Dying Memories

by Dave Zeltserman

  Carlson didn’t respond, instead just lowered his gaze.

  Bill chewed on his lower lip as he thought this over. “None of this makes any sense,” he said at last, his voice choked with anger. “It just doesn’t. What the fuck are you guys, a bunch of clowns? Why the fuck are you doing the shit you are? I mean, come on, rank amateurs would know better than to round up the homeless for your experiments. Are you guys just stupid, is that what the problem is? You’re just begging to be caught doing this shit. And if you really felt like you had to kill Tim Zhang and Kent Forster, why pick such a complicated and dumb way? You guys really are fucking morons!”

  Carlson nodded, said, “I’m not disagreeing with anything you’re saying. None of that was my call.”

  “Gail Hawes was a mistake, wasn’t she? Janet Larson was the real target, but your goons mistook Hawes for Larson?”

  Carlson nodded.

  “And why kill Tim Zhang? What happened there? Did he figure out that the immunology research was just a front for what you were really doing?”

  Carlson didn’t say anything, but the shadow that fell over his eyes caught Bill by surprise.

  “Why do you need an immunology expert?” Bill asked.

  Carlson stared blankly at him.

  “What was Zhang doing for ViGen?” Bill demanded, a coolness filling up his head as he prepared to shoot a hole through Carlson’s knee.

  Carlson met his stare. “Does it really matter? It’s not going to help you any to know.”

  Bill smiled thinly as he took aim at Carlson’s knee. “Then why not just tell me?”

  “When they pick you up, they’ll interrogate you and they’ll know what I told you, and I’ll be a dead man also.”

  Carlson squeezed his eyes shut as he waited for what was coming, his face twisted into a sick grimace. Bill didn’t shoot him. He didn’t want Carlson passing out on him, not while he still had one more question that he needed to ask him.

  “Who’s Peter Kloot?” Bill asked.

  Carlson’s head jerked in surprise at hearing the name. “You don’t want to know,” he said.

  “He’s the guy calling the shots, isn’t he?”

  Carlson nodded morosely.

  “A big-time spook?”

  Another morose nod.

  “Let me guess, he’s got an unnaturally pink face, as well as the smallest damn black eyes.”

  Carlson’s expression showed his confusion, then he smiled as he got the joke. “No, that’s not Kloot,” he said. “Not by a long shot. You’re talking about Simon, and he’s only a foot soldier.”

  A rumbling noise came from outside that stopped both of them.

  Chapter 75

  The noise that stopped them was a car pulling into Ian Carlson’s driveway. That was followed by a deeper rumbling noise as the garage door opened. Panic showed in Carlson’s eyes. He stared wild-eyed in the direction of the noise and then at Bill. “That’s my wife and my six year-old daughter,” he said in a whisper.

  A car door opened and closed, then another door being opened, and a woman’s voice asking someone named Sarah what she wanted for lunch. A little girl’s voice next rang out, saying that she wanted a grilled cheese sandwich.

  “I’m sorry,” Bill told Carlson. “I’m going to have to tie them up. I don’t have any choice. I can’t have you calling your buddies, and I can’t have them calling the police.”

  “You don’t have to,” Carlson implored in that same whisper, his eyes now alive with panic. “You can gag me and throw me in the closet over there. Knock me out if you feel you have to, I don’t care. My wife won’t be looking in my office until at least late this evening. She knows better than that. Once they’re upstairs, you can slip out.”

  Bill shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “Please,” Carlson pleaded. “They’re innocents in this. My little girl’s only six. Don’t involve them in this. You don’t have to.”

  Bill almost asked him about all the innocents they were involving and the lives they were destroying, but didn’t bother. A heavy weariness had settled in, and the thought of scaring and tying up a six year-old girl exhausted him. Instead he sat quietly and listened as Carlson’s wife and daughter entered the house and went up the stairs with the girl’s voice ringing out as she again proudly stated how she wanted a grilled cheese sandwich. If they had walked into Carlson’s office he would have had to confront them, but they didn’t. After their voices faded, Bill retrieved a knife from Carlson’s desk and used it to cut off Carlson’s tee shirt and tear it into strips. He used one of the strips to gag Carlson, another to bind his ankles. After that he dragged Carlson into the room’s closet.

