Enhancement (Black Market DNA Book 1)

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  Traffic had come to a halt. Out the windshield, the front of the cab gave way to a crumpled mess of torn metal. Three other cars were scrunched and tangled in front of his taxi. A single red vehicle, destroyed beyond recognition, looked as if it had smashed into the sides of the row of three cars. His cab had stopped just feet away from being speared with the other three tangled cars.

  Holding his right arm, he stepped out of the cab. Pain crept up his shoulder and into his neck. A crowd had already gathered around the smoking mess. Sirens wailed in the distance from several directions around them.

  “Hey, man. Are you okay?” A teenager, sweatshirt hood obscuring his face, approached him.

  Chris nodded, dizzy. “What the hell happened?”

  “Dunno, man. That red car over there seemed to just pile drive these other ones. You think the computer went whack?”

  He shrugged. Pain coursed through his right shoulder and up his neck, and he cringed. “That seems unlikely.” Too many coincidences.

  “Maybe the driver got high, man. You think? Decided he could drive better than a piece of software.” The boy’s face cracked into a smile. “I know my buddy tried to do that once. Big old idiot, I tell you. I bet that’s what happened. Gotta be it, you know?”

  Clenching his jaw against the pain, Chris trudged off. He looked at his comm card and glanced around him. Cars still stood motionless. Until the police arrived, traffic wouldn’t even begin to snail down the broad street. He called Veronica. Still no answer. He accelerated into a jog, each loping step sending pain up his right shoulder through his neck. The ambulance and police sirens grew louder, piercing the din of muddled voices around the scene of the accident. He pushed through onlookers and checked his comm card to see where the nearest place he might be able to pick up another cab would be. He needed to make it north two blocks to where the obtrusive wreck had not snarled traffic. He cursed the driver of that red car. Realizing the man might be dead, a brief moment of sympathy arose in him. Of course, the delay might mean worse for Veronica.

  ***

  By the time Chris hailed another cab and walked his injured self to Veronica’s, it was almost 12:40. There would be no way he could make it back to his meeting with Claire on time. He did his best to leap up the steps to her apartment building and called her again. Once more, there was no answer.

  He raced up the winding staircase to the fourth floor of the building and jogged down the hallway toward her apartment. The agony built, spreading from his arm and neck down his right side. He fought to catch his breath as he willed the dizziness to fade back from his head.

  When he reached her apartment, he knocked wildly on the door. “Veronica! Veronica!” He pressed his ear against the cold metal door. It struck him that just days ago, he had pressed an ear against a door, waiting with bated breath in hopes that there would be no footsteps, no breathing from the other side.

  Now he hoped that he would hear her light footsteps. She would come dancing to the door, wondering what all the fuss was about. He heard nothing.

  He stepped back, ready to resume his furious knocking in hopes that the outcome would be different. As he cocked back his left arm, his eyes darted to the door handle. Scratches marred the edge of the door and the wooden doorframe around it near the lock. While not ornate by any means, her door had been in more pristine condition yesterday.

  Still huffing, he wrapped his fingers around the handle and twisted. A click indicated the door was unlocked. He inched the door open, eyes wide and pulse pounding in his ears. When he opened it up all the way, he called out her name and stared down the short hall leading to her living area and studio, marked by large, naked wooden beams.

  Those beams framed the macabre scene before him. His vision swam again and the pain in his arm flared. He wanted to yell, to scream out, but felt too weak to even utter a sound. He collapsed in the doorway, his body weight slamming the door against the wall with a thud almost as violent as the sound his body made as it crashed against the hardwood floor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Chris blinked and propped himself up against the door frame. He winced and howled in pain as he leaned on his right arm. Using his left hand, he probed his shoulder, clenching his jaw, desperate for the pain to ebb. He thought about heading to the Johns Hopkins Medical Center just down the road to get his shoulder checked out before remembering where he was.

