Deadly Design (9780698173613) (12 page)

I
come out of the hotel bathroom, and Dad shoots me a look like he's wondering if the super-healthy diet I'm on is making me constipated. I don't want to tell him that I'm texting Cami and that together, we're scouring the internet for anyone who might be our mysterious Dr. Mueller.

“You okay?” Dad asks. Mom stops, a white hotel towel in her hand. Her face floods with concern.

“I'm fine.” I pat my stomach. “Too much whole wheat toast.”

They give each other a reassuring nod, and Mom resumes shaking out towels and peeking under the beds to make sure we don't leave anything behind.

“You want to go keep an eye out for the taxi?” Dad asks as he tries to get the zipper to close around the suitcase. “We'll be down in a few minutes.”

“Sure,” I say, happy to have a minute by myself somewhere other than the bathroom. We've pretty much been glued together since we got here. It wouldn't be so bad, might have even been kind of nice, if it weren't for the strangeness of it all. They keep smiling, being positive. Their son, their last son, is not going to die like their other two. God, wouldn't be that cruel—but then again, what's God got to do with me?

The humidity is awful. The air is thick, and moisture clings to my skin as soon as I step outside. Dark, heavy clouds from a late-night storm linger indecisively in the sky. A jackass father yells at his kids to hurry up as they drag animal-shaped pillows across the parking lot. He looks like he might pop them one if they don't hurry up, and the little boy and girl look like they know it, like they've felt the sting of the back of his hand before. He drops his suitcase next to an SUV and grabs the little girl by her arm, yanking her. A woman comes out of the lobby holding two paper plates with donuts on them in one hand and a bottle of apple juice in the other. Evidently, the asshole is in too big of a hurry to let his kids finish their free continental breakfast.

I shake my head and exhale deeply, as if my breath is steam and if I don't let it out, I'll explode. I take my phone, ready to video this jerk if he decides to backhand one of his kids or his wife. Then I'll call 911 and with a shot of his license plate, his stay in the great state of Texas might be extended for a day or two or a month. I lift my phone, then he looks at me. I act like I'm checking for a signal and turn away. That's when the image of a different man, a man taking pictures of me from less than twenty feet away, fills my screen—the same guy who was taking pictures of Connor at the track meet.

“Hey,” I yell after the guy. “Hey.” I move toward him, and he takes off running. I don't think; I just run. I'm going to catch him and take his phone. How many pictures of me has he taken? When did he start? Was it right after Connor died? Take pictures of Connor and then once he's gone, move on to his brother? Why? Because Dr. Mueller is paying him to? Making sure his experiments have turned out the way they're supposed to?

There's a steep ditch between the hotel parking lot and a busy intersection. He stumbles a little in the mud, but I manage to keep my footing. He's just a few feet ahead of me, and with a slight break in traffic, he dashes across the two lanes of vehicles heading west. He stays in the median for a second, wondering, no doubt, if I have the balls to keep chasing. I do. I wait for a metro bus, a black pickup truck, and a Mustang to pass before I make a move. The man checks the eastbound traffic and starts across the next two lanes. He makes it and pauses in the far lane to look back at me.

A car honks, and I jump back onto the grass shoulder. Damn it! I wait for a break in traffic and run to the median. There's a string of cars, and I'm watching as he runs in front of a row of two-story industrial buildings. I get across the first lane, wait for a UPS truck, then cross the last lane and start after him. He's maybe a quarter of a block in front of me, and he's so fucking fast! But I'm going to catch him. I'm going to find out who he is, and if he works for Dr. Mueller, I'm going to—

He turns down an alley between buildings but then I see him again, only this time, he's not running, he's flying, then falling onto the wet pavement in the center of the street. The brakes of the delivery truck that hit him are making a horrible screeching sound. Then I hear more brakes as a car tries to stop, the driver wrenching the wheel. She's trying not to hit the man who has already been hit, but she can't stop in time. The car pitches sideways, the rear tires running over his midsection. So much movement. So much chaos, and then time just stops. The woman in the car, the man in the truck, we're all motionless until some inaudible buzzer sounds, and we move, each of us running toward the man in the street.

“Oh my God!” the woman says. “Oh my God!”

