“I can’t sell them anything yet,” Farley had replied. “I believe I can make this work. But it could take years.”
“Well, sometimes sacrifices have to be made. You can pick up ten million overnight, twenty. That’d buy some pretty damn nice research facilities.”
Farley had been quiet, considering those words. Then he’d said, “I could keep tissue samples, I suppose, and then when we actually can do the cloning, I could bring them back then.”
“Hey, there you go,” said the doctor. Something in the tone suggested to Farley that he didn’t think the process would ever work. But the man’s disbelief was irrelevant if he could help Farley get the money he needed for research.
“Well, all right,” Farley said to his colleague — whose name was Anthony Sheldon, of the cardiology department at Westbrook Hospital, a man who was as talented an entrepreneur as he was a cardiovascular surgeon.
Six years ago they’d set up the Lotus Research Foundation, an in vitro clinic and a network of bogus charities. Dr. Sheldon, whose office was near the Cardiac Support Center, would finagle a look at the files of patients there and would find the richest and sickest. Then he’d arrange for them to be contacted by the Lotus Foundation and Farley would sell them the program.
Farley had truly doubted that anybody would buy the pitch but Sheldon had coached him well. The man had thought of everything. He found unique appeals for each potential client and gave Farley this information to snare them. In the case of the Bensons, for instance, Sheldon had learned how much they loved each other. His pitch to them was that this was the chance to be together forever, as they so poignantly noted in their suicide note. With Robert Covey, Sheldon had learned about his estranged son, so Farley added the tactical mention that a client could have a second chance to connect with children.
Sheldon had also come up with one vital part of the selling process. He made sure the patients got high doses of Luminux (even the coffee that Covey had just been drinking, for instance, was laced with the drug). Neither doctor believed that anyone would sign up for such a far-fetched idea without the benefit of some mind-numbing Mickey Finn.
The final selling point was, of course, the desperate desire of people facing death to believe what Farley promised them.
And that turned out to be one hell of a hook. The Lotus Research Foundation had earned almost 93 million in the past six years.
Everything had gone fine — until recently, when their greed got the better of them. Well, got the better of Sheldon. They’d decided that the cardiologist would never refer his own patients to the foundation — and would wait six months or a year between clients. But Tony Sheldon apparently had a mistress with very expensive taste and had lost some serious money in the stock market recently. Just after the Bensons signed up, the Whitleys presented themselves. Although Sam Whitley was a patient, they were far too wealthy to pass up and so Farley reluctantly yielded to Sheldon’s pressure to go ahead with the plan.
But they learned that, though eager to proceed, Sam Whitley had wanted to reassure himself that this wasn’t pure quackery and he’d tracked down some technical literature about the computers used in the technique and genetics in general. After the patients had died, Farley and Sheldon had to find this information in his house, burn it and scour the place for any other evidence that might lead back to the foundation.
The intrusion, though, must’ve alerted the police to the possibility that the families’ deaths were suspicious. Officers had actually interviewed Sheldon, sending a jolt of panic through Farley. But then a scapegoat stumbled into the picture: Mac McCaffrey, a young nurse/counselor at the Cardiac Support Center. She was seeing their latest recent prospect — Robert Covey — as she’d been working with the Bensons and the Whitleys. This made her suspect to start with. Even better was her reluctance to admit she’d seen the Bensons; after their suicide the nurse had apparently lied about them and had stolen their files from the CSC. A perfect setup. Sheldon had used his ample resources to bribe a pharmacist at the CSC to doctor the logs and give him a couple of wholesale bottles containing a few Luminux tablets, to make it look like she’d been drugging patients for some time. Farley, obsessed with death and dying, had a vast library of articles on euthanasia and suicide. He copied several dozen of these. The drugs and the articles they planted in the nurse’s garage — insurance in case they needed somebody to take the fall.
Which they had. And now the McCaffrey woman had just been hauled off to jail.
A whole ’nother story, as Covey had said.
The nurse’s arrest had troubled Farley. He’d speculated out loud about telling the police that she was innocent. But Sheldon reminded him coolly what would happen to them and the foundation if Farley did that and he relented.
Sheldon had said, “Look, we’ll do one more — this Covey — and then take a break. A year. Two years.”
“No. Let’s wait.”
“I checked him out,” Sheldon said, “He’s worth over fifty million.”
“I think it’s too risky.”
“I’ve thought about that.” With the police still looking into the Benson and Whitley suicides, Sheldon explained, it’d be better to have the old man die in a mugging or hit and run, rather than killing himself.
“But,” Farley had whispered, “you mean murder?”
“A suicide’ll be way too suspicious.”
“We can’t.”
But Sheldon had snapped, “Too late for morality, Doctor. You made your deal with the devil. You can’t renegotiate now.” And hung up.
Farley stewed for a while but finally realized the man was right; there was no going back. And, my, what he could do with another $25 million...
His secretary buzzed him on the intercom.
“Mr. Covey’s back, sir.”
“Show him in.”
Covey walked into the office. They shook hands again and Covey sat. As cheerful and blinky as most patients on seventy-five milligrams of Luminux. He happily took another cup of special brew then reached into his jacket pocket and displayed a copy of the codicil to the will. “Here you go.”
Though Farley wasn’t a lawyer he knew what to look for; the document was in proper form.
They shook hands formally.
Covey finished his coffee and Farley escorted him to the lab, where he would undergo the MRI and give a blood sample, making the nervous small talk that the clients always made at this point in the process.
The geneticist shook his hand and told him he’d made the right decision. Covey thanked Farley sincerely, with a hopeful smile on his face that was, Farley knew, only partly from the drug. He returned to his office and the doctor picked up the phone, called Anthony Sheldon. “Covey’s changed the will. He’ll be leaving here in about fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll take care of him now,” Sheldon said and hung up.
Farley sighed and dropped the received into the cradle. He stripped off his suit jacket then pulled on a white lab coat. He left his office and fled up the hall to the research lab, where he knew he would find solace in the honest world of science, safe from all his guilt and sins, as if they were barred entry by the double-sealed doors of the airlock.
Robert Covey was walking down the street, feeling pretty giddy, odd thoughts going through his head.
Thinking of his life — the way he’d lived it. And the people who’d touched him and whom he’d touched. A foreman in the Bedford plant, who’d worked for the company for forty years... The men in his golfing foursome... Veronica... His brother...
His son, of course.
Still no call from Randy. And for the first time it occurred to him that maybe there was a reason the boy — well, young man — had been ignoring him. He’d always assumed he’d been such a good father. But maybe not.