Crosscut

by Meg Gardiner

  “A brain tumor?” Jesse said.

  “Growths and degeneration. That part of her brain just”—he raised his hands, gesturing hopelessness—“disintegrated.”

  “Jesus.”

  We rolled through Westwood Village. Jesse glanced around. This was his old stomping ground, from his years at UCLA law school. Off to the left I glimpsed the Medical Center through the semibohemian mishmash of falafel stands and movie theaters and crapola vendors that edged the campus.

  Jesse shifted his shoulders. “Pain is nothing but a perception in the brain,” he said. “Eliminate the perception and you eliminate the pain. You can do that by disconnecting part of the body from the central nervous system, or you can do it by altering brain chemistry.” His voice was dry as sand. “Figure a vaccine would go for the second option.”

  I thought of Valerie’s unsteadiness, memory problems, and paranoia. And of Ceci Lezak being given a postmortem skull X-ray in Wally’s dentist’s chair.

  “Who else, Dad?”

  “Some deaths are outside the pattern. A couple of kids, pretty clear their deaths were alcohol- or drug-related.”

  “Chad Reynolds dying of exposure out in the desert,” I said. “Tommy told me animals got to his body, but there was enough of him left for the coroner to find barbiturates in his system. And Billy D’Amato—the crash site reeked of whiskey.”

  “And Ted Horowitz.” He shook his head. “Pure tragedy, walking headfirst into that propeller.”

  Jesse hadn’t heard about that. His grip on the throttle wavered. “Christ.”

  “I know the CAG on the Nimitz—the officer responsible for carrier air operations. They investigated that accident six ways from Sunday. Teddy was a popular crewman, and folks were looking for any way to explain what happened without blaming him. But he plain blew it.”

  My head began aching again. The day was flashy. Cars were streaks of shine passing on Wilshire, and trees waved dollar-green in the breeze. Around us office towers and penthouse apartments appeared. The boulevard curved, rolling like a river between rising cliffs.

  “Then there’s Dana West,” Dad said.

  “The hospital fire?”

  “It was arson.”

  “Holy hell. How do you know that?”

  “I called in a favor and—”

  His cell phone rang. He excused himself and answered, speaking tersely and taking out a pen to write something on the back of an envelope.

  My stomach was roiling. I pressed a hand against it. Nothing but a spark, and this little thing was already igniting my life physically and spiritually. Jesse pulled into the right lane. His hair fell over his collar. I wanted to push it aside and kiss him behind the ear and tell him the news before I burst into tears or flames. He stopped for a red light.

  I double-checked the address of Primacon Labs. “Two more blocks.”

  Dad hung up.

  Jesse turned to him. “If Dana West was murdered, then—”

  “Hold that thought.”

  He opened his door, jumped out, and dodged away, weaving between cars and dashing across the intersection.

  I gaped. “What’s he doing?”

  “Damn.” Jesse smacked his hand against the steering wheel. “He wants to talk to Swayze alone.”

  And he thought that he could short-circuit us because I would have to stay with Jesse to get his hardware from the back of the pickup. I jumped out and ran to the cargo bed.

  Jesse pointed up the street. “Forget it. Catch him.”

  “No way.”

  I fumbled with the bungee cords that lashed the wheelchair frame to the truck. Dad was halfway up the next block. The light turned green and traffic began moving.

  Jesse leaned out the window. “Leave it. Go.”

  Cars streamed past me. Horns blared. I yanked the frame free and chucked it into the cab. A Navigator rumbled by and the driver shouted, “Moron!”

  I slammed the door. “Meet me at Swayze’s office.”

  I ran after my father, across the intersection and down the street.

  Argent Tower was twenty-five stories of smoked glass, shaped like a Celtic cross. In the sparkling plaza out front, purple sage and white jasmine gushed around an extravagant fountain. Above the entrance a banner advertised two hundred thousand square feet of office space still available. I ran down the sidewalk, seeing my father cross the plaza toward the entrance. My mouth was dry. How could he pull such a rude stunt?