“Call 911!” the truck driver tells her as he leans over the man, and the woman runs back to her car for her phone. “What was he doing? He just ran in front of me. Did you see it?” he asks as I kneel down.

I nod, staring at the man with dark hair and an athletic build who'd looked at me at the track meet, who'd been eating breakfast in the diner back home. “Help's coming,” I tell him, but I don't think it matters. Blood is pooling underneath his head, and one side of his chest is lower than the other, like his ribs have been crushed against his lungs. He's struggling to breathe, and a strange whistling sound comes with each attempt.

“My pocket,” he wheezes. “Take it.”

A horn honks as more tires squeal. The truck driver rushes toward the approaching traffic, yelling for people to stop, yelling that there's been an accident, because people are too goddamned blind to notice.

I reach into the pocket of the man's jeans and take out his cell phone. He knows he's dying. “Help will be here soon,” I say, because I've had enough of death. I'm sick of death. I'm so fucking sick of it! “You have to hold on, okay? Just hold on.”

His hand grips my arm. “He needs to know where they die. Where the body is taken. Needs to access the autopsy reports.” The man coughs, spraying droplets of blood into the air.

“You're watching me so you'll know where I die? So Mueller knows where the autopsy will be done?”

He doesn't nod, but he doesn't have to.

“But I'm only sixteen. I've got two years left.”

He coughs again, tries to shake his head, then moans. “You don't,” he says. “He made you different. You won't make it to seventeen.”

Blood starts to pool in his mouth. He coughs, chokes. He looks at me, and it's so strange, because I see sympathy in his brown eyes, because even though he's dying, he's made it into his twenties, maybe even his early thirties, but I won't. I won't make it to seventeen. That's what he said. Those were his last words; now he's not looking at me anymore. He's not looking at anything, and the harsh whistling sound coming from his chest has stopped.

I
told the police the truth, most of it anyway. I told them that I'd seen the guy—Scott Stiles, according to his driver's license—in the parking lot. I left out the part about him taking my picture, because I also left out the part about me taking his phone. I've seen enough cop shows to know that everything ends up in evidence, and luckily, the delivery truck driver was so concerned with not being blamed for the accident, he didn't seem to remember anything after hitting the guy, and the lady, in shock, hadn't been able to find her cell phone and ended up calling 911 from inside one of the buildings. I doubt she told the police much of anything.

I told them that I was concerned because I'd seen this man back in Kansas at my brother's meet and at the restaurant, and considering everything going on with our missing Dr. Mueller, I wanted to talk to him, to see if it was just a coincidence that he was in Dallas. But when I approached him, he started running so I followed. The detective showed Mom and Dad his driver's license, and Dad remembered seeing him at the meet.

We missed our flight back home, and the police took our information in case more questions came up. They seemed satisfied, and we took a later flight. By plane, it's not far from Dallas to Wichita. I managed to hide out in the restroom for a few minutes to look at the pictures on Scott Stiles's phone. Almost everything on the phone required a passcode to access, but the last pictures he'd taken hadn't been saved to a file yet.

There are five pictures. One is of me walking through the hotel lobby. Then there's me walking through the lobby door, then standing in the parking lot. Next, I'm looking totally pissed off at the guy being an ass to his family. And the last picture Scott Stiles ever took was of me looking at him through my phone.

Everything else is locked away. I can't even access his contact page or text messages. It sucks because I know he was working for Mueller. His contact information must be on the phone, but I can't get to it. And then there's that thing he said, the thing I didn't share with my parents.

He made you different. You won't make it to seventeen.

What exactly does that mean? The doctors did a complete genetic panel. They'd found the sequence—the death sequence—but mine was the same as everyone else's, and they lived past seventeen. How am I different? And what did he mean by
made
? The doctors think the sequence is a mutation—an accident. But Scott Stiles said I was
made
differently. Did Mueller intend for us to die? He couldn't. Maybe he needs the autopsy reports to help him figure out
why
we're dying. But Stiles said “made.” Maybe Mueller knows exactly why we're dying. Maybe he just wants the autopsy reports to verify it.

Dr. Lee said that if they had Dr. Mueller's records, there might be a way to save us. I have the phone. Maybe it can help me find Dr. Mueller and his records. It has to, because I don't want to die, and because I have to know what he did to us.

