Frankenstein: The Legacy

by Christopher Schildt

  “I live in the city,” she said with a smile and a shrug.

  “New York, right?” he said with another of his almost-a-smiles. “I had a brother, Sigmund. He lived in New York. Married a really pretty girl from Long Island. He died about fifteen years ago, I think. But it’s all right,” Heiman added, half smiling. “Sigmund was a lousy brother.”

  Weaver, who had always taken pride in the fact that she didn’t have any kind of New York accent, asked, “How’d you know I was from New York?”

  “It’s the accent. You try to hide it, I can tell, but I’ve always had a knack for pickin’ that kind of stuff up.” He came in with a plate of crackers, a pot of steaming tea, and two cups and saucers and set it down on the coffee table in front of the couch. Then he took a seat on a cracked old leather easy chair. “Help yourself, Ms. Herbert.”

  As she made her tea, she asked, “How long ago was the fire at St. Michael’s?”

  “Well, let me think for a minute,” he said as he poured his own tea. “Yes, it was after Mrs. Krieger moved out of the neighborhood, just after her husband died. So it would have to have been ’bout thirty years ago. Thirty years . . . Hard to believe. But when you’re my age, the years get so short. They go by just like that,” he added, snapping his fingers, though they made no noise.

  “How did the fire start?”

  “An act of God, of all things,” he answered, half smiling, tugging his shoulders. “It was a terrible windstorm that night. The firemen thought that the wind knocked over some of the candles. You might as well have thrown a lit match into a pile of dry hay.”

  “Tell me, Mr. Heiman, did you know Father Eric Dawl?”

  Heiman set his teacup down on its saucer quietly. So very quietly in fact that she didn’t hear even the faintest clink of porcelain. He waved a finger in the air, saying, “Now, there was one of the finest men I’ve ever had the good fortune to know. Such a kind man.”

  “Then you knew him personally?”

  “Oh, yes. My son Bobby was an infantryman in the Army. Killed in Vietnam. My wife, Lauren, God rest her soul, and I got the telegram about our Bobby on February third, 1969. . . . Father Dawl held a special service just for our son. Imagine that, a Catholic priest holding services for a Jew. That was the type of man that Eric was. ’Course, nowadays, that sort of thing happens more often, but back then?” Heiman sighed. “Such a pleasant man. Always with a kind word and a good-morning-Mr.-Heiman. You know, it’s the small things that you miss the most when you get to be my age.”

  “Was he the priest of St. Michael’s during the fire?” Weaver asked.

  “It was the fire that killed him,” he replied. “That poor man . . . the burns he suffered were horrible. There was a wonderful write-up in the obituaries about him passing away.”

  Heiman leaned over the table, his face clenched, like a man who had just tasted something bitter. He seemed confused, asking, “Where was God’s mercy to such a fine man? How could any God have allowed him to suffer like that?”

  “I wish I could give you an answer, Mr. Heiman,” she said, taking a sip of her tea. It was bitter, but she decided not to put more sugar in. “I just don’t know.”

  “Ah, who’s to say. My son, that wonderful old priest. . . . Everything for a reason, I suppose.”

  “Mr. Heiman, did you ever hear of a man by the name of Daniel Levy?”

  “Should I have? I don’t remember anyone in the neighborhood by that name.”

  “No, he didn’t live here, but he might have visited St. Michael’s about the time of the fire.”

  He answered her at first by chuckling. “There were a lot of people around that night. They all came out of their houses to see if they could help. But the firemen told everybody to stay back.” Heiman slipped into silence for a moment, staring aimlessly across the room, then finally added, “There was one man though . . . oh, but you’d just think I’m a crazy old man.”

  “Who did you see?” Weaver asked, leaning over the coffee table. She looked at him curiously.

  “Well, all right, but remember, you asked me.” He took a deep breath. “It was the strangest-looking man I’ve ever seen in my life. As tall as my storage shed, he was. And that face . . . I’ve never seen such a face in all my years.”

  “What about it?”

  “I couldn’t even begin to describe that face I saw. All twisted—honestly, it looked like something from a Boris Karloff movie.”

