McMullan stabbed at his phone to end the call, cutting off the other agent’s voice. Following the direction of his partner’s shouting, he raced into another bedroom, where Gilman was looking at a computer monitor. McMullan stepped up behind him and stared for a moment.
On the screen was an electronic calendar. The month displayed was July of the previous year. It was obviously Katrina Stone’s schedule. The calendar was filled with dates and times of seminars, lectures, and experimental timelines—next to each, the name of one of Katrina’s students or her postdoc. Lab meetings. Departmental meetings. And days with Alexis, versus days that Alexis was to be at Tom’s house.
McMullan studied the calendar for a moment, seeing nothing of interest. Confused, he looked at Gilman, and Gilman pointed to a specific date.
“Recognize this section?” Gilman asked.
“No.”
The area to which Gilman was pointing read:
Seminar: World Health Organization: 1:15
Hosting Dan Russel: Pick up at 4:30
Pick up Alexis: 6:00
“I give up,” McMullan said. “What?”
“You didn’t obsess with that piece of paper like I did,” Gilman said, and picked up a pen off the desk.
On a yellow Post-It note in front of him, replicating the handwriting on the ESDA trace the best he could, Gilman scrawled:
WHO1315
DR1630
AL1800
“The first greeting card from the White House. The ESDA trace. It was a section of Katrina Stone’s schedule.” Gilman looked up from the computer monitor and into his partner’s dumbfounded gaze. “You still think your girl didn’t do it?”
FEBRUARY 5, 2016
7:36 A.M. PST
Oscar Morales was pleasantly surprised when he saw the woman who was there to see him. He had not been expecting anyone, not today, and was annoyed at having to leave his cell in the first place. At least this chick was a looker. Damn, she’s hot, he thought as she approached.
The woman was in jeans and a T-shirt and was holding a file. She didn’t look very happy.
“Who the fuck are you?” Oscar asked.
“Who the fuck are you?” the woman snapped in return.
“Don’t jerk me off, bitch… you came here to see me.”
“What do you want with me?”
“Lady, I don’t even know you, so fuck off,” Oscar said and stood up from the visiting table to leave. As he turned and began walking away, she asked, “Recognize this person?”
Just like that, the nightmare returned to the forefront of Oscar’s mind. His heart was in his throat as he turned around.
Suddenly, Oscar felt like he was in a movie—the kind of movie where a cop comes to someone’s door and shows that person a photograph, and then says that the person in the photograph is dead. Oscar stepped toward the woman and looked at the page in her hand.
The person in the image was unidentifiable, lying in a hospital bed with his or her face completely covered in a fluffy white envelope of gauze. “How the fuck am I supposed to recognize that person?” Oscar asked. His heart was still in his throat.
“How about now?” the woman asked casually, and showed another picture. In this one, beneath the gauze, the camera had caught the upper half of the hospital bed. A bare chest was exposed, and the large tattoo across it was still intact.
MORALES
“You fucking bitch!” Oscar screamed and lunged at the woman. She ducked quickly away and Oscar crashed across another of the visiting room’s tables.
The guard on duty rushed forward, reaching for his nightstick.
“What did you do to him?” Oscar demanded, whirling around to face the guard instead of the woman. He managed to land a forceful blow upon the guard’s jaw, but the nightstick still collided with his knee and sent him to the floor.
“Your brother did this to himself,” the woman shouted through the commotion. “What did he want with me?”
“I don’t know!” Oscar yelled. He stood again and lunged toward her, but then there were three more guards upon him.
Katrina stood immobile as the guards subdued Oscar Morales. Each of the four men pinned a powerful limb to the floor, and then one of them withdrew a needle and syringe. The guard uncapped the needle and plunged it through the prisoner’s pant leg into his massive upper thigh. With all four guards still holding tightly, the inmate began to relax, and then he was quiet. They picked him up by the limbs and carried him out of the room.
