BLOODY BELL

by Jeremy Waldron

  King drummed his fingers on top of his desk.

  There was only one course of action to take, and he and Alvarez could do it tonight. King knew just what to do.

  He rolled his chair back and turned to his partner. “Want to take a ride?”

  Alvarez reeled his hand away from the phone and tucked it back against his side. “Anything to quit working these phones. What did you have in mind?”

  King wagged his head toward the exit and stood. Alvarez took his sport jacket from the back of his chair and followed. On the way to the car, King explained what the county clerk said about there being no record of the Browns’ civil trial being scheduled for yesterday.

  “It doesn’t make sense. Why would Joshua lie about that?”

  “I don’t think he did,” King said.

  “Did you mention you were investigating a homicide?”

  “Only a judge can open up those files. It doesn’t matter what we’re investigating.”

  “So, what, you think that Keith Brown has something about the trial in his home office?”

  King stopped at his car door and gave Alvarez a knowing look. “It’s worth a look.” Alvarez paused. King recognized that face. “What?” he asked.

  “Unless whoever murdered him already got to it.”

  The thought had already crossed King’s mind, and now he was thankful the ME had ruled their death a homicide. If she hadn’t, they might never have learned about the trial in the first place.

  Not more than fifteen minutes passed before King curbed their unmarked sedan in front of the Browns’ house in the Congress Park neighborhood. There was no barking dog, no neighbors standing on their front porches. It was quiet. And King preferred their visit to remain so.

  At the door, the detectives logged in and gained access to the house still marked off with crime scene tape. Marching straight to the home office, they scoured the bookshelves and pulled open the desk drawers. It didn’t take long for King to find a name that drew his interest.

  “Look,” he said.

  Alvarez lifted his gaze and stared.

  “Notes from Keith’s lawyer.”

  Alvarez stepped to the desk and cast his gaze to where King was pointing. “Looks like Keith was taking this trial seriously. But is there a complaint?”

  King went back to searching Keith’s desk. “Not that I see. But the name Dr. Glenn Wu is mentioned heavily.”

  “Joshua said Keith was suing a doctor.”

  King scoured the notes, flipping the pages as he read. “Here. Phanes Biotechnology.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “It’s Dr. Wu’s company,” King explained, never once taking his eyes off the paper he was holding, “and this trial was over an apparent breach of contract.”

  Alvarez rested his tailbone on the edge of the desk and took the paper from King’s grip. Together they dove into the finer details of the many pages of notes they had found. The room fell silent as anticipation grew.

  “Here it is,” King said, explaining that, according to the paper, Keith was an early investor in Dr. Wu’s gene technology.

  “Gene technology?”

  King nodded once, explained as best he could, and continued reading. “Then, at some point, Wu backed out of their contract stating moral reasons for his departure. Feeling cheated, Keith knew that without Wu, he would eventually lose big on his investment.”

  “Okay, so Brown sued Dr. Wu over a contract because he didn’t receive the riches he thought he was promised.”

  King raised his eyebrows.

  “Then who is Dr. Wu?”

  “More importantly, was this a dispute worth kidnapping Keith and Pam or killing Tracey for?” King certainly thought so.

  Alvarez scrubbed a hand over his face and murmured, “I suppose we’ll just have to ask him and see where he was the night the Browns were killed.”

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  The newsroom was quiet—only those working with tight deadlines remaining—as I kept trying to get the search engines to dig up the Guardian Angel’s clinic website when King asked me to join him for dinner.

  I wasn’t sure dinner was the best use of our time, but I was starving. And, besides, King said he had found something I needed to hear.

  As I walked to my car, I couldn’t stop hearing the grave tone in his voice. It told me everything I needed to know—whatever he’d found was big. My entire body was wound tight as if sensing the danger waiting for me around the next turn, and King’s call only pulled the knot tighter.

