Liquid Fear

by Nicholson, Scott

  Ayanadi nodded. “Briggs was testing fear response, one of the favorite subjects of psychologists. On paper, he was conducting a simple maze experiment, similar to the Stanford Prison Experiment in which volunteers divided into the roles of guards and prisoners. They soon socialized and adapted to those roles, so much so that guards turned violent and the prisoners had trouble adjusting back to their regular lives.”

  “In other words, the make-believe became real.”

  “Yes, and whatever happened out there with Briggs must have been terrible.”

  “Out there? The records said the trials were conducted here in the pharmacy school.”

  Ayanadi’s face pinched in anguish. “Yes, that’s what the papers say. There was a big hush-hush, so much at stake, lawsuits and funding. The dean and chancellor thought it best to have it appear as a tragic accident. Susan Sharpe’s body was found at the foot of the stairs in the basement, suffering multiple contusions.”

  Mark wondered why his wife never mentioned the incident, but he also couldn’t accept she had any part in it. “I don’t understand.”

  “Whatever Briggs did to those volunteers, somehow Susan Sharpe was beaten to death as a result.”

  “No,” Mark said, reluctant to believe the nation’s oldest university had skeletons in its closet. But he of all people should know that the most polished veneer could hide the most alarming atrocities. CRO bent ethical rules as a standard operating procedure.

  “No charges filed,” Ayanadi said. “That would have been disastrous to all involved. The university police handled the investigation, the Board of Trustees negotiated in closed session, and a football booster funded the confidential settlement with the Sharpe family. The official report said she died here from a fall down the stairs. A tragic accident.”

  Mark had seen photographs of domestic-violence victims, people who had taken a pounding yet walked away. He couldn’t picture the amount of blows it would take to kill someone.

  He now remembered reading about the incident in the Daily Tar Heel. With a student population of 26,000 people, a death was unusual but quickly swept past in the bustle of rock bands, politics, frat parties, and sports.

  “Susan Sharpe,” Mark said. “She was a student?”

  Ayanadi cocked a bushy eyebrow. “They were all students, except Briggs, who had recently earned his doctorate and was teaching part-time. Briggs couldn’t stay on, of course. He didn’t help himself with his refusal to cooperate. And his personality didn’t lend itself to the support of allies.”

  “If these trials were going on in the building, how did he manage to keep it secret?”

  “No. His research here was innocuous, camouflage for the real work he was conducting in the Research Triangle. He never divulged the real location.”

  “Surely the cops found the lab?” Despite CRO’s involvement, Mark had never heard a mention of the tragedy within the corporation. No surprise there.

  “As I said, this was hush-hush. No one looked because no one wanted to see.”

  Mark did a quick calculation in his head. That would have been nearly two years before he met Alexis. And, despite her generally positive demeanor, at times a shadow crossed her face as if doom had skirted past without her fully recognizing it. Like most young married couples, they’d been more interested in their future together than the mistakes and secrets of their individual pasts.

  “These other…subjects. What happened to them?”

  The professor shook his head. “I don’t recall all the names, but I distinctly remember Wendy Leng, because she later joined our art faculty.”

  Wendy. Lex’s friend. And they never mentioned the trials…

  Wendy had married a man named Roland, who had been in school with the two of them. He and Alexis had attended the wedding, where Roland had gotten embarrassingly drunk and made a fool of himself. Mark wondered who else among his wife’s friends had been involved, and how much that friendship was built around a shared secret.

  “One last question, Doctor. Was CRO backing Briggs at the time?”

  Dr. Ayanadi stared at the periodic chart on the wall, as if he could rearrange the elements and structure the world into something good, whole, and sane. “CRO has always been a generous benefactor of our program, Mark. A relationship we all hope to continue.”

  Mark tapped the counter on his way to the door. “No one looks because no one wants to see, right?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Kleingarten held the little orange bottle of pills about six inches out of Anita Molkesky’s reach. The hunger in her eyes was unmistakable. He’d handled his share of drugged-out hookers, and when the need sunk in its teeth, they would do anything for a fix.

