by Jamie Metzl
“You know you’re drawing me into this, Richie?” she says, staring at me intently.
I don’t have an answer.
She looks slowly across the room as she thinks. “Okay,” she says after a short pause as if we both know she’s already drawn in.
I feel like reaching out to her but look down as she fumbles through her purse. She hands me her keys.
The words I owe you one form in my mind but hardly seem worth saying. All I can come up with is the same stale “Thank you.”
I head out the door still feeling somehow awkward. “I’ll see you later,” I say, then kick myself for saying it.
I call Joseph and Jerry as I drive toward Swope Park.
“Guys,” I say into my dashboard screen, “federal marshals went through my house last night.”
Neither of them looks surprised.
“I just want to let you know I won’t blame you if you want to step back.”
Joseph seems annoyed that I’m asking this question again. On the other half of the screen, Jerry simply looks distracted.
“They’re threatening to pull funding from the paper,” I add.
“If you don’t drop the story?” Jerry asks.
“Yeah.”
“How do they know you’re on it?” Jerry says.
“I’m betting the visit to Bright Horizons tipped them off. Joseph, anything on them?”
“I couldn’t find any records for Jessica Crandell.”
“Is that strange?”
“Is to me, boss. People usually show up somewhere.”
“What about their records?”
“Seem to be air-tight,” Joseph says.
“Who owns the company?”
“They’re owned by a company called Bright Horizons Holdings LLC.”
“Who are they?”
“A holding company, boss. There are five Bright Horizons clinics around the US, in Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Atlanta, Denver, and Nashville.”
“And what do we know about the LLC?” I ask.
“That’s the point, boss. There’s no information. I looked everywhere. All I can find is that it’s a Delaware holding company held by another holding company in the Cayman Islands.”
“Why would a fertility clinic be registered in the Cayman Islands?”
“That’s easy,” Jerry says. “You register in the Cayman Islands if you don’t want anyone to know who you are. All the porn and on-line gambling sites do it.”
“But for a fertility clinic?”
33
I’m starting to feel like a drug addict.
Who else races back and forth to Swope Park at all hours to meet secretly in an obscure picnic area?
Maurice is waiting for me as I pull up. He looks calm and collected. I sense I look like shit.
“Thanks for last night,” I say, then add awkwardly, “for warning me.”
“What have you learned?”
I pause for a moment feeling a bit uncomfortable about the pattern that’s emerging of Maurice asking me all the questions, me telling him everything I know, and him sharing so little with me.
“I’m pretty sure MaryLee was a patient at the Bright Horizons fertility clinic.”
“How confident?”
“I was pretty confident when I was there. Then, pretty soon after I left, the federal marshals came to the Kansas City Star and issued their second News Protection Act notice. Then you called to say the marshals were coming to my place just after that. Made me think I’d hit a tripwire or something.”
“What do you know about Bright Horizons?”
“It’s owned by a shell company in the Cayman Islands. Whoever owns Bright Horizons doesn’t want anyone to know who they are.”
“Go on.”
“I told you I was going to ask Carol Stock to request the tissue samples be reviewed.”
“Yes.”
“She went to the hospital and got turned away by Papadakis.”
“I’m not surprised,” Maurice says.
“So then I asked someone who works at the hospital to check into it.”
Maurice’s eyes perk up.
“And that person went to have a look where the samples were supposed to be.”
“And?” Maurice asks.
“The samples were gone. Missing.”
Maurice nods his head again pensively. “I see,” he says softly.
His lack of surprise at this major piece of potential evidence I’ve just given him finally pushes me over the edge. “What’s going on here, Maurice?” I say tersely. “You keep inviting me to this God-forsaken park and asking me to tell you everything I know. I’ve got my ass flapping in the wind, my friends are in danger, the Star is on the line. You ask me to trust you but you’re holding back.”
Maurice looks at me, but his eyes are unfocused, as if he’s weighing options in his head. “What do you want to know?” he says after a pause.
“Everything, dammit.”
Maurice stares at me intently. “Let’s get a few ground rules straight,” he says. “Everything we say doesn’t go beyond this car. If I’m ever asked about any of this, I’ll deny it. If you’re ever asked, you’d better damn well deny it, too.”
I nod slightly.
Maurice pauses once again as if not sure whether opening his mouth is the right thing to do.
“Another woman died in Olathe, Kansas, eighteen days ago. Her name was Megan Fogerty. It’s outside of KCPD’s jurisdiction, and I didn’t think anything of it at first, but after the autopsy report came out and after our meeting at the café a couple days ago, I started to wonder if it could just be coincidence two young healthy women about the same age drop dead in the same metropolitan area. I started poking around and found out she was cremated without an autopsy. Then you told me that MaryLee Stock was pregnant when she died.”
“And you confirmed it.”
“I didn’t,” Maurice says, “I just refrained from disabusing you of the notion.”
My mind tracks back to Maurice’s subtle nod I interpreted as confirmation. “What the hell was that about?”
