by L E Fraser
Rage fermented into something darker, something I could not name. I laid her gently back on the ground, then lay beside her and stroked her cheek the way I did each night before she fell asleep. Blood dripped from my fingertips and streaked her flawless ivory skin with ghastly trails of silver-blue in the moonlight. My tears fell against her cherished face, and I felt the inexorable splintering of our childhoods. Desperate to cling to a tiny fragment of our innocence, I sang in a hushed tone.
Oh, the scissortail roost on a telephone pole,
When the evening is old and the bayou is cold.
Then me got a lot of fishing to do.
Tomorrow I’ll come back to you.
Rocking her in my arms, I yearned for her to come back to me and sing the lullaby’s chorus. She didn’t make a sound, but her trembling stilled and her body pushed against mine, seeking the sworn protection that I had failed to deliver. My voice wet with tears, I rocked her and sang.
When the old horned owl in the piney woods yell,
Don’t worry, my belle, my sweet Mademoiselle,
’Cause everything’s gonna be ca c’est beau, oui,
Tomorrow for you and for me.
Her arms tightened around my neck. I felt the whisper of her breath against my ear and at last heard the sweetness of her voice.
Oh, bayou, my baby, on the bayou tonight.
To a katydid’s serenade, my cherie, sleep tight,
And dream of tomorrow when the fishing is through.
I’ll fly o’er the bayou to you.
“I’ll always fly o’er the bayou to you,” I whispered, but I could not finish the oath I had made to her each night since my father’s deployment.
My pledge to keep her safe had been a worthless platitude, uttered by a naive child. The angels’ punishment for my failure would be swift and merciless.
None of us would survive their wrath.
CHAPTER NINE
Sam
SAM HAD MANY issues around the office renovation. The primary one was that without a functioning office, her loft was the substitute. Every time she arrived home, Eli was there. Where he went, his sister followed. Sam wanted to talk to Eli about Aazar Basha, so she should have been pleased to see him. She wasn’t. Especially since he was sitting on the floor playing with Pepin. In her opinion, if Eli wasn’t going to work, he might as well go home.
Danny was ensconced at the weathered ebony dining table, typing on a laptop. She lifted her head and nodded a silent greeting at Sam. Evidentially, she’d forgiven her brother for spilling her secret. As Sam had predicted, Danny’s method of coping with her brother’s breach of trust was to pretend it had never happened.
Sam dropped her keys and phone on the ugly church altar that Reece loved. She kept hoping to come home one night and find it had magically disappeared, but no such luck. Someone had dumped a plastic shopping bag on the floor beside it. Annoyed, Sam untied it and gasped when a putrid stench hit her.
“My God, what is that smell?” She clamped her hand over her mouth and opened the bag fully with the toe of her sneaker. It contained jeans and a stained white T-shirt. The clothes Reece had been wearing this morning.
“That is the smell of death.” Eli threw a stuffed pig across the room, much to the delight of Pepin, who chased after it.
“Where’s Reece?” Sam looked around frantically but he wasn’t in the loft.
“Relax.” Danny stood and stretched her back. “He’s in the shower.” Crinkling her pug nose, she strode over and crouched to re-tie the bag. Then she stood with the ties pinched between her fingers and opened the door. “I’ll take it out to the trash chute. No way will he ever wear those jeans again.” She sniggered and stepped into the hallway. “I think that grey clump stuck on the leg is a chunk of rotting brain.”
Sam felt like she’d stepped into an alternate universe. “Whose brain?”
Reece descended the ladder staircase from the bedroom loft. “Harold Taylor’s,” he answered.
Sam stood on her tiptoes and wrapped her arms around his neck, inhaling the familiar scent of citrus soap. The relief of finding him in one piece turned her legs to jelly. As he stroked her back, the terrified butterflies in her stomach calmed.
He took her hand and led her into the kitchen. “My day calls for scotch on the rocks. Anyone want a drink?” he asked, as Danny returned, shut the front door, and went into the kitchen to wash her hands.
