MIND FIELDS Page 20

  “Cute, Jimmy. Real cute. Listen, I’ve been through her house, and there’s a bloody knife on the floor.”

  “What the hell were you doing, Richie? You’re on suspension, remember?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I remember. Listen, like I told you, she’s a friend of mine. She was supposed to call me and when I didn’t hear from her, I came to her place to make sure she was OK. The kitchen door was wide open.”

  “You know better than that, Richie.”

  “Hey, I was invited.”

  “Who am I to argue? I’ll send a team right over.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy.”

  There was not much else to do. Richie headed home to salvage what little he could from the rest of this night.

  ___

  The chief called for Kincade to meet him at the station first thing in the morning. Richie explained the information he had come across that implicated BNI in the theft of Sandi’s data.

  “Look, Richie,” the chief said gruffly, angered that he had to deal with something like this on the weekend, “I told you stay away from this BNI thing. Go take a damned vacation, would you. How am I going to explain what you were doing there last night?”

  “Who needs to know it was me.”

  “Those guys in the black suits have a way of knowing.”

  “You may be right, Chief, but if they give you a hard time about this, it’ll tie them into it. I’m sure they don’t want that, even if they are on JT Anderson’s payroll. We’ve got to find out what happened to Dr. Fletcher. She’s the key to all this.”

  “We’re on it now whether we want to be or not, Richie, but for Christ’s sake, keep your nose out of this. I don’t want any more visits from the NSA.”

  “I’ll keep a low profile.”

  The chief wasn’t thrilled with Kincade’s answer, but Richie had hung up before he could say another word.

  Kincade was tempted to give Paul Hingston a call, but he still wasn’t sure who the inside man was at BNI, and Hingston was a prime suspect. Richie decided not to fan the flames. He placed his trust in the police force.

  ___

  By Monday morning there was still no word and Richie was starting to give up hope that they would ever find Sandi alive. Then, at ten AM, the first clue came in. A motorist just outside of Columbia spotted a break in the guardrail of the Acorn Creek Bridge. It took only a few hours to determine the make of the vehicle from the paint on the guardrail. The blue paint was from a Chevy pickup truck matching the description of the vehicle owned by Guy Andrews.

  The surging river prevented an extensive search for the truck and its occupants; it would likely be too rough to dredge for weeks. The team focused on the shores of the river downstream from the bridge. A woman’s jacket was the only thing found; tucked safely away in an inside zippered pocket was a plastic card, the faculty ID card belonging to Dr. Sandra Fletcher.

  The chief had hoped that Sandi might have just left the coat in the truck at an earlier date, that maybe she had not been with Guy when he plunged into the Acorn Creek River. By four PM his hopes faded as a report came in from the forensics lab. The blood on the knife found at Sandi’s house, as well as a large bloodstain found on the jacket, were both the same blood type, a blood type matching Sandi Fletcher’s. He made the call to Richard Kincade a few minutes after four.

  Richie was beside himself. He was sure that Sandi would still be alive if he had insisted on staying with her that night. He was determined to find out who was responsible for her death, with or without the chief’s help. For three days he went over every clue that he had, and for three days he continued to come up with the same conclusion: he had to get inside BNI or he would have no chance of resolving this. He went over and over the four cases of the BNI employees that Shelly Lange had told him about. He was sure that BNI was somehow using the neurological nanobots to exert some sort of mind control, but proving it would be impossible without Sandi. Kincade didn’t know a nerve cell from a jail cell; he didn’t have a prayer of understanding this. There was only one option left to him. He had to hope that Paul Hingston was the honest man Sandi had once loved, that he was not involved in this madness. It was a long shot, but Kincade was ready to take it.

  ___

  “Dr. Paul Hingston?” Richie had been sitting in the lobby of Poe Towers for hours waiting for Paul to come home.

  “Who wants to know?” Paul was particularly edgy. He hadn’t slept well since hearing about Sandi’s disappearance. It was all over the news, and Paul had stopped watching TV a day ago to avoid the pain of seeing the morbid story.

  “My name is Richard Kincade. I’m with the Baltimore Police Department.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Dr. Sandra Fletcher.”

  Paul’s eyes turned down.

  “See, she was helping me with this case and, well, she spoke very highly of you. I was hoping you might be able to help me out.”

  Paul was furious. “Jesus, that’s what this is about? You sick bastard, they haven’t even found her body yet and you’re looking for a replacement for your case? Just leave me alone. You got a hell of a nerve coming here and...”

  “Look, Dr. Hingston, I’m sorry. I think you’ve misunderstood me. This is about Sandi. I need your help.”

  Paul was curious. As angry as he was at this intrusion, he was even hungrier for any information about Sandi. “Go on.”

  Kincade motioned Hingston to a quiet corner of the lobby, and they sat. “I know that Dr. Fletcher was upset with you, that she thought you had stolen some research from her.”

  Paul was offended. “Where the hell are you going with this, Detective? Surely you don’t think...Look, Sandi left me a long time ago, but I never stopped loving her. If you think I had anything to do with her death, or that I even would have considered stealing her research, you’re way off track.”

