Dying Memories (8 page)

Chapter 21

The parking lot at the
Tribune
was mostly empty with a half dozen other cars scattered about. When Bill walked through the office he took little satisfaction in seeing that for the first time in his five years he’d beaten Jack O’Donnell in. He turned on his laptop and checked his email and was disappointed to see there was nothing from his good pal,
G
. Phillips, the
Tribune’
s computer guy had sent him something to let him know that the email he had asked about was impossible to trace. Carol had sent him more articles about Trey Megeet. Emily had also sent him a note the other day about how much she was looking forward to dinner. It was a sweet note. Bill’s thoughts drifted towards Emily when a new email came in with the subject, ‘
sorry about yesterday
’. He felt a tightness is his throat as he opened it. The message read:

I didn’t have time to warn you yesterday. Sorry about that. Everything happened fast after they found out about your trip to talk to Megeet. But my men were the ones in the Hummer. You’re smart enough to know now that there’s a connection with the two murders. Here’s what it is: ViGen Corporation. I wish I could tell you more, but that’s all I’ve been able to figure out so far. In any case, you should be safe for now. They won’t try anything again, not after yesterday, and not now that they know I’m watching you. –yer pal, G
.

Bill sat for several minutes reading the message over and over again, a coolness flooding through his head. So that was it. As he had thought, he was their target all along. They planned his abduction, maybe hastily, but they still planned it. And their reason? To scare him? Maybe, at least initially, but there was more to it than that—the hypodermic needle made it something different, and then there was that man shooting at him when he saw Bill escaping.

So what now? He could drop his investigation, but that didn’t guarantee anything. They could still come after him again. He didn’t know what those men were really after, except it had to be more than just to scare him. He thought about showing his latest email to the police, but what would that prove? The detective he spoke to had already categorized Bill as either someone mentally unstable or unscrupulous enough to make up his abduction story as a means to further his career, and he’d just assume that Bill sent the email to himself.

Bill tried replying to the email, asking his pal
G
what the fuck was going on, but as he expected the message bounced back to him, reporting that a return email address could not be found. As he stared at the computer screen, a hard resolve took over. It wasn’t in his makeup to back down from a fight. He probably couldn’t even if he wanted, but he didn’t want to. For the last five years he kept telling himself he wanted to do real journalism, and not the quick, dirty, city desk stories he was being assigned. Well, this was his chance. More than that, though, he didn’t like being pushed around, and he sure as fuck didn’t like being shot at. He made his decision that he was going to push his investigation until he knew what was going on, and he’d be able to end things then.

Nothing came up when he tried googling, ‘Jeffrey Vozzmer’, the person he had supposedly been confused for by the men in the van. Nothing. Not a single hit. He tried variations of the spelling, and still came up with nothing. He smiled grimly over the fact they gave him such a dead end name. Next he tried ViGen Corporation and found the company’s web-site. There wasn’t much on it other than some photographs of men in lab coats and a proclamation that they were leading the way for the next generation of immunology technologies. Something clicked when Bill read that, and he went through the articles he had on Trey Megeet and found that Megeet’s victim, Tim Zhang, had been a renowned immunologist, and in fact his trip to California at the time of Megeet’s wife’s death had been to an immunology conference. Bill next tried to find more of a connection between Zhang and ViGen but couldn’t come up with any, at least with the web searches he was using. It had been a year and a half since Zhang was murdered and there were still hundreds of web pages that referenced his name and it took a while to check them all. Some of these were about his murder, but there were quite a few about his background as a scientist and his research. None that Bill could find, though, linked him to ViGen Corporation.

After more digging he found an address for ViGen. Curiously they hadn’t provided one on their web-site, and were also unlisted in the phone book. Bill discovered that they were in Cambridge, only a few blocks from MIT’s campus. It was too early for him to call either MIT or ViGen, but he had little doubt that Zhang had somehow been affiliated with ViGen. He went back to ViGen’s web-site, but there was nothing else useful there. No list of corporate officers, nothing about how they were funded. He thought about Kent Forster running a hedge fund, and sent Carol a request to find out whatever she could about them, especially whether Forster’s company was behind ViGen’s funding. He next tried to research whether sodium pentothal could be used to induce hypnosis, and his search came back with several thousand articles that addressed the issue. He brought up one of them and was reading it when a voice spoke up behind him, saying, “Produces hypnosis within thirty to forty seconds of intravenous injection.”

