The Lethal Helix

by Don Donaldson

  Seeing that letting this woman talk was just going to make his job later more difficult, Billy said, “Be quiet now.”

  Holly took sustenance from the gentle way he’d silenced her. Maybe she’d gotten to him and somehow that would make a difference.

  “CAR THREE TO car one. Come in.”

  “Car one. Go ahead.”

  “Sheriff, I’m at Delany Woods, and there’s a parked car in the path that leads to Rock Creek. The keys are in the ignition but there’s no one around. I think it belongs to that neurologist, Doctor Heflin.”

  “What’s the plate number?”

  The deputy recited the tag number.

  Speaking to the dispatcher, Otto said, “Doris, check that, will you?”

  “I’m on it.”

  She quickly verified that the car did belong to Heflin. Sensing that there was something important going on here, Otto ordered the closest car on duty to the Tastee Freeze. He sent the next closest to the woods and had several others start for the dairy as fast as they could travel.

  Already heading that way, he arrived in the area first. He parked at the ice cream stand and watched the dairy’s front gate until his replacement arrived. Even with that delay, he reached the woods before the other car he’d called.

  “It’s weird, Sheriff,” Deputy Calvin Erickson said as Otto got out of his car. “I checked back into the woods all the way to the creek, but didn’t see anybody.”

  “You were supposed to be watching the dairy gate.”

  “Sorry. I just got sidetracked wondering about this car here.”

  “Well, get yourself to a spot now where you can see it.”

  While Calvin headed for the road on foot, Otto walked past Calvin’s cruiser to Heflin’s car, opened the door, and looked inside. Seeing nothing of interest, he pulled the keys from the ignition and went to the trunk. Aided by the lights from Calvin’s car, he opened the trunk. Relieved not to see Heflin’s body, he looked in the empty gym bag Richard had left behind, then picked up Holly’s carry-on.

  When he saw her name on the ID tag, his mind slowly began to turn, almost making an audible clanking sound.

  There was a flash of light as the other car he’d called to the woods pulled onto the path. Joining him, Deputy Del Brice said, “What’s goin’ on, Sheriff?”

  “I’m not sure. Calvin hasn’t been able to find either Doctor Heflin, the owner of this vehicle, or the woman I think might have come here with him.”

  “Maybe they don’t want to be found,” Del suggested, grinning at his sexual innuendo.

  “These aren’t kids,” Otto said. “If that’s what they wanted to do, they wouldn’t be doing it in the woods.”

  Suddenly, the machinery laboring in Otto’s mind delivered the product it had been constructing. He pressed the Talk button on his shoulder mike and ordered the car at the ice cream stand and one other in service to proceed to the dairy’s front entrance and block it so no one could leave. He sent two more cars to do the same at the rear gate, and called a pair to join him.

  “Jesus, Sheriff,” Del said. “We’ve never used more than two cars on anything. Why are we mobilizing against the dairy?”

  Choosing to ignore the question, Otto called Calvin on his radio. “Sheriff to Calvin.”

  “Calvin. Go ahead.”

  “Del and I are going to take a look around. Let me know when the other cars arrive.”

  Del already had a flashlight with him. Otto got his, and they headed down the path into the woods, checking thoroughly on either side of the path as they went. When they reached the creek, Otto played his flashlight over the sloping side of the ravine. The fresh footprints and broken shrubs he saw convinced him that for some reason, Heflin and Fisher had come here to spy on the dairy.

  Heflin could have left the keys in his car because he was excited about what they were doing. Or, something had gone wrong. Otto shined his light down the ravine toward the dairy. While he was thinking about what he should do, the two cars he’d ordered to the front gate reported that they were in place. Thirty seconds later, the other two were also in position at the rear entrance.

  Otto had never been involved in an operation like this, so there was a lot to think about. If Heflin and Fisher had been caught and were in danger, as seemed likely by Hallock’s arrival and his probable involvement in the attempt on Fisher’s life during her first visit to Midland, then he had to move fast.

  This realization made him panic inside, because he couldn’t see the best course of action. He was standing there appearing so lost that Del thought he might have had a stroke.

  “Sheriff, are you okay?”

  “Quiet. I’m thinking.” Otto’s mind became a sandstorm, everything blowing around, nothing visible.

  Through the grit he saw that the quickest way to protect Heflin and Fisher was by letting the people in the dairy know that he and his men were out here. They might have already noticed the cars at both entrances, but in case they hadn’t . . .

  His hand went to the Talk button on his shoulder mike and he called the office. “Doris, I want you to call the Midland Dairy and tell whoever answers that I have men at both their gates, and we want to look around immediately. If no one answers, call Don Lamotte, the manager, at home.”

  Then he received a call from Calvin. “Sheriff, the other two cars are here.”

  He asked Calvin to stand by. If Heflin and Fisher had already been harmed, then any delay in getting in there would allow Hallock to cover up evidence. He glanced at the ravine. If they had gone to the dairy this way, they must have been carrying a cutter for the fence. And if they’d been caught after they got inside . . .

