Hemlock 03: Willowgrove (27 page)

“Mac.” Kyle’s voice was suddenly sharp. He turned Tess’s laptop so I could see the website on the screen.

My breath caught in my throat. Just to the left of a large block of type was a picture of a group of men and women in suits. There, second to the left, was a familiar face: the woman with the glasses who had singled out Serena at Thornhill. The woman we had seen with Amy’s father.

“Her name is Natalie Goodwin,” said Kyle. “She’s a doctor. Before CutterBrown, she worked for the CDC.”

I shook my head and reached for the list Ben had given me. Natalie Goodwin was third from the bottom. A wobbly
circle had been drawn around her name. “I don’t understand. . . .”

Kyle flipped between a number of open tabs. “Ben remembered names—just not the names of inmates. I haven’t found all of them—just the ones who have published research papers or who were mentioned in press releases and medical journals—but three of the names Ben circled were at CutterBrown.”

“Were?”

He went back to the page with the picture of Natalie Goodwin and pointed to the headline at the top of the page.
Zenith Pharmaceuticals Expands Research and Development.
“It looks like she and two other researchers left CutterBrown to go to Zenith.”

“When?” My heart pounded as I searched the screen for a date. The press release was almost a year old: Natalie Goodwin had left CutterBrown well before I had seen her at Thornhill. “It wasn’t an affair.”

Kyle shot me a confused look.

I set my laptop aside and stood. Pacing, I ran a hand roughly through my hair. “Upstairs, when we heard her talking to Amy’s father. She wasn’t talking about an affair—or at least not just an affair.”

I could feel Kyle’s eyes on me as I circled the room. “She said she made a mistake and that she wanted to come back. We thought she was talking about leaving Amy’s dad when it was really about CutterBrown. She made a mistake by going to Zenith. Oh my God.” I came to a sudden stop. “CutterBrown wasn’t experimenting on wolves at Thornhill. Zenith
was.” Kyle looked doubtful, but I was completely and utterly certain. It was the only way Sinclair’s connection to Stephen made sense. “Think about it. Stephen said it himself: he’s just an intern. If Sinclair was working for CutterBrown, she wouldn’t need Stephen to get her information. She could have just asked for it.”

Another thought occurred to me. “Where’s Zenith located?”

Kyle clicked a link. “Houston. Why?”

“Donovan—the guy with the accent—gave me a business card when he first showed up at Serena’s. It had a phone number with a Houston area code.”

I walked back to the couch and sat down heavily. “A pharmaceutical company was working with Sinclair—we just had the wrong one.”

“And CutterBrown was involved with a camp,” said Kyle, glancing back down at Ben’s list. “Just not the camp we thought. They were experimenting on wolves at Van Horne.”

“Jesus.” The word escaped my lungs in a weary rush. “It’s like
Spy vs. Spy
.”

And something Amy had left us was at the center of it.

“Jason was right.” Kyle ran a hand over the back of his neck. “A cure for LS would be worth billions. It makes sense that there would be more than one company in the race for it.”

I glanced back down at Ben’s list. I had assumed the four-digit numbers next to each name were the numbers of inmates—like the ones that had been on our wrist cuffs in the camp—but they weren’t. They were employee numbers, like the number I had seen on Stephen’s ID card.

“Ben told me he had to make sure it didn’t happen again—that
they
couldn’t do it again. He was after the names of the people who had been involved in Van Horne. That was what he was looking for in the study. He was going to go after them.”

As I spoke, the screen saver on my laptop—a slideshow Amy had made last year—flickered to life. Some of the photos were completely random but most were of the four of us. Amy had tried to make Jason and Kyle install it on their computers, but Jason had said any screensaver that girly would give his manly gaming machine a complex, and Kyle had refused on grounds that the program she had used had been downloaded from a site that was adware central. I thought the screen saver was cheesy, but I had put it on my laptop to avoid hurting her feelings. After she was gone, I couldn’t bear the thought of taking it off.

For a moment, I just watched the photos, hoping Amy’s smiling face would somehow make the mystery of the password clear. Some of the pictures were duplicates of ones on the USB key she had given me. After her death, I had stared at them so long and so often that I could close my eyes and recall every detail.