“I’ll take a beer,” Danny said, wiping her hands on a dishcloth.
“I would like a Mountain Dew.” Eli hurled the stuffed pig again, and Pepin raced across the grey hemlock floor after it, skidding on the glossy surface. His sharp toenails were probably scratching her expensive floor.
“Stop doing that!” Sam instantly regretted her peevish tone.
Eli’s face froze. He extracted a treat from the bag beside him and stiffly held it out. The puppy dropped the pig, gently took the chicken strip from Eli’s hand, and trotted into the built-in crate tucked beneath the kitchen’s stone countertop to enjoy his snack.
Brandy’s crate, Sam thought with a twinge of resentment. She glared at the puppy as he circled twice before lying down with the treat—Brandy’s favourite variety, no less—propped between his front paws. Pepin had his own crate, and he shouldn’t be stealing Brandy’s bed. She crouched, intending to shoo the puppy out, and spied a new blanket tucked around Brandy’s electric cooling pad. A new purple elephant lay beside a new ceramic water fountain. Sam’s cheeks heated with indignation. Pepin was making himself at home in Brandy’s crate because Reece had fixed it up for him.
“Unbelievable,” she muttered, outraged that Reece had commandeered the last reminders of her beloved golden retriever.
“You are in a bad mood. Again,” Eli stated, accepting a can of soda from Reece.
Sam stood and reined in her anger. “I’m not always cranky.”
“Yeah, you are.” Danny shoved her glasses up the bridge of her nose. She stared meaningfully at Pepin in Brandy’s luxury crate and then lifted her eyes knowingly to Sam’s face.
“That’s just because of the conundrum over her clinical practicum,” Reece said to Danny. He handed Sam a glass of wine and kissed her.
“If you say so,” Danny mumbled.
Reece sipped his scotch and debriefed them on his interview with Susan Taylor.
When he finished speaking, Sam thought in silence for a moment. “That poor woman. She endured forty years of psychological and physical abuse, and her husband essentially murdered their child,” she said with disgust. “Shouldn’t the detective have taken a look at the neighbour whose dog Harold killed?”
“If he did, it wasn’t in the file I received. I’ll dig deeper.” Reece turned to Danny. “Did you find any drone pictures on Harold’s hard drive?”
“I had to weed through disgusting kiddie porn, but I found a few,” she stated grimly. “The pervert wasn’t a good photographer. I need to enhance some of the better shots. No operator name or contact details on the drone that I can see.”
“That is illegal.” Eli hovered over her shoulder, peering at the photo Danny was in the process of enhancing. “Oh. It is a Vanguard.” His hazel eyes twinkled with excitement. “It is a long-range surveillance drone. It has a 1080p visual feed through a dual-antenna setup and a dual camera with a thermal detection mode,” he recited. “LAN offers real-time IP data transfer, and there is a Bluetooth connection for radiometric calibration to a cellphone.”
Eli’s massive source of trivial information didn’t surprise Sam any longer. “Drones can’t fly long, right?”
“You are wrong. This one can remain airborne for over ninety minutes,” Eli said.
“How far is the range?” Reece asked.
“Around thirty-five kilometres,” Eli answered. “It has an antenna tracker.”
“A stalker’s wet dream,” Danny muttered.
“A rich stalker,” Eli said. “These cost over forty-five
thousand dollars. The Vanguard is one of the most expensive consumer options.”
“How do you know so much about it?” Sam asked suspiciously.
“I would like to purchase one,” Eli said.
She laughed. “Of course you would.”
“It would be useful for investigations,” he stated primly. “Particularly insurance fraud cases.”
“What would be useful is for you to take your driver’s test and get a licence,” Reece said. “Transport Canada has strict laws around drones. You can only fly it during the day, there’s a maximum height restriction, and you have to see your drone at all times. We may as well watch the subject ourselves. From a car,” he added pointedly.
Danny grunted. “I’m going out on a limb and suggesting that whoever owns this one doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the law.”
“Do you think it was spying on Harold Taylor?” Sam asked Reece.