  Out in the hallway, there were no open apartment doors. No one had rushed to either help him or hurt him. He limped into Veronica’s apartment and closed the door behind him, locking it. In an attempt to filter the pervasive metallic scent, he bunched up his shirt over his nose. He gagged. Bending over for a moment, he steadied his breathing to ensure that his breakfast didn’t revisit him.

  He inched down the hallway. A trail of crimson, fresh and wet, led to the open living area that Veronica used as a studio. Against his gut feeling, he hoped it was spilled paint, splattered and drying. Every nerve in him tensed as he peered into the studio room.

  She was in front of him, on a stool against the exposed brick wall.

  “Veronica!” Chris rushed to her. He ignored the fire burning along his shoulder and neck. “Veronica! I’m here!”

  She did not respond. Her eyes were bruised shut and her mouth gagged. Hair, matted with blood, stuck to the sides of her face, clinging to a long line cut from her forehead down to her mouth. Blood dripped down from her lips and her nostrils. Her arms were wrenched behind her with her shoulders dislocated. Her wrists, tied together, were knotted in a nylon rope suspended over one of the exposed beams.

  In a panic, Chris searched for a knife to cut the rope, scattering paintbrushes, tubes of oil paints, cloths soiled with spatters and smears of color. He found a small shaping knife in her toolbox of supplies and sawed through the rope, gritting his teeth all the while. When the rope snapped apart, Veronica’s body slumped forward, off the stool. He caught her in his arms. Her body weight landing on his arm reignited the agony in his shoulder. He yelled out and lowered her into his lap. With the knife, he cut the gag from her mouth.

  He brushed aside the dark hair sticking to her face and lowered his ear above her mouth and next to her nose. No air tickled his skin. “Oh, God. Veronica wake up, please.”

  Pressing his index and middle fingers to her wrist revealed no pulse pushing back on his fingers. He situated his palms in the middle of her sternum. He pushed his weight onto her rib cage once, twice. Three times and he heard the pop of a broken rib. Despite knowing that a broken rib was common from CPR training he had taken in college, he cursed at the sound. Pain swelled in his own shoulder and he yelped each time he compressed her chest. He lessened the force behind each pump, imagining the broken rib puncturing a lung, but such weak presses would not reach her still heart. He pressed harder again, biting his teeth deep into his bottom lip and wincing all the while.

  Blood soaked into Veronica’s torn, loose-fitting shirt, pooled up over his fingers as his compressions squeezed it out from her cuts. He tasted saltiness on his lips, for the first time realizing that tears had been streaming down his face.

  Pausing, he felt for a pulse again. He listened for breathing. Nothing.

  Again, he pumped her chest with his palms, grunting all the while.

  A memory flashed in his head of Veronica on the stage, a gold leotard against a backdrop that resembled the night sky. She leaped, floated, spun. He had clapped and smiled, proud that she was his—or, rather, that he was hers.

  The splintering of wood and sound of plodding footsteps crashed through the hallway. Chris ignored it, desperate to revive the life in Veronica. He had left her, abandoned their relationship, as she’d pleaded for him to give up his obsession with underground genetic enhancements. He had told her she must be insecure about his success, about the newfound wealth that would fall on him like a blizzard. He accused her of being jealous of his time spent with Jordan, the late nights at his apartment, time spent at wild, excessive parties.

&
nbsp; A woeful look on her face, she had responded to him that she missed who he had been before letting that monster take control of his life. He had snarled at her and accused her of wanting him to be more careless and artsy like her. His life contained no room for a hopeless free spirit. And he had left, high on anger and obsession.

  Now, she lay covered in blood and no longer breathing. She jolted with each time he compressed her chest, but her eyes remained closed.

  “What the hell?”

  A distant voice rang hollow in his ears.

  “What the hell are you doing?” A hand grabbed at his right shoulder, accentuating the pain. He grunted as he pushed.

  They could take him too. He didn’t care. It was his fault.

  He pumped her chest.

  “She’s dead, Chris. She’s dead.”

  At the sound of his name, he turned. Tracy stood behind him. She held a gun, glinting metallic in the sunlight that filtered through the cracks between the heavy curtains pulled shut around the studio. She pushed him aside. He rolled back, twisting his body to catch himself with his left hand.