With his heart racing hard enough that he could feel it pulsating in his temples, Bill turned to see that the voice belonged to Jack O’Donnell, who stood behind him reading what was on his computer screen. The first thing in the morning, and the city desk editor was already looking rumpled and disheveled as if he had slept in his clothes.

“Next time why don’t you just sneak up on me and yell boo,” Bill said.

“Sorry about that,” Jack said, his poker face intact. “Kind of a shock as it is to see you in this early. Why the interest in sodium pentothal and hypnosis?”

Bill paused as he almost told his boss what he was thinking. That the hypodermic needle marks found on both Gail Hawes and Trey Meet were caused by them being injected with sodium pentothal. That they were then hypnotized to kill their victims. That the deaths of Tim Zhang and Kent Forster weren’t random acts of violence committed by mentally unstable killers but orchestrated by sinister forces. In his mind he heard himself tell Jack all of that, and realized how outlandish it sounded and what his boss’s reaction would be.

“I’m playing a long shot right now,” Bill said curtly. “I’ll let you know how it works out, boss.”

Jack O’Donnell gave him a wary eye. “I hope you’re trying to find out the reason for Gail Hawes’s psychotic breakdown,” he said.

“Boss, exactly what I’m doing.”

Bill knew that Jack hated to be called ‘boss’. It had to do with the city desk editor’s egalitarian view of himself, and it caused Jack to stare openly at Bill before walking off muttering unkind things under his breath about his reporter. Bill waited until he heard the door to Jack’s fishbowl office open and close, then checked the time. It still wasn’t seven o’clock but the store he needed to go to would be open by the time he got there if he left now. He grabbed his laptop and headed out.

Chapter 22

From the way the sales clerk carried himself and the tattoos showing on his exposed skin, Bill guessed the guy was ex-military, probably infantry. Short, wiry build, early thirties, with a scraggly beard and mustache, the clerk at Spy City stared at Bill dubiously before taking a handheld device and waving it over the laptop and cell phone that Bill had laid on the counter.

“Nothing,” the sales clerk insisted.

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. If there was anything transmitting out of them, that little light on top would be blinking. Don’t matter whether it’s an analog or digital frequency, this will pick it up. Your stuff doesn’t have any bugs or GPS transmitters planted inside them.”

“How about checking my car? I’ve got it parked out front.”

The sales clerk gave Bill a deadpan look as if he knew the story he was given earlier about Bill working on a story for the
Tribune
on the latest high-tech surveillance gadgetry was a crock, as was that he would be giving the store a nice mention.

“Twenty bucks,” he said.

Bill nodded, took twenty dollars from his wallet and handed it over, then led the sales clerk outside the store and to his car. When the clerk brought the bug detector near Bill’s car the device started beeping while simultaneously a small red light flashed in a frenetic beat.

Chapter 23

When Bill comes to after the second time his dad breaks his nose, he hurts all over, especially his face. He’s lying on the sofa; his dad must’ve picked him up and placed him on it. He tries opening his eyes, but they are too swollen, and he can’t open either of them more than a crack. He struggles to push himself up and ends up collapsing back onto the sofa.

“You had no right saying any of that to me,” his dad says, his voice low and gloomy and coming from the other side of the room. Without looking at him, Bill knows his dad is sitting in his chair watching him. “What did you expect saying such hurtful things to your own father?”

Bill doesn’t say anything. He slowly runs his tongue over his teeth, and is relieved that he hasn’t lost any of them. After that there is a long silence lasting several minutes which his dad breaks by telling him that he needs to get him to the hospital. His dad then helps him to his feet and out of the apartment.

When they arrive at the emergency room, Frank tells the attendant manning the check-in desk that Bill fell down a flight of stairs. She gives him a wary look, but doesn’t say anything at the time. When Bill is brought in to see a doctor, a security guard comes over to tell his dad to wait where he is. For a moment Frank looks as if he’s going to put up a fight over that, but instead sits back in his chair, his face deflated.

“Did you really fall down a flight of stairs?” the doctor asks Bill once they’re alone.

“Yeah,” Bill forces out, his jaw swollen so much that it is hard to talk.

“It looks more like you were beaten,” the doctor says.

