Case in point—Carol. He did miss her, but to be honest about it, their marriage had never felt right. He must have known at some level she’d married him only because of the comfort he could give her as the wife of a doctor. So why did it come as such a surprise when she’d become upset at his decision to leave his practice and join his father here?
Standing there, he once again heard her angry words; “I will not be the wife of a research drudge.”
That still stung.
Locked for the moment in the grip of things that once were, he went to his father’s office, opened the door, and went inside.
Looking at the big mahogany desk, he could almost see his father behind it, explaining as much with his hands as his voice, an idea he’d just had, or a novel he was reading. When he spoke about a book he’d liked and you hadn’t, he was so forceful and persuasive you’d begin to think you’d not read it properly and had missed the point. In his research he was a cyclone of a man who blew away the confusion in the minds around him with analyses of utter clarity. To hear from Irby that his father had said his contributions to the project were brilliant was like a fine glass of wine with pieces of the cork floating in it. Why couldn’t his father have told him that when he was alive? It would have meant so much to hear it directly from him.
Then, rebuking himself for dwelling too much on what couldn’t be changed, he returned to his own office to check his email.
A few minutes later, while reading a mass mailing from the company attorney warning employees to refer any phone calls from the media to the public affairs office, the image of red stitching above the pocket on the lab coat of Artisan’s hospital director swam up out of Carl’s subconscious.
Meggs . . . Meggs . . . Where the devil had he heard that name prior to today?
Before he could spend any time thinking about it, Marge came to his open door. “You gotta see this,” she said, holding out two sheets of paper. She rushed into his office and thrust one of the sheets into his hand.
“What is it?”
“The Coulter counts on the first animal we infused yesterday.”
The Coulter counter was the machine used to tally the various kinds of blood cells in a sample.
“Look at the red cell value,” Marge said.
Carl noted the figure. “Seems pretty low.”
“That’s the number after the infusion had a chance to equilibrate.”
“Okay . . . a very expected result.” And it was, considering they had diluted the animal’s existing reds with cell-free Synheme moments before the sample was taken.
“Now look at this.” She handed him the second sheet, where he saw that the reds on this one were much more numerous.
He sat up straighter. “This isn’t—”
“Yes it is. That animal’s marrow is pumping out new red cells like crazy, far more than could be accounted for by just dumping a reserve of already mature cells. Now check the whites and platelets.”
He went back to the first sheet and looked at those figures. Of course, they too, were low after the infusion had diluted the blood. He returned to the second sheet. My God. Those numbers as well were skyrocketing back to normal.
This was incredible. In addition to its oxygen carrying ability, Synheme appeared to be the best stimulator of bone marrow ever discovered. He looked at Marge. “This has to be some fluke. These values can’t be right.”
“You think the counter isn’t working properly? I can tell you, it is.”
“Then it’s the animal . . . some weird genetic anomaly.”
She handed him a second set of papers. “See for yourself. It’s the same for the other one.”
Carl checked the data. She was right. Could this be true?
It was widely accepted that any synthetic blood would just be an oxygen carrier and could never replace the ability of real blood to fight off bacterial and viral infections. White cells were needed for that. So synthetic blood could only be used for short periods, until the patient was moved to a medical facility and transfused with genuine blood. But if what seemed to be happening in this latest experiment wasn’t an illusion, Synheme would change everything. No subsequent transfusion would be needed.
It was a wondrous possibility. What a tribute to his father it would make. After all the miserable things that had happened in the last year, this was all so welcome.
Carl looked at Marge. “Don’t say anything to anybody about this until we know more. I don’t want people around here thinking we’re crazy.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve never looked good in outfits where the sleeves tie behind your back.” She looked at her watch. “I gotta get to my son’s soccer game.”
Carl was so elated over these results, he regretted his commitment to spend the next day out of the lab with Beth Corbin. But he had promised. “Look, I’ve got something I have to do all day tomorrow. At some point we’ll have to repeat what we did today, but tomorrow I’d like to see what would happen if we do an eighty percent replacement on two animals. Can you handle it by yourself?”
“What do you think?”
“So I’m really not needed around here.”
Marge grinned. “You make great coffee.”
“Okay, now I feel better. Go. Hope your kiddo’s team wins.”
After Marge left, Carl paced the lab, his mind running with the implications of what they’d found.
No . . . Possibly found. Don’t forget that, he reminded himself. Nothing is proven yet.
Then, he remembered why the name Patrick Meggs was familiar.
He went into his father’s office and headed for the wall of bookcases on the right. He ran his finger along the books on the second shelf, pulled down Hematologic Disorders In Parasitic Diseases, and carried it to his father’s desk. Dropping into the big leather chair behind the desk, he began flipping through the pages looking for . . .
This . . .
