MIND FIELDS Page 21

“OK then.” She smiled and pulled the covers up over her shoulders, laying her head back on the pillow.

  Richie threw on some clothes and went downstairs, trying not to wake Lara again.

  Sandi was at the front door waiting.

  “Doc?” Sandi’s thick brown hair was now short, straight and platinum blond. Her face was worn from the long, sleepless nights.

  “You look like hell.”

  “Thanks,” she smiled feebly.

  Richie looked around quickly and took her by the shoulder. “Come on in.”

  Sandi limped as she walked in.

  Richie motioned her into the kitchen. “Let me get you a cup of hot tea.”

  She was shivering from the cold.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  She shook her head no. “Gas station sandwiches aren’t so bad when you’re hungry enough.”

  “What the hell happened?” He sat down beside her and slid a cup of tea in front of her.

  “You were right about Guy.” Tears started to well up in her eyes, but she fought them back. “I took my shot Friday night from a sealed bottle of Synthulin, not the stuff with the Allohypnol in it. I waited up for Guy. When he came in, I hopped into bed, pretending to be asleep. He woke me and led me into the study. When he asked me to access my Internet connection and dial into BNI, I played along, hoping to find the name of his contact at BNI, but when he told me to upload my research, I refused.”

  She stopped to take a sip of tea. “He got real mad. I’ve never seen Guy like that. I got up from the chair and backed away from him. When I told him I knew about the Allohypnol, he pulled a knife on me. I was pressed against the wall and he kept coming at me. That look in his eyes…I knew he would do it.” A shiver went up her spine as she relived the terror of that night.

  She paused again and Richie put his hand on top of hers. “That pistol you gave me, I hid it in the pocket of my robe. I had my hand on it the whole time. When he came at me, I pulled it out. My hand was trembling so bad it was hard to hold the gun straight. I steadied it with my other hand, just like you showed me. When Guy heard the click of the safety release, he stopped dead in his tracks. I guess he could see it in my eyes too; I would have pulled that trigger, I…” she sobbed. “I can’t believe that I could really do something like that.”

  “You were only defending yourself, Sandi.”

  “Still…” She took another sip of tea and composed herself. “When he saw the gun, he mumbled something and dropped his knife. He turned and ran out of the room. I was so scared I couldn’t move a muscle. I was still standing there pointing the gun at the spot where he had been standing when I heard the truck start. The window was fogged from the cold. I wiped a spot clear so I could see out, and just stood there holding the gun; I couldn’t let go. I watched the truck pull away. I couldn’t believe he was gone. All of a sudden I felt dizzy and leaned back against the wall. My hands went limp and I dropped the gun as I slid to the floor.

  “I just sat there trying to decide what to do, trying to clear my head. I had to get out of there. I was afraid Guy or someone from BNI would come back for me and try again. I rocked forward onto my knees reaching for the gun and lost my balance. My left leg came down right on that damned knife. It hurt like a bitch. I grabbed at my leg; it was bleeding like hell, but the cut wasn’t deep. It just scraped off a chunk of skin. I got up and ran down to the kitchen where I keep the first aid kit and wrapped it up. That’s when the phone rang.”

  “That was me,” Richie said. “Why didn’t you answer it?”

  “I was petrified. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid Guy would come back, afraid he’d tell somebody at BNI that I was on to them. All of those people that died…,” she shook her head and paused. “I knew they wouldn’t be afraid to kill me... I ran back upstairs, scraped together whatever cash I could find, threw on some clothes and grabbed the keys to the Camry.”

  “The Camry?”

  “Yeah. When I borrowed Mrs. Flannery’s Camry that Friday to take you home after Hank’s car blew up, she told me that her kids were coming by to get her. She was planning on spending a couple of weeks in the mountains with them and told me to keep the keys in case I needed it again while she was on vacation. I knew no one would miss the Camry, but they might be looking for my car, so I took it and drove off. I’ve been hiding out in that hotel room ever since.”