  He met me at a little hole in the wall Thai restaurant near Sloan’s Lake that served the most authentic Thai in the greater Denver area. It was my request, but King didn’t put up a fight.

  I still hadn’t pinned down what angle I was going to give to the story Dawson needed. There were a couple different angles I could take, neither of which I liked. As soon as I stepped inside from the cold, the spices floating in the air heated me right up and I left my work worries at the door.

  King was sipping off a Tiger beer when I joined him at a table pushed against the back wall.

  “Did you get your questions in before Campbell arrived?” King asked me as I shed my coat.

  I grabbed his hand and leaned my body across the table to plant a kiss on him. “Good to see you, too.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re right.” He pressed his lips against mine. “I should have saved the shop talk for later.”

  I ordered a beer—the same as King’s—and an appetizer to go along with it. We took our minds away from work, flirted, laughed, and talked about Allison’s difficult future if the gene therapy didn’t work as we casually sipped down our beers. I spoke about Mason and King’s planned trip to the mountains. We ate a spicy—yet delicious—meal that left me feeling like I got more than my money’s worth. The ambience of the place wasn’t spectacular, and the room was small and noisy, but it was my kind of place—an eatery where we could blend in and feel like we’d left the country if only for a couple of hours. Then the inevitable came and it was back to discussing the case.

  King swiped through the photos of Cameron’s wounds. “Jesus,” he said deadpan.

  “Her doctor said there was no way a kitchen knife—like the one found in Tyler’s house—could have made this cut. It was done by a professional.”

  King lowered the phone and swept his heavy gaze to me. “She was left for dead.”

  “But Tyler found her.” I stared, hoping King would give me clues into what the department knew that I didn’t. He only stared back so I said, “Campbell threatened to arrest me for witness tampering if I spoke to Cameron again.”

  “He’s only trying to intimidate you.”

  “Why can’t he see that I’m trying to help?”

  “Campbell is dense. He wants what you have.”

  I turned my head and stared out the window for a minute, not wanting to make tonight about Campbell. What did I have that he didn’t?

  Rolling my neck back to King, I said, “Cameron didn’t respond to an online ad like her mother thought.”

  King quirked an eyebrow.

  “It was a referral to a website from a physician’s assistant at Mile High Health Clinic.”

  King slid forward on his elbows. His brow furrowed as he squinted his intelligent eyes at me. “Promising money and medical services?”

  I nodded. “Cameron couldn’t remember exactly what the URL was, but thought the clinic was called something along the lines of Guardian Angels.”

  King shook his head and said he’d never heard of it. “Kate’s father thought his daughter found a doctor at MHHC she really liked and was certain it was there she was convinced not to have an abortion.”

  My eyes shot to King’s face. Blood rushed through my pounding heart and I couldn’t dampen the jolt of excitement for finally having facts to work with. We were getting close—closing in on who was taking the missing women. It felt good to finally be making progress.

  I shared what little I knew f
rom my own research that both Erin and I had gathered from our phones. “Cameron mentioned a Dr. Cherub, cherub being another word for—”

  “Angel.”

  “Yes,” I whispered not at all surprised by King’s quickness. “Coincidence?”

  “You think it’s a made-up name?”

  “Seems likely.” Neither of us knew if Dr. Cherub was the one Kate saw, but that, too, also seemed likely.

  “Were you able to find the clinic’s website?”

  My spine curled as I slumped in my chair. “No, and not because I don’t think it exists, because I do. I just think it hasn’t been indexed in the search engine results pages.”

  “Strange, considering it’s being sold as a service to assist the community.”

  “I thought so, too. But wouldn’t you want to hide your tracks if you’re only recruiting certain women?”

  “So whoever is doing this is smart enough to make their operation seem like it’s open to all, but clever enough to only provide the information they want to share to a select few.”

  King was breaking down my thoughts exactly. “Precisely. From what we know about these women, they would never refuse to accept an offer promising so much when each of them had so little to begin with.”

