Luke continued, “And Caleb’s gotta know that I’d find a way to reach you. If he thought I knew about his role in CHEGAN, he would’ve come after you.”
Elmer made a blustering sound full of false bravado.
“But he’d only do that if his situation was desperate,” Luke said. “The last thing he wants is a police investigation that focuses attention on you and your malaria project.”
“By the way,” Elmer said with a sigh, “Caleb was appointed interim chairman of the medical staff after Barnesdale’s murder. He pretty much has carte blanche around here now.”
That drew a weary headshake from Luke.
He thought about the twelve hours that had elapsed since his escape from the river. “Caleb’s probably got minions working in your mosquito lab. Could they have already taken another colony of your mosquitoes?”
“No way.”
“How’re you so sure?”
“For starters, our transport unit is designed for larvae, not adult mosquitoes. That has certain advantages — our container is a fraction the size of what you’d need to move an equivalent colony of adult mosquitoes — but it means they’d have to harvest the larvae, and that takes four to five days.”
“Can it be done any faster than that?”
“You can’t hurry along the mosquitoes’ breeding cycle,” Elmer said. “It takes that long to produce enough larvae for a self-sustaining colony.”
“Could they do it without anyone noticing?”
“Someone could easily do the harvesting without raising an eyebrow. It’s just a matter of opening the valves on some breeding tanks that are already in the pen. But preparing a transport is another matter.”
“What do you mean?”
“To remove a colony from the mosquito pen, they’d have to lug a fair amount of equipment into the lab, including our transport unit. It’s about the size of a small refrigerator. And even if everything was ready beforehand, it’d take about an hour and they’d need a couple of trained technicians. There’s no way to do it without drawing a lot of attention to themselves.”
Luke knew the layout of his father’s lab and understood his point. The only way into the malaria lab was through the hospital’s main microbiology lab, which operated twenty-four hours a day. The sight of technicians rolling equipment through the micro lab would attract inquisitive eyes and unwanted questions.
“How would someone load the transport unit with larvae and get it out of the lab without being discovered?”
“That’s impossible.”
“Nothing’s impossible. Think.”
There was a stretch of silence, then Elmer said, “Wait a minute. This morning my lab manager told me we’re having a hazardous materials drill on Friday. He was complaining about it to me, saying he usually gets told about these things weeks in advance.”
“What time Friday?”
“Six o’clock Friday evening, just before the change of shift. That’s another thing he was griping about—”
“That’s over seventy-two hours from now. And they could’ve started the harvesting process last night.”
“Which adds up to just about four days,” Elmer said. “Enough time to harvest a colony.”
“That’s it, then. Caleb’s people are going to take the mosquitoes during that drill.”
Mock drills of that type were common in the hospital, even more so since 9/11, and usually run by outside consultants. Caleb’s operatives could evacuate the entire microbiology lab as part of the so-called drill, giving them free rein.
Kaczynski’s freighter flashed in Luke’s mind. He wondered how long the transit time was from Guatemala to the Port of Los Angeles.
“Would they transport the mosquitoes by ship?” Luke asked.
“If their destination is China, absolutely not.”
“Why?”
“The colony wouldn’t survive the time it takes for an ocean crossing. Like I said, our unit was designed for mosquito larvae. Essentially, it’s a fancy bucket of water — a stainless steel container with a lot of gadgets that dispense nutrients and control environmental parameters like temperature.”
“Why does that affect how you ship it?”
“If the transport unit doesn’t get to its destination in two to three days, you start losing the colony because the larvae mature and emerge as adult mosquitoes. The container has very little air space and no food source for adult mosquitoes, so they die off almost immediately.”
An air transport from southern California meant that CHEGAN had a half-dozen airports to choose from, and each probably had several cargo flights going to Asia every day. If Caleb’s people got the transport unit out of the hospital, there would be no way to stop them.
Luke’s knew his only hope was to thwart CHEGAN’s plan before the mosquito larvae left University Children’s.
But he had no idea how he would get back to L.A., or how long the journey might take. He had no option but to drag his father into the quagmire.
Before he could state the obvious, his father said it for him. “Luke, there’s only one way to stop this. I have to destroy my mosquitoes.”
“Caleb probably has people watching your lab.”
“The mosquito lab is locked up every evening at seven o’clock. It’s not staffed at night. Anyone lingering outside the lab after seven is going to stick out like a sore thumb. It won’t be hard to spot them.”
“Be careful, Dad. And except for Ben, no one else can know about this. No one,” Luke said. “Once you destroy the mosquitoes, get out of town. Go away for a few days, and take Ben and his family with you.”
“Where?”
“Remember the lodge at Big Bear Lake where we used to stay when I was a kid?” He waited for his father’s acknowledgment, then said, “I’ll call you there on Friday morning.”
There was a long silence before his father said, “You know, sooner or later we have to go to the police about this.”
