But Nancy’s aghast expression appeared sincere. Robin had no reason to suspect the woman of lying except for the damning evidence found in Jacob’s bloodstream. “Would you mind if we do a few blood tests on you, Mrs. Wright? This may help narrow down the cause of the prion infection as well as clear up the confusion regarding the suspicious delivery vectors.”
“Fine,” Nancy said. “Do whatever you must.”
“Thank you. I know this is upsetting and confusing, but I want you to know I’m on your son’s side, and I want to see your entire family walk out of this hospital in good health.”
Nancy appeared skeptical. “You won’t find any genetic enhancements in my blood.”
Robin didn’t respond as she prepared a collection needle. Anticipation filled her as she cleaned Nancy’s arm, located a vessel, and withdrew the blood.
“Promise me you won’t report us,” Doug said. “We’ve done nothing wrong. Between the cancer and this CJD stuff, we don’t need to fight against child-protection services, too.” His eyes sheened with wetness.
Robin chewed her bottom lip but wouldn’t make a promise she couldn’t keep. She wanted to believe them, but she’d been burned before by charming, manipulative parents. “I’ll have results as soon as I can.”
Since she was already staying late and wasn’t on shift for the pediatric oncology unit, she took the blood samples to the lab herself. Once in the room full of humming equipment, clean glassware, and racks of plastic test tubes, she loaded a drop of Nancy’s blood onto a screening assay to confirm the presence of the delivery vector they had uncovered in Jacob’s vessels. As she waited for the small machine to pop out the results, she found herself desperate to believe the Wrights. Doug’s final plea to her rang out in her mind. Between the cancer and this CJD...
She was supposed to make people feel better. She was supposed to cure kids of cancer, restore families, and send them home happy. Instead, she might destroy the Wrights if she reported them to Child Protection Services. She hated the pain she caused them after all they’d gone through but needed to prove Nancy told the truth and the woman hadn’t abused any gene mods.
The blood screening machine hummed along, and Robin glanced at a gene sequencer across the room. Of course! She pipetted a tiny droplet of the blood sample into a small plastic tube and rushed to the sequencer. The device buzzed to life as Robin inserted the sample.
A holoscreen appeared before her, first reporting the cells were being digested and the DNA separated from the cellular matter. Seconds later, a progress bar materialized, displaying the amount of decoded genetic material. She would have access to Nancy Wright’s entire genome in minutes.
Behind her, the blood screening machine beeped to signify it had completed its own processing. Robin swallowed hard when she viewed the reports and saw the same delivery vector system appearing in Nancy’s blood. The woman’s story wasn’t looking good. Maybe she had injected herself with an enhancement contaminated with those prions and it passed through her breast milk into Jacob.
Walking back to the genetic sequencer, dread filling her, Robin exhaled. The machine quieted down, and a holodisplay sparked to life. A long list of nonsensical As, Ts, Cs, and Gs appeared, signifying each of the nucleotides found in Nancy’s cells’ genes.
She ran Nancy’s genome through a database designed to detect known genetic enhancements. A ping sounded from the computer, and it reported no matches. Maybe Nancy was telling the truth.
To further confirm the results, Robin tested Nancy’s current genome with reports stored in her medical records back from when she was an infant and those obtained from routine physicals throughout her life. The genomes were the same. That meant there had been no genes added or altered in Nancy’s’ cells since her birth, which signified the woman hadn’t taken any enhancements.
But the question still lingered in Robin’s mind. Where did the delivery vectors come from, and how did they connect with the prion disease?
She examined a 3D model of a delivery vector. With a gesture, she rotated it in the air before her. Briefly, she thought to ask Chris what he thought. He probably wouldn’t have much to offer. He hadn’t been involved in the illegal enhancement business in a while. She’d tell him, but she needed to talk to someone soon, someone who’d be able to tell her what she was looking at. If that person couldn’t help her find the answers, her hands would be tied. She’d be forced to call Child Protection Services, and the courts would handle it from there.