“Keep your shirt on, Rich. I didn’t trust what I was seeing at KCPD and needed you to keep going. If the chief wasn’t going to allow a proper investigation, you were the only one digging.”
I’m annoyed at his manipulation but grudgingly accept the logic. “So tell me why you’re so blasé to learn the tissue samples are missing?”
A mischievous grin crosses Maurice’s face. “Because I’ve got the tissues.”
34
“Joseph,” I say, staring into my dashboard screen, “I need you to dig up everything you can about Megan Fogerty. She’s a young woman who died two and a half weeks ago in Olathe. See if you can find any parallels between what happened to her and what happened to MaryLee Stock.”
“On it, boss,” he says. “There’s another thing you should know. King’s people just started a flash vigil at City Hall.”
The pieces don’t yet fit together in my head, but I still can’t get over the strange connection between MaryLee Stock and Cobalt Becker, especially in light of Becker’s critical relationship with Senator King. “I’m heading over now.”
The traffic starts slowing at 17th and Locust. By 15th Street it’s not moving at all. I pull in to a lot then start walking rapidly toward the noise. The din that first sounded like electronic static clarifies into thundering words as I near City Hall.
“A cold night is descending on this country,” the unmistakable voice booms. “If we continue on the path of sin, if we continue to interfere with God’s plan and challenge our Creator through the manipulation of life itself, then we are sowing the seeds of our own destruction, we are paving the road for our descent into hell.”
By 12th Street, the full scene comes into view. Hundreds of people are holding hands in three concentric circles surrounding the City Hall building. All are wearing the same e-shirt, each digital shirt broadcasting the same live image on the front and back of Senator Kin
g speaking at yet another rally. The sound emitted by each of the shirts alone is small, but together they almost shake the building.
“I did not ask to follow this path,” Senator King declares from the hundreds of shirts, “but the Lord sometimes calls upon all of us to take a stand, to do what is right in his name. The Bible tells us to render unto Caesar all things that are Caesar’s. My friends, my brothers and sisters, we are all Caesars and God’s word commands us to get this great ship of state heading once again in the right direction.”
I am amazed at how completely Senator King, the brilliant political tactician with such a keen sense of the prevailing winds, has morphed himself from the rational conservative Republican he was to the quasi-religious figure he has now become. I despise what King and this movement stand for, but it’s hard not to feel the power of his words, the strength of the bond he has created with his band of believers.
I walk around the outside of the circle, noting the wide-eyed conviction of the righteous army, contrasting it in my mind with the mild agreement so many of my friends feel when listening to the measured words of President Lewis and Vice President Alvarez. The president may be right, but I sense something possibly even more powerful in the electric energy that binds these people to each other and to King’s Republican primary charge.
“And so my fellow Americans, my fellow children of God, I ask you. Will you stand for what you know in your heart to be true? Will you stand to cleanse our country through God’s will? Will you stand with me and stand together?”
The ralliers are now weeping. They let go of each other and raise their hands in the air. Their singing starts softly then gains intensity. “God shall overcome, God shall overcome, God shall overcome someday.”
Senator King’s amped voice trumpets through the song. “Together, we will reincarnate our great country through God’s will. God bless you. God bless America. God shall overcome.”
The scene is stunning. I feel moved in spite of myself, the electricity of this politically charged zealotry moving through me.
Until I feel the vibration on my wrist.
“I need to see you. Now,” Maurice’s voice booms through my earpiece with a tone I’ve never heard from him.
35
The look on Maurice Henderson’s face is bewildered with a strong dose of furious.
He stomps over to my car and gets in, slamming the door behind him.
“Potassium cyanide looks like sugar. At about three hundred milligrams, it’s deadly,” he barks.
“And that’s—”
“Yes.” He cuts me short. “In doses over three hundred milligrams, it leads to heart block and death. It wasn’t Blue Magic. That’s how MaryLee Stock died.”
“And—”
“Potassium cyanide clears the bloodstream within a few hours, leaving almost no trace. Someone killing themselves probably wouldn’t care so much about that and would have a lot of other options.”
“But if it clears the bloodstream so fast,” I say, “how do we know that’s what killed her?”
“A regular autopsy wouldn’t catch it. I had the deputy coroner do every possible test after he ‘borrowed’ the tissue samples. Trace amounts of potassium cyanide showed up in the tissue.”
“And a dose that high would need to be ingested or injected,” I say.
Maurice taps on the dashboard with an intensity and urgency that frightens me. A long, heavy silence fills the car. There’s something more.
“Maurice, tell me,” I say exasperatedly.
“How many chromosomes does a normal person have?”
“Forty-six.”
Maurice stares at me with an intense focus. “MaryLee Stock was pregnant,” he says after a pause.
My face tells Maurice, I know, so what?
He stares at me before speaking. “Her fetus had forty-seven.”
My eyes pop as my brain processes the magnitude of this new information. “And if she was impregnated at an IVFGS clinic,” I say feverishly, “then the various fertilized eggs were all screened before one got inserted.”