“If you don’t hear from me by ten o’clock on Friday morning, that’s exactly what I want you to do. But give me until then.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think the police will believe you, and I don’t want them to get in my way. CHEGAN isn’t even on their radar screen. The cops are chasing a killer, and they think they already know who it is. They’ll look for reasons not to believe you. I have no proof — nothing. The only way I’m going to clear myself is to go to the police with Caleb in tow. I need to get to Fagan before he buries whatever trails lead to him.”
* * *
Luke threw two antibiotic tablets into his mouth and swallowed them dry as he walked out of the pharmacy with Frankie. The boy was clutching a brown paper bag filled with HIV medications.
They joined Megan in a waiting cab, and Frankie sat between the two of them for what turned out to be a silent ride across town.
It was almost as if the boy knew what he would find when they arrived at his mother’s hospice.
Luke and Megan stood back with two nuns as Frankie walked up to the empty metal-framed bed. The boy rubbed the bed’s frame with a hand while his eyes traveled back and forth across the bare urine-stained mattress.
Eventually, Frankie looked back at Sister Marta Ann, and the two of them seemed to exchange a private thought. Then he squatted beside the bed and pulled out his green duffel bag. He fished through it, removed a wooden box, and opened it. Inside was a yellowed photograph of a teenage girl holding an infant. Frankie stared at it for a long moment, then rubbed it against a pants leg and slipped it into his shirt pocket.
Megan brought a hand to her mouth. Her wet swallow carried across the room.
The boy zipped up the duffel bag and pushed it back under the bed. Then he stood and walked out the door.
56
Luke tapped Megan’s arm with a water bottle. “Here. Drink some more.”
He stared out over the freshly harvested cornfield north of Mexico City, squinting into the late afternoon sun while Megan drank down h
alf the bottle without stopping to take a breath.
Twenty hours earlier, they had started their journey under a starlit sky on the Usumacinta River, crossing the Mexican border into Chiapas on a boat resembling a gondola. Frankie’s uncle, a truck driver and part-time smuggler with a nervous twitch in his shoulders, had agreed to deliver both of them onto U.S. soil for $2,100—half his usual price — but only after Frankie had worn him down in a hand-waving clash of wills that lasted the better part of an hour.
Luke had realized that Frankie’s feisty negotiations were fueled by the boy’s false belief that he would be traveling with them. When Luke explained otherwise, Frankie retreated into himself and remained there even as they said their final good-byes.
The trip’s first leg ended when their furtive boatman dropped them onto a rocky shoreline just inside Mexico, where Frankie’s uncle was waiting with a large garbage hauler. The pair squeezed into a false compartment on the truck’s underside, joining four other sweat-drenched stowaways whose faces showed a strange mix of both terror and hope.
Megan was still retching from the stench of rotting garbage when they finally stopped at the cornfield after driving all night and most of the next day. Her legs had barely held her upright when she first climbed from their metal cell into the late afternoon sun.
Dehydration was threatening to overtake both of them.
But they had to keep moving. When Luke had called his father a second time from the hospice, Elmer told him that Caleb had sent a memo to the medical staff announcing that he’d be traveling to Beijing, China, on Saturday for a weeklong conference on international healthcare.
Luke figured it was even odds that Fagan would suffer a fate similar to Kaczynski and “die” while on that trip.
He had to intercept Caleb before he left for China.
Megan was finishing the last of the water when Luke squatted on his haunches and started pulling chaff from a severed corn stalk.
She stooped next to him.
“Thanks.” Her voice had a dry rattle.
Luke’s eyes followed a dust funnel in the distance. “For what?”
“For saving my life.”
He turned to her.
Megan stared at the ground while tracing a circle in the dirt with her finger.
When she didn’t return his gaze, he picked up a shriveled corncob and started bouncing it in his hand.
Without warning, she leaned into him and kissed him on the cheek. Then she rose and started walking toward the trash hauler.
He followed her with his eyes, fingering his cheek as he wondered at the mystery of women.
The truck’s passenger-side door swung open and the seat tilted forward. A moment later, Frankie’s head appeared.
“Hi, boss.”
Megan and Luke exchanged a glance as the boy hopped down to the ground.
“I help you get home,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” Luke said.
The boy stepped closer. “My uncle say you no pay him enough, so he no will take you to America. But I no think that the problem.” Frankie glimpsed over his shoulder. “I no think he can do it.”
“What?” Megan shouted. “Where’s your uncle? I want to talk to him. He can’t just—”
Frankie held a palm up to her. “My uncle take us to U.S. border. You take me with you, and I help you get across border.”
57
“Look at the time stamp in the upper right-hand corner.” Detective O’Reilly pressed PAUSE and pointed at the LCD screen showing a lanky black man leaning into Luke McKenna’s office door. “He entered McKenna’s office at 5:57, exactly six minutes before the e-mail was erased from both McKenna’s machine and the hospital’s server. He left one minute after the file disappeared from the computers. You’re looking at the man who erased Kate Tartaglia’s e-mail. McKenna didn’t do it.”
O’Reilly had replayed the security videos after getting word from the forensic computer investigators the previous afternoon. He’d been waiting for Groff when the lieutenant arrived at the Police Administration Building that morning.
