‘Out of my jurisdiction and with these two, the closer we stick to the rules the better. Any evidence gathered not by the book will get tossed as inadmissible. We sit tight.’
‘Did you see who it was?’ Frank asked.
Sean hesitated. ‘Just feet and a bit of ankle, like a woman’s.’
‘Wearing shoes?’ Frank asked.
‘A muddy sock.’
‘The kind you get in hospitals?’
‘Maybe. It could be her. You got the card for those state troopers?’
Frank fished it out of his soaked and wadded-up pants pocket.
Sean dialed and put the phone on speaker. ‘Yeah hi, remember how you said Frank Garfield is a trouble magnet. Well, how do you feel about a body in a car trunk parked at one of the guest cottages at Merryvale?’
The by-now familiar trooper’s voice was clear. ‘Seriously? We’re on our way. What’s the number of the cottage?’
‘Can’t see from here,’ Sean said. ‘How well do you know this place?’
‘Well enough,’ she said.
Sean described the location. ‘There’s a big wisteria-covered arch thing behind it. Which is where we are.’
‘You going to tell me whose car it is, or is that part of the surprise?’
Sean hesitated. He knew the Langs poured money into this part of the state. But how much, and how far that might influence a pair of state troopers was unknowable. To lie, would create downstream problems. He took the middle ground. ‘I don’t want to say.’
‘Oh, fuck,’ she said. ‘What are we walking into?’
‘Sorry.’
‘We’ll be there in ten.’
‘I’d try faster, and just a thought, ditch the lights and sirens.’
A popping noise cracked from the direction of the cottage. ‘Shit.’ Sean unsnapped the holster of his gun, was out of the car and raced towards the cottage.
‘What’s happening?’ the trooper asked over the car phone.
Frank opened his door. ‘I think it was a gun shot?’
‘Is that you Doctor Garfield?’
But he was gone. ‘Get here fast,’ Grace wheezed from the backseat.
‘Five minutes tops,’ the trooper said. ‘Stay put, Doctor Lewis.’
But the trooper’s directive fell on an empty car.
FORTY-TWO
Leona primped and studied her reflection as she waited for Dalton. What if I gave myself another infusion? How far can I push? She tilted her head from side to side; all the loose flesh was gone. Her chin returned to its pointed splendor. She thought about giving that young drug rep a call. What was his name? Mesmerized, she stared at herself. You can do better.
A door opened and closed downstairs.
And here’s Dalton … Everything has its shelf life.
She waited as he bounded up the stairs.
‘You got me here,’ he said, from the doorway.
‘Is it done?’ she asked.
‘Yes. I tried to get confirmation but either the rain or something else is making access to the local emergency bands impossible.’
‘I see.’ She wondered, if he weren’t her son, how many years back he would have been fired. Would never have hired him to begin with.
‘You don’t. But, whatever. You wanted me here, what’s so important that I couldn’t visit Grandma Karen?’
‘You mean bring her booze.’
‘The store delivers. But yes, I always bring her something.’
‘It’s called enabling, Dalton.’
‘She’s old. What does it matter?’
‘She’s a bitch. I should never have bought her that place.’
She glanced from her reflection back to Dalton. ‘You were right. We could be brother and sister.’
‘Yes, hurray for you. You wanted me here. Say what you have to say.’
‘Why so angry?’ She stopped her self-examination and focused on him. Young, handsome, and petulant as a two-year-old. ‘It’s Frank. You had feelings for him. I’d thought that was an act.’ She shuddered.
‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘Who I like is none of your business.’
She snorted. ‘You’re wrong. Everything you do is my business. Is this something we need to talk about? Are you going to be gay now? I’m not certain how I feel about that.’
‘Stop it. What’s so important that you needed me here? I have things to take care of.’
‘More important than me?’
Dalton stared at his mother. Years of practice schooled his expression. Give her nothing. The weight of his briefcase dangled in his right hand. ‘What could be more important than you?’ He headed towards the kitchen. ‘Tea?’ he asked.
‘Sure.’
He rested his briefcase on a chair and filled the electric kettle. Are you going to do this? Are you really going to do this? He pictured the steps, the Glock in the middle compartment, loaded and good to go. You killed your father …
The kettle hissed.