  Kincade wasn’t expecting much cooperation. He suspected that Hingston was just a spurned lover, that he was likely the inside source of the data theft at BNI. But the sincerity in his voice, in his eyes...

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to open wounds. I was just going to say that although she did think you had stolen her data, she was also sure you never would have been involved in any kind of project that included hurting people. She refused to believe that you could have had anything to do with this.” He handed Hingston the file describing the four BNI employees with prior brain injuries who had met with strange and untimely consequences.

  “What’s this?”

  “Just read it and then give me a call. Here’s my card. Call me at home or on the cell anytime.” Kincade stood to leave.

  “That’s it?”

  “I think you’ll feel better about talking to me after you’ve read that.”

  Paul Hingston looked down at the file in his hand. His curiosity was definitely piqued.

  Kincade nodded and walked out the door.

  Paul Hingston took the elevator at Poe Towers up to his penthouse apartment. The elevators ascended the outside of the thirty-seven story building overlooking the harbor. The lights of Harborplace Mall, the Museum of Science and the Baltimore Aquarium lit up the periphery of the waterfront; it was a beautiful sight. Paul looked out over the harbor, but barely saw a thing. All he could think about was Sandi.

  He walked into his apartment and tossed the folder onto the counter. The bar adjacent to the balcony was well stocked; this was going to be a Dewars kind of evening. He poured himself a glass of scotch. The ice cubes rattled against the glass as he swirled the amber liquor over them. Paul loosened his tie, picked up the file and plopped down on the over-stuffed brown leather sofa across from the glass doors to the balcony.

  “Jackass,” he mumbled as he read about Lester Hanes smashing his car into a highway lamppost after de-chipping his car. “Serves him ri
ght.” He flipped to the next folder, the case of Helen Jensen. “Pathetic,” he said, shaking his head as he read about her history of childhood seizures and the life threatening episode of severe seizures that she suffered shortly after coming to work at BNI, which left her a mental vegetable.

  He laid the file down and took a sip from his glass. “What in the hell did you give me this for, Detective? Did you figure I wasn’t quite depressed enough yet?”

  Paul put his glass on the end table and turned to the third file. He remembered Billy Jackson. Billy was a high school football star from Harford County, heavily recruited by several top universities. He had NFL prospect written all over him. When he was blindsided in the state championship game and suffered a severe concussion, it made the headlines of all the local papers. Paul remembered the case well. Jackson had suffered a right frontal lobe injury. Thanks to extensive rehab at Sinai Hospital, he made a nearly complete recovery except for some slight weakness in his left leg that dashed any hopes of a pro football career. He came to work at BNI as a programmer right out of college. Paul had met him at the interview; the next news he heard about Billy was when his car slid off an icy bridge into the Middle River.

  Paul flipped back over the first two files again. “Shit,” he muttered. “Right frontal lobe, all three of them. What are the odds?” He looked at the dates of employment and the dates of the accidents. They all occurred within a two-year period of time, the same two-year period when the Phase Two neuronanobot program was in the testing stages. Each accident occurred within a few months of the victim being hired at BNI. “Now you’ve got my attention, Detective.”

  Turning to the fourth case, he immediately noticed that Janice Saint-Martin had suffered a minor right frontal lobe injury in college, when she was beaten by a boyfriend. Although she was still alive, her case was even more puzzling. She swore to this day that she had no recollection of hiring a mechanic to de-chip her car, even though the mechanic had a video of the transaction on his security camera. She also had no recollection, when questioned after her arrest, of having driven her car at one hundred and twenty mph, and everyone who testified at her trial described her as demure and conservative.

  Paul put the file on the coffee table, got up and stretched. He grabbed his glass and walked over to the window. As he stared out the balcony trying to make some sense of the four strange cases, his thoughts again turned to Sandi. He took a long, slow sip of scotch, hoping to dull the pain. As he stared out into the night, he remembered his last conversation with her and the packet she had sent him, the one containing the supposed evidence proving that BNI had been stealing her work. It was still unopened in the bottom file drawer of his desk at the office. He had forgotten all about it until this moment. A terrible thought occurred to him. “My God, could I have been responsible for her death?”

  ___

  Paul was at work earlier than usual Thursday morning. After pausing to pour himself a cup of coffee, he pulled his leather chair up to the old oak roll-top desk and leaned his elbows on the padded armrests. Staring down at the file drawer, head resting on his interlocked fingers, he sighed, half hoping that the packet within was only a figment of Sandi’s imagination.

  He took another gulp of coffee, and then reached into the drawer and pulled out the envelope. As usual, Sandi’s notes were both detailed and well organized. Methodically, Paul made his way through the notes. Nearly an hour later there was little doubt that the work completed in his lab at BNI, the work he had so proudly patented, had been derived directly from Sandi’s research at Hopkins. Every detail, every gene sequence that he had programmed into the nanobots was precisely identical to the corresponding one documented in Sandi’s notes.