I wanted to remember Amy as she was in those photos, not as the Cheshire cat version that haunted my dreams or as the sad girl Trey had known who had kept a million and one secrets. I wanted to remember her smiling and goofing off. Making screen savers and filling USB drives with photos and music just because she thought there might be something in there that I would someday—

“Oh my God.” My voice was a choked whisper. “What was it Amy said in the video? Something about me having the drive and the key?” I pushed myself to my feet, almost knocking over both laptops in my haste, and rushed to my room, where I retrieved Amy’s flash drive from its tangle of objects.

“She gave this to me just a couple of days before . . .” I trailed off, unable to say
before she died
.

“A USB key?”

“Also known as a flash drive.” I sat back down and plugged the drive into a USB port. “It’s just a bunch of music and pictures, but she named the drive.” I browsed to the drive on the computer.
MAJiK.
My heart gave a sharp twist. Our initials.

It felt like Amy was in the room with us, like I could glimpse her out of the corner of my eye if I turned fast enough. She had known that I would keep the USB drive if anything ever happened to her. She had planned for this moment.

I clicked the folder on the DVD. This time, when I entered the password, I got in.

A dozen subfolders filled the screen, all of them beginning with the prefix VH.
Van Horne.
Stomach plummeting, I opened the first folder. Inside were spreadsheets and patient files—many of them stamped with the CBP logo. Ben had been at Van Horne. One of the files might even be his.

I opened the second folder. It was filled with dozens of videos. I clicked one at random and an image of a boy strapped to a metal table filled the screen. I watched just
long enough to confirm it featured the same sort of torture we had seen at Thornhill before quickly closing the clip.

Proof. The folder was undeniable proof that CutterBrown had been experimenting on werewolves.

I began skimming other subfolders. It looked as though the experiments at Van Horne had gone on for at least four years, stopping only after a test subject mysteriously vanished a year and a half ago.

“Ben. Derby must have paid a fortune to get him out.” There were dozens of memos and reports detailing his disappearance—everything from a full security audit to speculation his escape had been an inside job to reported sightings of him. And there was an order to terminate the project—one that bore a horribly familiar signature.

Stephen had claimed his father had started drinking and acting strangely a year and a half ago. It looked like Ryan Walsh’s behavior had changed right around the time he ordered the closure of the Van Horne project.

“Back at the strip mall, Stephen said something about his father not giving a damn about him. That he had thrown something away. He meant Van Horne.” I ran a hand over the scar on my arm. Ben and Derby; Hank and me; Stephen and Mr. Walsh—why did it always come back to fathers? “Stephen knew they had been working on a cure and that his dad was the one who terminated the project.”

Had the warden told him or had he found out some other way? Maybe Stephen’s story about meeting Sinclair hadn’t been a total fabrication. What if he had sought her out only for her to turn him against his father once she realized who
he was and how she could use him?

Maybe and what if. A knot formed in my stomach. In the end, it probably didn’t matter how Stephen had found out. All that did matter was what he had done afterward.

Kyle frowned as he read the last report in the folder. “They thought it was a rival company. Corporate espionage. It looks like Amy’s father stopped the project because he worried there would be other security breaches, that word would get out about what they were doing.”

“They must have flipped when three of their employees went to Zenith.” The words were absent, automatic as my attention locked on a JPEG file. It was the only image in the folder. Feeling a flutter of trepidation, I clicked on the file.

Ben.

His blond hair had been shaved down to stubble and he was so thin that his cheekbones jutted out like sharp points. He was all hard angles and skin stretched tight. A living skeleton.

Only his eyes made him recognizable. Clear and gray, they stared out at me from the other side of the camera.

“That’s how he was able to work for Amy’s family for all those months without her father realizing who he was,” I said softly. “He doesn’t even look like the same person.”

I thought of the things that had been done to Serena at Thornhill and tried to imagine those same things being done to Ben. He had been fifteen when he had gone in—younger than I was now. . . .

The last thing I wanted was to feel sorry for Amy’s killer, but I did. I couldn’t forgive Ben, but as I looked at the photo,
I felt a strange mixture of pity and regret.

