by Jolie Mason
Sometimes it made Hayden feel a bit like a lost puppy someone brought home, but, most of the time, Mary made Hayden just feel like family. She hadn't realized how much she and Ace needed that, until it was there.
Eventually, Ace wandered in as he always did, and they sat around the island counter top and laughed for a while. They all talked and teased, then Mary announced she was tired and headed to bed. She knew there was always a reason Thursday showed up at this hour, and it was usually business.
They talked baseball a bit, then basketball. Then, they just stopped, in tacit agreement that it was time. It was one of the reasons they worked as a team. They just synced, even without trying.
Randy poured her another half-glass of milk before asking, "What do you make of this?"
She leaned back. "I think we need to get our hands on Dr. Kerry."
"You like him for this?" he raised an eyebrow at her.
"I don't know. He seems a little too sane and put together to be our killer, but he's neck deep in it somehow. That I know."
"Well, he's a researcher. What are the possibilities? Black market kinder?"
She chuckled. "I was thinking the same thing, but his financials don't show that. No, he was helping the victim, Dr. Macy, do something, something big, and in that lab. If I were a betting woman, I would put money on whatever they were doing being a government contract."
"The lab's research is military classification and clearance. I found that out this morning," Ace told her taking a swig of his beer. "Our request to be read in for purposes of the case was denied. But, if the military is involved, how come they haven't taken the case yet?"
She shook her head. "I don't know. Maybe, they don't know about it yet."
He quirked an eyebrow. "That's unlikely. They'll know by morning, if we're on the right trail, because Macy has to raise a flag somewhere."
"Yes, he will," she said. "I think Kerry is next, and I think he'll come to us, if he's not involved in anything that could put him in detention."
"How can you be so sure?"
"It's intuition like how Mary knows you've been snitching her sweet rolls for the bake sales at her grandkid's school."
Ace gave a mock glare and pointed at her. "You told her, so it's not intuition at all. I owe you for that by the way."
Hayden laughed, grabbed up a handful of popcorn and tossed one in her mouth. "What are you gonna do? I'll just snitch to Mary if you try to get even."
"How outnumbered can a guy be?" he growled into the lip of his beer bottle while Thursday laughed harder. She and Mary really did have her partner cornered, and he loved it. This had been the happiest two years of his life, he'd told her once when they'd overindulged for Chinese New Year. For that alone, Hayden owed Mary a debt she could never repay. Her partner had been on a downward spiral when they met her, about to lose his job, his honor and his dignity.
Now, here he was, a slightly paunchy family man with a house over a shop. It might sound funny to the rich and famous crowd, but Hayden hoped she was half so lucky one day.
*
The flat sat there, still and dark except for the illuminated fish tank. Paisley and Delilah both stared dully at her as she set her bag down on the table. After the Ace household, there was something so oppressive in the silence of her own flat.
A comm beep at the door sounded causing Hayden to go on complete alert. It was close to midnight. She pulled her stunner and held it to her side as she went back to the door and hit the vid comm for her hallway.
Dr. Gray Kerry stood on her doorstep looking frayed around the edges and nervous. He was decidedly less buttoned up now, she thought. "Detective Thursday, I'm here with information. Do you intend to let me in?"
She hit the broadcast button. "Have you looked at the time, Doctor?"
She watched Kerry struggle not to roll his eyes at her. "If I could come into your office, I would, Detective."
She kept the stunner to hand, but Hayden decided to buzz him in. After all, he was perfectly aware there was a record of his visit to her. It would do him no good to hurt the detective investigating him. There were more where she came from.
"Come in, Doctor," she said.
"You can call me Gray," he said affably once he'd stepped into her foyer.
"You can call me detective," she answered curtly. "What brings you here at this late hour, Doctor? We keep the precinct open twenty four hours for your convenience."
"I'm sure that's true. I came to you personally, Detective, because I can't help you while being detained. I know who your killer is, and I'm trying to stop him."
"I'm listening," she told him folding her arms to let him see the stunner in her hand. He watched the weapon warily as he started to explain himself.
"A test subject went missing a few weeks ago at the lab. You can look up the missing persons report. At first, Dr. Macy thought we could easily retrieve him, and it took a good while, then, to make the connection between our subject and your murders."
"Him? Does he have a name?"
"Yes," he said with some reluctance.
"I'm going to need a name. I presume he is a kinder."
"Tanner Murphy, and yes, he is. But, he is also a decorated veteran of war and a medic trainee. He was detached from his unit for his convalescence and, when we approached him with a government offer to retrain, he was enthusiastic. We knew he hadn't just left. He wanted this training."
Hayden held up a hand to interrupt. "Let's save time. You know I've got the Kinder angle or you and I wouldn't have met yet and you wouldn't be here. You must also know that we've been denied the opportunity to be read into your research which tells me you're about to go off protocol. My first question is simple; Did you have anything whatsoever to do with the deaths at your lab?"
"No, he said confidently. "Not as such."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"It means, I wasn't there when the murders were committed. I've been trying to find my test subject. I haven't been back in the lab since the day you saw me leave, but I have no doubt that my subject, Tanner Murphy is your killer."