  Tracy knelt down. She checked Veronica’s pulse as Chris had done and listened to her breathing. “She’s gone.” Her brow furrowed, Tracy picked up one of Veronica’s feet. Her toes were bloody and without nails. “Damn it! Someone tortured her.”

  Chris’s nose twitched and his stomach twisted.

  “I wish I knew what the fuck they think they’re doing,” she said in a low voice, as if talking to herself. “They didn’t just kill her. They wanted her to talk. What didn’t you tell me about Veronica Powell?”

  He stared hard at Tracy. He had seen death in prison, during the stabbings, while he himself had been in shock. Then it had not been so grisly or so personal. “I thought that he wanted to protect me. Why’d he do this?”

  “Chris, how do you know Veronica?”

  His eyes rose to meet hers. “How do you know her?”

  “Don’t be so stupid. I followed you here. I knew you were hiding something from me. I lost you when you came into the apartment.”

  “I closed the door, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, you did. But remember when you told me you knew people on that list? I do. You tried to tell me later you only knew Jordan.” She looked down at Veronica’s face. “I searched for the addresses of the living people on that list. Found her apartment. Publicly listed. Bad decision on her part.”

  Chris crawled back toward where Veronica lay across the floor. “You told me you thought Kaufman wanted to protect me.”

  “It’s not you lying in a pool of a blood.” She thrust out one arm toward Veronica. “Look, he’s making good on his promise. He needs to be stopped.”

  “It’s too late. I don’t care.”

  “Do you mean that?” Hurt flashed in Tracy’s expression.

  He averted his eyes, back toward a painting in the corner of the room. It had been a pristine scene of the wild, grazing horses in Assateague State Park. Now, little flecks of blood spatter tainted the image. “No.”

  “Look,” Tracy said. “I want to know what you were doing here, but there are more pressing issues right now.”

  Chris turned back to her and tilted his head.

  “We’ve got to clean this mess up. Get rid of all evidence that we were here today. Then, on our way out, we call the police. It’s not going to be perfect, but we’ve got to scour the place as much as possible for any hair, fingerprints, everything you touched.”

  Hesitating, he ran his fingers through his hair.

  “I know it’s vile and disgusting, but we have to do it,” Tracy said. “They’ll be able to match your DNA since you’re already in their databases. Easy first suspect, and then you’re back in jail. Ben stays out here and fucks people up like this.”

  Chris nodded.

  “Walk me through this, so I know what we need to clean up. Okay?”

  Again, he nodded. He felt warmer again, his thoughts more lucid. “Yeah, yeah. Sure thing.” He glanced at Veronica. Tears threatened to surge forth. He felt sick. “Oh, God.”

  “All right. You walked straight from the doorway, found her here and tried to resuscitate her, right? You didn’t go anywhere else in the apartment today. Not her bathroom, not her bedroom, right?”

  Chris closed his eyes. “Well, not today.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “What the hell do you mean?” Tracy’s nose scrunched in a snarl.

  Chris hesitated a moment, wondering if he should stop. “I was here yesterday, too.” He looked away and thought for a moment, remembering everywhere he had been. “In the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom.”

  Tracy’s face turned red, but her words were cold. “Is your DNA inside of her?”

  His cheeks flushed warm. “No.”

  “Right now, I’m not worrying about our relationship. Your life might be in danger and now, mine might be, too. Think about our lives. Other people that you might know. Jordan. Hell, they might come after Paul and Kristina. Before we leave here, I want to make sure that we have a head start to find these assholes. We don’t want the police to arrest me,” she said, her eyes narrowing, “or you while we’re doing that. The police already don’t believe your story about Randy, and, so far, things have just become a fucking mess. So when I ask you whether or not your DNA is inside of Veronica, I want you to be one hundred fucking percent sure.”

  “No. We didn’t do anything.”

  “Even in the bedroom?”

  “Even in the bedroom, we were just—”

  “I don’t want to know right now. I just want to focus on this.”