  “Maybe he burned in the fire?”

  Heiman shook his head. “No, his clothes weren’t burnt. I remember this—he smelled kind of funny, like he hadn’t bathed or something, but he didn’t smell any more of smoke than anyone else.”

  “So the fire department saw him?”

  “No, he was long gone before they arrived. And you know what? I don’t think they believed us when we told them about him, the firemen, that is. No. The only person they found in the building was poor Father Dawl—what was left of him.”

  Weaver leaned back in the sofa, and for a moment the only sound in the small living room came from the creak of the leather chair that her host sat in. She rubbed the bottom of her chin as she thought to herself, recalling the most ridiculous part of the story Dr. Soluri had told to Agent Blacker. It was, without a doubt, the strangest part of the story about this mysterious Dr. Daniel Levy, having to do with some sort of artificial man created thirty years ago at Princeton.

  Of course, there had been a fire at Princeton—perhaps Levy was burned in that fire. He did disappear from sight shortly thereafter, and maybe it was because of the burns. That would explain the “monster.”

  But then, wouldn’t the chief or his sister have mentioned the burns?

  “Wait!” Heiman exclaimed, his eyes widening. “How could I have forgotten about the other man the firemen found?”

  Her gaze slowly drifted across the room to him. “What other man?”

  “The man they found dead in the church. I believe it was from smoke inhalation. At least that’s what the firemen told us. I don’t think they ever found out who the man was. But you have to understand what kind of a man Father Dawl was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he was always taking in strangers—anyone who might be down on their luck or who just needed a hot meal and a place to stay for a night or two. I don’t think anybody knew who he was. Just a drifter passing through town, I suppose.”

  Weaver stood up. “Mr. Heiman, I need to get going. You have my card—I would really appreciate a call if you can think of anything else.”

  “Certainly,” he answered, nodding his head. “But I can’t imagine what else there’d be.”

  “Oh, one last thing, Mr. Heiman. Someone wrote Burn in Hell with spray paint over the altar at St. Michael’s and hung a cross upside-down. You have any idea why someone would do that?”

  His wrinkled smile tightened into a grim line, and he stared at her for a moment. “People believe . . .” he started to say but suddenly relapsed into silence.

  “What do the people believe, Mr. Heiman?”

  “That big man I told you about, the one with the terrible face . . .”

  “What about him?”

  “Some folks around here think it was the devil—that Satan himself killed Father Dawl.”

  “Bingo,” announced the assistant medical examiner, a fellow by the name of Walter Freeman, staring at the computer monitor on his desk. “Looks like this is your lucky day, Ms. Herbert. Got a John Doe in late October seventy-two with third-degree burns, just like you said. Geez, he had the burns over seventy percent of his body.” He peered at the monitor. “Date of death was October 28, 1972. Hey, this was the St. Michael’s Church fire.” “You remember it?” Weaver asked, surprised.

  “Sure. I was about twelve years old,” he said, then walked over to a row of filing cabinets. “We should still have the autopsy report somewhere.”

  Freeman spent the next ten minutes digging through the tightly packed files, flipping one set of fold
ers after the next. “Wow, you’re batting a thousand,” he said, pulling out a yellowed, wrinkled folder from the cabinet. “You got pictures here and everything.”

  “Don’t suppose you’d let me have a look, would you?” Weaver asked, leaning over the linoleum counter that divided a small office from the waiting room.

  “Don’t suppose you’d want to tell me why?”

  “Absolutely. Our insurance company is working to settle a claim on a man who’s been missing for about twenty-five years. His name was Daniel Levy. Now, the death of your John Doe does coincide with our policyholder’s disappearance.”

  “But you’re going to need some sort of authorization. Normally, you’d need a release signed by the family, but since he’s a John Doe—you’d need a court order.”

  Weaver sighed. If she had to, she could get that court order—it would only take one phone call to Blacker—but there’d be a wait and then she’d have to blow her cover. Federal investigations tended to make people a lot more skittish and would also draw attention that neither Blacker nor Dr. Soluri wanted this to have.