The investigators had called O’Reilly after finding an entry confirming the deleted e-mail. They couldn’t recover the original e-mail because the hard drive had been written over with newer files. Investigators confirmed that someone used McKenna’s computer to delete the file from the server at 6:03 P.M. on the night of Tartaglia’s murder.
Previously, O’Reilly had viewed only the later portions of the security video because he was trying to reconcile the timeline around McKenna’s departure from the hospital at ten o’clock. It wasn’t until last night, when he had gone back and studied the earlier video segments, that he spotted the black man breaking into McKenna’s office.
Lieutenant Groff shrugged. “So maybe McKenna had an accomplice.”
“I don’t think so.” O’Reilly wound back the recording and played it in slow motion. “Look at the way this guy leans into the door. Someone with a key to the office wouldn’t stand right up to the door like that. This guy’s concealing something. I think that something is a lock pick, and we’re watching him break into McKenna’s office.”
“All I see is the guy’s back. I don’t see a pick.”
“This guy’s too good to let us see it. Watch the way he moves. He knows the camera’s there. Look at the way he hides his face under the brim of that baseball cap.”
The lieutenant made a show of looking at the wall clock in the conference room, signaling that their meeting was about to end. “Even if I assume that this guy broke into McKenna’s office, which I don’t, how would that change anything? We found a copy of Tartaglia’s e-mail in McKenna’s home with his fingerprints all over it — after he told us that he never got it. Tartaglia’s mother puts him at the murder scene. And now, with what we’ve learned about Barnesdale and his dealings with Zenavax, McKenna has a clear motive for killing both Tartaglia and Barnesdale.”
He was right. When O’Reilly confronted Zenavax with the contents of Barnesdale’s safe deposit box — Tartaglia’s supposedly nonexistent employment contract with University Children’s, and Zenavax stock options worth nearly $3.2 million at the expected IPO price — the company’s CEO admitted to giving Barnesdale up-front cash and stock options under a “consulting agreement.”
The truth was clear: Zenavax had bribed Barnesdale to “lose” Tartaglia’s contract, leaving University Children’s attorneys with no choice but to drop the lawsuit. Though the CEO had denied knowing about Tartaglia’s contract and characterized the stock options as reimbursement for Barnesdale’s subsequent consulting services, O’Reilly knew that federal investigators would view the evidence differently.
“If the feds wanna prosecute Zenavax on some securities law violation, they’re welcome to it,” Groff said. “But I’m trying to capture a murderer here, and the dirty little secret between Barnesdale, Tartaglia, and Zenavax seals it. McKenna decided to go after the people who stole the flu vaccine from his father. McKenna must’ve found out about Barnesdale’s deal with Zenavax, or maybe he knew all along. Who the hell knows, and who the hell cares. Our psychologist is right — something sent McKenna over the edge and he went off on a killing rampage.”
O’Reilly had already told Groff about the fragments of Zenavax’s malaria vaccine found in the dead Guatemalan boy’s blood. As expected, the lieutenant was less than impressed after hearing that it was McKenna’s father who had run the tests. The truth was, O’Reilly didn’t know what to make of it himself, especially when, under questioning, Zenavax acknowledged the mysterious illness.
But one aspect of Groff’s theory still bothered him. “Your theory is that McKenna discovered the bribery scheme,” O’Reilly said. “But if this is some sort of vendetta killing spree, and Zenavax’s CEO was at the center of the bribery, why didn’t McKenna also go after him?”
The phone rang and Groff grabbed it. As he listened to the caller, the lines in his face darkened. When the call ended, he slammed down th
e receiver. “Goddammit.”
“What?”
“That was the State Department. Someone traveling under a fake passport who matches McKenna’s description just murdered the head of Zenavax’s research lab in Guatemala. The killer was ID’d by some workers at the lab. So do me a favor, O’Reilly — stop wasting my time with horseshit leads about some guy breaking into McKenna’s office.”
* * *
“How long will this take?” Ben asked.
Elmer attached one end of the large-diameter tube to a portal on the side of the mosquito enclosure. “I should be done in another twenty minutes or so.”
“I’ll keep watch outside the door. And while you’re finishing this, think about what I said. If you tell O’Reilly about finding your mosquito antigen in Josue Chaca’s blood, it’s probably only going to cause trouble for you and Luke. My advice is, don’t do it.”
Ben turned to leave.
Standing ten feet away, against the closed door, was the black man who had intercepted him in the doctors’ parking lot several days ago with the messages from Luke.
“You — what are you doing here?” Ben asked.
“You both need to come with me.”
Elmer turned. “Who are you?”
“Your escort.”
“Escort?” Elmer glanced at Ben. “Where are we going?”
Sammy Wilkes pulled back his jacket and showed them a nickel-plated revolver tucked into a holster under his armpit. “Wherever I tell you.”
58
The antibiotics had brought down Luke’s fever, but the throb in his left shoulder was pounding like an air hammer when they arrived in Mexicali at 7:00 A.M. on Friday. He had slept only six hours in the past three days and his body was deadlocked in its battle with the infection.
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