  “I’m going to be in your office for at least another hour,” he whispered into Carlson’s ear. “If I hear you make any noise at all, I’m not going to bother tying them up. That’s the way it will be.”

  With tears in his eyes, Carlson nodded. Bill closed the door on him.

  He didn’t spend another hour in Carlson’s office. Only ten minutes, which was enough time for him to find Peter Kloot’s phone number. Before leaving he removed Carlson’s gag and asked him for Kloot’s address.

  “I don’t have it,” Carlson insisted. “I swear all I have is his cell phone number.”

  “Do I have to get your daughter?”

  “No, please, I don’t think any of us at ViGen have more than his cell phone.”

  Bill stared at Carlson and the desperate pleading in the man’s eyes, and he believed him. He secured Carlson’s gag and closed the closet door. Seconds later, he slipped out of the office and waited pressed up against the hallway wall to make sure he wasn’t heard. ‘The Little Mermaid’ played on a TV set upstairs, the voices faint. Bill left the house through a side door. And then he was running back to where he had left his stolen car.

  Chapter 76

  The quaint downtown area of Winchester would’ve had what Bill needed, but he was anxious to get out of that town as quickly as he could, and instead drove to Route 3A and to Arlington center. He had his laptop turned on, and as he drove along Massachusetts Avenue he slowed to a crawl each time he approached a business that might offer Wi-Fi Internet access. One of the coffee shops he passed had a signal strong enough for him to pick up, and he circled back and parked in front of the shop. When he tried G’s web-site, he found the pornography had been removed and the site put back to what he was expecting. G had a message waiting for him:

  Bill, my friend, you can be a stubborn fucker, can’t you? But see how nicely things work out when we show a modicum of trust in each other? Good to hear that you broke into Carlson’s home. I want details on what you found, but more important I want those papers you liberated from Forster’s Hedge Fund. We know all about those from monitoring ViGen’s internal communication. You’ve certainly stirred up a hornet’s nest with that move. I wish I could take credit for suggesting it, but it showed brilliant inspiration on your part—yer pal, G.

  Bill read G’s message several times before typing up a reply. He explained how Ian Carlson was in his office when he broke in and that Carlson pretty much confirmed everything that he had been suspecting. He didn’t tell G about Peter Kloot. He decided to hold on to that information for himself. He also told G that he’d be more than happy to trade the Forster office papers for evidence that would exonerate him for the murders and other crimes he was being accused of committing.

  Bill sat unaware that he was biting his lip and drawing blood as he waited to see whether G would respond. It didn’t take long, no more than two minutes elapsed before a new message popped up onto the bulletin board:

  Good to hear from you! You’ve had me on pins and needles. I wish I could do as you’re asking, I truly do, but unfortunately my hands are tied for now. I am trying my damndest to convince those above me to change our scope for this operation from surveillance to something altogether different, and if that were to happen I should be able to help you with your legal situation. Those papers you possess coul
d go a long way in helping me with my bosses. Bill, from what we’ve been able to hear, you’ve been made a top priority with certain folk at ViGen. You need to show additional trust here and for your own safety use the safehouse I took you to in Chelsea, at least until I am able to obtain permission to take more proactive measures concerning ViGen. It won’t do either of us any good if you end up dead, which sounds likely if you’re not careful—yer pal, G.

  Bill sent back a terse reply that he wasn’t giving up the stolen papers without getting something concrete in return. And that if he did show up back at their safehouse he wouldn’t be bringing the papers with him.

