The Blood Betrayal

by Don Donaldson

  “In the early nineties we explored ways to introduce sperm directly into eggs by drilling a hole through the protective coat. You know . . . because sometimes egg impenetrability can be a problem in humans. From about 1996 until he died, we hoped to find a reliable way to separate sperm based on whether they carried the x or y chromosome, so people could choose the sex of their kid.” His posture melted and his gaze drifted to the floor. Head slowly moving from side to side he muttered “Man, if we could have pulled that off . . .”

  Then his eyes lifted and he rejoined the conversation. “And we were getting really close. About a year before Dr. Hollenbeck’s death, we found a drug that would selectively kill male sperm and another that would eliminate the females. It looked like the perfect solution, but the technique needed extensive testing to prove the drugs weren’t producing any abnormalities in the surviving sperm. That was too big a job for us, so Hollenbeck outsourced it.”

  “To whom?”

  “Don’t know.” His brow furrowed. “The doc was a complicated guy. In some ways, very open and friendly. But he had another, more private side. It was the latter side that never told me who was doing the sperm separation testing.”

  “I guess he wrote a lot of grants over the years.”

  “When I first came here, he did. And had trouble getting money. I remember him being very depressed.” Wells’s body language now seemed to reflect that depression. “The department was paying my salary as part of a start-up package for him, but there was a deadline on how long that would continue. At one point he told me that if he didn’t get outside funding soon, I’d have to find another job.” He suddenly sat straighter in his chair. “ Then, the old doc got a grant.”

  “NIH?”

  “He never said. And I didn’t ask. From then on, we never had any funding problems.”

  “What happened to his computers after he died?”

  An odd look crept across Wells’s face. It cleared, then he said, “The drives were all reformatted and spread out over the campus to people who wanted them.”

  “When I asked that question, your expression suggested you’d remembered something. What was it?”

  “I was just thinking about when I came to work the morning before we all learned of his death. I went to one of the computers and navigated to the recent documents section, where I saw that the list included some files we hadn’t worked with in years.”

  Carl’s eyes widened and his pulse quickened, because he had seen the same thing on one of his lab computers the day after his father had been killed. “Could Hollenbeck have come here the night before his death and opened those old files?”

  “Unlikely. He never worked at night.”

  The similarity in the two situations could mean only one thing. Someone had broken into both labs during the night and roamed through the files.

  Chapter 30

  THE INTRUDER who’d roamed through Hollenbeck’s computer could have just been snooping. Carl thought it more likely that this involved sensitive information the prowler didn’t want anyone else to see. If so, whoever had broken in, had likely erased the pertinent material. But Carl asked Wells the next logical question anyway. “I’m sure you both backed up each day’s work.”

  “Every computer had an external hard drive connected to it for that purpose.”

  “Any chance those hard drives are still around?”

  “All over the department, just like the computers.”

  “And the contents erased, I guess.”

  “Standard procedure whenever CPUs or hard drives are transferred to new owners.”

  “Were the contents copied by anyone for archival storage?”

  “Why bother? The old owner was dead. He wouldn’t be needing it.”

  “I’d have thought you’d step in and preserve all that data.”

  Wells scowled at the suggestion he’d been derelict. “Death has a way of interrupting things. That part of my life was over.”

  Worried he’d angered Wells to where he might stop talking, Carl tried to block that response. “I didn’t mean to be critical.”

  “It’s okay.” Wells’s hard expression softened. “I wasn’t helping and you just let your frustration show a little. All this interest in Hollenbeck’s computers . . . you thinking there might have been some clue on them to those people who disappeared?”

  “Maybe. Who knows?”

  “Hollenbeck was a fanatic for backing up data. Wouldn’t surprise me if he had another set of everything on a computer at home. You could ask his daughter.”

  “How can I find her?”

  “Name’s Annie Pillow. Odd name I’ve always thought. If I was a woman, I wouldn’t marry somebody named Pillow. Anyway, she and her husband own a car wash on J.F.K. Boulevard. She usually works the cash register. The place is called Pillow Land, like it was some kind of amusement park or mattress warehouse.”

  “Thanks for the information. We’ll talk to her.”

  As they left, they heard Wells muttering to himself. “If somebody can’t see what a dumb name their place has, how could you trust them to do a good job washing your car?”

  CONCERNED THAT he’d blown an opportunity, Ernst Mahler got out of his car and walked across the parking lot to the crime lab’s front entrance. Inside, there was no reception area, so he followed the sign to Evidence Check-In. He pressed the buzzer on the counter and waited impatiently for help. It arrived in the form of a woman with wunderbar hips, but facial skin like a raisin.

  “About an hour ago, a man in a baseball cap and long hair brought a cardboard box in here,” Mahler said. “What did he want?”

  The woman behind the counter eyed him suspiciously. “We’re not a public information service.”

  Mahler wanted to grab her by the throat and ask again, but he couldn’t afford to call attention to himself. “Did he have two brass urns in that box?”