Whether or not Nancy proved innocent, CPS might take Jacob as a precaution. It could be months of court battles and legal fees before the Wrights saw their son again.
Now Robin toyed with her comm card. An old message from Chris shone on the display reporting Dellaporta had survived the attack on the senator but sustained injuries. Robin hated to impose upon someone who’d recently escaped death, but this mystery was perfectly suited for Dellaporta and her Bio Unit.
Robin glanced at the time. Four thirty in the morning. She hadn’t been lying when she’d told Chris she’d be working late. Of course she had little time to spare. Tapping on her comm card to place a call, she hoped Dellaporta was an early riser.
Chapter 11
Ana Dellaporta slid her comm card over the security identification checkpoint. The doors hissed open, and she stepped into the basement vault where Baltimore PD stored evidence.
“Detective, what the hell are you doing here this late? Aren’t you supposed to be on bed rest or something?” Jesse Luciano’s voice crackled through a speaker. From behind the bullet-proof glass, he shot Ana a questioning look, his eyebrows arched and his lips pursed. He bore the lonely responsibility of checking in investigators to Baltimore PD’s evidence files.
“They can’t keep me at home, even if they fired me.”
Luciano laughed. “Don’t I know it. You’re one of my few regular late-night visitors. If you weren’t coming in, I’d probably be sitting here and getting paid to twiddle my thumbs. What can I do you for?”
She tried to tell herself to wait until Gordon approved her request to examine the rest of the equipment and Blackbird supplements he’d delivered to evidence. But waiting a few days wasn’t going to satiate her unquenchable curiosity. “I’m here to reexamine a few old files regarding the Christopher Morgan cases,” she said. Better nobody knew her real intentions yet.
Luciano scrolled through the files projected across his holoscreen. “All the cases involving Morgan are closed.” He raised an eyebrow. “Got a secret to share with the class?”
“No, nothing’s being reopened.” She leaned closer to the bulletproof glass, her lips near the tiny microphone by the old-fashioned intercom speaker. “I want to see if there’s anything we missed in connection with the Sharp case. If the feds got their heads up their asses, it’d look real sweet if our department found something first.”
“Sounds intriguing,” Luciano said. No one in the department had been thrilled when the FBI axed their roles in the Sharp investigations.
He pressed a button, and a hologram floated in front of Ana and requested her physiological signature. She took a step back from the desk as a series of lasers traced her body. When they were done, she opened one eye wide, and the lights scanned her retina. When the biometric identifications were complete, a metal door slid open beside Luciano’s glass enclosure.
“Do your stuff,” he said as he gave her a playful salute.
She nodded and ducked into the doorway. A shiver went down her spine as the cool air hit her. The rows of plastic bins, labeled with black ink on notecards and file folders, provided a marked contrast to the more technological security measures required to enter the environmentally controlled chamber. Her eyes dried out with the lack of humidity as she scanned the metal shelves searching for where Gordon had placed the contents of the day’s investigation.
He’d said the investigators found an entire at-home lab setup in the Baltimore Telegraph’s office. He claimed they’d discovered a genetic sequ
encer, an array of lab-on-a-chip devices, and other equipment used to screen for contaminants like viruses, bacteria, or other harmful pathogens and toxins. Such a collection should be easy to spot. She scanned the room.
Bingo. On a shelf near the floor, she found a plastic tub labeled with the correct date and case number. She pulled the tub out. No more than a dozen plastic Blackbird supplement bottles rolled around the bottom of the container, along with a few lab-on-a-chip devices the size of her palm. In her mind, she pictured the stacks of bottles back at the Telegraph’s office. This small sampling represented no more than ten percent of the stock she’d seen. Certainly the journalist’s exhaustive laboratory setup necessitated more than the handful of chip devices hardly taking up a corner of the plastic bin.
She must have missed something. She scoured the shelves and dug through containers unrelated to the case. The only other bin matching with any evidence from Ross Garret’s murder held the journalist’s bloodied shirt and pants. She found none of the equipment Gordon had described earlier.