He shrugged. “Hard to say. Harold was into some degenerate past times. My sense is that he was paranoid.”
“Disgusting douche-bag,” Danny growled.
Reece turned to Eli. “If I wanted my drone to follow someone when I couldn’t see the subject myself, how would I do that?”
“The Vanguard has photogrammetry and mapping,” Eli said. “You pre-define the flight grid. After it is launched, the internal software takes over.” He thought for a minute. “If I had access to your smartphone’s GPS, I could program the drone to read and follow the coordinates.”
“So, you’d have to hack your subject’s phone,” Sam said. “Wouldn’t an anti-virus stop you?”
Danny snorted. “People are so naive.”
“Then educate me,” Sam said in an even tone that she hoped hid her exasperation.
“I bump into you somewhere and use a small radio frequency identification tool,” Danny said. “It pushes a credential to your phone so it trusts my Bluetooth.” She grinned. “That’s it—I’m in. I can do anything, like upload a remote access tool or a spy app.”
“But if I’ve disabled the GPS, I’d see if you enabled it,” Reece said.
“Look at you, thinking you’re a technophile.” Danny laughed with genuine glee. “I can do anything I want and you mainstreamers won’t know dick. All social media apps track your phone’s GPS, genius. Even a novice hacker can use your social media apps to find out exactly where you are.” Danny grinned maliciously. “Someone like me? I can read your email, see your text messages, and activate your phone’s microphone to eavesdrop on you. The next time you connect to your computer, I’ll take that over, too. Then I can spy on you through your webcam.”
“Enough already. You’ve made your point.” Reece groaned and ran his fingers through his thick black hair. “I’m speaking with Annalise’s friend tomorrow. Maybe she’ll know something about the drone Annalise complained about.” He turned to Sam. “How was your day with Emily Armstrong?”
Sam told them about meeting Dr. Mathias Beauregard and disliking him on sight, which had heightened her indecision over the internship. Then she explained how she’d accidentally instigated a negative exchange with Emily.
Reece sipped his scotch. “If you won’t be working with Dr. Beauregard, eliminate him from your decision tree. What did you disagree with Emily about?”
“She asked me to meet Fadiya’s mother and her brother, Aazar. Mrs. Basha—”
“You met Aazar Basha?” Danny’s eyes widened.
“Yeah. Who is he?” Sam asked.
“Just the most brilliant scientist of our time.” Danny typed something on the laptop’s keyboard and then turned the monitor to face Sam. “Last year, he won a Gairdner Award for advancing medical research. He’s a prodigy. He had a medical degree and PhDs in physics and molecular biology before he was even twenty-one. He’s my hero.”
Sam had never seen Danny so animated. “I knew I recognized the name.” She leaned over to read the young man’s bio, which was appended to an article in a scientific journal.
“He developed advanced nanotechnology and created a new cancer drug,” Danny went on, and then launched into a highly technical explanation of Aazar Basha’s accomplishments.
Sam held up her hand to halt the assault of scientific data. “Can we have the Nanotechnology for Dummies version?”
Danny thought for a second. “In layperson’s terms, Aazar’s nanoparticles transport his drug molecules across the blood, targeting and killing cancer cells with no adverse effects on healthy cells. In preliminary tests, the process shrank tumours eighty percent more effectively than chemotherapy and radiation. If experts obtain the predicted results in human trials, Aazar’s discoveries have the potential of eradicating cancer.”
Aazar Basha was a genius who held the key to curing cancer. No wonder Emily had been surprised that Sam didn’t know who he was. She felt like an ignoramus.
“Do you know why he needs a transplant?” she asked Danny.
“That’s the tragic part,” Danny said. “Aazar was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in childhood. It went into remission but returned in his late teens and is affecting his organs. Oncologists don’t expect him to live long enough to complete his work. He has a rare blood type, but I also read something a while back about an abnormality in his antigens that makes tissue matching difficult. They must have found a donor, though. Transplants have saved him a couple of times.”
Sam wondered why they didn’t use that person for the lung lobe transplant. “When was that?”