  “You don’t understand English very well do you? I’m not here to answer questions about who comes through the door and what they might have with them.” She smiled, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “Have a nice day.”

  She turned and went into the back room.

  It wasn’t often Mahler failed to get what he wanted from someone, so he stood at the window, sorting through his options.

  The woman who had been working at the computer when Carl had come in was still there. She looked over her shoulder at the back room, then stood and walked to the window. In two months, she and her husband would depart for a three-week trip to Germany. In preparation, they’d both been taking a course in the language. Eager to practice on someone born in the Fatherland and picking up on Mahler’s accent, she approached the window and in German said, “Where are you from?”

  Puzzled, Mahler said, “Stuttgart.”

  Again, in German, she said, “It’s a fine day isn’t it?”

  It was obvious from the way she mangled the language and the stupid remark she’d made that she was trying to show off some supposed facility in his native tongue. Sensing an opportunity, Mahler said, in German, “It would be much better if that other woman had answered my question.”

  It took the woman a moment to figure out what he’d said, then she responded. “The man you asked about did bring in two . . .” she hesitated, her German vocabulary lacking the words brass and urns. Unwilling to fall back on English she substituted, “. . . two metal containers.”

  Without bothering to thank her, Mahler spun to his left and headed for the front door, muttering through his clenched teeth. “Der Kotzbrocken . . . son of a bitch” It had been Martin in the blue cap. Now it was no longer just a job. Killing this man had become a matter of personal satisfaction.

  Chapter 31

  ANNIE PILLOW was no older than her mid-thirties. Looking at her behind the counter displaying the spray deodorant bott
les and little packets of Kleenex, it seemed likely she had never experienced the fabled bloom of youth, but had been homely her entire life. Even so, her boxy face, tiny eyes, and thin lips could have been helped with a little makeup. Why she didn’t even try was a story only she could tell.

  The car wash was busy with people waiting to pay, so Carl and Beth queued up with everyone else and waited their turn. The line moved quickly, and in a few minutes, Carl was looking into the bland eyes of Arnold Hollenbeck’s most direct link with the living. “Hi, we don’t have a car being washed. We’d like to talk to you about your father.”

  Annie looked at him and then Beth as though they were toilet bowl floaters that just wouldn’t flush. “My father’s dead,” she replied in a tone suggesting she’d silently added, you moron.

  “I know he is, but I’d still like to ask you a few questions about him,” Carl replied. “It’s important.”

  A subtext of irritation mingled with the expression of disgust already on her face. She huffed once through pinched lips in protest, then said, “Let me take care of the people behind you, then if no one else comes in, I’ll talk to you. But not for long.”

  While the last two customers paid, another wandered in from where his car had entered the wash. It seemed to Beth that Annie took as long as possible to finalize that last transaction. She then looked up, leaned against the wall behind her, and folded her arms. “So what did you want to ask me?”

  Carl introduced Beth and himself and went right to the part about Hollenbeck possibly being the key to some missing people. “We hoped by talking to you we might get some insight into your father that could help us understand what happened to those folks.”

  “You want insight into my father? Okay, how’s this . . . he was a selfish bastard who cared more for his work than either my mother or me.”

  Taken aback by the rage in her response, Carl didn’t know what to say.

  Beth stepped in to fill the void. “I know sometimes men don’t show how much they care, but I’m sure he loved both of you.”

  Annie’s already tiny eyes became slits in reinforced concrete. “Were you there?”

  “No,” Beth admitted.

  “Then you can’t have an opinion. If he’d loved me, he wouldn’t have treated me like a piece of furniture. And if he’d cared for my mother, he wouldn’t have been screwing around with another woman.”

  Earlier, when Wells had mentioned Hollenbeck’s daughter, Carl had hoped she would know some pertinent and revealing things about her father that Wells didn’t. Her comment about him being a philanderer was certainly revealing, but it wasn’t pertinent.

  Annie’s apparent estrangement from her father didn’t bode well for the two questions Carl wanted to ask before getting to the computer issue, but since she was standing there in front of him, he decided to ask them anyway. “Does the name Robert Martin mean anything to you?”

  “Isn’t that your name?”

  “No. I’m Carl. Robert was my father.”

  “I didn’t know him.”

  “What about Artisan, Arkansas?”

  “What about it?”

  “Ever heard of it?”

  “Some little burg in the mountains, I think.”

  “Who told you that, your father?”

  “Unlikely.”

  Zero for two . . . no . . . for three. Worried about the trend, Carl moved to the central reason they’d come. “We had hoped we might find some clues to those who are missing if we examined the contents of your father’s computers at the medical school. But they’ve all had their disks erased. Jeff Wells, your father’s technician there, thought he might have kept copies of all his electronic files on a computer at home.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me, but it’s all a moot question now. I sold everything in the house at an estate sale a few months after my parents’ died.”

