Dying Memories

by Dave Zeltserman

  “Did Gail Hawes have any needle marks on her?”

  Bill heard the detective sighing wearily. “We released this to you guys already,” Boxer half growled. “A full toxicology screen was done. Nothing was in her system.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking. Did she have any unexplained needle marks on her?”

  Boxer hesitated before telling Bill that that information was not for public consumption, but yeah, she had a puncture mark on her arm. “Why you asking?” Boxer asked.

  “I’m not sure yet. I’ll let you know when I am.”

  Bill got off the phone and thought about Gail Hawes and Trey Megeet both with their mysterious hypodermic needle marks. As anxious as he was to research this, as well as the man he was supposedly mistaken for, Jeffrey Vozzmer, it was six-thirty and he badly wanted to see Emily. At that moment that was all that mattered to him. The other stuff would have to wait.

  Chapter 20

  Bill arrived at the agreed upon restaurant by seven, and Emily was already there. Like every other time he’d seen her she was stunningly beautiful as she wore her brown suede jacket and matching skirt, her hair down and flowing past her shoulders. When she saw him she flashed him a near heart stopping smile, but as she noticed his injured ear, her smile faded quickly and concern wrinkled her brow. Bill waved away her question about what happened by telling her it was a long story.

  After they were seated at their table and having drinks, Emily told him that he was going to have to tell her what happened regardless of how long the story was. “You’re still too wrapped up in it not to tell me,” she insisted.

  “I am, am I?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “You keep disappearing on me. So come on, spill it!”

  “You’ll think I’m nuts,” he said.

  That brought a smile back to her lips. “Maybe,” she said.

  Her smile was just too beautiful and alluring for him to resist. He relented, first telling her about Trey Megeet, then about his abduction outside his apartment building. She looked at him with a frozen half-smile as if he were joking.

  “You’re joking, right?” she asked.

  He hesitated for a brief moment before nodding. “Yeah, and not a very good joke either. I’m sorry.” He looked away from her, adding, “What happened was someone punched me in the ear. It happened while I was leaving the prison after talking to Megeet. Not all that interesting in reality.”

  “Why’d you tell me that other story?” she asked, her voice not quite right, her skin color all of a sudden very pale.

  “I don’t know. I’m having a weird day today, that’s all.”

  “Well don’t do something like that again!”

  He nodded, smiling weakly. So there it was. The first rough spot in their relationship, the first chink in the armor. What the hell was wrong with him? The story was too bizarre for the police to even consider, how could he expect Emily to believe it? For the first time since he was with her he noticed the silence between them, how uncomfortable it had become. He tried to fill the void with idle chitchat, but it took several minutes and another drink each before they were back to where they were earlier, or at least mostly back. He couldn’t help feeling as if Emily’s attitude towards him had grown slightly more reserved. It wasn’t until after dinner and they were back in her apartment and had finished their first round of love-making with Emily lying on top of him that he felt they were really back. That any doubts that had been creeping into her mind concerning his sanity were gone.

  “You really had me going before with your story,” she whispered into his undamaged ear. She hesitated, and with a hitch in her voice, added, “You really were just making it up, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “With that type of imagination you’re wasting your talents. You should be writing Hollywood screenplays instead of newspaper articles.”

  “Yeah, well, it looks like it’s time for me to once again put my active imagination to work. Among other things.”

  Bill rolled the two of them over so Emily was underneath him. And then they were onto round two.

  It was much later before they were done. Bill fell asleep surprisingly easily afterwards given what had happened that day. Emily’s warm slender body next to his had a powerful soothing effect on him. Still, though, his sleep turned troubled. At one point he found himself back inside the van with the same man with the hypodermic needle; the one with the scrubbed pink face, pointy ears and tiny black eyes. It was just the two of them, and the man kept pushing forward as he tried sticking Bill with the hypodermic needle. As scrawny and thin as the man was he was getting the upper hand, overpowering Bill, moving the tip of the needle closer to Bill’s right eye.

  “That’s not sodium pentothal, is it?” Bill grunted out as he fought to push the man’s face away.

  “Of course not,” the man said.

  The needle moved ever closer. Bill could just about feel it pricking his eye…

  He woke up with a start, his body damp with perspiration. Confused at first over where he was, he reached out and felt Emily next to him and memories from the other day came rushing back to him. He took a deep breath and craned his neck to check the time. Ten minutes to five. He lay quietly for several minutes until he could get his breathing back under control and stop his heart from pounding, then left the bed and gathered up his clothing.

  In the semi-darkness of the bedroom he quietly slipped his clothes on, then stood for a moment and watched Emily as she slept. She looked so fragile as she lay half buried under her quilt, seeming much younger than her twenty-nine years, her breathing coming out as a thin saw blade rattling softly back and forth. It tugged at Bill’s heart as he watched her. He badly wanted to just crawl back into bed with her and pretend that yesterday never happened. He couldn’t do that, though. Thoughts of that day forced their way into his mind. The pink-faced man with the hypodermic needle and how reptilian and deadly he seemed, especially his eyes. The two behemoths he was squeezed between inside the van. The car crash that supposedly never happened. The driver nearly falling out of the van, his face a broken wreck, but still shooting at Bill to kill.

