XGeneration (Book 5): Cry Little Sister

by Brad Magnarella

  “There you are!” Scott’s mother burst through the door to the office. Scott’s father plodded in behind her. “We’re all ready to leave, and I get a call that the two of you have been arrested?”

  Embarrassment burned over Scott’s face.

  “Not arrested,” Detective Buckner said. “Brought in on suspicion.”

  “Suspicion of what?”

  Scott couldn’t tell whether his mother was angrier at him or the detective. Detective Buckner must have wondered the same thing because he held up his hands in a defensive gesture.

  “With the events of the past few days, we’re just being extra vigilant,” he explained. “I found them behind Dr. Fields’s practice and wanted to know what they were up to. That’s all.”

  “I see,” Mrs. Spruel said. “Well, if they’ve answered to your satisfaction, Stanley and I would like to get going. We were supposed to have been on the road fifteen minutes ago, and the kids still need to pack their things.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that,” Detective Buckner said.

  Mrs. Spruel stopped as though she’d been slapped. “Well, that’s—that’s impossible!” Scott’s stomach clenched in dread. She sounded on the verge of a breakdown. “I have an open house scheduled for tomorrow, and the realtor will be there any minute to put the best face on it. She’ll have potted plants and potpourri and a bread maker to fill the kitchen with smells of home and—”

  When Detective Buckner raised his hand again, it was with authority.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Spruel, but these kids have not answered to my satisfaction. If they need some more time to think about what they’d like to tell me, that’s fine. Like I said, they’re not under arrest. Even so, it’s well within my power to make sure they remain in Murder Creek. If you would like me to get a judge’s order, I can have it in hand in ten minutes.”

  Mrs. Spruel looked from Detective Buckner down to Scott. The pointed ends of her eyebrows were nearly touching.

  Scott gave her a little nod that he hoped conveyed their need to stay.

  She huffed. “All right. We’ll delay our departure. I’m sure these kids will have something to tell you by the end of the day.”

  Scott felt his stomach release.

  Mr. Spruel, who had been wandering around the office, seemed to catch the last part. “And if they don’t,” he said, “we’ll prepare the hot irons, right, Detective? Har-har-har-har!”

  Detective Buckner tilted his head to tell them they were free to go. Scott stood and watched the detective return his thieving tools to the wallet. Hope crested inside Scott when the detective placed the wallet in the front pocket of his backpack, but when Scott reached for one of the straps, Detective Buckner withdrew the pack. The pack with his battery and laser, as well as the notebook in which he and Janis had jotted down information on Mr. Snyder.

  He carried the pack to a closet, where he set it on the floor before closing and locking the door.

  “It will remain safe here until we talk,” Detective Buckner said, raising his eyes.

  Scott backed away from the pressure of his stare.

  21

  “I hope you two are happy,” Mrs. Spruel said as they left the police station. “Linda squeezed me into her schedule of open houses as a favor—you know, realtor to realtor. Well that’s been blown clear out of the water. Lord only knows when she’ll be able to fit us in again.”

  Janis had to fight from groaning and rolling her eyes. Despite her assurances to Scott on the day they’d arrived at the beach house, Janis found that his mother was starting to annoy her. Badly.

  “This is actually good, Mom,” Scott said. “Janis and I have some strong theories going and…”

  “I don’t know who this Detective Buckner thinks he is,” Mrs. Spruel continued, as though her son hadn’t been speaking. “Couldn’t you have just told him whatever it was he wanted to hear?”

  “Not without compromising our identities,” Janis said.

  Plus, Janis didn’t know what Detective Buckner’s angle was exactly. Why did he want her and Scott to disclose what they knew? Was he looking for evidence outside of the established narrative of David and his friends as the killers? Or was he trying to defend that narrative? He was hard to read.

  The only thing clear in Janis’s mind was that ever since their second night in Murder Creek, Detective Buckner had been monitoring them.

  “Well, why not turn this whole thing over to the Program?” Mrs. Spruel was saying as they surrounded the family car and Mr. Spruel dug in his pockets for the keys. “Make it their problem?”