  Then she looked closely at Freeman. He looked both pained and conflicted. Weaver smiled to herself. While Freeman was playing by the rules, he also seemed unhappy about it. Maybe I can turn that to my advantage.

  She said, “I don’t have a court order, no.” That put the proverbial ball in his court.

  “All right, here’s what we do,” he said. “You give me the physical description of your policyholder, and I’ll either answer yes or no. So fire away.”

  Nodding, Weaver said, “Good.” She had hoped he’d find his own way out of the problem. She had also committed Levy’s physical description to memory. “Height: five feet, eleven inches. Weight: one hundred seventy five pounds.”

  Freeman glanced down at the report that he held open in his hands. He smiled. “Damn close, give or take a few pounds. Height is right on the money.”

  “Brown hair, brown eyes, caucasian—male, obviously. He was born in 1936.”

  “Bull’s-eye! Congratulations, Ms. Herbert, you are the winner of your very own decomposing corpse, now buried in plot number forty-one, at the Cherry Hill Cemetery. And, as a bonus, you’ll receive a free exhumation of the grave in question, a comparison of dental records, and DNA testing, all compliments of Essex County.”

  “I’ve got Mr. Levy’s picture; could we make a photo comparison?” Weaver asked, reaching into her briefcase.

  Freeman pulled a black-and-white eighty-by-ten glossy from the file and held it up to the light. He cringed, replying, “No way, most of the face is gone.” He made a face. “Well, there goes lunch.”

  “What about personal effects?”

  Snorting, Freeman said, “On a thirty-year-old case? Good luck. I mean, I can check, but I doubt they’re still around, particularly on a John Doe.”

  Taking out her cell phone, Weaver said, “Excuse me a moment, I need to check with the home office.”

  “Sure,” Freeman said, picking up the phone at his desk. “I’ve got to get the balls rolling on this anyhow.”

  Smiling, Weaver went off to a corner of the hallway in the county building and entered one of the numbers in the phone’s memory. It rang six times until a deep voice answered, “Blacker, go ahead.”

  “It’s Weaver. I think we found him. Unfortunately, he’s dead. I’m at the M.E.’s office in Salem. St. Michael’s burned down on the night that Levy visited the priest. It looks as if he died in the fire. They’ve got a John Doe, matching Levy’s description. The M.E.’s gonna exhume the grave, and we’ll know for sure.” Weaver waited for an answer, but there was none. “Did you copy, sir?”

  “What about his personal effects?” he asked, sounding irritated. “They must keep the personal property on an unidentified victim. Remember, we’re looking for some sort of an old book.”

  Weaver found herself matching Freeman’s earlier snort. “On a thirty-year-old John Doe?”

  “We need—”

  “They’re looking, boss, but I’m not holding out much hope. Anyhow, we’re getting DNA testing and all the works.”

  “Fine. I need you to go to a small town in Maine called Unity.”

  Weaver blinked. “What? Why?”

  “We put a tap on Nicole Levy’s phone. She got three calls from Unity since your little visit, one from a private number, the other three from a pay phone, all in Unity.”

  “Sir, I need to stay here for the exhumation.”

  There was another silence on the other end. “I’ll have Chief Wright contact your M.E. He’s still got an open case on the books regarding the murder of that O’Brien woman. We can trust him.”

  “More than you trust me, obviously,” she muttered.

  Frostily Blacker said, “What’s that, Agent Weaver?”

  “You could’ve told me that Chief Wright knew you and knew I was coming.”

  “Sorry about that, but I figured it was better for you to go in with the cover in case someone else was on duty.”

  “I still think it would make more sense if I stayed here until the body’s exhumed. A thirty-year-old murder case is—”

  “There’s more. Wright sent the fingerprints from the O’Brien murder down to the lab here. Back in seventy-one, they’d need a suspect for a fingerprint comp, but now they can check ’em on request. Guess who came up a match?”

  “Levy?”

  “No, Dr. Linda Kauffman—from a time after she was reported missing.”

  “Interesting.”

  “That’s not even the weird part,” Blacker said. “We’ve also ID’d three other sets of prints. One belongs to the victim. The other two? A nineteen-year-old boy from Baltimore, Maryland, and a thirty-two-year-old man from Atlanta, Georgia—both of whom had been dead for a couple of years at the time of the murder.”