  By the time I shoved my way through the revolving door into the lobby, I was winded. I looked around. At the center of the building soared a spectacular atrium. Two mezzanine levels circled the lobby, and for a dozen floors above that walkways ran around the overlook. The elevators had Plexiglas windows from which to enjoy the view. This building was meant to be admired, and it was apparently brand-new. On a tall scaffold near the entrance, two painters were lettering the name of a yet-to-open deli. And, given the banner outside begging for tenants, the building was nearly vacant.

  The gray man behind the front desk roused himself from his boredom and leaned forward in his chair. “Help you?”

  “Sorry. I’m running late. Evan Delaney to see Dr. Swayze at Primacon.”

  He had a face like a toad. He jotted on a clipboard and pushed it across the desk at me. “Sign here.”

  I scribbled my name on the sign-in sheet. He noted the time and lackadaisically tore off a square of paper that he affixed to a clip. “Hand this back in when you leave.”

  I clipped it on. “Which floor?”

  “Eight. Take the elevator on the far side of the lobby. The one behind my desk goes to the parking garage, and—”

  “Thanks.” I strode around the corner and saw elevator doors closing. “Hold that.”

  A hand stopped the door. I ducked in, wiping sweat from my forehead.

  “Sorry I’m late. Traffic was horrendous.”

  My father looked at me edgeways, pursed his mouth, and let out a little heh. The doors closed and the elevator rose. The view soared up the atrium.

  “Why don’t you want me along?” I said. “And don’t tell me this is about having a security clearance.”

  “I’ll get more information out of Maureen on my own.”

  “Information you’ll filter as you see fit?”

  “Are you questioning my motives?”

  I turned to him. “That was a dirty trick you pulled.”

  The elevator stopped on three and the doors opened. Nobody was there.

  He pushed the close button. “Give Jesse some credit.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He’s smart as all get-out, and he has guts. More than I ever imagined when I first met him.”

  The elevator stopped on four. Again it opened to an empty lobby. The doors half closed, opened again, and finally crept shut. Dad punched eight several times.

  “Now, do you think someone so intelligent and so tough expects me to make allowances for him at a time like this? I don’t.” He watched the numbers go up. “So take it on the chin, and stop feeling embarrassed for him. This is deadly serious stuff.”

  My face felt hot. Little muttering sounds popped around my mouth.

  He frowned. “You are madder than a hornet. Cool down.” His expression softened. “I know you feel for Jesse. We all do.”

  In his eyes I saw a sadness that nearly made me scream. Don’t pity him. Don’t you dare. I clenched my hands.

  “Fine, Dad. But I’m coming with you.”

  His mouth twitched, and he acquiesced. He watched the elevator rise through the atrium, eyes narrow, as though scanning the horizon for Comanches.

  “Dana West was an air force nurse. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “She was posted to Blackfoot Depot when she died.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “An alkali flat smack in the middle of Wyoming. It’s a podunk place, and that hospital was barely more than a clinic. A gas explosion in the operating theater blew up half the structure.
Fire took the rest of it.”

  “Jesus. How do you know it was arson?”

  The elevator lurched to a stop, bouncing on its cables. The doors cracked open on an unoccupied level: bare concrete and conduit hanging from the ceiling. We were two feet higher than the floor outside. We stared.

  “This building has a few kinks that need working out,” I said.

  Dad jabbed buttons. The doors puttered closed. We held our breath and felt the car move. When he spoke again, his voice was muted.

  “Surgical fires are deadly. Light up a laser or electrocautery tool around enriched O2 and the results can be devastating. And generally it’s the patient who gets burned.”

  “So what happened to Dana?”

  “Dana was the patient.”

  The door thunked open. A woman’s voice cut through the dire silence.

  “Phil Delaney. Talk about a bolt from the blue.”

  There in the sleek foyer of Primacon Laboratories, arms akimbo, knowing smile on her face, stood Dr. Maureen Swayze. And she didn’t look surprised. She looked like a woman who had long expected Phil Delaney to walk through the door.