  Bill steeled himself to leave the room and turned away from Emily. Once out in the hallway, he wrote her a note and left it on her kitchen table, then grabbed his laptop and left her apartment.

  He couldn’t help feeling jumpy once he was outside in the murky early morning light. It was only a quarter past five, the streets and sidewalks deserted. When a delivery truck rattled past him he half ducked before realizing what he was doing. He had quit smoking after the army, but at that moment he found himself craving a cigarette. Just as badly, he needed coffee.

  He took a detour to the bakery he had stopped off at the other day but it wasn’t opening for another forty-five minutes, and he ended up instead at a twenty-four hour convenience store and getting himself a thirty-two ounce cup of high octane and a couple of chocolate doughnuts. He almost bought a pack of Winstons, but decided to hold off, both because he was shocked at the price and also he didn’t want to start smoking again. Back in his army days a pack cost him thirty-five cents at the canteen, the convenience store had it priced at five dollars and thirty cents. He took a long drink of the coffee before stepping outside and moving in a fast half-jog to where he’d left his car the night before several blocks away. When he reached his car he started feeling even more paranoid, and he got down on his hands and knees to look under the chassis, then he popped the hood and checked there for any explosive devices.

  Christ, like they really would’ve followed him to the North End….

  He had convinced himself that it wasn’t the case of mistaken identity that they tried hard to sell him. It could’ve been they were just trying to scare him off. But from what? Of course he knew what the answer to that was, as bizarre as it sounded. The abduction happened after he visited Trey Megeet in prison.

  He got behind the wheel and once again held his breath while he turned the key in the i
gnition. After a long ten-count he exhaled in a loud burst. Nothing, no explosion. What the hell was wrong with him thinking they’d do something like that? If they wanted to kill him, they could’ve done it easily the other day. Besides, they knew where he lived and worked, but they wouldn’t have had any idea about Emily, and they wouldn’t have known he was spending his nights in the North End…

  Unless they put a tracking device in his car…

  He was just becoming more paranoid. Except he knew he wasn’t. If they were going to create such an elaborate setup to kidnap him, then later be able to clean up the crash site without the local police ever knowing about it, as well as quieting witnesses, why wouldn’t they be able to slip a tracking device in his car? But if the point was to scare him, why would they bother? Except it was more than that. That wasn’t the only thing they were trying to do. After the crash, the driver who stumbled from the van had shot at him to kill. He was pretty sure he felt a bullet go by his ear, and nobody’s that good a shot where they could’ve missed that closely on purpose.

  Grimly, he determined that he was going to have to ditch his car. He glanced at his laptop. His grimace tightened as he realized they might’ve put something in that also while it was left alone in his car. Maybe even his cell phone.

  The thought stunned him.

  What had he stepped into?

  Chapter 21

  The parking lot at the Tribune was mostly empty with a half dozen other cars scattered about. When Bill walked through the office he took little satisfaction in seeing that for the first time in his five years he’d beaten Jack O’Donnell in. He turned on his laptop and checked his email and was disappointed to see there was nothing from his good pal, G. Phillips, the Tribune’s computer guy had sent him something to let him know that the email he had asked about was impossible to trace. Carol had sent him more articles about Trey Megeet. Emily had also sent him a note the other day about how much she was looking forward to dinner. It was a sweet note. Bill’s thoughts drifted towards Emily when a new email came in with the subject, ‘sorry about yesterday’. He felt a tightness is his throat as he opened it. The message read:

  I didn’t have time to warn you yesterday. Sorry about that. Everything happened fast after they found out about your trip to talk to Megeet. But my men were the ones in the Hummer. You’re smart enough to know now that there’s a connection with the two murders. Here’s what it is: ViGen Corporation. I wish I could tell you more, but that’s all I’ve been able to figure out so far. In any case, you should be safe for now. They won’t try anything again, not after yesterday, and not now that they know I’m watching you. –yer pal, G.

  Bill sat for several minutes reading the message over and over again, a coolness flooding through his head. So that was it. As he had thought, he was their target all along. They planned his abduction, maybe hastily, but they still planned it. And their reason? To scare him? Maybe, at least initially, but there was more to it than that—the hypodermic needle made it something different, and then there was that man shooting at him when he saw Bill escaping.

  So what now? He could drop his investigation, but that didn’t guarantee anything. They could still come after him again. He didn’t know what those men were really after, except it had to be more than just to scare him. He thought about showing his latest email to the police, but what would that prove? The detective he spoke to had already categorized Bill as either someone mentally unstable or unscrupulous enough to make up his abduction story as a means to further his career, and he’d just assume that Bill sent the email to himself.