  “But how could that—” Weaver whispered in bewilderment.

  “One other thing: both the other guys I mentioned had their remains donated for medical research when they died.”

  THREE

  Blacker felt truly sick to his stomach at the sight of what Kevin Soluri considered to be a miracle of science, and it was no wonder that the doctor’s research facility had come to be known by some in the intelligence community as “Dr. Moreau’s place.” In one room Soluri showed Blacker how he was able to study the living brain of a dog by clamping the animal into a steel frame and removing the top of its skull. About a dozen pins that were drilled into the skull and spine prevented the animal from moving while it remained fully conscious. The same method was used to study the internal organs of four chimpanzees, large fishing hooks used to stretch apart the flesh where the monkey had been cut down the middle.

  Dr. Soluri was just about to explain why the organ donor program was a godsend to his work, supplying materials needed from the human organs, when he heard Blacker say, “You sick . . . psychotic . . . twisted . . . bastard!”

  The doctor answered him by shaking his head. “I don’t think you understand what we’re trying to do here. We’re interested in the preservation of life, not its destruction.”

  “By torturing little animals?” Blacker replied—shocked, holding back the need to vomit from what he had seen. “Couldn’t you get some rapists or child molesters—”

  “Love to. Unfortunately it qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment. You may have heard of the court case they cited as precedent; I believe it was held at Nuremburg.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m serious, Agent Blacker. Believe me, I’d rather do this on the scum of the earth, but the law won’t allow it. In any case, these animals were bred for research work. We didn’t just go around snatching them.” The doctor chuckled. “We’re working to offer hope to the hopeless. Do you know how many patients die each year waiting for a transplant?”

  “Transplant? What do transplants have to do with anything?”

  Soluri shook his head. “You misunderstand the goal of cloning. We’re only interested in replicating
the human organs. The idea is to create an unlimited supply of hearts, kidneys, lungs—virtually every organ in the human body. Now certainly that’s worth the lives of a couple of monkeys or dogs.”

  “When I joined the bureau, I worked violent crimes. Saw a lot of serial killers in my day. And you know what? They always have a rationalization for everything they do.”

  “What’s your point, Agent Blacker?”

  Blacker sighed. “If you don’t get it now, you never will. Tell me, Doctor, just for shits and grins—how do you propose to clone a single heart, or, let’s say, a kidney?”

  “Quite simple, we create a subhuman, a species whose organs are compatible to ours, and breed them as donors.”

  “You mean livestock, like cattle.”

  “Cattle,” Soluri repeated. “When you say cattle, are you referring to that thick steak that you ate last week, or the hamburgers you barbecued last Fourth of July with the family? How about that leather coat you have on a peg in the closet? Have you ever seen a slaughterhouse? Do you have any idea what goes on there? Of course you do. But you still enjoy your meat and poultry nevertheless. Unless you’re a vegetarian?”

  “No,” Blacker replied, quietly shaking his head.

  “In that case, you’ve been endorsing our proposed idea for years. All higher life-forms exploit lessevolved life-forms for their own survival.” Soluri smiled. “The only difference between your hamburger and our experiments is that we’re trying to save lives.”

  Blacker turned away from the doctor. Before he had the chance to collect his thoughts and make any kind of rebuttal, the doctor said, “Why, Agent Blacker, you look like a man who’s just been kicked off his high horse. What’s the matter? Have you lost your black-and-white perspective of the world around you?”

  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Before the doctor could make another smartass comment, Blacker turned and left the complex, stumbling out to the parking garage while holding his stomach and feeling weak. He imagined he could still hear Soluri laughing at him and at his hypocrisy.

  He leaned against the hood of his car, feeling the nausea struggling to burst forth. He tried to resist that terrible sensation, but the images of Soluri’s laboratory animals were too vivid. Blacker lost himself on the pavement of the garage, right next to his federal-issued sedan. Even after his stomach emptied, he continued to dry-heave. After fifteen minutes of this, he was finally able to pull a handkerchief out from his pocket and wipe the cold sweat from his forehead.