  This was terrible news, but not unexpected. After all, it had been six months. Carl made one last try at saving things. “Do you have any records of who bought the computers?”

  “Sorry, no. I insisted on cash for everything.”

  Carl looked at Beth and shook his head. They were now officially out of the Hollenbeck business.

  “Now if you don’t mind, this place doesn’t run itself.”

  While Annie took a credit card from another woman who’d come in, Carl and Beth headed for the door. As they were leaving, Annie called out, “Hold on. I just thought of something.”

  Carl and Beth returned to the register and waited for Annie to issue the waiting customer’s receipt. Business done, she said, “My father had a getaway in the woods about thirty miles from here—two miles down Grabar Road off State 18. He left the cabin to Chester Ralston, the guy who sort of looked after it for him. He lives about a mile farther on. If I know my father, he probably had a computer at the cabin, too.”

  “Is there any reason to believe whatever was there is still there?” Beth asked.

  “Ralston is a slob. He probably hasn’t done a thing to the place since he inherited it. If that’s true, you’ll see a little wooden sign tacked to the mailbox with my father’s name on it.”

  “Thanks,” Carl said. “We’ll check it out.”

  “It’s a shame how that woman didn’t appreciate her father,” Beth said, as they headed toward Hollenbeck’s cabin a few minutes later.

  “Sounds like there wasn’t much to appreciate.”

  “I don’t understand how the biological link between parents and children can be so easily broken. You threaten an animal’s young, and you better be prepared for a fight.”

  “Not always. Mice don’t seem to care. And sometimes they’ll even eat their young.”

  Beth’s eyes widened. “Seriously?”

  “It’s true.”

  “I’m not sure I wanted to know that.”

  “Sorry.”

  Beth looked at Carl as he drove. She had only known him for what . . . a little over twenty-four hours, and they had been through so much, she felt as though it had been far longer. He was not like her husband at all. William had been a passive man who, though kind and caring, could not have endured the hardships of the cave. And attack an armed man with only a tire iron? He would never have even tried that, let alone handle himself so well. There was a strength and resourcefulness to Carl Martin that made her feel protected, and a part of her wished she’d met him much earlier in her life.

  She reflected on the answer she’d given him the day before, when he’d asked if she was ill. She’d said she wasn’t. While it was an accurate statement at the time, it was clearly an evasion of the truth. And she was sorry for that. With all he was doing for her, and the dangers she’d exposed him to, he deserved to know everything. But after so many years hiding it from outsiders, it wasn’t easy to say.

  But Artisan obviously held secrets even she didn’t know. So the balance was shifting. Soon, she would at least tell him the truth about herself. As for the rest, that would depend on what they learned about Arnold Hollenbeck.

  Chapter 32

  THE DIRT ROAD to Hollenbeck’s cabin was so narrow that if they’d met another car, both would have to edge onto the shoulder and crush some of the chest-high grasses to pass. The current untouched state of the foliage suggested that such meetings didn’t happen often.

  “If someone wanted to get off by themselves, this looks like a good place to do it,” Beth observed.

  “Feels like we’re a hundred miles from the city,” Carl said. “I wonder how much farther—” The weeds on the right suddenly disappeared, revealing a mailbox with the name Hollenbeck carved into a plaque nailed on the post.

  Beth and Carl stared at what lay beyond, unable to speak, for where Hollenbeck’s cabin once stood, there was only a blackened fireplace and chimney surrounded by a collapsed and charred wooden
carcass.

  “Why did Annie Pillow send us out here if it was burned?” Beth said.

  “She probably didn’t know.”

  “Doesn’t look like it happened recently.”

  “I’m assuming it happened after Hollenbeck died. If so, the guy down the road was the new owner. There’d be no reason to tell her about it.” Carl looked at the site for a couple of seconds and shook his head.

  Noticing he was conducting some mental business he wasn’t sharing, Beth said, “What are you thinking?”

  “How we seem to be blocked at every turn in finding an intact Hollenbeck computer.”

  “Are you implying someone is intentionally hindering us?”

  “Remember when Wells said that the morning after Hollenbeck’s death he noticed someone had recently opened a bunch of their old computer files?”

  “You asked if it could have been Hollenbeck, and Wells said no.”

  “I found the same thing on a computer in my father’s office the day after he died.”

  Beth’s brows arched upward and she took a sharp breath. “Carl, you’re suggesting—”

  “That Hollenbeck and my father were both murdered. When I was at the crime lab this morning, I saw the photos taken after my father was brought to the morgue. The pattern of the wounds he suffered was not consistent with an accident. I started to become suspicious while looking at those pictures, then when Wells mentioned Hollenbeck’s old files being opened . . .”

  “Is that why you asked Annie if she knew your father, to find out if Hollenbeck knew him?”

  “Yeah. The only connection between them I’m aware of was that note I told you about in my father’s book.”

  “There has to be more.”

  “Apparently someone else thought so too, and they believed they’d find it on my father’s computer.”