Katrina sat down heavily at the visiting room table once again. He really did not know who I was, she thought, and the connection she thought she had made—between the twins, herself, and the anthrax attack at the prison—was broken.
Katrina was still sitting in the visiting room, staring absently at the floor in front of her, when the door opened. She did not turn around to see Sean McMullan and Roger Gilman approach her from behind. When McMullan placed a hand lightly on her shoulder, she jerked and then looked up into his face, dazed. “I’m fine,” she said. “You guys didn’t need to come here.”
“Actually,” Gilman said quietly, “we’re not here to help you.”
Katrina looked from one agent to the other, questioning.
Gilman and McMullan glanced at each other and Gilman nodded to McMullan. “Go ahead,” he said firmly.
McMullan sighed. “Dr. Katrina Stone,” he said. “You’re under arrest for sixty-eight murders in the first degree. You have the right to remain silent… ” And as he rattled off the Miranda monologue as if in a trance, Sean McMullan took out his handcuffs.
9:13 A.M. PST
“How can you possibly think I killed all those inmates?” Katrina asked on the plane back to San Diego.
“How can we possibly think you didn’t?” Gilman replied. “We found your schedule on the greeting card.”
“I sort of figured,” she said, remembering how, in her haste leaving the house, she had stupidly left her calendar app open on her computer. “Obviously, I’m being framed. I had nothing to do with that card.” Her eyes bored into McMullan, and he looked at the floor of the airplane. For a moment, Katrina thought it was embarrassment on his face.
“Actually Katrina,” he said, “that’s not all we found.”
“What, then?”
“Well,” McMullan continued with an air of reluctance, “you knew we were monitoring you when we started this investigation. You were amply forewarned, and your staff was amply forewarned. You all signed agreements acknowledging this.”
“Yeah? So?”
Gilman interrupted. “In fact, the grandiose salary increases you all received were negotiated because of your so-called endangerment and the privacy loss you willingly accepted. So the government was operating completely within our rights.”
“What are you talking about?” Katrina asked.
“You knew we had placed guards around your lab,” Gilman continued, “and that these guards were there to monitor the activities in the lab as well as to protect you and your staff. What you weren’t told is that there were also bugs placed throughout your facility. We knew that if there were guards most of the time, you’d be lulled into thinking that the guards were your only surveillance. The guards were a decoy.”
“Oh my god,” Katrina said quietly.
“Katrina,” McMullan said, “our San Diego agents have been to your lab and they have collected the bag of notes that you fished out of your liquid nitrogen tank. Our specialists have read those notes. And they agree that those pages describe in detail the discovery of the molecular activator that comprises the Death Row Complex.”
FEBRUARY 8, 2016
1:04 A.M. EST
In the main forensics laboratory at USPIS headquarters in Dulles, Virginia, Teresa Wood shook her head as she viewed the results of her initial PCR analysis. This time, she was not looking for a suspect. She was looking for evidence against Katrina Stone; she was looking for the data package that would put the rogue scientist away forever. And tw
o more pieces of data had just been provided. Two new greeting cards.
As Teresa had suspected, there was no infectious material present on the greeting card from Roger Gilman’s house or the one from Sean McMullan’s post office box. Same result, same MO, she thought to herself, reflecting on the similar result—or lack thereof—that had been obtained from the original card mailed to the White House.
Teresa stared blindly at the fluorescent pink bands for a moment before switching off the UV light that allowed them to show through the DNA gel in front of her. She’s playing with us, she thought.
Until last Friday, Teresa had felt a certain kinship toward Katrina Stone. Both women were laboratory researchers, both immersed in the constant uphill battle to succeed in male-dominated fields. Both women supervised several other people, stepping into the lab themselves occasionally to don gloves as required by the current situation.
But that kinship was shattered last Friday, when Roger Gilman discovered that the ESDA trace was a snapshot of Stone’s online calendar, and when Stone was caught red-handed hiding the data that led to the Death Row anthrax strain.