  He knew the area well enough to recall that just on the edge of the woods, a tributary joined Rock Creek. And that stream was in a ravine with steeper sides than this one, forming a significant hindrance to approaching the dairy through the woods and across the field behind it.

  Otto thumbed his shoulder mike. “Sheriff to Calvin.”

  “This is Calvin. Go ahead.”

  “All of you get back here to the creek on the double. And get my bullhorn from my car.”

  He looked at Del. “Let’s go.” Without waiting for the others, Otto started down the bank of the ravine, hoping his gimpy knees wouldn’t fail him.

  35

  AFTER HIS CONVERSATION with Holly, Billy’s mind worked to repair the breach she had made in his emotional armor. By the time the car pulled up to the gates to Bruxton’s estate, he’d recovered to the point where he’d definitely be able to do what was required of him and keep his record of successes intact. He had to. It was all that made him special. But for the first time in his life, he thought of the penance for an act before he’d committed it. A single hundred-dollar bill wasn’t going to do the job this time.

  Seeing the ornate capital letter B woven into the wrought iron of the gates, it wasn’t difficult for Holly to correctly guess who lived here. But she still had no idea why she’d been brought.

  When they pulled up in front of the house, Billy left the car, went around to Holly’s side, and helped her out. With Billy propelling her forward with his hand in the small of her back and the driver behind them, they stepped up to the front door, which opened at their approach.

  “He’s in the study,” Boone said.

  He led the group to the study’s big double doors and turned to face them. “He wants to see only Mr. Lynch and Doctor Fisher.” Looking at the driver, he added, “While you wait, I can offer you the use of the billiard room, the bowling alley, or our theater.”

  The driver expressed an interest in the theater.

  “If you’ll just wait here, I’ll return and show you the way.” Boone opened the study doors and Billy pushed Holly inside.

  Bruxton was standing in front of his desk in a three-button
gray suit, a blue-and-white striped shirt, and a micropattern tie as though he were about to preside over a board meeting. Holly was struck by his small stature and luminous pink complexion.

  “Doctor Fisher, we meet at last. I’m Zane Bruxton. But I suspect you’ve figured that out already, you’re such a clever woman.”

  Bruxton’s talents at camouflaging his feelings were being greatly tested as anger and pain fought for control of his face and mind. He looked at Billy. “Turn that chair toward me and put her in it.”

  When Holly was seated, Bruxton turned a matching chair toward hers. He sat and put his pink hands in his lap.

  “My security chief said when he caught you, you were looking through the window of our collection area. What did you see?”

  “Something that made me sick to my stomach,” Holly said.

  “Do you understand what it means?”

  “I think that’s where you get Vasostasin. You extract it from some part of those fetuses.”

  “The brain,” Bruxton said. “It’s a substance normally produced in very small amounts in the developing brain. But we’ve inserted a promoter in the genome of each fetus we create that drives the production of huge amounts of the material. This overproduction causes the brain, and therefore the head, to be abnormally large. It’s worked out extremely well.”

  “Creating human babies to be harvested . . . it’s obscene,” Holly said.

  “They’re hardly human,” Bruxton said. “At least not in the usual sense of the word. The abnormal brain development is incompatible with life outside the womb. So each fetus is stillborn, which means we aren’t killing them because they never really lived.”

  “But they had the potential to live. They’re stillborn because of what you did to them. You made them monsters.”

  Fighting off the pain that was as bad as it had ever been, Bruxton said, “In my experience, potential is a vastly overrated commodity with little significance.”

  “Pardon me for also pointing out that what you’re doing is a federal crime. So obviously, the legislature of this country feels the way I do.”

  “Only because they had no idea what they were doing when they created that law. At the time, the issues involved were all abstractions to them. I know of three senators and a dozen congressmen and women who voted for that bill who are cancer-free because of Vasostasin. And there are scores of legislators whose spouses or parents are still alive because of me. Do you think any of them would vote the same way now?

  “You’re morally outraged over this, but when you were diagnosed with leukemia . . .” Noticing the surprised look on Holly’s face, Bruxton said, “Yes, I know a great deal about you. When that happened, it wasn’t a hopeless situation. There was an effective treatment available. But suppose your own bone marrow couldn’t have been cleaned. And the only place where marrow to save you could be obtained was from a genetically engineered human fetus like those I’m producing. Would you have said, ‘No thanks, I’d rather die?’ What would you have done? Be honest with yourself.”

  He waited for Holly’s answer, but none was forthcoming because she wasn’t sure what she’d have done. She’d been so frightened of dying. Would she have compromised her moral beliefs just that once?

  “Not such an easy decision, is it?” Bruxton said. Now that he’d educated her, it was time to hurt her. “And you have put it all in jeopardy. Your disappearance alone will focus a great deal of attention on this community. But you brought Richard Heflin and his sister into it as well. When they vanish too, it will be extremely difficult for us. But the program will go on. It must. Actually, you should feel proud of the integral part you’ve played in our success.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The ability to drive the production of Vasostasin to the abnormally high levels necessary to make the program economically feasible requires a genome that contains a particular combination of coding sequences in a number of genes. We don’t fully understand why, but it does. Before we could begin, we had to find a woman with that rare combination of coding sequences.”