  “Except Tracey.” King’s deep voice floated across the table. “She had access to resources Kate and Cameron didn’t have.”

  “But here is where it gets even more interesting,” I said, telling him about Kristi Patterson’s story and how she believed someone at North Denver Reproductive Medicine had messed with her embryo.

  King lifted his bottle of beer but it was empty. He set it down, and I could tell he was lost in thought. Something was on his mind. I asked myself if he could be holding something back.

  “I haven’t had time to visit that clinic, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said, remembering the conversation we’d had immediately after the press conference.

  King gave me a hesitant look before dropping his voice down to a whisper. “What I’m about to tell you, you can’t tell anybody else. Understand?”

  I nodded my head in agreement, asking myself if he meant Erin, too. I assumed he didn’t, but I’d rather ask for forgiveness than for permission.

  His eyes swayed along with mine. “And it has to be completely off record.”

  “I promise,” I said, feeling my arm muscles flex as I leaned in closer.

  King told me about his visit to First Bank and that it was there he talked to Keith Brown’s colleague about a civil case the Browns were involved in. I felt my jaw unhinge when learning their deaths happened the day before their trial was supposed to have begun.

  “They were murdered,” I said under my breath.

  “Made to look like a suicide.” King wet his lips and glanced around the room, making sure no one was eavesdropping. “But there was no record the trial ever existed. Even the county clerk couldn’t find anything about it when I called.”

  My stomach sank, and suddenly it all came back to me. The suppressed court case I’d missed yesterday and the other trials crossed out in secrecy. King had been right about treating the Browns’ death as a homicide, but the examiner got it wrong in thinking it had been something as simple as a drug overdose. This was no longer about going after a street drug dealer to please the upper brass, but something much bigger.

  “So, Alvarez and I went back to the Browns’ house and found evidence to prove that the trial did in fact exist. Whoever killed them must not have known about the papers Keith’s lawyer supplied to get him ready for trial. I can’t imagine this is about anything other than what was going to be revealed during the hearing.”

  “Who was the complaint against?” I asked, thinking about the whereabouts of Tracey.

  “The founder of Phanes Biotechnologies, Dr. Glenn Wu.” King briefed me on what the company did and how Wu was a fertility doctor. “Apparently, it was over a breach of contract.”

  I had about a dozen questions ready to fly off the tip of my tongue when King told me more about the details of the case. When he was finished, I asked, “When did the Browns and Wu part ways?”

  King’s shoulders hit the back of his chair. “According to the records we found, four years ago.”

  “Tommy Patterson,” I murmured. And when I saw the look of confusion on King’s face I said, “That was about the time he would have been conceived at North Denver Reproductive Medicine.”

  “You think Dr. Wu is Tommy’s biological father?”

  “Does he work there?”

  King nodded. “I thought you knew.”

  I shook my head and cast my gaze to the table with the pressure in my head pounding. This trial provided motive to kidnap Tracey and murder the Browns, but it didn’t explain how Kate and Cameron fit into the puzzle. Either way, I kept coming back to the same conclusion—Dr. Glenn Wu was guilty of something.

  “It’s not that easy, Sam.”

  “C’mon King.” I pressed my palms flat into the table when leaning forward. “I know you see it, too. You said it yourself—Wu stopped his research claiming moral reasons right about the time Tommy was conceived. Everything we know is pointing at him. We have to question him.”

  “And we will. Planning to do it first thing in the morning. But it’s too late to do anything tonight.”

  I checked the time. My adrenaline spiked. King was right. It was too late to knock on doors without an arrest warrant. We didn’t know if Dr. Wu was guilty, but it was the closest thing we had to identifying a suspect we could work with.

  “He does business here.” King turned his palms up and reached for my hands. “He’s not going anywhere.”