He both felt and heard a loud pop. A sharp pain at the base of his scalp. A moment of clarity. She shot me. Too late. He pictured Frank. He pictured Grandma Karen, and then he died.
Leona, pistol in hand, stared as Dalton crumbled to the floor.
The kettle screamed, rain pounded on the roof, and she smelled ozone from the discharge. Her fingers tingled inside a soft kid glove. She held still and parsed her emotions. A tinge of regret, but something stronger … freedom. ‘Sorry Dalton.’
She laid her pistol on the kitchen table, turned the kettle down, opened Dalton’s briefcase and pulled out his Glock. As expected, it was loaded. She arranged her scene and alibi. ‘He came at me. I had no choice.’ She knelt and pried open her dead son’s hand.
And the gunshot to the back of his head?
‘The kettle distracted him. He turned. I grabbed my gun from my purse and fired.’
It will do. Not as simple and elegant as with Lionel. He slipped and fell. He hit his head. She arranged the Glock into Dalton’s still supple fingers. She felt the calluses on the pads from playing guitar. He was good. Such a waste. Is he still alive? She stared at his chest. There was no movement.
Immersed in the moment she did not hear the front door, which Dalton had left unlocked, or the sound of three pairs of feet up the stairs.
Her concentration shattered at the sound of a man’s harsh voice. ‘Leona Lang, put your hands where I can see them.’
FORTY-THREE
Like the night his mother killed his dad, what happened in the next sixty seconds became seared in Frank’s brain. Soaked, burned, and in borrowed sweats he padded silently behind Sean with Grace two steps back. The shot had come from upstairs.
As they cleared the landing Frank spotted Leona Lang with her back turned, kneeling on the ground by a wall of cabinets. At first, he couldn’t see what she was doing. But then he saw a swath of flesh. Dalton; she killed her own son.
Sean, revolver drawn, moved fast towards the kitchen.
Frank followed, his gaze fixed on Leona who was oblivious to their presence. Her gloved hands wedged something into Dalton’s.
A gun. Frank saw the dark elongated barrel fitted with a silencer.
Leona strained as she raised Dalton’s hand in the two of hers. The gun pointed towards the door … and Sean.
‘Leona Lang, put your hands where I can see them,’ Sean barked.
‘She has a gun,’ Frank shouted, and moving fast he grabbed Sean and nearly tackled him.
‘What are you doing here?’ Leona spat out, her words punctuated by the pop of a bullet and the sound of a shattered mirror in the hall behind them. She wrested the firearm from Dalton’s lifeless fingers, sprang to her feet and assessed her intruders. She glared at Frank and Grace. ‘Shit, Dalton. Even this you couldn’t do right.’
Frank stared at her, the gun … and Dalton. A cruel thought came to mind, one down, one to go.
Sean regained his stance and trained his revolver on Leona. ‘Leona Lang, put down your weapon. You’re under arrest fo
r the murder of your son, and God only knows what else.’
Her eyes darted from him, to Frank, to Grace. ‘No,’ she said, as a siren sounded in the distance. ‘This is not how this plays out. He came at me with a gun and tried to kill me. I acted in self-defense.’
‘Not from where we stand,’ Sean said. ‘Put down the gun.’
‘No.’ She stared at Frank. ‘Don’t think for one second that any of you are safe. Or those children, those sweet innocent babes. One by one Frank, Logan, Tara … little Jen, and don’t think I won’t.’ She turned to Sean and to Grace. ‘I have resources you cannot imagine. You do as I say, or things will get very ugly.’
Frank caught her gaze and held it. He focused on her face, twisted with emotion, but so young. It fascinated him – this is my doing. This is all my doing. This is why she stole Jen’s dose. Jackson had been right all along and it killed him. I killed him. He raked in the details of the space between them, two overstuffed chairs to the left and a sofa to the right, in between a glass-topped coffee table. Her gun pointed at Sean. He sensed the flurry of her thoughts, their three stories against hers, and one of them a cop. Her jaw twitched.
‘Put down the gun, Leona,’ Sean ordered.
She turned on Sean, her mouth twisted up in a half smile. ‘I don’t think so.’