"Your chip has been in the lab," she said doubtfully. "How is that possible?"
"I know how it all sounds, but it's true." He pulled out his personal device and looked at her. "Go get your tran."
Hayden walked to the table in her foyer and picked up her own tran device. The small flat rectangle of the common tool lay cool and hard in her hand. Like so much technology, these were also translucent, except for the screen which projected images and information. Bringing it back to the Doctor, she held it out. He pressed his to her in an upload without looking away from her a second.
His direct gaze was unsettling. "That's everything I have on Medic Tanner Murphy, who's as much a victim as those he killed. It includes about two seconds of video showing his face standing over the body of a woman he had just killed."
"Victim?" she said. "Have you seen any of the reports? You've seen him kill. How can you see him as a victim?"
"I knew him, and this man you're chasing is not him, Detective. Dr Macy and I believed we were working for the greater good. Tanner was a kinder who was placed with a family after Kinder tech was consolidated. He'd been nearly complete in the lab and unsold. There were several children like him in need of families. A few who had families waiting for them were redirected with the government giving very little explanation. I wasn't part of the program at that time, so I don't know more than that."
"However, Tanner believed as we did; that the research we were doing was going to help our troops in the field and our society in the long run. He was nothing if not a patriot."
"Believed? Why do you keep using past tense?"
"Because I no longer believe that is my friend, Tanner Murphy. Some of the kinder are equipped with technology that can essentially rewrite their brain. Always were. Their history, their training, who they were can, in theory, be removed with a single swipe of a finger. I can't confirm this unless I get access to Tanner's body and do test
s, but I think that's what happened to him. It is the only logical explanation."
"You talk about him like he's dead. He's not dead yet, is he?" she asked, disturbed with the direction this was going.
"He'll have to be. He won't stop otherwise, can't be stopped any other way, if I'm right. I hope I'm not."
"Do you know how this sounds?" She was astounded at what he was saying, but she was more astounded that she believed it, or, at least, it all fit.
"Look, Tanner didn't ask for this!" He spoke harshly, his voice breaking on the next words. "Neither did I." The cool facade of Dr. Gray Kerry was cracking before her eyes.
"All right, all right," she placated. "Sit down. Get some rest. How long has it been since you slept?"
"Around two days."
"Okay, you can take the sofa. I'll read what you brought me. What's Tanner's next move? How much time do we have?"
Kerry looked stricken. "I can't stay here. I think he's going to kill me next. Whoever activated this programming will use him to tie up the loose ends, and then get rid of him. I took that video from the lab security feed. They will trace that back to my home computer. He'll have been ordered to find me."
"The lab never prepared for this kind of thing?" she asked testily because, if she could think of it, why hadn't they?
"He had a tracking chip, but it's deactivated. Has been since he picked up and left his apartment. There was also a check in protocol. He wasn't a prisoner. He was a volunteer."
"Until he wasn't," she said.
"Until he wasn't." He nodded tiredly.
Kerry rubbed his head as if fighting a headache and sat down at her small dining room table. His suit was wrinkled and his beard was scruffy. All very out of character, it would seem. He had the frantic air of a man on the edge.
Hayden found him oddly appealing now, where before he'd struck her as just another ego in a suit trying to make a buck. Funny how the threat of death can humanize a guy.
She sat across from him and put a hand on his forearm. Then, she took out the stunner and put it on the table. "Go get a nap. I can keep watch while I read this." She held up her tran.
"Once I know what you know, we'll discuss how we stop this guy for good, all right? That's the plan. Are you good with it?"
"It's not the whole plan, is it?" He smiled weakly and pressed bleary eyes with his thumbs.
"We'll call it part one of a multiple step plan."
She watched him get up and walk to her sofa, then plop down exhausted where eventually he fell asleep, too tired to do anything but snore, while she read the story of Tanner Murphy.
There were pictures. His highly pressed uniform made Murphy look incredibly boyish as he smiled her way through the screen of her tran.
She leaned back and propped her legs up on the corner of her table as she read with her stunner close by.
She found the tran to be full of research files and notes, and, as she started, she had a feeling it was gonna be a page turner, and it was.
As she read, she found the story of Tanner Murphy didn't fit with that of a serial killer. He was a model soldier, a model citizen. He tutored at risks youth. He bowled in a league on the base. There was nothing about this man's file, other than the fact that he was engineered for greatness and possessed top secret tech in his head, that would ever suggest he was the type to go off the deep end.
Yet, here he was, she thought watching the very last file of Tanner Murphy with blood splatter on his face looking up at a camera and smiling. It gave her a serious case of the creepies, making her shiver in the cool, dim apartment. Thank god, morning was almost here.
CHAPTER THREE
*
Her house guest slept exactly four hours, then sat up as though from a bad dream. He'd removed his shirt and suit coat at some point while she researched what she'd learned in these files with what she had on Kinder Tech.
She'd noticed his sleep was fitful at best, but it was sleep, at least. Whereas, she might never sleep again after reading this. She looked at him rubbing his face with his elbows resting on his knees. He yawned into his hands from her sofa in the sunken common area where she spent a lot of her time.