  “Because it would compromise their secrecy,” Scott answered. “Plus, it’s not necessary.”

  Mrs. Spruel harrumphed. “You wouldn’t be saying that if it was your mortgage.”

  God, help us, Scott thought-spoke.

  “Hey, ah, I just realized we left the bikes at city hall.” Janis pointed over the top of the car to where the pair of cruisers were set in the bike rack. “We’re going to need to ride them back.”

  The car rocked as Mr. Spruel landed in the driver’s seat. Mrs. Spruel paused with one foot inside the car, her torso twisted. She seemed to be trying to determine whether the cruisers would fit inside the trunk.

  “Straight home,” she said with a single nod.

  “Oh, man,” Scott told Janis as the Volvo pulled away. “I’d have gone crazy if I had to listen to another minute of that.”

  You and me both, Janis thought to herself.

  “Whoa, there,” Scott called. “Bikes are this way.”

  Janis continued angling toward the library. “I just had an idea.”

  She waited until they were back in front of the microfilm machine to explain. “I’ve been assuming that the antagonism between David and the police was over their long history of run-ins. But do you remember that first time we met David, in Murder World? When I mentioned the police, a part of him reacted, deep down—on a visceral level. Is there a way to do a cross search for Dr. Fields and Chief McDermott?”

  “Sure,” Scott said. “In that box, just type in ‘Harold Fields,’ ‘AND’—in caps—and then ‘McDermott.’”

  Janis did so and hit Enter.

  “You think McDermott’s the collaborator?” Scott asked.

  “We’ll see.”

  A minute later, the computer returned one hit, an article from March 1957. Scott retrieved the appropriate roll of microfilm and loaded it into the machine.

  Buried in the middle of the local section, the hit was less an article than a photo with a caption. Its headline read “Murder Creek Awarded Grant for Nutritional Therapy Study.”

  The grainy black-and-white photo showed a slender, darker-haired Chief McDermott standing opposite a younger Dr. Fields. Both looked appropriately stoic, Dr. Fields in a white lab coat and horn-rimmed glasses. On a small table between them were jars of what looked like Ovaltine. As Janis studied them, a prickly wave of nausea moved through her.

  She read the caption aloud. “‘On Tuesday, Murder Creek was awarded a twenty-thousand dollar grant to participate in a study on the effects of a nutritional supplement on behavior. Local pediatrician Dr. Harold Fields will oversee the study at the Sunshine Camp for At-Risk Youths in cooperation with Police Chief Liam McDermott. The grant is being funded by Rourke Pharmaceuticals.’”

  Janis sat back. “I think this is the connection we’ve been looking for.”

  Scott snapped his fingers. “The Snyder I came across in the police database—it wasn’t Giles, it was Chastity! His daughter! When I was referencing other files, looking for misdemeanor offenses and punishments, I hit on hers. I think she’d been nailed for shoplifting or something. Like with David and his friends, her file also had that ‘RP’ in the header!”

  Janis reread the last sentence in the caption. “Rourke Pharmaceuticals,” she said. “There’s our ‘RP.’ They were subjects in the study.”

  “They must all have been in that camp together.”

  “Do yo
u remember when we went to the police station so you could report David having your father’s stolen shirt? McDermott referred to David and his friends as being troubled—that was the word he used. He also said he tried to straighten them out when they were younger.”

  “That’s right!”

  Janis patted the air for him to quiet down.

  “That’s right,” Scott repeated in a whisper. “And then he said something about their progress only going from bad to worse. I guess it’s safe to assume that whatever nutrition they were given didn’t have the desired effect.”

  “If it was even nutrition,” Janis said, eyeing the white-labeled jars in the photo.

  “You think it was something else?”

  “We talked about David and his friends and why they look the way they do. Their paleness and the fact that they don’t seem to age like the rest of us. You believed they were vampires, while my vote was for genetics or plastic surgery. I think we were both off the mark. I think whatever was in those jars did that to them.”