Danny typed for a few seconds. “It started seventeen years ago, when an umbilical cord stem cell transplant put the disease into remission.”
“It must have been Fadiya’s stem cells,” Sam said.
“Sure, if that’s his only sibling,” Danny said. “Over the years, he’s had bone marrow, kidney, and liver section transplants.”
“All from his sister?” Sam asked.
“Given the difficulty in finding a match, I’d assume so.” Danny frowned. “That’s a lot of donor surgery for a child.”
“Aazar now needs a lung lobe transplant. That was the basis of the disagreement I had with Dr. Armstrong,” Sam said. “The family wants the clinic to petition the court to overturn Fadiya’s incapacity ruling so she can give surgical consent.”
The colour drained from Eli’s face. “They are using her as spare parts to keep her genius brother alive.” He began to pace, growing more agitated. “Someone is raping her and they are harvesting her.”
“We don’t know that,” Sam said.
Reece patted Eli’s shoulder gently but firmly, which Sam recognized as an attempt to keep Eli calm.
“She didn’t get pregnant by herself,” Reece said.
Eli’s gaze fluttered around the ceiling. He lifted his hand, tapping his middle finger in the air, and his expression tightened with anxiety. “We must protect her. Fadiya is in danger. They are harvesting her. Stealing parts of her body. Putting her at risk. It is disgusting.” He marched around in a tight circle, his arms glued to his sides and his fingers twitching.
“She must have provided consent for the previous living donor transplants,” Reece said calmly. “There’s no evidence to suggest she had a change of heart and would deny her brother a lung lobe after all the other procedures.”
“What’s the matter with you?” Danny snapped. “How about this for evidence—the kid ran away and joined Bueton.”
“A cult where her parents couldn’t reach her,” Sam said hesitantly. “A sanctuary where Fadiya believed she’d be safe.”
CHAPTER TEN
Reece
“ARE YOU SURE it’s supposed to be inside out?” Sam grumbled.
“Positive,” Reece said with false confidence. “We turn it right side out after we attach the clips to hold the duvet in place.” It had looked much easier on the video he’d watched after he bought the duvet donuts.
“I have new respect for hospitality workers,” Sam muttered. “Changing linens on a Calif
ornia King is the worst job in the world.”
He grinned at her. “Really? Even worse than hunting rats in the New York sewers?”
He knew Sam had a rat phobia. She had to turn off the television every time one showed up in a program.
“We should visit the Bird Kingdom in Niagara Falls,” she said sweetly. “It’s the world’s largest free-flying, indoor aviary. Doesn’t that sound fun?”
Reece shudder at the thought of birds flying around him and threw a pillow at her, which she caught with a laugh.
He checked his watch. “Can you finish?” he asked sheepishly. “Annalise’s friend Denise wasn’t keen about talking with me, and I don’t want to risk being late.”
“Sure. It’s just pillow cases,” she said.
He hurried down the stairs before she realized they hadn’t put the sheets on the bed yet. That fitted sheet was a bitch. He’d cook lasagna for dinner—her favourite—to make up for ducking out on her.
On his way to the door, Reece crouched to rub Pepin’s bat ears. “Did Mommy give you a nice breakfast and a walk? Yes, she did, didn’t she?”
This morning, Sam had offered to feed and walk the little French bulldog while Reece took a shower. Her willingness to care for the puppy was a positive step, which relieved him. Over the past month, her inexplicable negativity toward the puppy had begun to worry Reece.
He grabbed his keys and phone from the church altar. Pepin stayed at his feet gazing up at him with sad brown eyes.
“Go find your elephant.” He pointed at the built-in crate in the kitchen.
Pepin trotted over to the crate, scratched at the side of the waterfall countertop, and whined. Reece exhaled in frustration. Sam had securely locked the wrought iron gate, keeping Pepin out and his elephant trapped inside. He unlatched the door with a scowl of annoyance. The puppy ran inside, flopped onto his cozy new bed, and chewed happily on the elephant’s trunk.