Frank heard vehicles pull into the gravel lot behind the cottage. Their time was up. Her back was to the wall and he knew, she’s going to shoot him. And without pause, eye on the ball, he charged her, this ends now. He didn’t hear Grace scream or feel the bullet that tore through his left shoulder a centimeter from the arch of his aorta. He was pure momentum and forward force as his one-hundred-and-eighty-eight pounds barreled into her. The impact that connected his right shoulder to her larynx was deliberate and surgical. He heard the crack of her head against the maple-fronted cabinet, followed by a strange full-body spasm beneath him from the shock to her spinal cord as she sank to the floor with him on top.
Footsteps pounded up the stairs, as he tried to raise himself off but couldn’t. He felt and saw the blood, not hers but his. He saw a look of confusion and wide-eyed surprise on her beautiful face, she seemed at a loss. Her lips quivered and pursed, like a fish with too little oxygen puffing at the surface.
‘Active shooter!’ a woman shouted from the stairwell.
Grace, furthest from the action, shouted, ‘Frank. Oh my God, Frank! No.’
He stared into Leona’s sapphire eyes. Jackson’s words, ‘the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen’ – he felt light-headed and frozen. She’s not dead, but then her lips stopped as did the tremors that rolled through her body.
He felt Sean behind him, a hand on his shoulder, there was pressure and pain. ‘You’ve been shot. What the fuck? Why?’ Good questions, but he couldn’t find words, and he was suddenly so tired. And the last thing he heard or remembered was Sean’s anguished voice, ‘Shooter is down. We have a man shot. We need an ambulance now!’
FORTY-FOUR
Frank tried to focus on the silver haired UNICO executive across from him. Behind the man in the five-thousand-dollar suit stretched a panoramic city scape. It had been three weeks since Leona shot him, since they found his mother dead in Dalton’s trunk, and two weeks since Sean last spoke to him … or at least with him as he was present in the hospital when he gave his statements to the FBI and then to detectives from Connecticut’s Major Crime Squad. He’d had two surgeries to his shoulder, slept little, eaten less, and felt separated from everything and everyone.
‘Unprecedented, to say the least,’ Matt Taylor, UNICO’s CFO and acting CEO for the past week, said.
Frank sat silent; unprecedented was a comment not a question. It had taken everything he had to get dressed and into the UNICO limo that morning. He knew he’d had no choice, but everything to that point had been a series of mistakes. From not listening to Jackson, which he now knew cost him his life, to saying yes to the murderous Langs. He tried to pay attention to Matt, early fifties, perfect hair, bespoke suit and muted-red silk tie dotted with tiny paisleys.
‘You’ll want more time to recover. I can’t imagine the shock of what you’ve been through.’
‘Thank you,’ Frank said. He felt a trap. Why am I here? His mouth filled with saliva. This morning he’d barely been able to suck down a cup of coffee and a dry piece of toast. He still felt the impact with Leona, the sound of her cervical spine as it fractured, the feel of her beneath him. Grace’s screams. And then Sean’s cold expression and hard words after he woke from the first surgery, ‘you’re going to be OK. But we’re not. Was any of it real? Was it all lies?’ Frank gasped.
‘Are you OK?’ Matt asked.
‘No. Not really,’ he admitted. ‘Why am I here?’
‘Good. Business. You’re here because you signed a five-year exclusive non-compete contract with UNICO. And a generous one at that. There is a thirty-day buy-out option, but it’s on our side only and at least while I sit here, we won’t exercise it.’
Frank met Matt’s gaze. This felt familiar. Had he survived Dalton and Leona only to encounter … ‘What do you want?’
‘Very little, Frank. At least for now. Leona was obsessed with your project at Hollow Hills. While I’m not a scientist anyone can see the results were astounding. Six children with terminal cancers, all … cured. How is such a thing possible?’
Frank held his tongue.
‘Fortunately, they all signed nondisclosure agreements,’ Matt said, ‘and I’ve never met a group of more grateful individuals. You’re quite the hero to them, and understandably so.’
Frank’s internal alarms sounded. ‘You met with them?’
‘Of course. The Langs took the need for damage control to new heights. One thing that’s clear, they all think you walk on water, Dr Garfield. But we have some problems to … fix.’
