by Bill Myers
“Yeah, I worked computers for the defense department. Back in the NORAD days.”
“Well, take a look at this.” Murkoski motioned to a piece of beige equipment on the counter. It stood three-and-a-half-feet high by two-and-a-half-feet wide. Beside it, a computer screen glowed with row after row of multiple-colored bands. “This is our ABI PRISM 373 DNA Sequencer. In many ways, these are our brains. We have lots of these beauties scattered throughout the complex.”
Katherine stepped in for a closer look. “A DNA sequencer?”
“Yes.”
“What does it do?”
“Remember those gels in the last room?”
“Yes.”
“These automatically read them. They record the bands, label the gene, hold it in memory, then fire it off to our main computer.”
Coleman watched as Katherine examined the computer and equipment. For the first time that he could remember, she appeared totally absorbed, at peace — almost happy. She seemed to lose herself as she poked, prodded, and explored the fascinating new machine. And as he watched her face fill with awe, he began to experience her wonder himself. He knew nothing about the equipment she was examining, but it didn’t matter. Not only was he able to feel people’s pain, he was also able to experience their joy.
Unfortunately, the moment was short-lived.
“Dr. Murkoski!” A young technician burst into the room, a look of urgency on his face.
Murkoski turned, angry at the interruption. “What is it?”
“B – 11, we have an emergency.”
Murkoski’s attitude instantly changed. “It’s not Freddy, is it?”
“I tried to beep you, but you didn’t —”
Murkoski pulled up his beeper, looked at it, then threw it to the floor in disgust. Without a word, he raced out the door, the technician on his heels.
Coleman and Katherine looked at each other. Neither was sure what to do, but since neither wanted to be abandoned in this labyrinth of labs, they hurried after the other two.
Murkoski moved briskly down the hall. He took the stairs two at a time, then crossed the atrium. Coleman and Katherine managed to keep him in sight down another long hallway until they finally arrived at the open doorway to B – 11.
Two paramedics hovered over a body lying on grassy sod. One checked for a pulse while the other squirted goop over the paddles of a heart defibrillator. A handful of Genodyne staff gathered around, watching. In the far corner, clinging to a dead tree and shaking it, a baboon screamed hysterically.
“Who is it?” Murkoski shouted as he raced toward the group. “What happened?”
“It’s Wolff,” one of the staff called back.
Coleman and Katherine moved closer as the paramedic placed the paddles on the chest and yelled, “Clear!”
There was a faint thud as the body convulsed. The baboon barked and screamed louder. Murkoski scowled at the animal and demanded, “Was Freddy part of this?”
“They were just playing,” someone said, “roughhousing, and suddenly Wolff keeled over.”
“Cardiac arrest,” the first paramedic explained.
Murkoski scoffed, “A heart attack? He’s young, he’s in great shape — look at him!”
A chill swept over Coleman. There was something about Murkoski’s tone. Even over the animal’s shrieking and screaming, Coleman could hear a falseness in Murkoski’s voice. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong.
“He’s back!” the second paramedic shouted.
All heads turned toward Wolff as he began coughing up a clear pink fluid. His eyes fluttered, then opened. He was searching, desperately looking for something. But it lasted only a moment before the eyes quit moving. Now they simply stared. And it was that expression that brought the cold sweat onto Coleman’s face, making his mouth fill with salty brine.
“Hey, are you all right?” He looked up and saw Katherine. Though she tried to hide it, there was no missing the concern in her face. “You don’t look so hot.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I just have to sit down a —” But he was unable to finish the phrase before he doubled over and threw up. He wretched once, twice, three times, spewing vomit onto the freshly lain sod.
“Get him out of here!” the paramedic shouted. “Someone get him out of here!”
He felt Katherine take his arm and direct him toward the door. They had to stop one more time as his stomach contracted with another set of heaves. At last he was able to rise and make it out into the hallway, as the shrieks and screams of the baboon continued to echo inside the room.
CHAPTER 9
FIRST TIME YOU’VE SEEN somebody die?” Katherine asked as they headed back down the freeway toward Everett.
Coleman looked out the passenger window. “I’ve seen a lot of death,” he answered quietly. “It wasn’t his dying that hit me. It was the expression on his face.”
Katherine nodded, thinking she understood. “That how-could-this-be-happening-to-me look?”
“No, it wasn’t that.” Coleman continued to stare out the window. “That wasn’t his question.”
Katherine glanced at him. “What do you mean — what was it then?”
Coleman slowly turned to face her. “The man was not asking why he was dying. He was asking why he had ever lived.”
The statement stunned Katherine. She wanted to respond but couldn’t find the words. Instead, she studied the road in silence.
It had been a week since their first run-in, and this was not the first time he had left her speechless. In fact, it was happening more and more often. But it wasn’t just his insight into people that silenced her. It was also his lack of self-consciousness. Whether he was waiting on a customer at the store, horsing around with Eric, or trying unsuccessfully to scale the barriers she kept erecting between them, she had never met a person so completely empty of self.
