Dying Memories (11 page)

Chapter 32

Over the next two and a half years after Bill left home, he spends nights with friends, at shelters, camped out in subway stations, hiding in abandoned buildings, whatever he has to. Most nights he’s able to find places to scrounge free food.

Early on he becomes friends with Eddie Righetti, who teaches him how to pick locks and hotwire cars. Bill is always careful when he breaks into an apartment, first making sure it’s empty, and steals the bare minimum he needs to to survive the next few days, sometimes just taking food and other necessities. The one time he screws up and breaks into an apartment which isn’t empty, an elderly man is sitting in a wheelchair on the other side of the door staring at him. Bill turns and run. Somehow the police never arrest him or even approach him during the three dozen or so break-ins that he commits during his brief criminal career. When he’s seventeen and can get a job helping a driver deliver furniture, he quits doing break-ins completely. While all this is going on, he continues going to school and graduates high school.

It is after he finishes high school that Bill returns to the apartment. His dad never moved like he promised, instead staying year after year in the same apartment where his wife was savagely murdered. Bill picks the lock, and when he enters, finds Frank sitting in his chair, the floor by him littered with empty beer cans with half a remaining six-pack by his side. His dad looks older, grayer, his face flabbier, more jowly, deeply lined. Frank stares at Bill but doesn’t say anything.

“I’m taking mom’s stuff and any pictures you have of her,” Bill tells him, not bothering to hide his contempt. “You don’t deserve to have any of it.”

Frank mutters that he is sorry, a look of befuddlement coming over his face as if he didn’t mean to say what he did but couldn’t help himself.

This stops Bill cold. “What? What the fuck did you just say?”

His dad looks away. His mouth puckers up as if he is going to start bawling. He sniffs a couple of times, then half-whispers, “It was an accident.”

Bill’s head is roaring. The room dissolves into a red haze, and he only partly hears himself as he screams at his dad, demanding how it could’ve been an accident with him sneaking away from work during the middle of a job. At first Frank avoids looking at Bill, his body shrinking into the chair. But as Bill keeps yelling, demanding to know how he could’ve done what he did, Frank’s old belligerence comes back. Then he is out of his chair swinging wildly at Bill and breaking his nose for the third time. As Bill stumbles backwards, Frank charges him like a bull blinded by blood and fury
.

Chapter 33

Professor Carl Wallofer was a thin man in his fifties with a large shiny bald scalp and a thick unruly beard. He sat behind his desk, refusing to make eye contact with Bill, mostly looking past him to the hallway beyond.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Wallofer stated curtly.

“You’re saying you don’t work for ViGen Corporation?”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been saying. I never heard of them.”

Bill held his cell phone out so Wallofer could see the display which showed the picture he took the other day of the MIT professor entering ViGen’s front door. The professor reluctantly glanced at it.

“That’s not me,” Wallofer claimed.

The picture was clearly of the same man who was now sitting in front of Bill.

“That picture is clearly you,” Bill said.

“I’m saying it isn’t. Now leave my office. I don’t have time for this nonsense.”

Bill put his cell phone away. He placed both hands on the desk and leaned forward. “Two ox-sized brutes, along with a man with a very pink face and a very big hypodermic needle, tried to kidnap me. I think they wanted to do a lot worse than kidnap me, and I also think it’s somehow connected to ViGen. What the fuck is going on over there?”

Wallofer tried to give Bill a condescending smile as if Bill was crazy, but he couldn’t quite manage it. A sheen of perspiration glistened on his bald scalp.

“I told you I never heard of them. I’m calling security.”

“Tim Zhang worked for them also, didn’t he?”

A hint of fear showed in Wallofer’s eyes. He lowered the phone that he had picked up and his head snapped back so that for the first time he was looking directly at Bill. He made a sucking noise. His tongue wetted his lips, but he closed his mouth without saying anything.

“Professor Tim Zhang,” Bill said, repeating the name of the man Trey Megeet had stabbed to death. “He was a professor here at MIT, specializing in immunology. He was murdered in Harvard Square a year and a half ago. You knew him, right?”

