The official theory so far of the destruction of the Wasser-man Facility was a rupture in the ancient gas line that ran all the way from Blue Hills to the old Boston State Hospital complex. Pockets of trapped gas had gathered in various locations underground, and when one of them was sparked by an electrical short the explosion caused a chain reaction, taking Wasserman’s building down along with the surrounding brush and half the street.
How that explained the rest of it, Jess had no idea. There were too many dead men at the scene, along with the pieces of the destroyed helicopter scattered among the debris. Someone would have to be held accountable.
“You done good,” Charlie said. “I know it might not seem like it right now, but what happened is the way it had to be. Someday you’ll see it the same.”
“Maybe, Charlie. Maybe you’re right. But it doesn’t keep me from feeling pretty damn guilty. A lot of people died. I could have done something differently, gotten her out somehow without causing her to tear the whole place to shreds. You know?”
“They would have killed you, to keep her,” Charlie said. “You know it as well as I do. There was nothing that could have changed that. It was fate. That and the almighty dollar.”
Jess looked out across the cemetery to the street. For some reason, she thought about Maria’s face. Embrujado. Haunted. Something shiny winked in her eyes, and then was gone. “I don’t know what to think anymore,” she said.
“What you need is a hot bath, lots of bubbles, and someone to scrub you raw.”
“I’m going to disappear for a while, Charlie,” she said. “I’m leaving Thomas Ward. I just can’t bring myself to care about the degree anymore. This whole experience has changed my perspective. I don’t know if psychology is the field for me.”
“Take your time, sweetheart. Don’t make any rash decisions. The mental health field will be a colder, darker place without you in it. Can I see you back to the hospital?”
“I’ve got an errand to run first, a couple of them actually.”
“I’ll go with you, then. You blew up my car, I can’t go anywhere else right now anyway.”
Jess looked at Charlie and saw that there would be no changing her mind. She smiled, insanely glad at that moment to have such a friend, and wondering how on earth she had earned the honor. “We’ll take a taxi,” she said.
Over one hundred yards away, Philippa Cruz lowered the binoculars and handed them to the driver standing to her right, and he switched the umbrella he was holding to his other hand to take them.
Droplets of water spattered the shoulders of her suit jacket. She rubbed at her eyes to get the grit out. She’d forgotten the last time she had slept. Her hair was lying limply across her face and the fine lines around her mouth and brow had become more pronounced. It had been a very long couple of days.
They were parked among a row of other cars and far enough down the street to remain unnoticed, but she had a clear line of sight to the graveyard and the small group of people gathered there. With the high-powered binoculars, it was almost as if she stood shoulder to shoulder with Jess Chambers.
“No sign of her,” Cruz said. Not that she had expected the girl to be there anyway. They would be keeping her out of sight for a while, maybe forever. That is, if she was still alive.
Cruz had been on the premises when the disaster had taken place. Unlike Steven Berger, she had decided early on not to stick around and see what happened. Cruz was not interested in saving any lives except her own, and she supposed that saving lives had not been Berger’s motivation either. He had remained out of pure greed. They had not had the time to remove their most sensitive and important research, and he was simply trying to protect his valuable assets.
What Berger didn’t know was that Cruz had been keeping separate records on all of her own findings since the beginning. She was far too smart to lose them in something as silly as a fire.
She watched as the mourners slowly filed out of the cemetery. The big black woman hugged Chambers and they talked for a few minutes. Then a taxi pulled up to the curb, and the two women got in.
Cruz was dying to know what exactly Chambers could do now, if anything. She had received four separate doses of the dimerizer drug, which should have been enough to induce psi gene expression for some time. But it was impossible to tell for sure without a blood test.
Through careful research, they had identified her as one out of a possible three carriers in the area. Shelley had been instrumental in making all that happen, using her many contacts in the medical community to identify those with a family history of the particular type of autism that served as a marker for psi, then working up detailed psych profiles based on any significant events or trauma in the subject’s past. The final step, DNA testing, was a relatively simple process that could be accomplished by acquiring hair, blood, or skin samples.
Their extensive research had shown that psi carriers often formed some son of mental link to each other. Shelley had hoped that Jess would be able to draw Sarah out and influence her to perform for them. The evidence was still foggy on that, as far as Cruz was concerned. She strongly suspected that it was her new formulation of the dimerizer drug that had caused the girl to come out of her fugue, but now they might never know for sure.
The ultimate plan had been to make Jess Chambers the second subject in the later phases of their testing model, in order to verify the effectiveness of the drug candidate. Psi carriers would be the first target, and she was a perfect choice since she hadn’t shown any obvious signs of ability before. The gene was natural to the carriers and simply had to be activated and then controlled, which was a much easier thing than cloning and implanting the gene on an adenovirus, then injecting it into the muscle tissue of a noncarrier.
One step at a time, Cruz thought. It was difficult for her to hold back, to let the science develop. She was so eager to try new things.
Now they would have to come up with an alternate plan. Another carrier, perhaps. Or she could just go ahead and clone the gene, multiple samples of which were still sitting in storage in a safe location. Either way, she would have to let the girl go for a while. The shiny new facility in Alabama was empty and waiting for them, but everything was too hot at the moment. She needed to sit out the storm.
Moving everything overseas for a year would serve the purpose nicely.
She opened the back door to the car and slid inside, welcoming the warm, dry puff of air against her skin. The Asian man in the back offered her a small white towel. She dabbed at her face and neck. The towel had been heated against the vent. That was the most pleasing part of Asian culture, their thoughtfulness.
That and the money this man could offer her. Enough to fund the project for two more years in relative quiet and seclusion.
The Asian man asked her if she was comfortable. She smiled, nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “Shall we go? I believe the plane is waiting.”
He gave the nod to the driver and they pulled out into traffic, the long black car blending in among the others as they wound their way toward a new future.
Jess and Charlie stopped briefly at a Hallmark gift shop, and then climbed back into the taxi for the ride to the group home in Cambridge.
The general feeling about public housing for the mentally ill in Massachusetts has seen a dramatic change in recent years. State-run permanent residence programs are few and far between. The Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, or DMH, provides mostly rehabilitative residential programs; group homes and shared apartments are the rule, and patients may remain in them until they learn how to live on their own.