At first she had mistaken this lack of ego as some major self-image problem. But instead of making him weak, it seemed to make him strong. And the more she saw him in action, the more she found herself envying him. By taking himself out of the picture, by having no focus on self, he was completely free of himself. That freedom allowed him to be perfectly honest and to focus intently on others. He saw things in people. Deep things. Like with that dying man back at the lab.
Once again, she felt him looking at her. Searching, exploring. She shifted uncomfortably. “You’re doing it again,” she warned.
“Oh. Sorry.” She could almost hear amusement in his voice as he turned and looked ahead.
The man enjoyed her company, she could tell. And, if she were being honest with herself, she’d have to admit she was beginning to accept his.
No, actually, it was more than that. She found his freedom exciting, his concern for others moving. And these emotions set off a quiet trembling somewhere deep inside her. She was starting to feel things again, things she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. But she was through with those types of feelings — she’d sworn them off long ago, and she wasn’t about to give in to them now.
“So,” she said, trying to change the subject. “Do you think this blood stuff is for real?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what does it feel like to have what could be the blood of Jesus Christ running through your veins?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “To be honest, I really don’t know that much about the man.”
“You’ve never read the Bible?”
Coleman smiled sadly. “Guess I was too busy with other things.”
“Come on,” she insisted, “everybody’s read the Bible — at least some of it.”
He shook his head. “Sorry.” Turning back toward her, he asked, “What about you?” She could feel him probing again.
“Sure,” she said. “When I was a kid I used to read it every night.” She couldn’t resist glancing over to see how that bit of information was received.
But instead of surprise, his face was filled with questioning concern. “I�
�d like to hear more.”
She knew he wasn’t talking just about the Bible. He was also talking about her, about what she’d been through. His sensitivity sent a faint quiver through her body. Effortlessly, without even trying, he had reached in and touched her. She suspected that, in time, if she let herself, she would be able to open up to this man. If she wanted, she would eventually be able to talk with him about the Bible, about God’s betrayal, about the brutal loss of the only man she’d ever loved. She could speak of the injustice of losing her father, the only man who’d tried to help, who’d loved her even when she was ugly and unlovable. But Katherine would not — could not — give in to that temptation. Instead, she swallowed back the emotion and remained silent.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to pry. I won’t do that again.”
She wanted to say something clever, something wry and sarcastic. But she wasn’t sure she could pull it off. Fortunately, the Mukilteo Interchange was coming up, so she was able to busy herself checking the mirror, changing lanes, and jockeying for position as they left one freeway and entered another that headed west toward Puget Sound.
By the time she had finished the maneuvers, she had managed to partially re-erect the wall holding him out. And to ensure that there would be no further assault, she went on the offense. “What about you?” she asked.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“What Murkoski said, doesn’t that concern you? That everything you are, that it’s all a bunch of chemicals? Doesn’t it bother you that you’re nothing but some big kid’s chemistry experiment?” She saw Coleman wince and immediately hated herself. Why had she said that, just when they were getting so close? But of course, that was her answer. They were getting too close.
He shook his head. “No. That doesn’t bother me.”
“What does?” she asked. “I mean, there must be something that gets under your skin, something that sets you off. Or did they take that away, too?” It was another poke, and she hated herself even more.
Coleman remained silent a long moment before answering. “I guess… I guess what really bothers me… is the pain.”
She glanced to him. He was deep in thought. “Pain?” she asked.
“I never knew that people were in such anguish. I never knew there was so much loneliness. Sometimes when I see it in them, I actually feel it, right along with them.” He hesitated, then continued, almost sadly. “Sometimes I think it would be better to feel nothing at all than to feel that.”
“It’s true, then.” The edge to her voice was softening. “You do sense what other people are feeling.”
He nodded. “On the one hand I experience this incredible beauty all around me, things I’ve seen every day of my life but have never seen — drops of dew on a spiderweb, steam rising from a wooden fence in the early morning sun. On the other hand, I see our inability to connect with that beauty, to be a part of it. I see in every pair of eyes this frustration, this fear that we’re nothing but vapor or shadows, that we’re skimming across the surface of reality without ever touching it, without connecting to that — that intangible something, that deepness that makes all the other beauty possible.”
Katherine realized that she was holding her breath and forced herself to exhale.
He continued. “That’s what I saw in his eyes this afternoon. It wasn’t his fear of death, it was his searching. The realization that he was nothing but a shadow without substance — dancing across creation’s surface with no purpose, no reason for being.”
Coleman looked back out the window. “I guess that’s what bothers me the most. Sensing all that pain. Feeling all their… hollowness.”
Katherine nodded, then quietly quoted, man of sorrows acquainted with grief.’ ”
“Pardon me?”
“That’s one of the descriptions of Jesus in the Scriptures.” Coleman turned toward her as she nodded. “Yes, sir, I think we definitely need to get you a Bible.”