  “Smart thinking.” Richie admired her ability to think under pressure. “There’s still one thing I don’t get, though. They found a jacket downstream from where Guy’s pick-up went off the bridge. It had your Hopkins ID in the inside pocket…”

  “My ID?” Sandi looked surprised.

  Richie nodded. “And a large blood stain on it...your blood. We figured Guy must have forced you into the truck after he stabbed you. When we found that jacket…well, we all figured you were dead.”

  “Oh God,” Sandi rolled her eyes, “So that’s where it was. No, that jacket had been sitting in the back of his truck for weeks. I spent hours looking for that damn card. I never thought to look in that cruddy old jacket.”

  “So how’d the blood get there?”

  “Hmm? Oh…we had gone hiking out in the Catoctin’s a few months back. We liked to do that whenever we could both break away for the weekend.” She hesitated a moment and bit back a tear, then continued. “Well, it was kind of a warm day, so I tied the jacket around my waist. I was just wearing a T-shirt and I slipped on a rock… you know, one of those big boulders.”

  Richie nodded, but he really didn’t know. Hiking through the mountains was not his idea of a good time; he’d never seen the rocky trails in the Catoctin Mountains.

  “I skinned my elbow real bad – bled like a stuck pig. The only thing I had with me was the jacket, so I wrapped it around my arm. By the time we got back home, that jacket was such a mess I just tossed it in the back of the truck before I went in the house.”

  Sandi slumped back in her chair and sighed.

  Richie could see the exhaustion in her face. “Come on, there’s a guest room upstairs. We’ll talk some more in the morning.”

  Sandi nodded appreciatively and followed him up the stairs.

  Chapter nineteen

  Paul Hingston stretched and looked out over the harbor from his penthouse in Poe Towers. The heavy rain of the night before covered Harbor Place with a surrealistic glaze that caught the rays of the morning sun. It was a crisp, clear morning, the kind that invigorated the soul, something that Paul needed desperately. He had struggled through the workday on Friday. Everyone looked a little different to him now. He eyed everyone with suspicion and hoped his paranoia did not give him away.

  The thought of someone using his work to kill people sickened him more than it angered him. He couldn’t believe that JT would be involved in something like this, but who else could it be? Paul had gone over and over the possibilities in his mind, trying to tie together the theft of Sandi’s data with the four cases that Kincade had given him involving the BNI employees with frontal lobe brain injuries. There was only one plausible explanation: JT was so anxious to reap the rewards of the new nanobot therapy that he stole the work from Hopkins to keep his lab on pace, and then authorized premature human experimentation with the nanobots on his own employees, each time with dire consequences.

  Paul couldn’t believe it. Although no one was around to hear, it often helped him to organize his thoughts out loud. “JT must have been looking to hire people with frontal lobe injuries so he could experiment on them. The early generation nanobots weren’t ready for clinical use, and JT proved that the hard way. God, if anyone ever finds out and associates me with this…”

  He wasn’t sure who he could trust, but Kincade was as good a place as any to start.

  “Hello?” Richie was in the kitchen making breakfast when the phone rang.<
br />
  “Detective Kincade?”

  “The one and only.”

  “This is Paul Hingston. We need to talk.”

  “Ah, you read the file.”

  “Yes.” Paul wasn’t sure it was wise to elaborate on his other discoveries over the phone.

  “So what do you think?”

  “I think we need to meet.”

  “Right.” Richie could hear the anxiety in his voice, but wasn’t sure if it was derived from a fear of what he might be mixed up in at work, or whether he was just trying to figure out how to get Richie off his back. Kincade still wasn’t convinced that Hingston was not involved in the theft and murder plot unfolding at BNI.

  “Meet me at noon in front of Phillip’s at Harborplace.” His voice was shaking.