Wallofer rose from his chair, his eyes intent on Bill. What the professor did next surprised Bill. He fled his office as if someone had set fire to his ass. Bill stood frozen where he was for a minute or so before he realized that the professor wasn’t coming back and that it would be a good idea for him to get going also. He got up, walked quickly out of the office, then the building, and kept moving fast as he covered the two blocks to where he had left his car. As he was driving away, he called Roberson. He had tried calling him several times earlier that morning but the lawyer so far hadn’t returned any of his calls. This time Roberson picked up.

“You see today’s
Tribune
?” Bill asked.

In a frosty voice, the lawyer said, “Yes, I saw it.”

“Okay, so you saw that you got the article you wanted linking the two killings. How about I now get to meet with your client?”

“We had no such arrangement in place,” the lawyer said. “And I thought I made myself clear when we spoke last that I will not be allowing you to visit Gail.”

The call was disconnected at the lawyer’s end. As had happened the last time he talked with Roberson, Bill felt a tightness clenching his jaw as he wondered what the fuck was going on. Before he had too much time to wonder about it, his phone rang. It was the service manager at his auto dealership letting him know that they couldn’t find any problem with his car, but if it stalled again—

Bill cut the service manager off telling him he’d return the loaner and pick up his car.

Chapter 34

Bill waited as his car was brought outside for him. After the mechanic disappeared back into the garage, Bill used his bug detector to sweep his car for hidden transmitters. He smiled grimly as the device indicated that his car was now clean. His paranoid thought from earlier turned out not to be all that paranoid after all. They must’ve broken into the auto dealership’s garage the previous night and removed their bugs. Bill thought about why they did that, and realized it was obvious. They were cleaning up after themselves and removing any evidence that he could bring to show what they were doing.

He drove away from the city and towards Brookline and to the same coffee shop with Wi-Fi access that he’d camped out at the previous day. A thought struck him that maybe Trey Megeet’s delusion was accidental; that ViGen could’ve been conducting their illegal trials for over a year and a half and that Megeet was one of their early guinea pigs. Maybe in his case the delusion he suffered was a side effect of the drug they gave him and his killing Tim Zhang was simply a coincidence. Or maybe not that much of a coincidence. If Zhang had administered the drug to Megeet, or was present when it happened, that could explain why Zhang became wrapped up in Megeet’s delusion. This all could be nothing more than them trying to keep Bill from uncovering their illegal trials and the possible homicidal consequences of at least one of them. But if that’s what this was, how did it explain the two ox-sized goons and the scary pink-faced man with his hypodermic needle? Those men smelled like military to Bill; some nasty, dark branch of it. And how did Gail Hawes fit into it? Why would Hawes have been involved if it was a matter of the drugs causing an unforeseen side-effect of psychotic delusions?

Bill played out different scenarios in his head as he tried to make sense out of what was happening, but couldn’t quite get the pieces to fit. Later at the coffee shop, he checked his email. There was nothing from his new good pal,
G
. Jack O’Donnell had sent him a curt note with the minutes of yesterday’s staff meeting, that he wanted another piece on Trey Megeet and that he was still waiting on Bill to uncover the traumatic event that caused Hawes’s temporary break with reality. The million dollar question.

Almost as if he were on autopilot Bill typed out a fifteen hundred word article rehashing Megeet’s murder of Tim Zhang with his observations of the man he met in prison a couple of days earlier. All the details were stuck in his head, and he didn’t have to consult his notes while he wrote fast and furious. The article was mostly filler with the
Tribune
biding its time until something new broke with the Hawes’s shooting. Bill read what he wrote, and satisfied that it wasn’t complete shit, emailed it to Jack.

A few minutes later he got a response back from his boss commenting how the article wasn’t a complete pile of stinking manure, and that it would run with only a few minor edits. Jack also wanted to know when Bill would be arranging a meeting with Gail Hawes given that the
Tribune
had held up their end of the deal. Bill sent him back an email saying he was working on it.

After that Bill realized he didn’t know what to do next. At least not until it got much later.