  Tasting the coppery saltiness of his blood, he wiped a hand across his mouth and was surprised to see his lip was bleeding. He quickly forgot about that when a new message came from G:

  We do need those papers. I’ll see what I can do. Bill, it can’t be too safe for you sitting outside Roast Offerings in Arlington for the last seven minutes. I’d suggest you get moving. And to force the issue concerning our safehouse, I’m going to be changing things so you’re only going to be able to access this web-site from the computer we have installed there. Don’t worry, if the good folks at ViGen are monitoring access to this site (which we’re now suspecting) and trace back the safehouse’s computer’s IP address, it will lead them to a neighborhood tavern in Manchester, England. Why don’t you check back later this evening to see if I have anything more I can tell you? And I am sorry about your friend. While the local authorities haven’t been able to identify him yet, we have our own surveillance photos of him—yer pal, G.

  G provided a web-link which took Bill to a Boston Tribune story concerning a suicide that morning. An unidentified man in his thirties, about six feet and three inches tall and two hundred and twenty pounds, was killed instantly when he jumped in front of an incoming commuter rail train at North Station. According to witnesses the man stood by himself weeping moments before taking his life.

  Bill wanted to mourn Jeremy but couldn’t; he was too emotionally spent to feel much more than a dull hollowness welling up inside his chest. He wished it hadn’t happened, and he felt responsible—he should’ve refused to use Jeremy’s computer to look at G’s web-site no matter what Jeremy was threatening. What happened to his friend didn’t surprise him, though, and his first thoughts turned towards Augustine, about who would be taking care of him, and his next were about G’s warning that he should get moving. Of course G was able to figure out where he was by tracing him back through the coffee shop’s Internet address, although it was a lucky guess that G had him sitting outside the shop instead of inside of it. But if G could trace him back there so could the same men who were also monitoring the website and had earlier been led back to Jeremy’s apartment. Yeah, it was good advice on G’s part, but Bill considered staying where he was and waiting for a very pink-faced man and his ox-sized thug companion to arrive. He was armed now and he could take them out. The problem was that as good as that might feel, it wouldn’t help him do what he needed to do, which was get his old life back. Before driving away he tried using the coffee shop’s Internet access to perform a reverse phone number search for Peter Kloot, but was unable to come up with an address.

  Chapter 77

  That morning when Chuck Boxer arrived at the station he put a call in to one of the assistant district attorneys that he was friendly with about getting a warrant to search ViGen Corporation. The assistant DA wasn’t in yet, and Boxer left a sketchy message about what he was looking for. While he waited for a call back, he worked on a list of all the things that didn’t add up with the Hawes shooting and all the crimes piling up on Bill Conway. He was mostly done with his list when his captain came over to tell him about a commuter rail train hitting a waiting passenger and turning the man into a grease spot over by North Station, and that he was the lucky detective being assigned to the investigation.

  “Ah fuck,” Boxer complained miserably, his neck already a beet red over the news. “I’m waiting on something here. Can’t you give this to someone else?”

  “Your name’s up,” Harrison told him as he stared unmoved at his detective. “Just get your witness statements and close this up, okay?”

  The crime scene was pretty much what Boxer expected. The train’s operator didn’t realize what had happened until he came to a stop at the end of the platform and had dragged the body over one hundred yards. There was little left of the man’s face, nothing left to get fingerprints from and no wallet or anything else on the body to identify him. Patrolmen who arrived on the scene before Boxer had gathered up a half dozen witnesses for him, all of whom looked badly shaken, and a few more than a little green around the gills over what they’d seen.

  “That poor man seemed so distraught,” a tiny gray haired woman of around seventy told Boxer.

  “Yeah?”

  She nodded and pointed a shaky finger towards the end of the platform. “He was standing over there crying. He looked so inconsolable.”

  “Was anyone else near him?” Boxer asked.

  The woman shook her head.

  “Could he have been pushed in front of the train?”

  The woman’s mouth crumbled a bit as she shook her head again. “Nobody pushed that poor man,” she said. “He jumped. I saw him.”

  The other witnesses told Boxer the same.