  “Noon won’t work for me, Hingston.” Richie would make sure that this meeting took place on his own terms. “Be at the phone booth across the street from your building at one o’clock today. I’ll contact you there.” Kincade had jotted the number down when he left Poe Towers after his brief meeting with Paul Hingston the other night. He had a feeling it would come in handy.

  “I’ll be there.” Paul hung up the phone and poured himself a drink. He was disgusted with himself for drinking this early in the day, but his nerves were frayed. He glanced at the clock. He still had four long hours to wait.

  ___

  Sandi slept well for the first time in days. By the time she awoke, Lara had gone to work and Richie was lounging in the kitchen having coffee and catching up on the morning news.

  “Good morning,” she smiled as she walked in.

  “Maybe we should get you to a doctor,” he said, watching her limp into the room.

  “Nah, it’s not that bad, just a little stiff when I first get up. What I could really use is a hot cup of coffee.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Richie said, pushing away from the table.

  “No, no,” she motioned him to sit back down. “You stay put. Just point me in the direction of the cups.”

  Richie pointed to the cabinet above the coffee maker. “Help yourself. Can I make you some eggs or cereal or something?”

  “Not yet, thanks. I’d just like to sit and talk if that’s OK?”

  Riche nodded. “Sure.”

  “I had plenty of time to think things over sitting in that hotel room,” she said. “I keep going over and over it in my head, that bizarre scene with Guy. God,” she laughed, “you should have seen him. He’s definitely not the cloak and dagger type. I think he was more nervous than I was when he pulled that knife out, and believe me I was plenty scared. I’m surprised the two of us didn’t both just pass out on the floor together.”

  Richie smiled, but he could tell that Sandi was still rattled when she talked about it.

  “Anyway, like I said, I keep thinking about it to see if there was some hint that I missed, some clue that he might have given me as to who his contact at BNI was. I keep coming up empty except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The BNI Intranet mailbox that Guy was having me send the information to: the ID was TOM and the password was Mindfields.”

  Richie didn’t want to make her feel stupid, but it sounded pretty obvious. “Well, Tom could be the name of Guy’s contact at BNI.”

  “Duh,” she glared at him. “Is that why they call you a detective?”

  Real swift, Richie, he thought. “Suppose you thought of that, huh?”

  “Uh, yeah. Came up with it right away. Pretty clever, eh?”

  “All right, all right. So I suppose you checked it out already, right?”

  “No. I was afraid to access the Net. I don’t know who these guys are, but I figured it would be better if they really thought that I was dead. If they were monitoring the Internet, I’d give myself away as soon as I linked in. I kept going over and over it in my head, and all I could think of was Paul.”

  “Paul? Is his middle name Tom?”

  “No, but his father’s name was Thomas and Paul thought the world of his dad. It would make sense for him to use it as an ID name on a hidden account.”

  “Except for one thing,” Richie said. “If Paul were using that account to steal your data, he wouldn’t be hiding it using a secret ID that would be so obvious to you.”

  “I thought about that too, but it just seems so right. Paul is one of the few people in the world who would know what to do with my data, he works at BNI, his father was named Tom and,” this part made her sick, “he could have told Guy all the right things to say to win my trust.”

  Richie felt sorry for her. It was tough to argue; Paul was the obvious suspect. “I’ve learned that things aren’t always what they seem, Doc. Let’s check out all the avenues before we plunge headlong down that road.”

  She composed herself and nodded.

  “Right,” he said, “let’s get to it then.” He motioned for Sandi to sit at the kitchen table by the computer monitor. She nodded and they sat.

  The computer was already booted up, displaying the latest network news update.

  “Computer, close program.” The screen went blank. “Computer, load program ‘Daisy.’”

  “I’m here, Detective,” was the immediate response. “You don’t think I’d sleep the whole day away, do you?”

  Sandy gawked at the computer. “Wow! What is that?”

  “Daisy, meet Dr. Sandra Fletcher; Doc, meet Daisy,” he pointed to the monitor.