She rose and went down the three short steps to sit beside him.
"Well, that was not light reading," she said.
"Morning. No, it's not."
"Let me just clarify a point. He's only got brain enhancements, right? Bullets still work?"
She'd forgotten that this was his friend at one point, or at least, to the Doctor, the man was an unwilling victim. His whole body tensed as he clasped his hands together tightly and rested his face on them which he had turned slightly toward her with a reproving expression that her know she'd gone too far with her flippancy. "Bullets still work. He's human, Detective. Just like either of us."
"I'm sorry. I know this is hard for you," she said then paused. "But, he's not really like either of us, is he? Not really."
She caught his eye. "What you mean is that he should be human like us. It may not be his fault. However, it's still our responsibility to see him stopped and that means I have to know his limits."
The Doctor nodded and let down his cool facade once again. She decided to cut him a break. "I'll cook some breakfast. You go shower and get cleaned up."
He nodded, seeming grateful for a little bit of normalcy in the midst of all his own personal tragedy.
"Were you and Dr. Macy close?"
He stopped walking, stood still and gave his next answer a lot of thought. "He was my mentor. We spent every day of the last five years working toward the same goal. I guess we were pretty close. I thought we were, anyway."
She nodded. "I'm sorry for your loss," she said quietly. "Bathroom is through there."
With a single nodded acknowledgment, he shuffled away, still dead tired. Hayden couldn't help but feel for him. He'd lost a lot.
Now, she needed a multi step plan to keep Dr. Kerry alive and find her killer without alerting the people she was really after that she was after them. People she still didn't have names for at all. Simple.
That meant maybe keeping the precinct out of the loop at present. Possibly Ace, if he wanted to keep his job.
"Oh, this is gonna be fun," she muttered as she headed toward the kitchen to make bacon and eggs, the only dish she was capable of cooking.
*
Her multi step plan began with step one: Tell Ace she was following a long shot lead and she'd be in touch later that afternoon. She sent a text message because she'd never lie convincingly over the comm. One look at her face, and Mary would probably pick something up remotely.
She and Dr. Kerry got in the transport and decided to talk their way into Tanner Murphy's abandoned apartment. It was kept to military inspection spec, but it wasn't spartan or sterile. Tanner Murphy had pictures on a few open surfaces showing a life well lived. Plenty of family, plenty of fun, she thought sadly.
A woman who could only be his mother hugged him and smiled into a shot in a picture on a side table. He had multiple pictures of himself enjoying water sports of all kinds. One of his old units smiled in front of a bar on some tropic isle somewhere. He seemed like a poster boy for clean living and emotional connection. He had more pictures than Hayden had in her sparse little home.
The idea that the touch of a button could erase all of that, as well as a man's dignity, was beyond disturbing to her. Sense of self was everything, she thought. How could that just be erased?
It genuinely looked as though he'd walk back in any minute. If Gray and the files she'd just read could be believed, young Tanner Murphy didn't even have a clue he'd ever existed. He was overwritten with some twisted profile of a killer.
The irony of that research was strong. They'd been working on a way to help the most extreme cases of PTSD in soldiers and trauma victims by overwriting the traumatic event, though from the notes, Tanner wasn't at that stage yet. Tanner's research itself was more passive, merely a tracking of the cloned organs and bionics in the
patient for health and longevity. Monitoring his hardware, they'd been watching to see how his brain accepted the new inputs from his box. In this case, medical training, but it was clear from the file that Tanner Murphy had been interested in helping himself overcome PTSD as well as all the other men and women involved in war.
There hadn't been many takers on the mind-wiping study because Hayden wasn't the only one who felt the way she did about sense of self, but Tanner Murphy was facing a life without the service he loved. He'd desperately sought treatment, and it cost him his whole life.
She moved one of the pictures and looked at it long and hard. "He doesn't even know this apartment is here, does he?"
Gray looked at her, tension in his angled jaw. "I don't think he does."
"What happened to the overwriting research?" she asked continuing to look around and seeing nothing.
"It was segmented. Dr. Macy and I were focused on developing a way to use that same tech to download training to the soldier's brain. In this case, medic training. It was going well, or so we thought. This was separate from my own data on cloning."
She felt her mouth tighten at the grim thought. "Why does it only work with kinders?"
"The main reason was that the undeveloped brain is the most flexible. It works for the same reason stem cells work. Their function has yet to be determined, and they are looking for a function, as are the brain cells of a child. Kinder were, literally, a blank slate."
"Their very genes could be manipulated to increase the effectiveness of the training you wanted to implant. If you want a scientist, there are genes for that. Our hope was to adapt the therapy to human physiology. It wouldn't have been nearly as effective, but it could perhaps do some good."
"God, it just seems so cold," she observed.
"Sure it does, now. At the time, it was miraculous. Think of what we could do with the genome. Think of how far we could rise. But, now, you're right. It just feels mercenary."
He was a man disappointed and disillusioned. That much was obvious.
"Any thoughts on how to draw this guy out?"
"Only the most obvious," he said. "He thinks I'm a loose end like Macy."