  “Waste of my goddamned time,” Boxer grumbled to himself as he left the commuter rail station. His mood didn’t improve any when he returned back to the precinct and found a memo left on his chair about a new departmental directive requiring all detectives to get flu shots, supposedly to reduce lost man hours. Boxer was steaming as he crumpled the memo into a small ball and watched as his attempted basketball shot bounced off the lip of his wastebasket and dropped to the floor. Boxer hated needles, and even more, didn’t like being told what he had to have injected into his body. He was still fuming when his cell phone rang, and he stared with mild disbelief when the Caller ID showed that it was Conway calling him.

  “I’m glad you called,” Boxer told the fugitive hurriedly, hoping that the sonofabitch wouldn’t hang up on him this time. He lowered his voice and added, “I’m working on a search warrant now for ViGen.”

  “That’s good,” Conway said without any enthusiasm. “You heard about a man being hit by a train over at North Station?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He was a friend of mine. His name was Jeremy Brent. ViGen made him do what he did.”

  Boxer felt his pulse quicken. “How do you know this?” he asked while making a concentrated effort to keep his voice flat and not show any of his excitement.

  “I took a fax off one of them, and it mentioned about them going to Jeremy’s address.” There was a hesitation, then Conway added, “My guardian angel told me about it also. He claimed that their surveillance photos showed that it was Jeremy.”

  “What’s this about a guardian angel?”

  “It would take me too long to explain. I was afraid this might happen and I made a 911 call to send the police to Jeremy’s apartment. Why didn’t they show up?”

  There was a pause, then Boxer told him how the 911 operator had recognized Bill as the caller from his Caller ID and had forwarded the call to him. “Your friend lived in Charlestown? 37 Tremont? I was there no more than a half hour after you had placed that call. The apartment was empty. Why would they send people to that apartment?”

  “They were looking for me.”

  Conway hung up then.

  Boxer tried calling him back but Conway wasn’t picking up. He had more questions he wanted to ask him, especially about this so-called guardian angel. He was cursing Conway under his breath when an odd-looking dude wandered over to his desk. The guy had the pinkest damn face Boxer had ever seen, and his eyes were almost cartoon-like, not much more than black dots.

  “Detective,” Simon said, addressing Boxer. A thin smile showed as his dot-sized eyes lowered to observe the crumpled paper ball lying near Boxer’s wastebaske
t. Then his gaze shifted upwards and met the detective’s dull glare. “I believe you saw the latest departmental memo concerning mandatory flu shots.”

  “This is bullshit.” Boxer’s mouth folded into a surly frown. “I’m calling the union about this. The department has no right ordering what I do to my body.”

  “There, there, detective, don’t be a baby about this.” Simon put down a small leather case. He opened it and took out a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a swab of cotton. “We can’t afford to have our lead detectives missing work because of the flu, can we? Now if you would please roll up your sleeve.”

  “Fifteen years on the job and I’ve never called in sick,” Boxer groused as he angrily rolled up his sleeve. Simon disinfected an area along Boxer’s upper arm. He next removed a hypodermic needle from his bag. Boxer gritted his teeth as he was given his shot.

  “That wasn’t so bad was it?” Simon asked cheerfully.

  Boxer swallowed back what he wanted to say and instead stared silently at Simon and watched as the man packed up his leather case and walked away. It was several minutes after that when a confused assistant district attorney called him.

  “That was an odd request you left for me,” he told Boxer. “Tell me about this conspiracy and why you think this Cambridge biotech company is involved.”

  Boxer wondered about that also. Why the fuck would he call his friend, especially after that phone call he received from Conway? He remembered Conway’s call vividly, how that fucker admitted to Boxer that he killed Hartley and Schlow, as well as nearly beating his ex-fiancée Karen Wilkerson into a coma. Christ, Conway even laughed about how he created those stories about ViGen as some sort of warped attempt to make a name for himself.

  “Hey buddy,” Boxer said, his face turning as beet red as his neck, “I don’t know why the fuck I called before. Forget it, okay? And next time we get together, drinks are on me for wasting your time.”