Chapter 35

Thomas Roberson’s last scheduled appointment was at two-thirty, and forty-five minutes later was finished with it but he waited until five o’clock before packing away papers and folders into a briefcase and slipping a gray wool overcoat over his bony, almost skeleton-thin body. He stopped for a moment to wipe a handkerchief along his forehead and the back of his neck. He’d been feeling an uneasiness for the last few days, and even more so since receiving that phone call from Bill Conway. He stood for a moment to compose himself before heading out, then took several wooden steps towards his office door. Before he reached it, the door swung open, and standing in front of him was a thin, neatly dressed man with pointy ears and small black dot-sized eyes. A flesh-colored bandage on the man’s forehead stood out in contrast to his overly pink-hued face. Beyond him in the anteroom was a boulder-sized man who stood frowning dourly with his thick arms folded across his chest.

Roberson’s skin color grayed to a shade that almost matched the other man’s suit. His mouth squeezed into a worried-looking oval as he looked down to see the small case the man was carrying. “I was just heading out,” Roberson said, forcing a frail smile. “Why don’t we schedule a time to meet tomorrow?”

Simon didn’t say anything. He stepped further into the office making Roberson stumble backwards to avoid being bumped into.

“I can give you five minutes now,” Roberson conceded. He tried to straighten his posture as he walked back to his desk to show that he was in charge, but his voice betrayed him, quavering as he asked Simon, who had taken a seat across from him and had casually crossed his right leg on top of his left, what he wanted.

“You recently contacted a reporter named Bill Conway,” Simon said.

Roberson didn’t say anything. He blinked rapidly for several seconds before realizing he was doing it.

“Well?”

Roberson swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing noticeably in his thin neck. “Conway discovered that I was representing Hawes,” he said. “He called me to see if I could arrange a meeting between him and my client.”

Simon shook his head admonishing Roberson. “That’s not what happened,” he said. “We have your phone records. We know that you initiated contact. You’re the one who suggested that he consider a link between Hawes and Megeet. Isn’t that true?”

Almost imperceptibly, Roberson nodded.

Simon sighed. “You were given specific directives, none of which involved sending reporters to talk to Megeet. Why did you do this?”

Roberson again started blinking rapidly. This time he was unable to stop himself. Simon smiled inwardly as he took his leather case from the floor and opened it. When he took a hypodermic needle from it, Roberson spoke up, telling him that he was instructed to do what he did.

Simon’s smile turned pensive. “And who instructed you?” he asked.

“Your organization,” Roberson said.

Simon arched an eyebrow at that.

“It’s true,” Roberson insisted. “Your organization instructed me to do what I did. I was just following orders.”

“Who contacted you?”

“I wasn’t given a name. But it was your people.”

“Describe him.”

Roberson gulped causing his Adam’s apple to start bobbing again. “I can’t,” he said. “It was done over the phone and the man’s voice was electronically modified, but he was one of you.”

“And why did you lie to me earlier?”

Roberson’s color darkened to a harsher shade of gray. “I was warned about the consequences if I spoke a word about this to anyone, even others within your organization,” he said.

Simon sat still for several minutes, his expression thoughtful. Then nodding to himself he placed the hypodermic needle back into the case. “How much were you paid?” he asked.

“Fifty thousand dollars was transferred into an offshore account,” Roberson said without hesitation.

“Give me the account information.”

Roberson wrote the information on a piece of paper and handed it to Simon, his hand shaking noticeably. Simon folded the paper into an inside jacket pocket and smiled philosophically. “What’s done is done,” he said. “Just don’t make that mistake again. If anyone else from the organization tries contacting you, let me know me immediately. That’s all, we’re done here.”

Roberson felt a shakiness in his chest as he got to his feet. He waited for Simon to leave, but the man stayed seated, smiling at him, so Roberson took the hint and walked to the door first. If this man wanted to search his office, let him. When Roberson’s hand touched the knob, he felt a pinching behind his ear, then his eyes widened with a horrible terror. He opened his mouth wide but whatever scream he tried to let out seized instead within his throat. Clutching at his chest, he fell to the floor dead of a massive coronary. Simon stood over the body observing it with a mix of curiosity and amusement, then packed the hypodermic needle back in its case. He moved Roberson’s corpse so he could open the door, then left the office.

“What’s too painful to remember…” he said with a melancholy sigh to his subordinate, the ox-sized thug who for this assignment was using the name Todd Shackleford. Shackleford didn’t bother glancing towards the open doorway to see the body that lay on the floor. He stood silently until Simon walked past him, and then followed his freakish boss out of the building.