“You mustn’t tell anyone about this. We’ve had orders not to talk with you about him.”
“We?”
“The people who worked with Victor at Nucleus Labs.”
Her breathing sounded in his ear a few seconds. He could even hear her shivering. She must have her lips pressed to the mouthpiece.
“What do you want to do?” he asked. “We could meet.”
“No.”
“I could pick these documents up.”
More breathing.
“Tell me what you have then.” He felt cold just listening to her.
“Maybe I better explain how I got them in the first place. I don’t want to get in trouble with the police.”
He opened his mouth to stop her, but she pressed ahead.
“Victor programs his PC at home to forward whatever files he’s working on to both his and my computer at our offices whenever he shuts down-” She stopped and let out a breath that stuttered into a sobbing sound. After a few seconds, she said, “I mean he used to. I still can’t believe he’s dead.”
She may already be saying too much. “Listen, you should call me on a regular phone before saying anything more. I’m on a cell phone,” Mark warned her, all the while worried he might lose her for good.
He thought he heard her swallow. “No, I can hear you okay, and I want to get this over with. He’d set the system up that way so we’d always be sure to have his files the next morning in case he forgot to forward them manually. For a bright man, he sometimes had a mind like a sieve…”
She didn’t understand. But if he spelled it out that someone might be listening in… Christ it was too late anyway.
“He obviously didn’t delete that function, because a folder dated yesterday was on top of my e-mail when I got to work. The first pages were nothing special, results of genetic screenings we’d done on various groups of siblings, mainly for different sorts of cancer genes. You’ve probably seen the type of reports I’m talking about in your own practice.”
He had. They were a bunch of spikes along a horizontal line, each peak representing the amount of a particular sequence of DNA, the building blocks of the gene under investigation, including a peak or peaks for the mutated section, if it’s present. These defective portions stood out like sore thumbs when compared to a similar preparation of a normal strand, even to the untrained eye. “Victor left me a message saying he’d retrieved some test results that he’d found peculiar. Could they be the ones?”
“Peculiar? Not that I could tell. The only thing odd about them was that they’d been flagged for some reason, yet there were no obvious abnormal spikes. I wouldn’t know how to read the finer details well enough to have spotted anything else. Victor could have, though. He had the knack, and the training. In fact I initially thought they were copies he’d been using to practice his interpretation skills on and had simply returned them. It was the next few pages that got me concerned. As soon as I read them, I knew they were nothing anyone at Nucleus Labs had been meant to see. When I phoned his house, it was to ask him what he wanted me to do with the file. But you answered. By midmorning word got around that he’d died, probably from a heart attack, and I was devastated. But when we found out the police were all over his house, I got frightened. After all, I know you don’t bring out the yellow tape for simple coronaries, and after seeing what he’d been doing on the computer, well, my imagination went into overdrive.”
“Just tell me what you have.” He could barely keep his voice steady.
Still more breathing. Then she asked, “Do you know how screening for executive health plans work?”
“Sure. I’ve done my share.”
“He’s managed to get records from some of our biggest clients documenting when executives’ policies were newly issued or terminated,” she continued. “This basically reflects who’s been hired and who’s been fired. I can only guess someone at these companies sent them to him on the QT after he’d twisted their arms. He had that kind of good rapport with the people he dealt with. Word got around like wildfire on the Internet when they learned…”
He thought he heard her sob again.
“Sorry,” she said. “All those e-mails of condolences, yet outside of office hours he seemed so alone.”
Waiting for her to compose herself, he wondered if she knew the half of it.
She sucked in a deep breath. “Dr. Roper, before telling you what he found, I have to know. Did someone kill Victor because of this?”
Mark’s official line that he couldn’t give out confidential information sprung to his lips, but he didn’t speak it, knowing he might spook an already frightened woman. Instead he told her the truth. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, God! So it’s possible.”
“Listen. We can get you protection. I’ll take you to the police myself, right now if you want. And we mustn’t say anything more-”
He was listening to a dial tone again.
As he slowly lowered the phone, he sat staring straight ahead, trying to think what he should do. His gaze swept north, pulled by a glowing orange smudge that pulsed and waned above the trees against the nighttime skyline. It took him a second to realize it must be coming from a huge fire, and a heartbeat more to think it could be near Nell’s cabin.
A wall of flames rose above the back half of the structure; smoke engulfed the front.
She lay in the snow before the door where she’d crawled, naked, the skin on her head and the left side of her torso covered in carbon. But within the blackened face, white eyes glittered, alive, the nightmare from his childhood.
He thought her wrist had a weak pulse. As he reached into the flesh of her neck to palpate her carotid to be sure, that same cloying smell that could send his heart pounding came off her in waves and filled him with terror. Swallowing to keep from gagging, he felt the artery fluttering beneath his fingertips. In the headlights of the Jeep he could see the burns weren’t that deep. The black was mainly soot.
Her darkened lips parted, revealing a slash of creamy teeth, and she screamed.
“Help me get her to the back of the Jeep,” he told Lucy, his voice quivering and barely able to keep from breaking.
Seconds later they careened out of the driveway, Lucy at the wheel as he huddled over Nell’s body, muttering words of encouragement, at the same time punching in the number for the fire department, summoning them to a lost cause. Then he called Dan, briefed him on the details, and dispatched him to the scene.
Her screams continued, and her pulse grew weaker.
“She needs morphine and IV fluids, or she’ll never make it to Saratoga. Go to Mary and Betty Thomson’s,” he yelled at Lucy. Then he called their number, told them he’d be there in five minutes and what to have ready for him.
Betty stood at the door with the vials, bags, needles, and tubing in a plastic bag. “I’m praying for her,” she told Mark as he scooped up the equipment.
“Me too,” he heard Mary call from the back room.
Lucy spun the Jeep back out on the highway and they were off again.
The burns on her head, shoulders, and left trunk were less than he originally thought, first- and second-degree at the most, the same for the side of her face. It puzzled him how she’d protected that part of her body from more severe damage. The mucosal membranes inside her mouth, however, were blackened as well, and he feared most for her airway. The soft tissues there were much more vulnerable, and even with less deep burns, they could swell up to obstruct her breathing. An explosion must have accompanied the flames, as only hot gases would penetrate orifices to damage them like that.
He easily inserted an angiocath needle into her right arm and opened the IV full, to raise her pressure, then adjusted it to replace the bodily fluids that would leak from her charred skin. To quiet her shrieks and cries, he injected half an ampule of Mary’s morphine.