Steiner’s body cried out for sleep, but he wouldn’t listen. He stared at the computer screen while throwing another handful of Tylenol into his mouth and washing them down with a Diet Coke. He’d lost track of time. It could be day, it could be night — he didn’t care. He only knew that he was close. Very, very close. He clicked the mouse and brought up the names and addresses of the airplane owners he’d requested from the FAA.
The past few days had not been easy. After interviewing the orderly at St. John’s, he had tracked down the cabby who had picked up the “burn victim.” The driver was a punk, less than cooperative. All he’d remembered was taking two men to the airport on the morning of January 30.
“There’s nothing else you recall?” Steiner had asked.
“Nope.”
“Any conversation?”
“Nope.”
“Can you describe the bandaged man’s voice?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Did they say where they were flying?”
“Nope.”
The conversation was going nowhere fast. “You don’t remember anything?”
“Nope. Just that the guy stiffed me on the tip.”
“That, you remember?”
“If a man’s got his own plane and he’s too cheap to tip you, that you remember.”
“They had their own plane? How do you know?”
“I didn’t drop them off at the commercial terminal. I dropped them off at the general aviation area.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You didn’t ask.”
Next had come the slow and laborious process of elimination. Steiner knew this was always the most tedious part in any investigation. But he also knew that if you had the time and tenacity, it was the most profitable. Steiner had both.
First he had contacted the Air Route Traffic Control Center in Omaha and asked for all noncommercial flight plans filed on January 30 out of Lincoln Municipal Airport. These records were confidential and it hadn’t been easy to get them, but a few well-placed lies about working for the Johnson County D.A.’s office did the trick.
He had thirty-five choices, thirty-five noncommercial flights that had flown out of Lincoln on the thirtieth. But he quickly cut that number in half by eliminating all flights that had a destination of five hundred miles or less. If Steiner’s suspicions were correct, the stakes and the need for secrecy were high; he doubted they would risk being seen in any airport if they could make the journey by land within a day.
Now the number of choices had been reduced to eighteen.
Next Steiner listed the tail ID numbers of each of the eighteen aircraft and pulled strings at the FAA to get the names and addresses of each of the registered owners.
This was the list he now stared at on the screen. Since Lincoln is the state capital, slightly less than half of the aircraft were government owned, leased, or affiliated. This could, of course, be a government operation, but he had his doubts.
That brought the number down to eleven. Six private, seven corporate. It had to be someone on this list. But who? Steiner rubbed his forehead. His headache was relentless, but so was his determination. There was something here, there had to be. And he wouldn’t stop until he found it.
Once again he scanned the column of private owners:
N9745B David Buchanan Lincoln, Nebraska
N340E Richard Kaufman Salt Lake City, Utah
N698O Willa Nixon Rockford, Illinois
N889DG Thomas Piffer Lincoln, Nebraska
N7724B Susan Smoke Kalispell, Montana
He ran a cross-check with Coleman’s friends, with witnesses of the execution, antideath groups, defense leagues…
Nothing.
He popped another Diet Coke, chugged several gulps, and scrutinized the next list; the corporate planes:
N395AG American Containers Lincoln, Nebraska
N737BA Genodyne Inc. Arlington, Washington
N349E Johnson Agricultural Chicago, Illinois
N7497B Kellermen Dye Casting Omaha, Nebraska
and Lumber
N5487G Van Owen Seed Company Des Moines, Iowa
He stared at the list, hoping to force a pattern, to see something, anything. He saw nothing. Well, almost nothing. That second name, Genodyne, sounded familiar. He’d read something about that company not long ago. Time or Newsweek, he couldn’t remember. Wasn’t it some sort of genetics firm?
He studied the address. Arlington, Washington. What were they doing all the way out there? Cattle breeding? Hybrid corn?
He clicked the mouse a few times and popped up his phone directory. Scrolling down, he found the home number for Leonard Patterson, head of security at the penitentiary in Lincoln and one of the few men at the facility Steiner had not completely alienated. He clicked the mouse, let it dial, then reached over to pick up his phone.
It rang five times before someone fumbled with the receiver and a groggy voice mumbled, “Hello?”
“Hi, Leonard. Steiner.”
“Harry? What time is it?”
“I don’t know. Listen, do you remember those scientists you said were hanging around before Coleman’s execution?”
“Harry, it’s 4:30 in the morning.”
“Yeah. Did you ever hear what area of science they were into?”
“Harry —”
“Just — did you hear a company name or location or anything?”
“No, Harry.”
“Why were they so interested? I mean, what were they studying?”
“They took some blood samples and stuff, I don’t know…”
Steiner waited, letting Leonard think.
“They said they wanted to test his genes or something, yeah, they were a couple guys interested in what a murderer’s genes were like.”
Steiner’s eyes shot to the screen:
Genodyne Inc., Arlington, Washington.
Bingo. His head still pounded, but he no longer noticed.
“And Sarah and Julie, how are they? Can you put them on?”