  When Scott turned from the image, his eyes were huge. “You think it made them sick?”

  “It screwed them up, that’s for sure. Dr. Fields would have kept a written account of the effects of the supplement and shared the information with this Rourke Pharmaceuticals. I bet that’s what’s in those missing medical records.” Anger smoldered in her gut. “To them, David, Chastity, and the others were nothing more than lab rats.”

  “And here’s the cage master.” Scott had raised a finger to the screen and now he drew an “X” across Chief McDermott’s face. “Mr. Snyder’s next target.”

  “No doubt. And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Chief McDermott was the one who removed those records from Dr. Fields’s office.”

  “Yeah,” Scott said. “He didn’t want whoever took over the practice to come across them and piece together what was going on.” He stood and rushed to the filing cabinets. After retrieving a box and swapping microfilm rolls in the machine, he found the giant headline they had read earlier that day.

  MURDER CREEK MAN KILLS WIFE AND FLEES. MANHUNT UNDERWAY.

  Scott picked out a line four or five paragraphs down and tapped it hard. “Look who was first to the scene.”

  Janis leaned forward. “Chief effing McDermott.”

  “What if the Snyders figured out that Dr. Fields was deliberately making their daughter sick? What if they confronted him, threatened to blow the whistle?” The words tumbled from Scott’s mouth in the way they did when an idea was unfolding faster than he could speak it. “Think about it. Who was chosen for the experiment? The kids of parents who were probably just as troubled as their offspring. Parents who wouldn’t push back.”

  “Only the Snyders may have had it together just enough,” Janis said.

  “Exactly! And so while Mr. Snyder is out drinking, Chief McDermott pays his wife a visit. Shoots her with her husband’s gun. And just like that, one accuser is dead and the other’s a fugitive.”

  Janis was about to say that Chief McDermott didn’t strike her as a killer when her reality went topsy-turvy. Large spots blotted out the microfilm machine, and her tongue became thick in her mouth. It was the same sensation as when she would sometimes regress into her past. But the scene that replaced the back of the library was somewhere she had never been before.

  The dirt-stained door of a wood-frame house loomed before her. She wavered as she reached into the psychic residue growing around her and grasped the knob with a thick, calloused hand.

  Not my past, she thought with a chill, Mr. Snyder’s.

  The door swung open and he stepped into a front hallway. Floorboards groaned beneath the weight of his boots. He stripped off his work shirt and hung it on a hook outside the closet door. Tucking his undershirt back into his trousers, he raised his face to where light from the kitchen illuminated the other end of the hallway. Giles thought about how his wife didn’t mind his drinking as much as his coming home late. He was pleased for cutting himself off at six beers tonight—over the chaffing protests of his slaughterhouse buddies.

  It’s progress, Ellie would say with that weary smile, but she’d be happy to see him. Happy he’d made it home for dinner.

  He needed to wash his hands first, scrub the blood from his nails and palm creases.

  Giles took two steps toward the bathroom door and stopped. In his semi-inebriated state, the realization came late. There was an absence of smells, of sounds—the snap of feet over linoleum, the groaning of baseboards, the clinking of pots and pans, Ellie’s muttering sighs—of anything.

  Ellie? he called.

  A morgue-like silence swallowed the word.

  He veered right. Though he tried to move silently, each footfall sounded like an axe-blow into a tree trunk. In the darkness of their bedroom, he knelt and swept an arm under the bed. He pawed his hand over scattered boxes of shells, but his shotgun, which he had used the day before to hunt squirrel and then replaced—he was sure he’d replaced it—was gone.

  He sat back on his heels.

  Had his wife taken the gun? She’d hunted with it before, but at this time of night? And what about Chastity? Where was she? An image replayed in his mind from the night two weeks before when she had awakened him and Ellie. They had turned the light on to find their daughter standing beside their bed, blood dripping from both earlobes. After packing her ear holes with cotton, they waited anxiously until first light and rushed her to a doctor—not to that quack of a pediatrician, Fields, but to the clinic over in Statham. Giles’s memories of that night stoked his current worries and made a loud drumbeat of his heart.