“Yes.”
“And so a decision was made at Bright Horizons to impregnate her with an abnormal fetus.”
“Yes,” Maurice says softly.
“Holy mother of God.” I only realize the irony of my words after they escape my mouth. “And so either the father has a genetic abnormality and the clinic agreed to use his DNA regardless or something else is going on.”
Maurice nods pensively.
“But IVFGS clinics don’t impregnate people with abnormalities like that. The Supreme Court settled that,” I continue.
“Yup.”
“And we’re dealing with something a lot more serious than we thought.”
“Yes.”
The silence feels thick as fog.
“So why would an IVFGS clinic impregnate a woman with a defective chain of chromosomes?”
“Defective?” Maurice asks.
“If I remember my biology, people born with too many or too few chromosomes can end up kind of freaky.”
“What do you know about genetic enhancement?”
The words stop me in my tracks. “Biology 101,” I say. “Viruses carry replacement genes into the nucleus.”
“That’s right,” Maurice says. “I spoke with the deputy coroner about this. Apparently a forty-seventh chromosome can work as a docking station for additional genes.”
My mind shifts into overdrive. News reports from past years on the miraculous advances in genetics and reproductive biology position and reposition themselves like jigsaw pieces in my head. “So why don’t you just go to your boss and tell him what’s going on?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Maurice says. “I don’t trust him. Nothing about this case has smelled right from the beginning. It’s obvious the official autopsy report was a sham. It’s one thing to miss potassium cyanide traces, but no one misses a pregnancy. There’s no way that could’ve happened without the chief being somehow involved. I have no idea who else might be involved and how high this goes. Reporting this in without first figuring it out could make things ugly.”
“And option two is for me to go to my boss and try to get her to run the story, but they’re not going to risk the paper for this. And I can’t publish elsewhere because the NPA restrictions apply to me, and any news organization in the US that runs it will be shut down and any foreign news organization immediately taken down by the US government.”
“Which leaves us with option three,” Maurice says. “Finding out what the hell is going on before more bad things happen, so we can figure out what to do without getting fired, imprisoned, or killed.”
Maurice’s words hit me. When this story hinged on computer code, the stakes were high enough. The stakes now are, quite literally, existential. Whoever killed MaryLee Stock won’t necessarily stop there. “So what now?”
“We need more information on Megan Fogerty and Becker.”
“I’ve got my team working on that already,” I say. “The Becker connection is eating at me. His ‘chosen one’ is murdered pregnant, then I start questioning him and the feds jump in. It’s too many coincidences. I feel like I should I go back to Springfield.”
“So he can tell you the same thing again? You’ve done that already,” Maurice says, “we need to start probing him from different angles, approach him from a different place.” He pauses a moment to think. “Didn’t you say Becker has a home in Texas?”
“I’m not sure about a home, but he seems to have a big cattle ranch.”
“Is that strange?”
“I don’t know. One of the newspaper articles called him God’s rancher building his herd.”
“Sounds pretty strange to me,” Maurice says wryly.
“Hmm,” I mumble, the preliminary thought forming in my mind.
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure,” I say, the neurons not fully connecting. “Something about building a herd, building a c
ongregation, building a movement.”
“Maybe you should go have a look.”
36
“MaryLee Stock died from a dose of potassium cyanide. Her fetus had an extra chromosome.”
Joseph’s shock comes through the screen. “An extra chromosome, boss?” He looks as if he hasn’t heard me correctly.
“A mutation, possibly an enhancement.”
“An enhancement?” Joseph says, going through the stages of shock I went through earlier in the morning.
Joseph starts to mumble indecipherably. “Thayolee.”
“What are you saying Joseph?”
“It’s Malayalam. You don’t want to know.”
“A parking station for genetic enhancements.”
“I’ve read about the possibility of using an extra chromosome as part of a genetic enhancement process, boss. We used it in India to make our rice drought resistant when the aquifers started to dry.”
“Well, we need to know a lot more,” I say, wiping my sweaty palms on my jeans. “We need to know the possibilities for an embryo with an extra chromosome.”
“Yeah, boss, and how it got there.”
“That’s the key, Joseph.” I’m almost numb from the potential implications. “What do you have on Megan Fogerty?”
“There’s not much on her, but I’m sending you what I have right now. Twenty-six years old, not married, worked as an art therapist in the Willard Knox Village retirement complex.”
“Was she involved with a church?”
“I didn’t see anything, boss.”
I tap my u.D, and the side of Jerry Weisberg’s head appears on my dashboard.
“Mmm,” he says, not looking up from his bank of computer screens.
“Jerry, it’s Rich and Joseph,” I say.
“Mmm,” Jerry says.
“Jerry,” I say, trying to get his attention, “we need to talk with you.”
“Mmm,” he says again, still not looking up from his screens.
I tell him what we’ve found.
Jerry’s head snaps toward the screen. “Holy shit,” he says with the face of someone who’s just seen a UFO. “And if she got it at Bright Horizons, then—”