  Anything.

  This Briggs guy was on to something.

  “You know you need it, honey,” he said.

  “I need it,” she murmured.

  She was sitting on the bed like she knew her way around it. She looked a little rougher than she had in the waffle house, just before he’d crashed the car into it. Briggs had called the collision a “trigger” and said it would kick in the necessary adrenalin to juice her brain. Kleingarten had cut him off before Briggs launched into a lecture, but he understood the basic idea. He knew plenty about drugs and hookers.

  The only thing he couldn’t understand was why Briggs had gone for the Slant when this gooey candy on the hoof was available. Sure, she’d had some work done, and those melons were inflated by at least two letter sizes, but she looked like she was primed for partying.

  He’d picked her up outside the hospital after her appointment with just a few well-chosen words. He’d use them again if he had to.

  “Okay, Daddy will fix you up, but I just need you to do one thing for me, okay?”

  She nodded. One thing was easy.

  Kleingarten looked around the motel room. It was a lot like the one in Cincinnati where he’d killed that hooker while Roland Doyle was in sand land—cheap paneling, a chipped dresser, a single lamppost, and an EZ chair that, despite its obvious age, had no ass print in the seat. Nobody came to motel rooms to sit around in chairs.

  He pulled the digital tape recorder from his pocket. He thought about playing with her a little, but the doc had said the recording was an important part of the job. In fact, it pretty much was the job. The rest was bonus.

  “Are you going to hurt me?” she asked, her tone flat, like she couldn’t care less one way or another.

  “Maybe,” he said, with equal ambivalence. She was taking the fun out of it.

  He held the recorder out and hit the button so the red light came on. It was a basic Sony model, but solid, and it would record for a week if he needed it to. He didn’t think he’d need it.

  “Here’s what you say, Anita. You say, ‘Wendy, I’m in the Monkey House.’”

  “But I’m not in the Monkey House. I’m in a motel room.”

  He wondered if she’d been hitting other stuff besides Briggs’s happy pills. Maybe a barbiturate or oxy. He didn’t know how the Halcyon would react with other drugs, but he figured it wasn’t his problem.

  “Take two. Say ‘Wendy, I’m in the Monkey House,’ only say it like you’re scared. Like in a panic.”

  “I was an actress.”

  “Yeah, I bet. Weren’t you with George Clooney in that, whatsit, the Ocean’s Fifteen?”

  “No, but I met him once.”

  One thing about human nature, you gave somebody a chance to brag and they forgot all about their problems for a second. Kleingarten shook the bottle to bring her back around.

  “Wendy, I’m in the Monkey House.”

  She closed her eyes, maybe channeling Marilyn Monroe. “Wendy, I’m in the Monkey House.”

  “Not bad, but a little more energy. You sound like you’re getting your nails done.” Kleingarten cut the recording so he wouldn’t have to edit too much later. “Picture the scene. This crazy guy has you locked away in a filthy, dark factory, and he’s trying to put you in a cage. But�
�—Kleingarten acted out the next part, grunting as he spoke—“you kick him in the nuts and run. You get to his little office and there’s a cell phone, right on the desk, like he wanted you to use it. You got no choice. You pick it up and call your only friend in the world—”

  “I got lots of friends.” Her nostrils flared a little.

  “Yeah, I know, but nobody else who understands. You know you’ve got less than a minute, tops, and how could you explain it all to anyone else?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, in that case, it would be Wendy.”

  Kleingarten hit the “Record” button. “So you pick up the phone, punch in her number and—”

  “I don’t know her number. Not off the top of my head. I’d have to dig around in my purse. Unless it was my cell phone, then her number would be stored in it.”

  “Okay, goddamn it, let’s say it’s your phone on the desk. You pick it up and get through and she answers and you go…” He pointed the recorder toward her face as the cue.