  Paul went back through his own notes on the computer. He searched for instances where they had encountered problems with the gene sequencing of the nanobots, and cross-referenced these instances with Sandi’s notes. He was shocked to discover that in each case, the solution that he had found to the problem was identical to the one found by Sandi, and in each case, his own discovery had followed the identical breakthrough in Sandi’s lab by a matter of days. There was no way this could be coincidental; someone at BNI had been stealing her work on a regular basis and feeding it to Paul.

  He thought back to the hundreds of hours of research, trying to remember where these answers had come from. The intense work of the past two years blended together to the point where he was convinced that some of these ideas had been his own. He knew, of course, that he had not been stealing the research from Hopkins. The most likely prospect was Sean, but as bright as Sean was, Paul rarely remembered him solving any of the major gene sequencing problems; Sean’s strength was always in the physical construction of the nanobots.

  He sat back in his large, cushioned desk chair, struggling for answers. And then he remembered. “Of course,” he muttered, “the meetings.” Once a week, during the project, he and Sean would meet with JT Anderson to review the progress. Paul had often admired the astuteness of Anderson to scan the data and come up with seemingly impossible solutions. He had always attributed it to JT’s genius. After all, JT was one of the pioneers of nanobotics, and still considered one of the leading experts in the field. But now it all made a lot more sense. JT wasn’t solving the problems; he was merely giving Paul and Sean the solutions that he had stolen from Sandi. He certainly had the wealth and power necessary for industrial espionage.

  “It had to be JT.” Paul thought about how he had chided Sandi for accusing him of stealing her work. “And all this time I just thought she was a paranoid fool, a sore loser,” he mumbled under his breath.

  “What’s that, lad?” Sean was standing in the doorway behind him. “You’re a loser? Man, quite an evening you must have had.” He laughed. “What’s that you’ve got there?” he asked, spotting the packet of files on the desk.

  Paul gathered them up and tossed them in the trashcan. He wasn’t sure just how much Sean had seen or heard. “Ah, just a bunch of crap. More letters from those geeks over at Hopkins saying we stole their work. Must have been sent before Sandi died, God bless her. I loved that girl, but she was a sore loser.” He turned to Sean. “Did you run the probability studies on those new gene sequences we worked out yesterday.”

  “I’ll get right on it.” Sean smiled. “Sorry again about Sandi.”

  “Thanks.” Paul watched him walk away, then gathered the papers out of the trash and put them in his briefcase. Much of the remainder of the day was spent checking into the employee files of Lester Hanes, Janice Saint-Martin, Billy Jackson and Helen Jensen. There was not much to be found, and the absence of information was the most disconcerting evidence that Paul could find.

  ___

  By Saturday night, Richard Kincade still had not heard from Paul Hingston. He paced back and forth across the living room floor, and prayed that he had not made a mistake. If Hingston was the NSA’s inside man at BNI, it wouldn’t take them long to discover that Richie knew too much, and they would be certain to make sure he didn’t tell anyone else what he knew. Everywhere he went, he began looking over his shoulder. He was furious at himself for putting Lara’s life in danger.

  “For God sakes, Richard Kincade, you’re going to wear a hole in my new carpet. Take me out to dinner. I’m in the mood for some steamed crabs. You can take your frustrations out on those claws.”

  The crabs were running small, but it was still a good idea. After a mug of beer and half-dozen steamed crabs, Richie was feeling a lot better. Lara was relieved to see the tension melting away from her husband’s face as he pounded the claws with a wooden mallet and artfully scooped the chunks of meat out with his knife. By the end of the meal, they were reminiscing about the annual department crab feast, and the antics spurred on by the Chesapeake Bay ritual of good friends gathered around bushels of steamed crabs and a keg of draught beer. Lara left the beer drinking to Richie tonight; she
played designated driver. They finished up and washed the sting of Old Bay seasoning off their lips and out of the narrow crab-shell cuts that stung their fingers.

  Richie fought to stay awake on the ride home, and by eleven they were both in bed, drifting off to sleep. At eleven-thirty, the phone rang, startling Richie from a dream state. He reached out in the dark and knocked the phone off the receiver.

  “Shit,” he muttered, as he groped around the nightstand.

  “Hello?” he said wearily as he managed to get the phone to his ear.

  “Detective Kincade?”

  The voice was shaky, but there was no doubt who it belonged to. “Sandi?” Kincade said incredulously. “Thank God you’re OK. What in the hell happened to you? Where have you been?”

  “Can we talk? Is this line safe?”

  “Sure, at least I think so.” As he thought about the car bomb and the NSA, he realized that it probably wasn’t, but if someone was listening, they knew by now that she was alive anyway.

  “I’m right out front. I took Mrs. Flannery’s Camry after Guy ran off, and I drove to a small hotel off I-95 just outside of DC. I didn’t know what to do. I stayed there until my money ran out; I figured they’d find me if I used my credit cards. I’m scared, Detective.”

  He decided it would be best to continue this conversation in person. “I’ll meet you by the door.”

  Richie hung up the phone.

  “Who was that, dear?” Lara turned toward him, half awake.

  “Ah, just my mistress. Go back to sleep.”