Sandwiched between pages deep in the book was a newspaper article and yellow Post-it he’d found two months ago while consulting the book. The article was about a man named Arnold Hollenbeck, who, along with his wife, had been found in their home dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, victims of an apparent furnace malfunction. On the Post-it, in his father’s handwriting, were some cryptic notes. The first was the name, Patrick Meggs, with a question mark after it.
More interested now than when he’d first found these things, Carl stared at the next two words neatly printed under Meggs’s name: Tree Fountain.
Damn. He’d forgotten that one, because at the time, it didn’t mean anything. But now . . . he’d seen a tree fountain. Meggs and the fountain. It had to be a reference to Artisan.
Carl read the next three phrases: Find The Records, Closer Than You Think,1978.
What records? Was that what was close? What was this?
It seemed like a note his father had written to himself, but why hide it? Maybe he hadn’t hid it. It could have been closed up in there by accident.
1978? The year Carl had been born. What else had happened that year? Hell of a lot of things.
Puzzled over the entire situation, he removed the Post-it and read the article under it more carefully. He discovered that Arnold Hollenbeck was a fertility physician on the local medical school faculty. The rest of the article mentioned how he’d been the recipient of numerous teaching awards and had published many papers in his long career.
Carl put the article down. So what does this have to do with my father?
Carl’s mind went back to Meggs. Did he and my father know each other? If so, why hadn’t Meggs mentioned that when I asked him if we’d met before? It would have been the perfect opportunity to bring it up; No, we’ve never met, but I knew your dad . . . Wouldn’t that have been a natural exchange?
His eagerness to see Beth Corbin returned. It
wasn’t likely she could answer any of those questions, but she could certainly tell him more about Artisan.
Chapter 5
PATRICK MEGGS had very quickly realized that killing Carl in Artisan wouldn’t be smart. Better for it to happen in the city, where the circumstances of his death wouldn’t implicate the town. Not that Meggs could actually make such a significant kill on his own. He needed permission. And now he’d received it. But he had yet to make the arrangements.
At the moment, he was leaning against the kitchen wall in his home in Little Rock. Across the room, his bulldog puppy was pushing a plastic food bowl around the floor, trying to get at the very last scrap of tuna in it. Watching the little dog with affection, he became the caring child he once was.
But Meggs was not a child. He was a man; a very different one than anyone would have predicted. It had not happened suddenly. Rather, his character had disintegrated gradually, as though it had been blurred through multiple generations of photocopying.
The first copy had been made when he was a college senior and was enrolled in a physics course headed by a strange man who seemed out of touch with the world. As part of the requirements for the course, every student had to submit some physics-related project. Feeling this was beneath him, Meggs procrastinated until it was too late to do anything himself. So he submitted an electrostatic device built by a friend for a course at another school. For this deceitful act, he received an A in the course. To quell his conscience, Meggs convinced himself he’d been led to this by the teacher’s childish requirement and his obvious gullibility. He promised himself he would never do anything like that again.
The third generation copy of Meggs had been created when he was a second-year medical student. He’d heard two classmates discussing a test they’d completed that he had yet to take. Rather than walk away, he stayed and made notes of their conversation. Of course, he never would have done that if the curriculum hadn’t been ridiculously overloaded and impossible to manage. And it didn’t really matter because the course was something no doctor really used in his daily practice.
A year later, in trying to avoid a shopping cart blown into his path by the wind, he crashed into a parked car. Being very pressed for time, he departed the scene without even leaving a note. This was actually not his fault. Had the person who last used the runaway cart secured it properly, the accident never would have happened. So why should he be inconvenienced over someone else’s carelessness?
By the time he submitted his first fraudulent Medicare bill, the original Meggs was so badly obscured as to be unrecognizable. So it was not a large step for him to join the Artisan management team. And the money was so good . . . forty percent better than his best year in private practice.
On the downside was that long drive every day and sometimes at night if there was an emergency one of the nurse-trained residents of Artisan couldn’t handle. There was also the occasional deathwatch when he had to stay in the hospital for several days with the outsource medical team. But that didn’t happen very often.
He didn’t like to reflect on the negatives in his job, because even if he decided they outweighed the positives, he couldn’t move on. When he’d accepted directorship of the Artisan Hospital, it was with the clear understanding it was a lifetime position unless The Brotherhood decided otherwise.
The little dog finally pushed his bowl into a corner, where it could no longer get away from him. Meggs didn’t get to see what happened next because his cell phone started ringing and he had to go into the study and get it.
“Meggs.”
“This is Hanson. Beth Corbin didn’t show for dinner. We found her cross on her desk in the library, so there was no way to track her. The CO2 monitors didn’t pick up anything anywhere other than the dining hall, so I’m thinking she’s either in the woods, or—”
Meggs’s thoughts immediately went to Carl Martin’s visit earlier in the day. No. She couldn’t have. “I saw her at four o’clock yesterday for her regular checkup. What delivery vehicles have been inside the gates between then and now?”