  He removed his hat. “Sway.”

  He smiled at her. His hand was out. She shook it briskly.

  He gestured to me. “My daughter, Evan.”

  She lifted her chin to peer at me through rimless glasses. From her squint, I might have been an intriguing retrovirus.

  “You have that Delaney glint in your eye. Phil called it poise. Others labeled it mulishness.” She smirked at him. “Did she inherit your taste for Jack Daniel’s and Patsy Cline?”

  I almost squirmed. “Yes, actually.”

  “ ‘Sweet Dreams’ on the jukebox?”

  “I’m more the ‘Crazy’ kind.”

  She laughed, brisk and clipped: a single ha.

  Her hair was the color of tin mixed with copper. Younger, she had been one of those luxuriant redheads who looked at home striding into a wild headwind. Now, with a pencil jammed into her untidy ponytail and her blouse coming untucked from her skirt, she looked overworked and wonkish. The squint, I guessed, came from thirty years spent frowning into the lens of a microscope.

  “It’s China Lake, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Yes,” Dad said. “Only now it’s more than that.”

  “I heard on the news. Come with me.”

  She gave the receptionist our names. As the girl jotted them down, Swayze swiped a passcard along a security strip by double doors and took us down a hall past offices and cubicles. The carpet was plush, the wallpaper soothing. Primacon looked busy. Purposeful men in shirtsleeves were working at computers or conferring intensely, drawing diagrams of molecules on whiteboards.

  “Quite a setup,” Dad said. “What’s the focus of your research?”

  “Enzyme deaggregation of amyloid plaques as an approach to Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.”

  She veered into an office. Papers were piled on chairs and shelves, and a spider plant was dead on a credenza. On the bookshelf, a set of dog tags hung from a framed photo of a young Swayze arm in arm with an army Ranger. She was in jeans and a tank top, wearing a beret. Wearing it like a commando, not a mademoiselle. I bet they spent evenings spitting bullets into the bedroom wall for fun.

  Dad slapped his hat against his thigh. “Word on the grapevine, these murders might have been committed by someone who was connected to the base back when you were working there.”

  She cleared seats for us, dumping things on the floor. “So why is it you’re here, instead of the police?”

  “The victims are members of Evan’s high school class.”

  She plopped down in her desk chair. “Explaining why you dropped out of the sky like the airborne, with offspring in tow. You think I can give you a name?”

  “We’re hoping.”

  She took off her glasses, rubbed her nose where they’d left red marks, and stared at my father. “You’re scared.”

  “Damn right.”

  “What information can you give me, beyond what I hear on TV?”

  I sat down. “I have a source who’s told me the killer was attached to Project South Star.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Goodness. How do you come to have sources who want to break security on a classified project?”

  “They’ve told me the killer is known as Coyote.”

  She drummed her fingers on the desk. “And let me guess. Your source suggested that this killer was one of South Star’s robo-grunts.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She glanced at Dad. “What does she know?”

  “What’s in the open literature. Sway, you—”

  “So this source played it up.” She peered down the length of her nose at me. “Reducing soldiers’ need for food and sleep on the battlefield? Keeping them from collapsing from pain? I was turning them into drones. Machines who kill without reason or remorse. Robo-grunts. Right?”

  “Wrong,” I said. “I have no complaint with giving our forces a physical edge on the battlefield.”

  Dad gave her a conciliatory smile. “Sway, we aren’t here to argue.”

  “She is.” She had heat in her voice. “She thinks my project is responsible for killing her friends. Don’t deny it.”

  I didn’t. I couldn’t. I generally can’t lie worth crap.

  “I don’t know how much propaganda you’ve swallowed, but preventing pain and exhaustion in war fighters is not inhumane. It’s lifesaving.”

  She reached for the dog tags that hung on the picture frame and tossed them on the desk in front of me.

  “Those belonged to my husband, Sam. When his unit was ambushed, he took an RPG blast to the gut. The enemy was closing in and he was in too much agony to aim his weapon, and his unit refused to leave him. So to keep his men from dying there defending him, he put the barrel of his rifle to his own head.”