  “Wendy, I’m in the Monkey House.”

  “Hey, not bad, a little passion, a little fear, a little drama. What movies did you say you were in?”

  “Nothing you probably heard of. Tommy Salami, Patti Cake Patti Cake, and Cherry Paradise.”

  She’d named them with a perverse kind of pride. Kleingarten had heard of them, and had seen one, and now he knew why she looked familiar. “You did a lot of movies with food in them.”

  “Yeah.” She gave him a glassy-eyed smile.

  Kleingarten was angry now. He usually didn’t get too worked up over a job, even an enjoyable one, but she’d just shot down one of his little fantasies of how this would play out.

  After remembering the disgusting things she’d done with those guys in that video—guys of every color in the rainbow—he wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole. And that was a fucking shame.

  “Can I have my pill now?” she asked.

  He moved the hand with the vial behind his back. “Okay, now pretend he’s got you again, and you go, ‘Help me, hurry, we’re in the old factory where we killed Susan.’ Except rush the words all together.”

  She started and then forgot the line.

  “Here, let me help you,” he said, grabbing her wavy blonde hair and yanking.

  “Ow.”

  “Help me, hurry, we’re in the factory where we killed Susan.” He was getting impatient, and that scared her a little.

  “Help me, hurry, we’re in the factory where we killed Susan.”

  He clicked the recorder off. That was an Oscar performance. Briggs would be pleased. “Okay, honey, it’s a wrap.”

  Kleingarten slid the recorder in his pocket and shook out one of the green pills. He gave it to her and she tossed it in her mouth without looking at it. He figured she put a lot of things in there without looking.

  The dose seemed to hit pretty quickly, because she looked around as if realizing she wasn’t in the hospital or her apartment. “What were you making me say?” she asked.

  He shook the vial. “These pills. They really help you forget, huh?”

  “Forget what?”

  “That movie we were talking about.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “A movie. Did I get the part?”

  “Sure. Didn’t you get the script?”

  “No. What happens next?”

  “A little reunion. And then you commit suicide.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Mark was startled to find his wife’s office door ajar and the lights off. During scheduled office hours, she kept it wide open. Otherwise, the small room was locked.

  He glanced at his watch. He was only twenty minutes late, and she wouldn’t have left knowing he didn’t have a car. He tapped on the door as he opened it.

  “Lex?”

  He flipped on the light. Her normally neat office was in disarray, books pulled from the shelves, desk drawers open, papers and magazines scattered across the desktop. The computer was turned on its side, the mouse dangling by its cord halfway to the floor. A splintered pencil protruded from the forehead of the Styrofoam mannequin head he’d given her as a present, upon which she’d drawn a crude diagram of the brain’s different lobes.

  Scrawled across the foam forehead, in Alexis’s handwriting, were the words “Every 4 hrs. or else.”

  Or else what? If you’ve harmed her, you bastard, I’ll gut you like a frog in biology class.

  He heard a purring electronic echo. Her phone was in the room. He found her purse upended behind the desk, the makeup compact, tampons, pens, coins, and car keys scattered across the floor, but it had quit ringing before he could answer.

  Alexis was never without her phone. He checked the incoming number but it was blocked.

  He jammed the phone in his pocket, swept up the keys, and grabbed the note. He locked the door behind him. A janitor’s discovery of the mess might lead to questions.

  On the way to the parking deck, he called Burchfield, who answered with a terse greeting. While Mark was part of the inner circle, the senator didn’t like people calling without an appointment.

  “Senator, we might have a problem with the trials,” Mark said, making sure no one was in earshot. People seemed wrapped up in their own concerns and the evening rush hour that awaited them.

  “No problems, Mark, everything is under control.”

  “But is Briggs under control? We knew he would be a big risk factor.”