Before I go to bed, I search through my high school yearbook, looking for anyone voted most likely to hack into a government agency's database or maybe a huge bank's vault. We have a few geeks at our school, but being in rural Kansas, I'd have a lot more luck finding someone with an expertise in barrel racing or bull riding.

There has to be someone who can hack into a phone, and I need to find whoever it is fast. My seventeenth birthday is in less than six months . . .
You won't make it to seventeen.

I close my eyes and try to replace the bloodied face of Scott Stiles with thoughts of James. Tomorrow he'll get his pacemaker. It'll work. James will make it past eighteen, and I'll make it past seventeen.

C
ami's truck is parked in the driveway. Her house is a nice, standard ranch, like almost every other house in town. There's a flower bed trimmed in brick out front, but from the way the weeds look right at home, I don't think flowers have been planted in front of the yellow house for a long time.

As I walk up the drive, I notice feet sticking out from under the truck. Her dad must be changing the oil. I've never met him. I've seen him mowing the lawn a few times over the years when Connor and Emma would drag me and Cami along to a movie and we'd swing by to pick her up. But he and I have never been introduced.

The feet are wearing worn-out tennis shoes. The cuffs of his jeans are frayed and dirty. I clear my throat to get his attention and hear a thud followed by a “shit.”

He slides, or rather scoots, out from beneath the truck, and I realize right away that this man is not Cami's father.

“Hey.” He nods and then wipes his grease-covered hands on his grease-covered jeans. “I've never met you before. Name's Jimmy.” He offers his hand.

I want to shake it lightly. Actually, I don't want to shake it at all, but he latches on to my hand with a killer grip.

“I'm Kyle,” I say.

“You a friend of Cami's?” he asks, still clenching my hand. His dark brown eyes burn into mine. “You're not selling something, are you? Not one of those Jehovah's people?” His eyes scan across my clothes. “No, you're not dressed nice enough to be one of them.”

He lets go of my hand, and blood pulses back into my fingers.

Despite the days of stubble on his face and the way his hair does a really good Medusa impression, there's something . . . nonthreatening about him. I glance at his bare arms, at the tattoos rising and falling along the contours of his biceps.

“That's not a marijuana plant,” he says, pointing to the tattoo of a jagged leaf. “It's a Japanese maple leaf. You know, peace and tranquility. That's what I'm all about now, man. I'm done with that war shit. And Uncle Sam is done with me, so it's mutual. All good.”

The front door opens. Cami steps out onto the porch. She's wearing her Sak & Save shirt and holding a large bag of garbage. Uncle Jimmy rushes toward her and takes it.

“I got it,” he says. “Need to earn my keep somehow.”

I look at Cami, and she shrugs. “I guess you two met.”

“I live here,” he says, launching the garbage into the trash can. “Uncle Sam put me on disability. But I can do things. I can work. See that bike?” He motions toward an old black-and-white motorcycle. “I can take that baby apart and put it back together again in less than a day. They say my brain's not right, but could a person with an effed-up brain change the oil in a truck? I don't think so.”

Cami takes my arm and starts pulling me toward the house. “Speaking of changing the oil, we better let you get back to it.”

“Yeah.” He nods, looking at the truck like he'd forgotten it was there.

“You didn't say much in your text,” Cami says once we're inside. “How was Dallas? Did they figure out anything?”

I don't know where to start or how to start.

“Kyle?” Before I know it, she's giving me an awkward hug. “It's going to be okay,” she says, and I want to believe her so much I hug her back. I hold on to her until a timer starts buzzing in the kitchen.

“Frozen pizza for my brother and his friend,” she says after we let go of each other. “They're in the backyard. I made them go out a little while ago because they were driving me crazy. Nine-year-olds!”

Cami opens the oven door, and warm bacon and pepperoni smells float into the kitchen like spirits taunting me. I can't remember the last time I ate pizza. Even with my arteries being one hundred percent clog free, Mom still wants me to eat healthy. It's torture.

“Want me to get them?” I ask. I need to breathe some unpepperonied air.

“Sure.”

