you weren’t such a nice guy.” She actually smiled at him and Ryan.

  “Thanks, I think,” John said.

  “Anyhow, that’s where we stand.” Carstairs drained the last of her coffee, and Francis followed suit. “This photo lineup was my last job for the day— meaning a very long yesterday. Now I hear a soft pillow calling my name. Tomorrow I’ll be writing more reports till the cows come home. You all have a nice day.”