Teresa closed her eyes and envisioned Stone’s office desk, which she had never actually seen but could imagine well enough. In Teresa’s mind, the desk resembled her own workspace three floors above where she now sat. In the postal inspector’s vision, Stone sat at her desk in San Diego doing similar work to that done daily by Teresa in Dulles. Reviewing the data of her subordinates. Reading the scientific literature. And like Teresa’s own desk, she saw Stone’s desk piled with raw notes, loose reports, data-stuffed notebooks, and scientific journals.
But there was one discrepancy. In Teresa’s vision, there was an item on Stone’s desk that should never have been there. Beneath a stack of pages in front of Stone, there was a greeting card with a computer graphic on the front, the graphic copied from one of the scientific journals on the shelves above the desk. A card with a threatening message written in Arabic. A card that had not yet been mailed to the White House.
Teresa pictured Katrina Stone going through her daily activities. She saw Stone glancing from her computer screen down to the pages she was reading at the moment. She saw her clicking into her computer to bring up her schedule. She saw her making a note on a piece of paper to remind herself of her obligations that afternoon. She saw her pen making indentations through the page being written on, indentations into the card that lay beneath.
History repeats itself, Teresa thought, and made a decision. She threw the DNA gel in front of her into the trash and removed her gloves. The next assay she performed on the new greeting cards would be the ESDA.
8:36 A.M. PST
The San Diego County jail system is currently comprised of seven facilities. Male inmates are generally booked at San Diego Central downtown, where they may be held or transferred to one of the others. Female inmates are typically taken to the Las Colinas Detention Facility in Santee.
In response to a truly surreal phone call from his postdoctoral advisor, Jason Fischer had only to drive four blocks from his Santee apartment to visit Katrina at the Las Colinas facility. More than an hour after his arrival, Katrina was finally brought out to see him.
Jason was shocked at her appearance.
Like Jason himself, Katrina had always excelled under pressure. The two had collaborated brilliantly from Jason’s first day in the lab. Without ever needing to try, they understood each other. Both worked hard at all times, but it took a deadline to bring both Jason and Katrina to top form. When a grant was due, when a revised paper was due, or when a milestone was approaching, Jason and Katrina functioned as one mind. More than her postdoc, Jason was her colleague, ally, and good friend.
It was obvious to Jason that right now, Katrina was at her breaking point. The inmate uniform covering her body was way too large, and in it, her diminutive size was accentuated. In looking so small, she also looked exceptionally vulnerable. Her thick auburn waves, streaked with the occasional gray strand, were tangled and unkempt. Several frizzy, unruly strands sprang outward from her face in a crazed, electric halo. Her normally animated blue-gray eyes were swallowed in deep black cavities. The look on Katrina’s face was madness.
And the biotechnology convention was eminent. The opening keynote speech was scheduled for the next morning. The scheduled keynote speaker was Katrina Stone.
“What’s going on?” Jason asked.
“Jason, it’s a long story,” Katrina said nervously. “In a nutshell, the FBI found the activator data, along with some other stuff that gave them reason to think I was the person who released the anthrax at San Quentin and killed the whole death row wing.”
Jason was immobile.
“I need to ask two favors of you,” Katrina continued. “You’re the only person I can trust right now.”
Without hesitation, Jason asked, “What do you need?”
“First, I need you to give my keynote speech at the convention tomorrow. Obviously, I can’t be there. Obviously, the fact that I won’t be there because I am in jail is going to put a minor wrinkle in my credibility and my career as a scientist. I’m trying like hell to negotiate a release, but it’s not looking good. So if I can’t be there, I want you to be there. My talk is on the desktop of my computer. If the FBI has confiscated that, you can still find the presentation in the Cloud. You know the password. Give the talk, and do the best you can to control the damage when people start asking questions about why I’m not there. I don’t know if it’s going to be public by tomorrow that I’m in jail. So far, I don’t think the press has caught wind of it.”