  Then he remembered that Chastity was doing house chores for the old woman two streets over. As for his wife, if she had gone out, there would be a note on the kitchen table.

  Giles made his way back to the hallway, no longer frightened by the sound of his own footsteps. The strangeness of the last two weeks, especially what the doctor in Statham had discovered, had made him paranoid, that was all.

  He shook off the last of his apprehension as he stepped out between the kitchen and den. And there was his shotgun, set across the table. Red-labeled beer cans were scattered to one side of the gun. Schlitz. He would often knock off two or three before bed, but he didn’t remember leaving the cans out like that. And his wife didn’t drink. Curiosity gave way to a low burn of anger. Had Chastity and her boyfriend gotten into them? What was the kid’s name? Marko? Markus?

  He swung toward the kitchen to check his beer stash, and that’s where he found his wife. The scream began in the pit of his stomach. But before it could take full form, a hand clapped over his mouth.

  Janis!

  The library snapped back into being, and Janis found herself struggling to pull the hand from her mouth.

  “Janis,” someone whispered again. “It’s okay. It’s me.”

  As Janis relaxed, so did Scott, who was facing her. He removed his hand and wiped strands of hair from her eyes. Breath thundered from Janis’s chest. Using the cuffs of her sweatshirt, she dabbed tears from her cheeks.

  After a moment, she said, “Yeah, I’m good.”

  “You went spacey and then screamed.” The concern in Scott’s brown eyes was total. He looked around as though to make sure the librarian wasn’t coming to check on them, then touched his lips to her forehead.

  “I … I tapped into the night Mr. Snyder found his wife.” Janis winced at the image. The woman’s chest had caught the blunt of the blast. The force had knocked her across the kitchen. Pieces of cabinet doors were scattered around the impact site. “It was pretty awful.”

  “Oh, man.”

  “You were right. Something was going on with Chastity. About two weeks before the murder she started bleeding from her ears. The Snyders took her to another doctor to get her checked out. He found evidence of radiation poisoning.”

  “Radiation?”

  “The 1950s were the early years of the Cold War, remember? Everyone was interested in the effects of fallout
from a nuclear attack. I bet Rourke Pharmaceuticals was trying to get that information, probably through studies in small towns like Murder Creek. Towns with one pediatrician and a chief of police who could be bought.” She spoke with growing certainty. “One of Rourke’s mandates to Chief McDermott would have been to keep the information from getting out.”

  “So, just by taking Chastity to another doctor, the Snyder’s were threatening the study.”

  “Exactly,” Janis said. “And Rourke probably already had major buyers lined up for the data. A lot of money would have been on the line, probably in the millions of dollars.”

  “Or Russian rubles.”

  “Or both,” Janis said grimly. She wondered how many other lives had been deemed expendable in the competition between superpower nations. The number probably was in the millions as well.

  Scott’s brow collapsed in thought. “If David wanted Dr. Fields as dead as Mr. Snyder did, why was he still seeing him?”

  “He’s a smart man. Maybe he worked something out with Dr. Fields and Chief McDermott, some sort of payment. If Dr. Fields was still collecting data, Rourke was still sending them money. After all, info on the long-term effects of radiation exposure would be just as valuable, if not more so, to buyers than the short-term effects. Harder to attain. It explains why David would threaten Dr. Fields, you know, for administering the supplement thirty years earlier, but be working with him at the same time.”

  “And what about Mayor Walpole?” Scott asked. “Every time we’ve seen him, he’s been a ball of nerves.”

  “He has crossed my mind,” Janis said. “But he doesn’t really fit into the puzzle, does he? According to your mother, he’s only been mayor for five years, and he’s not even from Murder Creek.”

  “But when my mom asked if the town was being attacked…?”

  “Oh, what I felt? I think the mayor was staring at the end of his tenure. The failures of the boardwalk and amusement park, the break-ins, then the dog slayings … If the town was under attack, he knew he was finished as its mayor. I’m pretty sure it was that thought he was reacting to.”