Pushing the uncomfortable thoughts away, I forced myself to close the image and open another file. No sooner had I read the first line then the TV suddenly went out, plunging the living room deeper into shadow.

I reached for the lamp next to the couch and yanked on the pull cord. Nothing happened.

Kyle stood and crossed the room. Shivering, I followed him to the window.

Most of the windows in the apartment overlooked the back parking lot or the building next door, but you could see a slice of Elm Street from the living room. The whole block looked dark. In the distance, behind some of the buildings, I could just see the orange glow of fires.

Somewhere below, there was a tremendous smash followed by the blare of a car alarm.

“Looks like the looters ran out of places to hit downtown,” said Kyle, reaching out and pulling the curtains closed as mindless whoops and cheers erupted on the street.

I burrowed down in my oversized shirt. We were probably safe—we were on the third floor and there were two locked doors between us and the street—but what about the others? Jason had the protection of the Trackers, but what about Trey and Serena and Eve?

I knew Kyle was right, that there was nothing we could do, but I wanted to be out there, looking for them.

Heart heavy, I turned away from the window and headed back to the couch. We didn’t have long—just until the batteries in the laptops ran out—and we had to get through the
rest of the information Amy had left.

Knowing there wasn’t anything else we could be doing didn’t make me feel better, but I still slipped out the first DVD and inserted the second.

The same password worked for this one, too, unlocking dozens of folders.

I opened the first one. It was filled with PDFs, spreadsheets, and documents. I clicked on a PDF at random and a file came up on the CutterBrown letterhead.

It was an internal memo about a multiple sclerosis study. I frowned at the screen, rereading one sentence over and over. “I don’t understand.” I highlighted it for Kyle as he crossed the room and sat next to me. “I’ve got to be reading this wrong. They couldn’t have reduced symptoms in ninety-two percent of patients in the test group.” I glanced at the date on the top of the memo. The document was fifteen years old.

I bit my lip. Lupine syndrome had only been around for twelve years and the camps for less than that. Whatever this was, it didn’t seem to be related to either Van Horne or Thornhill. It was, however, weird. And Amy must have thought it was important. “If CutterBrown developed something that effective, why don’t we know about it? Why doesn’t the whole world know about it?”

“Maybe the effects were only temporary.” Kyle leaned forward, studying the words on the screen. “Maybe the symptoms came back or their reporting methods were flawed.”

I closed the memo and opened another. This one was
about a clinical trial for a bone cancer treatment, and it had a similar, unbelievably high success rate. It wasn’t until I had skimmed two more files that I realized the clinical trials were all for the same drug—something called ARC42.

“It doesn’t make any sense.” A crease formed between Kyle’s brows. “All of these diseases have completely different causes. Different symptoms. You couldn’t develop a single drug that would work on all of them. If you could, you’d be a god.” He reached for the computer and went back to the main list of folders.

“Arcadia.” We were sitting close enough that I felt him tense. In the glow from the computer screen, Kyle’s face looked ashen.

“What’s Arcadia?”

He shook his head and ran a hand roughly through his hair. “It’s a myth—well, it’s a myth and a real place. In Greece.” A siren blared outside and Kyle got up to check the window. “There are two versions,” he said, staring down at the street for a long moment before coming back. “In one, Lycaon, king of Arcadia, tried to test Zeus by inviting him to a feast and serving him human flesh. As punishment, Zeus transformed Lycaon into a wolf and killed each of his fifty sons.”

“Sounds like overkill. Sorry,” I added quickly, “bad joke. What about the other version?”

Kyle met my gaze. His eyes looked almost black. “In the other version—in the story the packs tell—Zeus transformed Lycaon into a wolf and cursed his sons to a half-life of being neither wolf nor man. They say they were the first
werewolves. Eumon, Portheus, Carteron—the Denver packs are all named for them. They say every werewolf can trace his lineage back to one of the fifty sons.”

My stomach flipped. Superstrength, superspeed, superhealing—how many times had I thought that people would line up for LS if you could find a way to harness the benefits while suppressing the wolf? What if CutterBrown had been looking for a way to do just that?