  “And that was me?”

  “You came to our attention through the relationship we had with various hospitals across the country in which they sent us a small sample of blood from each of their female patients along with the patient’s name and address. Through genetic analysis of those samples, we found you.”

  “That’s why I was approached to become an egg donor?”

  “Exactly. At the time, we were unaware of your medical history. After your refusal to participate, our investigators discovered your connection to the fertility clinic in Mississippi. That made it all so easy.

  “We fertilized one of your eggs with the appropriate sperm, and when the resulting embryo had divided several times, we separated the cells and established a number of cell lines in culture. We then inserted a special promoter for Vasostasin into those cells and established another line so that we now have millions of such cells. The next step requires a steady supply of human eggs that don’t have to be special in any way. I like to think of these as ‘starter’ eggs.

  “I hired a man named Henry Pennell to develop a method to use bovine eggs for this step, but that didn’t work out. Until that’s possible, we will continue to operate our traveling clinic and our program to buy starter eggs from willing donors.”

  As Bruxton explained things, Holly’s mind was racing ahead of him. And she saw with horror where his story was heading.

  “Each fetus we produce is made by removing the nucleus of a starter egg and replacing it with the nucleus from one of the cells we have in culture. We allow the starter eggs to divide four times, then we separate the resulting sixteen cells and culture them individually until each one has formed an embryo. They are then implanted into the cows we have genetically manipulated to support human gestation.

  “Our level of success with this is far superior to any other group in the world, approaching a hundred percent, so that fairly routinely, we ultimately get sixteen fetuses from each starter egg we buy. But as I have indicated, the starter eggs merely provide the right environment for development to begin. Any human egg can suffice. It’s the genome that’s the key. Your genome.

  “So you see, Doctor Fisher, if I’m the father of the program, you are the mother.”

  36

  HOLLY’S MIND COULDN’T grasp it. She was the biological mother of every fetus Bruxton had produced. The thought was so impossible. How many had there been? Hundreds? Thousands? All carrying her genes . . . harvested . . . their heads removed.

  The impact of all this was so emotionally staggering that to protect Holly from it, her brain began shutting down. Bruxton was still talking, but his voice sounded far off. He was reaching into the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “And we were able to accomplish this using only three of the eleven eggs you left at the fertility clinic.” He produced a vial containing a pink liquid. “The other eight are here, still viable I’m sure, even though I’ve let them thaw.”

  Her eggs. He had her remaining eggs in his hand. Holly’s senses snapped back, heightened. She started to get up, but Billy put a firm hand on her shoulder. Fearing the stun gun, she remained seated. Muscles coiled, she watched Bruxton through slitted eyes.

  He unscrewed the cap on the vial, and alarms began to clang in Holly’s head.

  “All my professional life, I have rewarded loyalty, and where possible, punished those who work against me,” Bruxton said. “What I do now, I do, not for pleasure, but out of necessity.”

  As he tipped the vial and poured the contents onto the floor, Holly erupted from her chair, a primal cry of anguish coming from a part of her she’d never known. Hatred seething behind her eyes, she lunged for Bruxton, but Billy intercepted her with the stun gun.

  The electrical shock took her legs, and she crumpled to the floor, her
head grazing Bruxton’s pants as she fell.

  Suddenly, a repetitious buzzing sound filled the room. A calm female voice said, “There is an intruder on the property.”

  CONSIDERING THE SIZE of the house and grounds, Susan Morrison shouldn’t have been surprised when the security system began switching on the outside lights. But she was.

  When she’d approached Billy’s car from behind as it left the dairy, she’d recognized Holly through the rear window. Considering all that Holly had told her, it seemed possible that she was being taken somewhere against her will. Then, when Billy turned Holly’s face forward with his hand, a rude gesture at best, she’d come to believe that even more.

  She couldn’t follow them onto Bruxton’s estate, but the B in the wrought iron gates told her, too, who lived there, a further cause for worry. At that point, she had to make a quick decision—go for help or try to do something herself. Afraid that any delay might allow them to harm Holly, she’d driven fifty yards past the front gates, then veered onto the lawn that ran along the iron fence surrounding the estate. She’d managed to get over the fence by climbing onto her car. Now that she was inside and lights were popping on all around her, she at least had their attention. That alone should give them something to think about besides Holly. Caught in the open, she ran for a cluster of spruce trees that would provide cover.

  “IT’S A WOMAN,” Bruxton said, watching Susan on one of the monitors in his study, “in street clothes.” He leaned closer. “And she’s carrying a pistol.” He glanced at the other monitors that served different parts of the grounds. “She seems to be here alone.” He turned to Billy. “Get rid of her. Go out through the kitchen and head left along the conservatory walkway. When you reach the end of the walk, you’ll see those trees she’s in down to your left. Boone will show you the way.”

  Bruxton went to his desk and called Boone on the intercom, which served the whole house. He then called the sheriff’s office in Midland.