  “Pleased to meet you, Doctor.”

  “Awesome,” Sandi gasped. “AI?”

  “Yes,” Daisy answered. “I have artificial intelligence capabilities, but they’re rather stifled in this cramped computer.”

  “Give it a rest, would you, Daisy? I told you I’ll get more memory for you as soon as I can. Hell, if things go right I may even be able to take you back to the station soon.”

  “That would be a relief.”

  “Enough small talk. It’s time to earn your keep. Access the BNI employee database and show me a list of everyone with the names Tom, Thomas or Tomassina.”

  Sandi looked up. “Tomassina? I never would have thought about Tom being a girl.”

  “That,” Richie emphasized, “is why they call me a detective.”

  Sandi grinned.

  The list came up immediately. “I already took the liberty of running that search while you and the doctor were talking.”

  Richie raised an eyebrow. “You scare me, Daisy.”

  “Thank you.”

  Sandi and Richie scanned down the list:

  Thomas Jones, Mailroom Clerk

  Thomas Martin, Director of Sanitation

  Tom Post, Legal Department

  Thomas Richter, Marketing

  Tomassina Small, Inventory Management Clerk

  “Pretty unsavory looking bunch, eh?”

  Sandi rolled her eyes. None of these people would have the education to understand nanobotic gene sequencing. She sat, staring at the screen, and then a thought came to her. “What if it’s not a name?

  “Huh?”

  “What if Tom is not a name? When Guy had me type it, he had me enter it in all capital letters. Maybe T...O...M are initials.”

  “Hmm...Daisy, show us a list of all BNI employees with the initials T.O.M.”

  The list appeared after a brief delay:

  Timothy Olin Mallory, Finance Division

  Thomas Oliver Martin, Director of Sanitation

  “That sanitation engineer is starting to look pretty suspicious, isn’t he,” Sandi smirked. “None of this is helping dissuade me. It’s got to be Paul.”

  “Daisy,” Kincade said, “display all employees with the middle name “Tom, Tomassin
a or Thomas.”

  Once again, the list was short:

  Jason Thomas Anderson, CEO

  Harold Thomas Johnson, Marketing

  Marsha Tomassina Smythe, Human Resources

  “Bingo,” Sandi said. “That son of a bitch. JT Anderson. I never thought about what the JT stood for.”

  “Anderson? He’s a CEO. How would an administrator know what to do with genetic research? Besides, why would he dirty himself with stealing your data? If he wanted it done, he’d just pay someone else to do it for him.”

  “Maybe, but if you were doing something like this, wouldn’t you want as few people as possible to know about it?”

  “I suppose.”

  “And as far as understanding what to do with it, don’t forget that JT Anderson was one of the pioneers in nanobotics. Before he was a bureaucrat, he was one of the brightest scientific minds in the world. Believe me, he would have no trouble figuring out how to use my research.”

  “Well, unfortunately, there’s still the matter of proof. The last time I went to talk to him, two NSA agents came knocking at my boss’s door within an hour...and that was just for talking to him.”

  “Our only hope is to go to the press. If we go public with this, they can’t touch us.”

  “Go public with what? All we’ve got are a bunch of mysterious coincidences with BNI employees, a scientist griping that America’s leading medical research company stole her ideas...no offense...”

  “None taken.”

  “...and to make matters worse, the most damning fact we have against Anderson is that his middle name is Thomas.”

  “Yeah, we’ll look like idiots.” She had to agree. “We need someone on the inside, someone who can get into the files at BNI.”

  “Funny you should bring that up.”

  Sandi looked at Richie and put up her hands. “Nooo. No way. Look, I don’t believe for one minute that Paul Hingston would get himself involved with this murder and espionage stuff, but there’s no way I’m contacting him again. The last time I called to accuse him of stealing my work he called me a pathetic loser, not in so many words maybe, but I felt about two inches tall. I am not going to let him make me feel like that again.”