There's a sliding glass door in the dining room. I open it and walk outside. Two kids, a boy and a girl, are sitting on the cement patio drawing with sidewalk chalk. The girl, wearing a bright sundress, has drawn several flowers with a rainbow stretching over them. The boy, Cami's brother, is drawing monsters who look like they're about to descend on the girl's garden.

“You're such a boy,” the girl says.

“We should play zombies,” Josh says, using a red stick of chalk to smear blood over the face of one of his creatures.

The girl stops coloring, and I'm so prepared for her to tell him how immature he is. “Do you have any guns?” she asks. “We can't play zombies without guns.”

“Yeah.” He stands. “I've got Nerf guns and cap guns. I've got a machine gun that sounds like the real thing.” He turns around and sees me.

“Sorry, kids. The zombies will have to wait. Your pizza's done.”

The girl stands up and starts to shake dirt from her dress, but then realizes her fingers are more colorful than the rainbow she's drawn. “I guess I should wash them,” she says as she walks past me. “And he's
not
my boyfriend, in case you're wondering. We're just friends.”

“Got it,” I tell her.

• • •

“Hungry?” Cami asks me after she slides two slices onto each paper plate and sets them on the table.

“I'm good, thanks,” I say. “I had a delicious walnut and spinach salad back home, followed by a handful of vitamins.”

Cami gives me a sympathetic, supportive smile. “How about a can of Sprite?”

“Sure. If, that is, you don't have any pureed broccoli.”

“All out.” She hands me a cold can. “After you're done with your lunch,” she says to the kids, “I want you to either watch television or go back outside. Kyle and I have important things to discuss.”

The little girl finishes washing her hands at the sink and leans over to whisper something into Josh's ear before sitting down.

“No they're not,” Josh says, his face turning red.

“We're not what?” Cami asks.

“Going to have sex,” Josh says.

“When my sister says that her and her boyfriend are going to go ‘talk' in her room, it means they're going to have sex. That's what Mom says, so I have to stay in my sister's room with them, or else they can't close the door.” She looks at Josh. “Maybe we shouldn't play zombies. We should stay inside and keep an eye on them, or else you'll end up with a . . .” Her face squashes up as she tries to figure out what relation Josh would be to a baby his sister might have.

“We're not going to have sex,” Cami nearly screams. “And I don't think your mom should talk to you about such things.”

The little girl straightens in her seat. “My mom's a therapist, so we talk about everything. I know lots of stuff.”

“Well.” Cami flashes me a look of disbelief. “Josh doesn't know a lot of stuff, and I'd like to keep it that way, so let's not share everything you know, okay?”

The girl considers this and nods. “Girls mature faster than boys anyway, so I doubt he's ready.”

Cami goes to the refrigerator and takes out a small bowl of sliced watermelon. “Eat all your food,” she says, “then go play. My friend and I are going to go
talk
in my room, but we'll keep the bedroom door open so you don't have to worry.”

Their talk turns back to zombies and what guns are best to kill them with.

“So,” Cami says, once we're in her room with the door semiclosed. “Tell me about Dallas.”

I start to talk but then see all the artwork hanging on Cami's walls. There are charcoal drawings, pencil sketches, and pastel paintings. Above her bed is a huge black-and-white portrait of her brother when he must have been maybe . . . two or three. He's asleep and has that peaceful sweet-dreams look on his round face.

There are all kinds of pictures. Trees and birds. Flowers and empty park benches. A drawing of a wheelchair sitting next to a pond pulls me in. The chair is empty, and there is no one walking or crawling or drowning in the picture. The surface of the water is perfectly still, and the chair sits forlorn and empty.

“Weird, huh?” Cami says. “I was taking a walk one day out in the country. I like to drive down dirt roads and then go walking and see if I find anything interesting to draw. That pond was probably a quarter mile from the road. There weren't any houses around. Just the pond and the chair. It was so eerie. A person could make up a hundred stories about why that chair was next to the pond. Maybe somebody got tired of taking care of his grandmother.”

“Creepy,” I say and shiver, but I like the feeling. There's something normal about a teenager getting creeped out by a scary story—as long as the story isn't depicting his own life. “You're really good. I mean,
really
good.”