Katrina paused. “I know this is a lot to ask,” she said. “If word gets out about where I am, I’ll be crucified at the convention. And you’ll be crucified based solely your association with me. So I’m begging you—just do what you can.”
To Katrina’s surprise, Jason smiled. “Dr. Stone,” he said, feigning formality, “as the resident death-metal-head of the SDSU biology department, I’m no stranger to being judged out of context. I’m also no stranger to conflict. I look forward to the convention.” His smile widened when he saw the look of gratitude on Katrina’s face, and the tear that streaked down her cheek. She gently wiped it away with one forefinger.
“What is the other thing I can do for you?” he asked.
“I need you to look into someone. His name is Oscar Morales. He is a prisoner at San Quentin. The man who attacked me—twice—was his monozygotic twin. I don’t know the twin’s first name but he had a vial of the Death Row strain of anthrax on him when he came after me in the lab.
“I think he was in the lab to poison me with it or just kick my ass, whichever became more convenient. I also think that Oscar had to have been the one on the inside who released the bug in the prison. If you can find out Oscar’s story, and who gave it to him, and why, you might be able to save my reputation. And by association, your own.”
“My reputation’s beyond salvation,” Jason said, “but I’ll see what I can do.”
As Jason was leaving the visiting area of Las Colinas Detention Facility, an FBI forensics researcher at the San Diego headquarters was confirming what Jason had just been told by Katrina. The vial found in Chuck Morales’ pocket had been filled with the Death Row anthrax strain.
10:02 A.M. PST
Mr. Gilman –
How unfortunate that you do not speak my language.
The Doctor
In an office of the San Diego FBI headquarters, Sean McMullan and Roger Gilman stared at the Xeroxed copy of the card that had been inadvertently opened by Gilman’s wife. And at the copy of a nearly identical version, addressed instead to a “Mr. McMullan,” and sent to his personal mailbox.
The original cards were in Dulles, Virginia in the hands of the United States Postal Inspection Service. The fact that the agents had not heard a word from Teresa Wood suggested to them that nothing of value had been found on either card. And Katrina Stone was confessing to nothing.
Th
e image on the front of both cards was the same image as that on the original card that had been mailed to the White House just before the Death Row anthrax attack. It was the crystal structure of anthrax infiltrating a mammalian cell. But the text of the latter cards was not like that of the first. It was written in English, not Arabic.
“How unfortunate that you do not speak my language,” Gilman said under his breath, “written in English, as if to make the point. Just when I was starting to think that ISIL was off the hook.”
“Maybe it’s not ISIL,” McMullan said. “Maybe it’s another terrorist organization. But what the hell is the connection between any terrorist organization and Katrina Stone?”
“I’ll give you that,” Gilman said. “There most definitely isn’t one. If there was, she would never have worked with live anthrax in the first place. She started her own lab after 9/11, which she never could have done with any red flags in place. So if she’s made friends with ISIL, she has done it so discreetly that the FBI and Homeland Security had no clue.”
A moment later, McMullan changed the subject. “And who the hell is the Doctor?”
Gilman shrugged his shoulders. “Katrina Stone is a doctor.”
“Yeah, I realize that. But as you just pointed out, she couldn’t possibly have been involved with ISIL, and I’m fairly certain she doesn’t speak Arabic.”
“I know!” Gilman yelled, picking up a paperweight off the desk and throwing it across the office. The paperweight smashed into the wall clock, breaking its face, and then landed with a thud on the thin, worn carpet.
McMullan let out an exasperated sigh, and Gilman sat back down. “Sorry,” he said.
McMullan didn’t hear. His mind was elsewhere. “Maybe you’re onto something, Gilman. Maybe it is a scientist. Maybe it’s a doctor. Maybe it’s not Stone.”
The Death Row Complex (The Katrina Stone Novels Book 2) Page 19