Ana checked the time on her comm card. The card displayed 3:59 a.m. She’d been in here for more than an hour. Luciano would be getting suspicious by now. She cursed inwardly and knelt to examine the bin with the supplements again. Where the hell had the rest of the confiscated equipment gone?
She considered asking Luciano if all the evidence from Garret’s murder had been deposited but struggled to concoct a viable reason why she needed to know.
A muffled bang caught her ears. It sounded like a chair falling and slapping against the tiled floor. She paused, her head cocked as she waited to hear Luciano cursing outside for his clumsiness.
But no other sounds penetrated the thick steel doors to the evidence room.
Ana slumped and dropped her head into her hands. Why am I driving myself crazy over a case that isn’t even mine?
She sighed and stretched her arms out. Her right shoulder lit up in pain as she flexed the healing tissue. She stood to leave, but the doors to the room hissed open. Her heart leapt into her throat. She scrambled away from the Telegraph evidence bins and hid behind the shelf. She didn’t know who was coming through that door, but she didn’t need anyone else to find she’d been spending time in evidence when she was supposed to be off the job. That might land her another couple weeks on paid suspension—or, worse, they might catch her drooling over the Telegraph evidence and a by-the-book asshole would report her for tampering with unassigned cases.
She slunk behind a shelf farther in the back and peeked through the bins to see who had interrupted her late-night solitude. Two figures walked in, their faces masked. One holstered a weapon, and the other carried a pistol in his right hand.
Ana held her breath. Her fingers traced over her own holstered handgun and curled around the pistol grip. She inched further into the shadows. A layer of sweat formed between her palm and the gun.
One of the figures crouched down, disappearing from her sight, near where she had examined the Telegraph case bins. The sound of plastic scraping against metal rang out. “See? I told you there’s practically nothing in here.” The voice possessed a slow cadence Ana recognized, but the muffled words coming from the mask prevented her from placing it.
“I need to see all the bins,” the other figure said, his voice unfamiliar.
“Right now?”
“Damn it. Yes, right now. If there’s anything at all that would connect us, it’s got to be eliminated.”
“I’m telling you, there’s nothing else here,” the crouched figure said.
“I want to see for myself.”
More scraping of plastic against metal sounded as one of the men opened all the evidence files in the row.
Adrenaline surged through Ana, and her nerves went cold. If they were going to examine every damn case in the room, she’d need to move. She prepared to dodge to another row when the vibration of her comm card emanated from her pocket. Plunging her hand into her pocket, she turned it off, silencing the incoming call.
The figures rifling through the files stopped. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Thought I heard something. Sounded like someone prowling around outside or something. I’m telling you, man, you can cut the alarms in here, you can do everything you want to the security system, but if some busybody comes down here to check something in or out, they’re sure as hell going to see Luciano.”
The familiarity with which the man spoke Luciano’s name seemed to indicate the masked figure knew the evidence guard. A shiver went down her spine.
“You’re too easily spooked, kid.”
“Spooked?” The crouched figure stood. “I’m being cautious.”
“Fine. Nobody came down with us, but why don’t you see if anyone’s out there if that makes you feel better. Either way, we’re getting out of here soon.”
The figure with the familiar voice peeked into the hall and then returned. “Nobody.”
“Like I said.”
Ana could see them both again. She flipped on her comm card’s recording feature and cursed herself inwardly for not acting sooner.
“Yeah, we’re safe. We’ve got eyes in the sky, eyes in the halls, eyes fricking everywhere. We’ve got nothing to worry about but cleaning up this damn mess.”
“This is your damn mess.” The second figure jabbed his finger into the other’s chest. “If you cleaned it up like you should’ve before, we wouldn’t have to be here now.”
Ana bit her bottom lip to refrain from gasping. She now realized to whom the second voice belonged. Gordon Huff. She still could not fathom why he roamed around in a mask with a gun at the ready down here but figured something much larger was at stake regarding the Telegraph murder than she’d first thought.