“Thanks. I got a scholarship to study art at a couple different universities, but I'm going to spend the first two years at the community college. That way I can stay home and help with Josh, keep an eye on his new girlfriend.”

“She's not his girlfriend,” I correct her. “She made that very clear to me.” I notice a drawing of two girls sitting on a merry-go-round eating snow cones. They look like they're in maybe fourth or fifth grade. The drawing is mostly black and white except for the red-and-blue tops of the snow cones. “Is this you and Emma?”

She comes closer and looks at the photo that's pinned just below the drawing. “Field day at school, in fourth grade. My mom took that picture. That was back when Emma lived next door to us, and we were pretty much inseparable. After my mom started chemo, she'd send me over to Emma's house so I wouldn't see her getting sick. And then when things got worse and our whole living room looked like a hospital, she'd try to send me to Emma's, but I wouldn't leave her. I was so afraid I'd come home and she'd be . . . Even after I told Emma that my mom was dying, she was willing to come to my house to play Barbies or babies. That's when I knew she'd always be my best friend.”

“I'm sorry,” I say, “about your mom.”

“If I ever get rich, I'm going to have my breasts cut off,” she says nonchalantly.

“What?”

“I'm serious. Cut them off, get fake ones, and then I'll never have to worry about getting breast cancer, or at least, I won't have to worry as much.”

“Seriously?”

Cami sits on the edge of her bed. “Yeah. At least, if I have kids, I will. I'd do it for them.”

I believe her. I can't imagine a woman wanting to cut off perfectly healthy breasts, but I believe her. And I have to wonder what I'd be willing to cut off if doctors said it would save me.

“So, what happened in Dallas?” she asks.

I sit down next to her. “I met both of the other Mueller babies, James and Amber. Amber died in front of me, and they're going to put a pacemaker in James to try to keep his heart from stopping.”

Cami sits next to me. “I'm so sorry. What was she like?”

“She liked chocolate,” I say, smiling at the memory and blinking away the burning sensation in my eyes. “James is something else. He's like a seven-foot-tall Zulu god or something. He got a scholarship to MIT. Hopefully the pacemaker will save him.”

“And if it saves him, then they'll put one in you?”

I nod.

“It'll work,” she says and squeezes my hand.

“Remember the guy from the diner?”

“Yeah, the guy you said was at Connor's meet?”

I take his phone out of my pocket. “This is his phone.”

She lifts her eyebrows in question.

“He's dead. I saw him and started chasing him and . . . he got hit by a truck and then a car and then he died.”

She's silent.

“I guess in a way, I killed him. If I hadn't started chasing him, he wouldn't have run into the alley. He's dead because of me.”

Cami takes my hand. “You couldn't have known what was going to happen. You just wanted answers. You can't blame yourself.”

“Then who do I blame?” I look at her, and I'm so grateful that she's not giving me some horrible stare, like I'm a killer, even though I am.

“If he didn't have anything to hide, he wouldn't have run,” she says, so matter-of-factly that I feel a slight lifting of the blame I've placed on myself. “So he was watching you?”

“Somebody was watching Amber too, and I'm sure someone's watching James. They work for Dr. Mueller. Before the man died, he said that Mueller needs to know where we die so he can get access to the autopsy reports.”

“But how can he get access to the autopsy reports? I mean, just because he knows what hospital they were performed at doesn't mean he can access them. And why does he want them?”

“I don't know,” I say, because I don't want to say more. I don't want to tell her the rest of what Scott Stiles said.

“He must have connections—some way of accessing hospital records,” Cami says. “Without having you firsthand to study, maybe he thinks the autopsy reports are the best way to get the information he needs. I feel so bad for the rest of them.” Cami's head lowers, and I know she's thinking about the faces she's seen on Facebook. “At least he has more time to figure out how to save you.”

I give her a weak smile.

“What about the phone?” she says. “You said you have the guy's phone. Isn't there something on it that can help us find Dr. Mueller?”

I hold the small black device in my hand. “It's locked. I can't figure out how to get into it.”

“Get into what?” Uncle Jimmy presses the half-shut door open. He's wiping his hands on a towel, but it doesn't look like he's washed them yet.

I don't answer him, but I have a feeling he already knows a lot. He was probably standing in the hallway listening in and just decided it was time to make his entrance.