  I settled my hands inside of his and his embrace was warm and inviting but I couldn’t stop thinking about Tracey. Imagining her all alone and scared left me feeling cold. She was still out there somewhere—dead or alive—and I was determined to know what happened to her before she met the same fate as Cameron.

  King squeezed my hand and, by the look he was giving me, I knew he wanted me to go home with him. But I couldn’t. I had other things planned and it was a secret I couldn’t even tell him about. Even if it meant putting myself in danger.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Susan was feeling apprehensive about her dinner with Benjamin. Since yesterday’s conference and Benjamin’s refusal to even consider meeting Dr. Glenn Wu, a chasm had opened up between them. They’d still spent the night in Boulder but it wasn’t as romantic as Susan had hoped. Now she wasn’t sure what their date would bring, but she was ready to find out.

  Benjamin picked her up in his Toyota 4Runner and together they headed up the hill to a top-notch seafood restaurant in Genesee. Perched on top of a hill overlooking the city, they sipped white wine and stared at the twinkling lights below. They were a sea of stars. It was a magnificent distraction to remind Susan that despite their differences in opinion, Benjamin was still the man she had her eye on.

  Susan keep the mood light and talked over an incredible meal as fresh as the ocean. Benjamin looked fantastic in his three-piece suit and Susan was never one to shy away from wearing her best. They flirted and laughed and spoke little about work until finally the hours passed and the inevitable arrived as soon as their plates had been cleared.

  “How is Allison doing?” Benjamin asked sincerely.

  Susan cast her gaze to her glass. “She’s receiving genetic counseling.”

  “She’s lucky they found the gene now, before there were any symptoms. It’s still tough to swallow, but her prognosis is hopeful.”

  Susan knew Benjamin was right. Allison was one of the strongest women Susan knew, and selfless, too—never one to put the spotlight on her personal struggles. She also knew Allison might be masking her emotional struggles and putting on a strong face.

  Susan lifted her gaze and locked her eyes on Benjamin’s. “She’s on the list for CRISPR gene therapy. Just like Dr. Wu was talking about yesterday.”

  Benjamin nodded. “Gene editing,
” he corrected her. “The goal is to target and correct the mutation in the single gene that causes Huntington’s Disease. If it works, it could save her life.”

  Susan cocked her head to one shoulder and gave him a look that said, Really? Now you’re all for it? What’s with this guy?

  “What?” Benjamin grinned. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No.” Susan tucked her hands beneath the table. “Now you just seem to be for the same technology you were resisting yesterday.”

  She felt herself getting heated over something small. They should have talked through their argument yesterday but had avoided it instead. Now she felt silly for continuing the disagreement that should have ended the day it started.

  “This is different,” Benjamin said.

  “How is this different than the couple looking to edit their embryo?”

  Benjamin leaned back and looked to his left. Susan watched his jaw muscle bulge. Was it annoyance or frustration? She couldn’t decide.

  Lowering his voice, Benjamin turned back to Susan and said, “Correcting a gene to a disease like Allison’s is good medicine.”

  “And in fertility it’s not?” Susan lengthened her spine.

  “The ethics of that same medicine begins to take on a different shape when a scientist pushes the boundaries of what is possible with an undeveloped embryo who has no say in the matter.”

  “But if the baby who is to grow from that embryo is susceptible to a disease—like cancer—or another life alternating illness, are we supposed to sit back and ignore it even when we have the tools and science to fix it?”

  Benjamin’s face tightened as he stared. “Maybe I’m not making myself clear.”

  Susan leaned back, crossed her legs at the knee, and tucked her hands deep inside her armpits. “No, I don’t believe you are.”

  “My fear is not that a doctor will ignore the science or not make use of the tools he has available to treat illnesses. This technology is incredibly powerful, and with it comes great responsibility.” Benjamin paused and sighed as he carefully chose his next words. His eyes were back on Susan when he continued. “My fear is that a research scientist will take the application of CRISPR too far and begin creating designer babies according to the parents’ desires.”