Dismissed, thought Remo as he followed Chelsea Radcliff back into the corridor.
“We’ll have to make this quick,” she said. “I do have work.”
“Of course. Lead on.”
“Examination rooms,” she told him, passing by the numbered doors that stood between her father’s office and the foyer. Choosing one at random, Chelsea led the way inside. It was, indeed, a standard treatment room, complete with padded table, chairs, a stool on casters, sink and paper-towel dispenser, metal cabinets on the walls, assorted medical equipment on the counters.
“No one stays the night, then?” Remo asked.
“On rare occasions, when there’s minor surgery involved, or a reaction to some medication, but we always try to send them home as soon as possible.”
“And treatment normally includes a course of counseling?”
“Where indicated,” Chelsea said. “Some couples don’t require it. Others are distraught and desperate by the time they come to see us. Since emotions may influence both fertility and fetal growth, we treat all aspects of the problem.”
Their next stop was an ultramodern lab where sperm and eggs were frozen, thawed and merged in vitro, in the cases where traditional attempts had met with failure. Remo listened, made a show of taking notes, but it was gibberish. So far, he was no closer to an answer for the riddle of a dead assassin and his doppelgangers than he had been yesterday.
The clinic had a fully sterile operating room with all the fixings, plus a spacious lounge of sorts where Chelsea said she met with clients who required her services.
“You must be running short of time right now,” he said.
“That’s right,” she confirmed.
“But I would love to hear some more about your end,” he said.
“My end?”
“Of what goes on here.”
“I don’t see—”?
“Unfortunately, Dr. Radcliff, I’m on deadline, and my editor…well, let’s just say he makes Saddam Hussein look like a pussycat.”
“You ought to find another job,” she told him, not quite smiling.
“I’ve considered it,” he said, “but I can’t shake the curiosity.”
“That killed the cat, you know.”
“I’ve had my shots.”
“In any case—”
“And I was thinking,” Remo interrupted, “if you’re free tonight…”
“Tonight?”
“If I could buy you dinner, talk some more about your work. No names, of course. I understand the ethics problem. But we don’t hear much about the mental and emotional impact of infertility.”
She thought about it for a moment, looking Remo up and down before she answered him. “Where are you staying?”
“Nowhere, yet. I drove from Louisville.”
“You’ve got a fair wait until suppertime.”
‘I’ll manage.”
“Seven-thirty, then,” she told him, pushing it. A test. “You passed Antonio’s as you were coming into town.”
“Italian place, out on the highway.”
“Right. I’ll meet you.”
“I could pick you up,” he said.
“I doubt that very much,” said Chelsea Radcliff as she turned away and left him staring after her. Again the suggestion of a challenge in her tone.
Another time, it might, have been amusing to find out, but there was too much work left to be done, and it was deadly serious. The Radcliffs. needed more investigation before he could decide on what to do.
Two doctors in the family, he thought.
A paradox.
But he was getting closer. He could feel it.
He was on his way.
Chapter 16
Remo had some time to kill, but he didn’t enjoy the thought of driving back to Louisville and sitting in the motel room while Chiun stared sullenly out the window. Instead, to play it safe, he phone from a public booth.
Chiun answered on the second ring. His normally singsong voice was flat. “Hello.”
“It’s me,” said Remo.
“Me who?”
“Don’t start, Chiun. I just called to say I won’t be back for supper.”
“You are doubtless too busy busting ghosts.”
“You know this might go faster if you helped out instead of sulking,” Remo said.
“We will never know.”
Chiun hung up on him, the dial tone buzzing like a wasp in Remo’s ear. Frowning, he slammed the handset in its cradle. Some things never changed.
The booth was situated near a Monarch filling station, on the edge of town.. He crossed the asphalt minidesert to the station, went inside and got directions to the public library. It was a long shot, but with spare time on his hands, he had nothing to lose.
The Brandenburg librarian was in her early forties, ash blond hair pulled back and tied off. Her baggy slacks and sweater tried to hide a body that, in Remo’s estimation, would have made most men look twice. He pegged her as a competent, no-nonsense hand, when she was on the clock, but guessed she might cut loose and let her hair down after hours.
She directed Remo to the corner where a filing cabinet held back-issues of the local newspaper on microfilm. The reader was a vintage hand-crank model. Precise dates would have narrowed down his search, but none such were available, so he selected rolls of microfilm for 1983 through ’85, relieved to find the local paper was a weekly.
Remo scored in April 1984. The paper didn’t tell him what his quarry had been doing in the nearly-three years since he left Eugenix Corporation, but it trumpeted the plans for Dr. Radcliffs clinic, calling him an “imminent” physician and geneticist. The typo brought a smile to Remo’s face. The author of the piece, one Reuben Sprock, would never know how right he was.
The article laid out an overview of Radcliff’s plan to build a family-planning clinic in the neighborhood of Brandenburg, with no specific mention of a site. Considering the neighborhood and local politics, friend Sprock had made a point of finding out that no abortions would be offered at the clinic. Three short paragraphs about the doctor’s background and the anguish of infertility wrapped up the piece.
They broke ground on the clinic two months later, with an article and photos on page two. Another five months, and the clinic’s opening was featured on page one, below the fold.
And that was all.
Reporters came around when buildings were erected, and again when they burned down or were demolished, but between times, it required some newsworthy event to bring them back. A strike or lawsuit, major accidents, a juicy crime committed on the premises, complaints from patients or the staff. In Radcliff’s case, there had been nothing of the sort, and he was left alone.
Remo pegged Chelsea somewhere in her early thirties, which meant she was barely out of college—probably still working on her doctorate— when Daddy opened Family Services in Brandenburg. It was a sweet gig, stepping out of grad school into an established job, with no one but a parent supervising. Some of that depended on the parent, though, and Quentin Radcliff didn’t seem like anybody’s candidate for Father of the Year. That might be totally unfair, of course, based on a fleeting interview, but Remo was a decent judge of character.
He spent the afternoon in Brandenburg, ate rice at a little mom-and-pop cafe for lunch and introduced himself—complete with phony press credentials—to a dozen downtown merchants who looked old enough to have some detailed memory of Brandenburg before the clinic came. Eleven of the twelve knew the clinic existed, and nine were capable of giving him directions to the site, but only five had any real idea of what went on behind the clinic’s walls. Those five agreed unanimously that the clinic was a good thing for the town of Brandenburg. One knew a girl who worked part-time for Radcliff, making decent money, while the others allowed with approval that “Doctor” always paid his bills on time. So much for small-town amateur detective work.