  “It’s only a risk when you have a choice.” Laughter and music leaked from the background, suggesting the senator was at some vitally critical social function. Canapés and Chablis on the taxpayer dole in the name of national security. “Briggs is the only one who can pull it off.”

  “He’s not exactly flying under the radar here. Not when he’s dragging in a member of the bioethics council.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know yet. But he’s playing some kind of game. It’s not just for money anymore.”

  “You’re the boots on the ground there, Mark. Control Briggs and control your wife. Do whatever it takes.”

  Mark wanted to hurl the phone at the concrete pillars of the parking deck. Instead, he said, “Yes, sir.”

  “And Mark?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Watch your back.”

  The senator rang off and Mark took his advice, glancing behind him. After the incident at the airport, he felt exposed and vulnerable. The solid world of company profits, performance bonuses, Washington hobnobbing, and a big house in one of the brain centers of the South had given way to a landscape of ever-shifting horizons and illusory detours.

  And a man in a dark jogging suit was now also in that picture.

  Mark picked up his pace, wondering where Briggs had taken Alexis. Or if she’d been taken at all.

  The man behind him began jogging in his direction. Mark gave one more glance back, and then began running. His hard-soled leather shoes slapped on the concrete, and a young couple eyed him suspiciously as he burst past the rows of cars. He made it to the stairwell before the jogger caught up with him. Mark waited, panting, on the concrete steps.

  “Where is she?” Mark asked between gasps.

  The jogger wore a stocking cap despite the relatively mild March weather, and it was pulled down to his eyebrows. He was trim, in his mid thirties, and clean-shaven, and had blue eyes that showed no hint of intention. “You’re forgetting who you work for, Morgan.”

  “Christ. You’re CRO?”

  “Let’s just say we’re an ‘allied interest.’”

  “What’s with the cloak-and-dagger shit? Why can’t you just text me like everyone else?”

  “Because they’re watching. We have to put on a good show.”

  “They? There’s another level above you guys?”

  The eyes didn’t harden, but the tone did. “There’s a lot more riding on this than Senator Botox and his rumored run for the presidency. Word is that CRO is going to let a few crates of Halcyon slip through the cracks,
up through Canada and over to our cave-dwelling friends in Afghanistan. It looks like the first extensive field trials are going to involve U.S. troops.”

  “No way. CRO is as red, white, and blue as Uncle Sam’s Saturday beer.”

  “The only flag CRO waves is green.”

  A teenager wielding a backpack shuffled around the turn in the stairs above, either too stoned to find the elevator or else on a misguided bout of self-inflicted physical activity. Mark thought over this new information until the student passed.

  “Why should I believe you?” Mark asked.

  “Your wife told us.”

  Mark balled his fists and approached the man. “She’s out of this. That’s the word from the top.”

  The man didn’t draw back or stiffen from the threat. “You’re assuming there’s only one top.”

  “Tell me where she is.”

  “You’re not in a position to make demands, Morgan. In fact, there are some who think you’ll have to be moved out of the way after this is over. Even though you don’t know as much as you think you do, it’s still too much.”

  “More cloak-and-dagger bullshit. Just tell me what you want and get out of my face.”

  “We hear Briggs is developing a spinoff. A rage drug.”

  “Never heard of it.” Mark wondered how well he’d hidden the lie.

  The man gave a snort of laughter. “I thought we were beyond all that. I thought you were in a hurry.”

  “What are you? CIA? FBI?”

  “I’m with the good guys. We’re checking out Briggs, but we need an inside source at CRO to tie this together.”

  “Do I look like the kind of guy who would know what’s going on?”

  The man looked him over as if deciding whether Mark would walk away breathing, or whether pain might elicit information. “Then maybe you better ask your wife about it.”

  “I will. As soon as you tell me where she is.”

  “We want to protect everyone.”

  “None of you people give a damn about my wife, or any of the people in this. All you want is a piece of Halcyon.”

  “Halcyon isn’t the real issue here. It’s the other stuff we want. The Seethe.”