  The steel in her eyes discomfited me. I looked at the photo of the smiling Ranger. There was pride on his face, perhaps at having Maureen Swayze at his side.

  “Did I want to keep that from happening to others? You bet. Preventing pain is a noble goal. So stop acting like you need to hold your nose around me.”

  She returned the dog tags to the edge of the picture frame.

  “Don’t misunderstand,” she said. “My work at China Lake was a martial enterprise, and I knew it going in. The brain is the ultimate weapons platform.”

  “Dr. Swayze, that’s what I’m afraid of. Some of my classmates have died from neurological problems.”

  “And you think it relates back to that explosion near Renegade Canyon?” She eyed me. “Yes, I remember it. You ended up shuddering on the floor in the gymnasium hallway. But it’s not possible.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “We monitored your health. There were no effects. Not even smoke inhalation.”

  “What if this thing had a long incubation period?”

  She held up a hand. “There is no ‘thing.’ It’s not possible. That’s all I can say.”

  I gestured at Dad, frustrated. “Could you say more to him if I weren’t here?”

  Her phone rang. She answered, spoke two clipped sentences, and hung up. “Need to check on something in the lab. Come along. I’ll give you the tour.”

  Dad and I followed her out of the office and down the hall. I felt as though I were being sucked along behind a twister. She absentmindedly tucked her shirt back inside her skirt, nodding at people we passed.

  “After I left China Lake, my research became focused on neurodegenerative disease.” She waved at the offices around her. “Parkinson’s treatments, reversing Alzheimer’s by strengthening the body’s defense mechanisms against rogue protein aggregations that can destroy the brain—the potential is tremendous. Absolutely mind-blowing. And we’re on the bleeding edge of development.”

  We passed a lab. I saw beakers and computers and two men scribbling equations on a whiteboard.

  She eyed me, rimless lenses shining. “I will not di
scuss my classified research with you. But I will say that if the explosion that day caused your class any lasting harm I will eat this laboratory piece by piece, down to the last petri dish.”

  “If it comes to that, I’ll buy the ketchup,” I said.

  She gave a dry laugh. “Fine. Now, brass tacks. You think somebody from China Lake has gone off the deep end. That was twenty years ago, so give me a prompt.”

  Dad said, “A young man, teens or early twenties. Probably white.”

  “Neat. Compulsive. Mission-oriented,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I need more.”

  “An unemotional loner. Maybe nocturnal,” I said.

  She slowed and brought her thumb up to her lips.

  “Someone comes to mind?” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  We reached a heavy door. She pushed it open and went through into a laboratory. Dad followed. I stood rooted in the hallway.

  Dad turned, curious. “Coming?”

  On the door was a radiation hazard sign.

  “I’m—”

  Black and yellow and big as anything: WARNING.

  “Sorry, I’m not feeling well.” I ran the back of my hand across my forehead. “Could you point me toward the bathroom?”

  Perplexity crossed both their faces. Swayze pointed around the corner.

  “Just off the lobby. You don’t need a swipe card to get out. Shall I go with you? Are you okay?”

  I was backing away. “Yeah, it’s just . . .”

  Dad stepped toward me. I shook my head.

  “Get a name.” Turning, I rushed down the hall.

  Damn. I needed air. I needed confirmation, absolutely, that I was actually pregnant. I needed to get out of this nightmare. It wasn’t just my classmates at risk now, or me. It might be my child. Jesse’s child. Oh, my God.

  I shoved open the door to the lobby. The corporate wallpaper felt grating. The potted plants looked screechy. Two visitors milled in front of the receptionist’s desk, waiting for her to get off the phone. I took four steps toward the women’s room and heard what the receptionist was saying.

  “Dr. Swayze, Archie from security just called. A man’s downstairs at the desk asking to come up and see you, third guy in a row, so Archie wants to double-check,” she said. “This one’s in a wheelchair.”