Slowly, painfully, Bill repeats that he fell down stairs. He repeats the same when the police come to question him. The hospital holds him overnight, but outside of a broken nose and concussion he escaped serious injury from his beating. He’s released the next morning after a woman from Social Services talks to him about his home life, and particularly his father. A week later Bill packs what he has into a duffel bag and leaves home
.

Chapter 24

The sales clerk from the spy shop had moved over to Bill so he could whisper without being overheard. “You’ve got something,” he said, his voice hushed but excited. “You want me to find it? Only take a minute with this baby.”

Bill shook his head. He took several steps further away from his car and signaled for the sales clerk to join him. “What did you find?” Bill asked.  “GPS transmitter or bug?”

“Both,” the sales clerk indicated in the same hushed tone. Bill nodded grimly. It didn’t matter anymore whether he dropped his investigation or not. If they were bugging his car they weren’t going to back down. Even if he didn’t want a fight, he had no choice now. He got in his car and drove away from the spy shop. His next stop was the car dealership where he had bought his car a year earlier. When he got to the service desk he complained about how his car was stalling on him. “It’s happened four times already,” Bill told the service representative. “Each time it’s when I’m in stop-and-go traffic. Last time was an hour ago. I was traveling on 93 coming over the bridge and this damn car almost got me killed.”

The service representative looked genuinely surprised. “There have been no reports of that problem with your model,” he claimed.

“Yeah, well, you’ve got one now. I’m not driving the car again until you figure out what the hell’s going on and fix it. And I want a loaner car until that happens.”

The service representative looked like he wanted to argue, but Bill had made sure earlier to mention that he was reporter for the
Tribune
and the rep recognized his name from Bill’s recent front page bylines. Instead the rep made a few phone calls and gave Bill an unhappy smile, telling him that he would make sure things were taken care of. When Bill left the dealership, he left with a loaner car.

At a quarter to nine Bill was camped out across the street from ViGen Corporation’s headquarters, a nondescript gray brick building in the Central Square section of Cambridge. They had no sign out front, just the street number painted onto a glass security door. Security cameras were visible above the main entrance and Bill tried to keep out of their range. He also tried to look like he was waiting for someone and held a coffee cup in one hand and a newspaper tucked under his arm. While he stood there he used his cell phone to discreetly take pictures of the odd assortment of workers who entered the building. Almost all of them had that awkward quality that identified them as scientists, but a few were dressed well and had the more straight-laced look that most likely put them on the business side of things. After a half hour of this, Bill tossed his empty coffee cup and newspaper into a trash can, and walked across the street heading towards ViGen’s front entrance.

Chapter 25

Emily sat inside one of the cafes lining Hanover Street. On the table in front of her was a double espresso and a small stack of books that she had brought so she could do research for her doctorate thesis, but she kept finding herself distracted. Even though she fought against it, she kept playing back in her mind how Bill had told her he been abducted in broad daylight, then later admitting that he made the story up.

When he first told her about being thrown into a van outside his apartment, it stunned her. She badly wanted to ask him if one of the men involved was a thin very pink-faced man with dot-sized black eyes, but in her shock she reacted defensively, even somewhat angrily, as all the dangers that she had been imagining were suddenly becoming very real. Then Bill admitted that he made the story up as some kind of bad joke, and all she could feel was foolish, almost like he had betrayed her by playing on her gullibility.

She took a sip of her double espresso, added more sugar, stirred it, and took another sip. Satisfied with her espresso then, she took one more sip before putting the cup back down on the table and picking up a book on early Italian baroque sculptures.

Emily tried to concentrate on the book, but her mind wandered as she imagined the way Bill looked when he told her his abduction story. Damn, he had a good poker face. He seemed so sincere at that moment. She found herself blushing with embarrassment thinking of how at first she thought it possible and how it had momentarily freaked her out. She tried to understand why he would tell her something like that in the first place, and the more she did this the more disappointed she became in him. Enough of that! She knew she was prone to looking for any excuse she could to keep people at arm’s length, and she didn’t want to do this with Bill. She certainly didn’t want to see their relationship damaged over something that was meant only as a joke, regardless of how bad a joke it might’ve been.

She checked the clock on the wall and saw that she didn’t have much time before she had to be heading off to the university. She took several more sips of her espresso and forced herself to concentrate on her early Italian baroque art instead.