“I have to be,” she said pragmatically, and with no trace of self-pity. But clearly she didn’t want to talk about it. “Uncle Keith, tell me again about SkyPower.”
“Well, it’s a nuclear reactor in stable orbit, as you know. When it’s finished it will generate enormous amounts of energy that will be beamed down to Earth as microwaves. We’ll get all the benefits of nuclear power without the contamination risks.”
“You mean the owners of it will,” Lillie said, and Keith laughed. He enjoyed her shrewdness. She’d pulled her hand away from his; she was getting old enough to feel self-conscious about touching. The day was cold and she wore a bright red jacket. Sometime, he hadn’t noticed when, she’d had her ears pierced. Two tiny red hearts nestled in her ear lobes.
She said, “And you’re the lawyer for SkyPower.”
“Well, one of them.” His firm had only recently been named corporate counseclass="underline" a coup.
“If anything goes wrong, you defend the company.”
“So far nothing has gone wrong. Knock on wood.”
She did, rapping on the pub table and saying, “Hello? Come in?” She laughed uproariously. Keith did, too, not because it was funny but because it was so good to see her throw back her head and guffaw. A second later, however, she glanced at the watch he’d given her. “I gotta go. Thanks for lunch!”
“Don’t you want dessert?”
“I can’t. Mom’s getting home soon. Thanks again!”
Home from where? Keith wondered, but Lillie was gone, whirling out the door in a swirl of red. He must call Barbara tomorrow, not wait until Monday, find out what the current crisis was.
But Sunday he had a casual, non-involving date. Monday turned out to be spent putting down brush fires. By the time he called his sister, it was too late.
“The same clinic that did your sister did the little boy’s mother,” Jamal said, “the ChildGive IVF Institute in Croton-on-Hudson. It went out of business in January 2001. Started in May 1999. Eighteen months, and we’re looking at some very weird stuff, boss.”
Keith nodded. He wasn’t going to tell Jamal yet again that Keith disliked being called the semi-mocking “boss.” Most investigators were good at one thing: leg work or computer hacking or underworld informants or turning a tiny site clue into an entire trail of reeking spores. Jamal Mahjoub did it all, or at least got it all done by somebody, and if he wanted to call Keith “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” he could. Jamal was small, with dark curly hair, glasses, and a face that looked about sixteen.
“The clinic had four employees: a secretary, two nurses, and the doctor. The secretary and nurses check out, working types who just found other jobs when the clinic ‘went bankrupt.’ The doctor is something else. His name was Timothy—”
“Was?” Keith interrupted.
“He’s dead. Coming to that in a moment. Timothy Allen Miller. Born in 1970 and grew up in Siller, Ohio, a small town, mostly farming. Never fit in, the high school yearbook is full of little snide jokes about him. Valedictorian, went to Harvard, did brilliantly in premed but not popular there, either. Arrogant, but also weird in ways other arrogant pre-docs didn’t like. Full of conspiracy theories about everything, from the JFK assassination to secret Jewish banking cartels to some sort of black-Catholic alliance to overthrow the government.”
“I can see why nobody liked him.”
“Big time. He was brilliant at Harvard Med, intern and resident at Mass General, and then they didn’t want him on staff. Neither did anybody else.”
Keith looked out the window. Ten floors below, two yellow cabs had run into each other on Madison. The drivers stood nose to nose, waving their fists.
“So Miller joins a group practice, and that lasts two years. Then he opens up solo, and in a year he files for bankruptcy. He takes a job as a lab technician in Poughkeepsie.”
“Quite a comedown,” Keith said.
“And he felt it. Now Miller is bitter as well as arrogant. One of his coworkers said she thought he was the kind of guy who was someday going to come into work with an AK-47 and blow everybody away.”
“But he doesn’t,” Keith said. You had to let Jamal tell it his own way, and he liked audience participation.
“No. Instead, he channels all his weirdness into the Roswell thing. Aliens coming to Earth, all that.”
Oh, God. Spare me the nuts. “Roswell is a long way from Poughkeepsie.”
“Yeah. But Miller makes the trip, several times. He goes to meetings where UFO types huddle on the highway, waiting to be picked up. And then one night, he is.”
Keith grimaced and Jamal laughed.
“Well, all right, he says he is. Comes into work and says he has important work to do, aliens have anointed him, blah blah. That same coworker is so creeped out she decides to quit, but the boss saves her the trouble by firing Miller. Miller had been AWOL for a solid month, no word, no excuse.”
“Can’t blame the boss,” Keith said, keeping up his end. His hands felt like ice. Sometime in Jamais rambling tale, this lunatic medico was going to connect with Lillie.
“No. But Miller just laughs at being fired—my informant was standing right there—and he saunters out, cocky as spaniels. A month later he opens ChildGive in Croton-on-Hudson. Big glossy offices, state-of-the-art equipment, competent personnel.”
“Where’d the money come from?” Keith asked.
“Don’t know. I couldn’t find the trail. But he pays his people well. Even so, none of them like their new boss. He’s a son of a bitch to work for. But he’s apparently good at what he does. He gets hundreds of couples pregnant in vitro, some with the parents’ egg and sperm, some with donors. But no shady stuff… every time he uses a donor, the parents agree, and all the paperwork dots the legal i’s and crosses the legal t’s.”
“A model citizen.”
“Yep. Not only that, but by this time enough genes for hereditary diseases have been identified that Miller picks and chooses his embryos and everybody gets as healthy a kid as possible. No complaints filed with any officials, scores of glowing thank-you letters, money coming in hand over fist. And then, eighteen months later, Miller closes shop.”
“Why?”
“He never said. Not to anybody. He waves his hand to make the whole thing go away, and it does. Then Miller himself disappears. No tax returns, no credit cards, no e-mail address, nothing.”
“Murdered?”
“You watch too much TV, boss. No, he was alive, but he changed his name, moved to New Mexico, and worked under the table in a restaurant. For two years, the waiters and restaurant owner and busboys and customers say he’s the happiest person they ever met. The original sunshine kid. Then he’s killed by a drunk driver while crossing Main Street.”
“Did you―”
“Of course. It really was an accident. Fifteen-year-old redneck kid without a license, been arrested for it before, drunk out of his mind. He’s still doing time in juvie for vehicular manslaughter. But now hold on, boss. Here it comes.”
Keith waited.
“In the last three months, twenty of Miller’s test-tube babies have gone into trances like your niece’s. They’re starting to find each other. I have the names, and one of the parents is a doctor. He’s actually a stepparent who married the mother of a girl like Lillie years after the kid was born, and he’s not a, what do you call it, a geneticist, but he knows enough to know what he’s looking at. And he’s mad as hell. His name is Dr. Dennis Reeder, and here’s his address in Troy, New York. He wouldn’t say much to me, but he’s raring to talk to you. A physician no less. Doctor, lawyer… all you need is an Indian chief.”