The plane is on the ground now. I do not know if Harvey is acting alone or with some help. I cannot imagine he slaughtered Trian and Whitherson on his own so I assume he has accomplices. I am sure that he is on to me. So tonight I will hide someplace.
Tomorrow morning I will confront him in the clinic where I know there will be a lot of witnesses and I will be safe. Since you are reading this letter, I guess I screwed up someplace. Know that I love you, Susan, and I am sorry for all the pain I caused. Please let Tommy know that his father will always love him and somehow I will always be with him.
Good- bye, Susan.
Bruce She did not move. She just sat for a very long time. There was no need to reread the note.
"Susanr She turned toward her sister.
"Bruce mentioned a package." "I mailed it to Harvey yesterday. He thought it might be important."
Susan sat up.
"Does anyone else know about this?"
"Just Sara. She's with Harvey now."
"I'm really sorry, Sara," Harvey said, moving the gun from his left hand into his right.
"I never wanted to hurt you."
Sara stared at him with a mixture of disbelief and horror.
"Your
"Yes."
"You murdered your own patients?"
"Not murdered," he corrected.
"Sacrificed. I'm not a monster, Sara."
She glanced at the still body behind her.
"Tell that to Eric." He smiled his weary smile.
"You don't understand." She said nothing.
"It was an impossible struggle from the beginning," he continued.
"Powerful people tried to squash us. You can't imagine what we went through to get the initial funding for this place."
Her voice, when it finally came, sounded hollow.
"You killed your own patients?"
"They were already dying."
"From what?"
"AIDS."
Pause.
"I thought they were cured."
"No." He smiled sadly.
"Please, Sara, you have known me for a long time. I am not an evil man. I want you to understand before... "Before, what?"
"I'm sorry. I wish there was another way, but there isn't. As soon as Jennifer told you about the package, the decision was out of my hands.
"I'll have no problem convincing her that Brace's package had nothing to do with the Gay Slasher. But you would have insisted on the DNA tests."
"You're going to kill me." It was not a question.
"You will have to be sacrificed, yes."
"And you're going to kill our baby."
He winced.
"I wish I didn't have to. You see, Sara, AIDS is a disease unlike any other. One minute the world is focused on it. The next, no one cares.
I needed a way to maintain focus."
"SRI doesn't work, does it? It never did. It was all a lie." "It worked perfectly in the animal tests," he said.
"Even the PDA agreed with that. The problem is we have not been able to get it to work on humans. But it's just a matter of time until "
"Then Michael is doomed."
He shook his head.
"I'm so close, Sara, so damn close. All I needed was a little more time to perfect the formula. But our grant was not going to be extended. Sanders and his fellow conspirators would have seen to that.
Our funds were about to be cut off. I needed something, Sara. Some way of keeping the funds."
"So you faked a cure?" "It was easy really," he said.
"I was the one who drew the blood from Trian, Whitherson, and Martino.
All I had to do was switch test tubes replace their blood specimens with someone's who was HIV negative. It went perfectly."
"Then why did you murder them?" "Because they were dying," he said.
"SRI had managed to put the HIV into a sort of remission for a while, but eventually the treatment accelerated their deterioration. I could only dismiss their worsening condition as a drug side effect for so long. I had to get rid of the evidence. The AIDS virus would have killed them anyway in another month or two."
"So you had them murdered."
He shook his head.
"I didn't have George 'murder' anybody.
I had him speed up the inevitable."
"I can't believe this."
"I did it for them, Sara, not for me."
"For them?" she repeated incredulously.
"You took away their last precious months of life for them?"
"I did not want them to die in vain. I wanted their deaths to mean something, to benefit the AIDS movement."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
His eyes gleamed now.
"The publicity, Sara. The media doesn't focus very long on medical developments, but throw in a Gay Slasher and whammo, you have nationwide press. Look at the News Flash report. Parker spent more time on the serial killings than on the AIDS cure. The murders stirred up the masses in a way even Sanders would have been proud of.
Record- setting donations have been flooding in since the show aired, not just because we are on the verge of finding a cure, but because people are outraged by the slashings."
Sara gripped her cane tightly.
"You crazy bastard."
"No, Sara, I am rational. I am looking at it on a cost-benefit basis.
Trian, Whitherson, and Martino were going to die awful, painful deaths from AIDS. Instead, they were killed painlessly while helping the development of a cure."
"You call mutilation and torture merciful?"
His smile evaporated.
"That was never supposed to happen," he said quickly.
"That was George's doing. As soon as I found out about it, I put a stop to it. It was a mistake."
"And what about Bruce and Janice? More 'mistakes'?"
"I never wanted to hurt them. Bruce stumbled onto the truth.
He had to be silenced. And George killed Janice when she spotted him near Michael's room. They were both accidents. I mourn for them more than anyone. I can't sleep at night because of what happened to them.
But I have to shut my eyes to my pain. When I think of the goal, Sara, when I think of the possibility of curing AIDS, I realize how insignificant a few lives are. I'm not talking about saving hundreds of lives here. I'm talking about saving thousands, perhaps millions, of people."
Her harsh glare did not waver.
"So they were expendable?"
"I know it sounds cruel, but it's true."
"The end justifies the means?"
"When the end is something as important as an AIDS vaccine, of course the end justifies the means. Wouldn't you sacrifice one person to save a thousand? If you could go back in time, wouldn't you murder Hitler rather than let him kill six million Jews?"
"Don't compare innocent victims with Hitler."
"That's not the point and you know it. I am talking about life-and-death realities here. Sometimes the innocent must suffer, it's a fact of life. But if we can stamp out AIDS, isn't it a small price to pay? Wouldn't any good person be willing to sacrifice his life to save thousands of others?"
"Why did you kill Bradley Jenkins? He wasn't one of your cured patients."
"But he was dying and frankly speaking I was terrified of how his father would react if he died while under my treatment. It could have been disastrous for the clinic."
"And that's why you 'sacrificed' him?" "Not just that." Harvey paused and took a deep breath. He tried to renew his smile, but it never reached his eyes.