“I asked the gate attendant that question. He said there was only the mail truck. It stopped at the gate kiosk as usual, dropped off the mail, and left.”
“Damn it,” Meggs muttered.
“What?”
“I had a visit today at the hospital from Robert Martin’s son, Carl.”
“What did he want?”
“To talk about Benjamin Rasco’s red blood cells.”
“Oh, God.”
“I’m wondering now if he picked up Beth Corbin when he left.”
“You don’t think she’d say anything sensitive do you? She’s well aware of what that could lead to.”
“I don’t know. But if he brought her back to Little Rock with him, they spent far too much time together. You keep looking around there for her. I’ll pick up Mahler and see if I can locate her here.”
Chapter 6
AFTER THE divorce, Carl and his wife had sold their home in Little Rock. In the settlement, she’d received most of the profits and more than half the remaining assets. So he hadn’t been left with much to spend on new housing. But after a couple of weeks looking, he’d discovered an old firehouse for sale in a rundown area of the city that was making a comeback. The previous owners had done some work on the place to make it habitable, but there was still so much to do, it hadn’t drawn a lot of interest from prospective buyers. Intrigued by the prospect of doing much of the remaining renovation on the place himself, Carl had bought it and moved in.
Sometimes when he left the house for work, he’d go to the garage via the fire pole, which the previous owners left in place. But tonight, not wanting to wrinkle his trousers or his shirt, he took the back stairs.
The place even came with an old fire truck the real estate agent had claimed still ran. But Carl had been so busy on other things he had yet to see if that was true. Already thinking about the questions he wanted to ask Beth Corbin, he went to his car, got in, and clicked the remote to open the big firehouse door.
Twenty seconds later, as Carl’s Camry faded in the distance, a black Lincoln Town Car slowed in front of the firehouse. Patrick Meggs was behind the wheel. In the passenger seat next to him was Ernst Mahler.
Mahler had dark brown hair and green eyes, hardly the model of Aryan heritage his great grandfather, Heinrich Himmler, the butcher of the Third Reich, would have wished for.
Mahler had left Germany for the United States eighteen months ago with a laundered past and documents proving he was someone else, just hours before the BKA had arrived at his flat in Stuttgart to arrest him. He had once been shot in the head at point blank range but suffered no harm because of a genetic anomaly that caused his skull to be three times thicker than normal.
To date in his thirty-seven years of life, Mahler had killed seven men, most of them during his uranium smuggling activities with The Brotherhood.
His first kill had been a Dutchman with one blue eye and one brown one. Now, eight years later, those eyes still visited him at least three times a month in his dreams. When the dreams first began two days after he’d killed the Dutchman, he broke into the funeral home that had the body and destroyed the cadaver’s eyes. But it hadn’t helped.
His second victim had been a Frenchman who’d spit in Mahler’s face. Before killing him, Mahler had plunged a sharp piece of metal into each of the Frenchman’s eyes, and that had worked because Mahler never dreamt about the man. So that became Mahler’s practice. None of the five subsequent men who went to their deaths blind, ever returned.
“Carl Martin lives here?” Mahler asked, in an accent too thick to allow him to work in Artisan.
“It’s the address I found for him.”
“He repudiates the normal,” Mahler said, nodding. “I like such behavior. It will be a shame to kill this man.”
“First we find out if he knows where Corbin is,” Meggs said. “Where the hell can a person park around here?”
“Probably on that side street,” Mahler said, pointing.
Meggs wheeled the Lincoln around the corner and pulled to a stop by a row of Bradford pears lining the sidewalk. “Wait here.”
The rain had stopped an hour ago, and the evening sky was clearing, so Meggs didn’t need to bother with rain gear as he got out, walked around to the firehouse, and rang the front door added by the previous owners. Because it was a big building, he didn’t worry about getting no response until he’d waited half a minute. Then he rang again. When another thirty seconds had elapsed, he went back to the car.
“Not home,” he said, getting in.
“We could start checking motels for her,” Mahler suggested.
“Eventually, we may have to do that. Right now, let’s just wait awhile and see if he shows. But we need a better spot to watch for him.”
Meggs started the car and drove off, intending to circle the block.
BETH CORBIN WAS waiting for Carl in the Hampton Inn lobby. She wore an apricot mock turtleneck sweater and dark pants. The simple, clean effect fit her wholesome face perfectly.
“You look nice,” Carl said.
“Thanks. So do you. I looked out my window and saw that the rain had stopped. Will I need a jacket?”
“You’re fine.”
They walked to Carl’s car, which he had parked near the entrance. He held the door for her while she got in.
“Do you like Vietnamese food?” Carl asked when he was settled behind the wheel.
“I don’t know. I’ve never had any.”
“Want to risk it?”
The Blood Betrayal Page 4