  Bill tried replying to the email, asking his pal G what the fuck was going on, but as he expected the message bounced back to him, reporting that a return email address could not be found. As he stared at the computer screen, a hard resolve took over. It wasn’t in his makeup to back down from a fight. He probably couldn’t even if he wanted, but he didn’t want to. For the last five years he kept telling himself he wanted to do real journalism, and not the quick, dirty, city desk stories he was being assigned. Well, this was his chance. More than that, though, he didn’t like being pushed around, and he sure as fuck didn’t like being shot at. He made his decision that he was going to push his investigation until he knew what was going on, and he’d be able to end things then.

  Nothing came up when he tried googling, ‘Jeffrey Vozzmer’, the person he had supposedly been confused for by the men in the van. Nothing. Not a single hit. He tried variations of the spelling, and still came up with nothing. He smiled grimly over the fact they gave him such a dead end name. Next he tried ViGen Corporation and found the company’s web-site. There wasn’t much on it other than some photographs of men in lab coats and a proclamation that they were leading the way for the next generation of immunology technologies. Something clicked when Bill read that, and he went through the articles he had on Trey Megeet and found that Megeet’s victim, Tim Zhang, had been a renowned immunologist, and in fact his trip to California at the time of Megeet’s wife’s death had been to an immunology conference. Bill next tried to find more of a connection between Zhang and ViGen but couldn’t come up with any, at least with the web searches he was using. It had been a year and a half since Zhang was murdered and there were still hundreds of web pages that referenced his name and it took a while to check them all. Some of these were about his murder, but there were quite a few about his background as a scientist and his research. None that Bill could find, though, linked him to ViGen Corporation.

  After more digging he found an address for ViGen. Curiously they hadn’t provided one on their web-site, and were also unlisted in the phone book. Bill discovered that they were in Cambridge, only a few blocks from MIT’s campus. It was too early for him to call either MIT or ViGen, but he had little doubt that Zhang had somehow been affiliated with ViGen. He went back to ViGen’s web-site, but there was nothing else useful there. No list of corporate officers, nothing about how they were funded. He thought about Kent Forster running a hedge fund, and sent Carol a request to find out whatever she could about them, especially whether Forster’s company was behind ViGen’s funding. He next tried to research whether sodium pentothal could be used to induce hypnosis, and his search came back with several thousand articles that addressed the issue. He brought up one of them and was reading it when a voice spoke up behind him, saying, “Produces hypnosis within thirty to forty seconds of intravenous injection.”

  With his heart racing hard enough that he could feel it pulsating in his temples, Bill turned to see that the voice belonged to Jack O’Donnell, who stood behind him reading what was on his computer screen. The first thing in the morning, and the city desk editor was already looking rumpled and disheveled as if he had slept in his clothes.

  “Next time why don’t you just sneak up on me and yell boo,” Bill said.

  “Sorry about that,” Jack said, his poker face intact. “Kind of a shock as it is to see you in this early. Why the interest in sodium pentothal and hypnosis?”

  Bill paused as he almost told his boss what he was thinking. That the hypodermic needle marks found on both Gail Hawes and Trey Meet were caused by them being injected with sodium pentothal. That they were then hypnotized to kill their victims. That the deaths of Tim Zhang and Kent Forster weren’t random acts of violence committed by mentally unstable killers but orchestrated by sinister forces. In his mind he heard himself tell Jack all of that, and realized how outlandish it sounded and what his boss’s reaction would be.

  “I’m playing a long shot right now,” Bill said curtly. “I’ll let you know how it works out, boss.”

  Jack O’Donnell gave him a wary eye. “I hope you’re trying to find out the reason for Gail Hawes’s psychotic breakdown,” he said.

  “Boss, exactly what I’m doing.”

  Bill knew that Jack hated to be called ‘boss’. It had to do with the city desk editor’s egalitarian view of himself, and it caused Jack to stare openly at Bill before walking off muttering unkind things unde
r his breath about his reporter. Bill waited until he heard the door to Jack’s fishbowl office open and close, then checked the time. It still wasn’t seven o’clock but the store he needed to go to would be open by the time he got there if he left now. He grabbed his laptop and headed out.

  Chapter 22

  From the way the sales clerk carried himself and the tattoos showing on his exposed skin, Bill guessed the guy was ex-military, probably infantry. Short, wiry build, early thirties, with a scraggly beard and mustache, the clerk at Spy City stared at Bill dubiously before taking a handheld device and waving it over the laptop and cell phone that Bill had laid on the counter.

  “Nothing,” the sales clerk insisted.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. If there was anything transmitting out of them, that little light on top would be blinking. Don’t matter whether it’s an analog or digital frequency, this will pick it up. Your stuff doesn’t have any bugs or GPS transmitters planted inside them.”

  “How about checking my car? I’ve got it parked out front.”

  The sales clerk gave Bill a deadpan look as if he knew the story he was given earlier about Bill working on a story for the Tribune on the latest high-tech surveillance gadgetry was a crock, as was that he would be giving the store a nice mention.

  “Twenty bucks,” he said.

  Bill nodded, took twenty dollars from his wallet and handed it over, then led the sales clerk outside the store and to his car. When the clerk brought the bug detector near Bill’s car the device started beeping while simultaneously a small red light flashed in a frenetic beat.