“Fine, fine. Torch the damn place.” The first figure sauntered over to another plastic bin.
“Thank you,” Gordon said, his words drawn out in exasperation. “Just because you screwed up doesn’t mean I did.”
The other masked man ignored the jibe, and he pulled out one of the evidence files. Ana considered jumping out and commanding them to freeze. She gripped her pistol tighter.
As she drew her right arm up, the pain in her shoulder coursed through her again. She wanted to tell them to stop, to find out what the hell they were doing, but they were both armed. She might take down one of them, but if the other was a cop like Gordon, she could end up in a point-blank firefight, and this time she wore no bulletproof vest to protect her. She didn’t know how many times fortune would bless her in less than forty-eight hours.
Her palms grew clammy as she debated her next actions.
“That’s the one,” Gordon said, pointing at the bin the first figure had slid from the shelf. “The comm cards in there belonged to that guy we locked up for neural implants. Real wizard with electronics. If anybody had programmed an incendiary device to escape detection, it would’ve been that guy.”
“This is a pretty shitty plan as it is. You better pray to God this works.”
“It will.”
Ana wanted to move, but fear kept her in place. The memories of the bullets slamming against her chest, knocking the air out of her, plunging into her flesh, blood soaking into her shirt...it all flooded her mind.
The first figure dropped a comm card into the evidence bin, and Gordon hustled to the door. The other man joined him. Gordon tried to exit, but his partner grabbed his shoulder. “Not so quick. We need to do it now. I need to make sure it goes up, or this will all have been a waste of time.”
Gordon pressed a small device he held in his right hand, and flames burst forth from the shelf where he’d dropped the comm card. A bright orange ball of fire exploded upward and enveloped the evidence bins.
Ana fell back against the wall.
“There’s your goddamned fire. Let’s move.” Gordon sprinted out as the blaze spread to the neighboring shelves. His accomplice scanned the evidence room once more before following.
As the
fire grew and smoke filled the space, Ana crawled to the exit. Her arms shook, and her lips quaked. She felt like a child, a little girl. She’d let this happen.
Fury built up and exploded within her, more violent than the incendiary device Gordon and the other man had set off. She stood, her knees shaking. With a frustrated yell, she charged out of the room, her pistol out and her face contorted in anger.
She swung the gun out into the hallway, but both men were gone. Whipping her head back and forth, she figured they’d go out the nearest exit and sprinted toward the stairs leading away from Luciano’s desk. As she ran by the glass enclosure, she saw Luciano had left his post. No wonder the two men had gotten in undetected.
Her foot hit the first step, and a gargled yell called out. She froze and spun around. Another gurgle sounded from near the desk. It came from the intercom attached to the glass shell protecting Luciano’s post. Only when she paused to strain her ears did she notice the hole torn through the purportedly bulletproof material.
Ana’s heart thumped against her rib cage. She rushed back to the desk and pressed her face against it to see behind Luciano’s desk. The officer reached up, his left eye catching hers. The bottom right half of his face had been shorn off. Only ragged fragments of tissue and bone hung from where his jaw and eye socket should have been.
Her stomach twisted, but Ana steeled herself against the building nausea. She pounded on the glass. “Let me in. Please, let me in.” The post locked from the inside. Only the officer on duty or a higher-up with security clearance could access the area. The touchpad the man used to unlock the glass cage sat on top of his desk. “Just hit the damn button, Luciano. Please.”
A gurgling cry bubbled up from the remainder of his mouth. His fingers twitched.
Ana dug into her pocket for her comm card and placed a call for immediate medical attention. There was no way they would make it down in time. She stretched through the hole, the jagged glass tearing at her shirt and arm. Blood trickled out of cuts as she struggled to reach the touchpad. Her fingers traced the top of Luciano’s desk. She reached in farther, now on tip-toes. Agony coursed through her as the wounds in her right shoulder opened again.
The Black Market DNA Series: Books 1-3 Page 58