‘Such as?’
‘How many people are aware of the Hollow Hills study? As you now know, it was never vetted through a human study review board and was never submitted to the FDA for approval. From start to finish the whole thing is an illegal cluster fuck that needs to be buried. It never happened. So who knows about it?’
‘Myself, Dr Lewis … various UNICO employees will know pieces. They’re not blind to the changes in the kids.’ He stared at Matt, ‘Not to mention anyone who caught sight of Leona. Her transformation was – is – remarkable.’
‘True,’ Matt said. ‘Although where she is, and will remain, should prevent further speculation.’
‘Which is where?’
‘A UNICO facility outside Mexico City.’
‘And her condition?’
‘Unchanged, a permanent vegetative state. She will never wake up, and I’ve got to clean up this shit.’ Matt’s gaze narrowed. ‘Though I must say, her interest in you and your product makes sense. Cure cancer and look twenty years younger. And that’s the assessment of an MBA. I wonder, what else can it do? Not that those two things wouldn’t be game changers.’ He sighed. ‘But here’s the deal, Dr Garfield, it’s over. This project is shut down as of now.’
‘You just said you wouldn’t terminate the contract.’
‘True. You’ve got five years to do what you’d like with a million-dollar salary, profit sharing, the whole package. It’s all yours. None of that has changed.’
‘What’s in it for UNICO … for you?’
‘Your silence. Even after the five years are up, whatever you created at Hollow Hills belongs to UNICO, though it appears you never committed it to paper.’
Frank tried to make sense of Matt’s words. ‘UNICO is a drug company, wouldn’t you want something that actually cured cancer?’ He wondered if the taped session of his frenzied night making Jen Lewis’s dose had been for the Langs’ eyes only. In which case … a good thing. But what happened to it? And Leona in a coma, was not Leona dead. He wanted to ask Sean about it, if the FBI would be able to break through her passcodes, and if they did, would anyone have the scientific background to understand his work
? But none of his texts, or voicemails to Sean in the last two weeks had been answered.
Matt smiled, and with the tone of someone talking to a small, not-bright child, said, ‘Dr Garfield, we are first and foremost a for-profit corporation that must turn a profit. Your product, while enticing, would torpedo a trillion-dollar industry.’
His bluntness stunned Frank. But he was being offered a way out that neither Leona or Dalton would have given. ‘You shelve a product that could save millions of lives in the interest of the bottom line.’
Matt smiled. ‘Yes. Do you have a problem with that?’’
‘Actually, no. And what am I supposed to do for UNICO during the remaining four years and nine months of my contract?’
‘Up to you. But be aware while the contract is generous in many respects, should you pursue other research, all of the product belongs to us in perpetuity.’
‘I could choose to do nothing?’
‘Yes … or you could return to your medical practice, and to teaching, but we would be watching.’
‘For?’
‘Unusual success. Patients defying the odds, that kind of thing. Be a good doctor, just not too good.’
This felt familiar. Matt Taylor was another head of the pharma hydra, and he’d had enough. ‘Here’s the deal, Matt.’ Frank stood and leaned over the desk. His shoulder twinged, but he bit back the pain. ‘I may be under contract to you sick bastards, but I don’t care about the money. Never have. Give it to charity. And yes, I think I will go back to practicing, and to teaching … if they’ll have me. But the first hint I get that anyone from UNICO is following me, watching me, going into patient records, any of it, I will find a way to make it stop.’
Matt pressed back into his chair. He snorted. ‘Idle threats, Dr Garfield.’
Frank shook his head. ‘Tell that to Leona.’ With that, he took a last look at the long views over the park and walked out. In the elevator, he thought of Dalton and the awkward kiss in the park. The guy was a sociopath, but there was something quirky and almost likeable beneath his Teflon good looks. In the weeks since what he and Grace, in a stab at humor, now called Macbeth Act V, he’d compulsively watched Dalton’s YouTube videos one after the other, repeatedly. They were good. The tune from one of them had lodged in his head. As he headed down it played in his mind, but with his own lyrics, Pimps and whores, Pimps and whores. I don’t want to work for pimps and whores.
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