  Tracy picked up the compact pistol and slid it into a holster within her jacket.

  “When the hell did you get a gun?”

  “I just want to focus on this right now,” she said again, but with more of an edge to her voice.

  They grabbed rags from an art supply box to wipe all the surfaces that Chris thought he might have touched. Walls, countertops, tables, sculptures.

  When they finished, Chris used Veronica’s handheld vacuum. He wondered what evidence he might be destroying that might not just lead the police to him but also to the true killers. Tracy scrubbed the bloody footprints they had left near the scene of Veronica’s death and used the soiled rag on the bottom of her shoes. Chris licked his finger and cleaned away a smear of dried blood from her face. She scowled at him but let him wipe it away.

  After Tracy deemed the apartment clean enough, Chris went back to take a final look at Veronica. He wanted to pull her close, to apologize, but covering himself in more blood would be unwise. Instead, he relegated himself to stroking her forearm where less blood stained her skin. He traced from her upper arm toward her wrist, ending in a soft caress. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” His forefinger traveled back up her arm. It hit a little bump as it did.

  He squinted and leaned in closer to the bump. It looked like a mosquito bite. As he studied it, he realized it lay right over a particularly large vein. “Tracy, come here.”

  Tracy appeared back at his side and examined the spot. “They inject her with something?”

  He recognized the small scab for what it was. Just like when they had taken his blood in prison. The doctor had taken a sample, run it for analysis and then reused the same site for an injection. Chris had questioned the doctor, but the white coat had explained that all inmates needed to be vaccinated.

  “Against what?” Chris had asked.

  The white coat’s eyes had narrowed, but he hadn’t responded as he stuck the needle back into the spot where he had taken the blood.

  Chris looked back up at Tracy. “Maybe they didn’t inject anything. Maybe they took a blood sample.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “A sample? Seems to be more than enough blood over the rest of her and around this whole goddamned place. Why the hell would they need a sample like that?”

  He shrugged. He winced and grabbed at his shoulder again. “I’ve had enough. You think we ca
n go now?”

  Tracy nodded and walked out back to the front door. Waiting a moment, Chris touched Veronica’s wrist again, whispering his apologies. He wiped at the corners of his eyes. He imagined he felt her pulse again, weak, but throbbing. Shaking his head, he wiped away the mucus draining from his nose and walked away from her body, his head hung low.

  ***

  As they left the apartment, Tracy cleaned the door handle. The doorframe near the lock was splintered, white wood sticking out like a broken bone piercing skin. Chris, willing himself to be numb, struggled to hold back from dry-heaving again.

  “Careful,” Tracy said. She deposited the rag in a plastic bag with the others they had used to dust and clean their traces from the apartment. After tying the bag closed, she stuffed it into her coat. “We don’t need to leave any more of a mess.” Her eyes went up and down the splintered wood. “Must have the deafest neighbors around.”

  “Probably at work.” He took a deep breath.

  “Speaking of work, you missed your meeting with Claire.”

  He glared back. He didn’t want to meet with Claire or anyone else at Respondent.

  “Just saying. Let’s get the hell out of here. Then we’re going to leave an anonymous call with the police when we get out of Fell’s Point.” Tracy walked tall and calm, leading Chris out of the building. “How’s the shoulder?”

  “Hurts.”

  She handed him a pill from her pocket. “Take this. It’ll help with the pain.”

  “I think I need to see a doctor.”

  Tracy explored his shoulder. “No, you don’t.”

  Chris popped the pill into his mouth. He ushered his thoughts away from Veronica, away from what he had just seen, away from what they had just cleaned up. He focused on the pill, feeling the muscles in his esophagus carry it down into his stomach. “How the hell do you carry all this around without a purse?”

  Tracy shrugged. “Got to be prepared.” With a huff, she gripped his upper arm with one hand and pressed down on his shoulder with the other. Chris let out an agonized yell as a sickening pop came from his shoulder. The pain throbbed on. “You should be fine after a while. It’ll still hurt, but at least your shoulder isn’t dislocated anymore.”