Silent Night (Sam Archer 4) (7 page)

‘We’re working on it.’

‘Good. I know it’s your day off, but you’re the man I want in charge. That’s why I called you in.’ Shepherd looked back at Franklin who held his gaze. ‘And all bullshit aside, if you want to talk to me, you know where I am.’

‘Thank you, sir. I need to get back to work.’

Franklin
nodded. Shepherd turned and headed back into the briefing room to re-join Rach.

Franklin
remained where he was, watching him walk away.

In
New Jersey
, another car swung into the parking lot at
The Kearny Medical Institute
where Dr Bale and his team had worked. There were four people inside the vehicle, two men and two women. They weren’t a group, however.

Two of them were Wicks and Drexler.

Wicks was behind the wheel. He stopped outside the doors of the three-storey building and pulled on the handbrake. In the back seat, Drexler was sitting on the right, her silenced Glock in her hand, the barrel of the silencer buried in the armpit of the other woman who was sitting beside her. She was shaking with fear.

Drexler pushed open her door, stepped out, then reached back inside and grabbed the woman by her hair. She dragged her out, shoving the silenced pistol into her back while keeping a firm grip on her hair. Wicks hauled the last member of the group, a man, out from the other side and with his pistol jabbed into the guy’s spine, they marched the man and woman into the building.

As they were pushed through the entrance and into the lobby, the two captives saw a tall man behind the front desk in a guard’s uniform.

‘Morning, sir,’ Drexler said.

The man didn’t respond.

He looked at the woman whom Drexler was holding.

‘Who the hell is she?’

‘Think she’s his girlfriend.’

He looked at them, then nodded. ‘So take them up. He’s waiting.’

Twenty seconds later, they arrived on the third floor. The large man with black curly hair was standing by the doors of the elevator, a pistol in a holster on his hip. Wicks and Drexler pushed the two captives out onto the level and they stumbled forward. Regaining his balance, the man immediately put his arm around the woman protectively, both of them uncertain and scared, glancing around nervously.

The curly-haired guy looked at the newcomers and grinned.

He focused on the man.

‘Good morning, doctor.’

The male captive didn’t respond. He was distracted, puzzled by the lack of activity around him.
The large man jerked his head, indicating the two captives should move forward. They walked slowly across the polished tiled floor towards the main laboratory. As they passed him, the large man grabbed the woman and motioned the doctor to keep walking. He came to a stop just outside the main lab.

It was empty.

‘Inside,’ the man ordered.

The doctor turned. ‘What is this about?’

The large man’s face darkened.

He grabbed the pistol from his holster and put it to the woman’s head. He pulled the trigger and the weapon buzzed angrily, a cloud of blood and brains spraying in the air.

‘NO!’
the man shouted in horror.

Her body dropped like a stone, blood spattering all over the white floor. Then the curly-haired man swung his pistol to the doctor, aiming at his legs.

‘Get in there and wait, asshole. You move or make a sound, you lose a kneecap.’

Numb with shock, the doctor stumbled backwards into the lab behind him. He stepped just inside the doors, which slid shut again in front of him. Behind the glass, he stared at his girlfriend’s corpse on the tiled floor.

Outside, the man with the gun turned to Wicks and Drexler.

‘Tibbs?’

‘Handled,’ said Drexler.

‘Were you seen?’

She shook her head. ‘Used the fire escape.’

‘But we had a problem,’ Wicks said. ‘Kruger wasn’t home.’

The man thought for a moment, then shrugged. ‘This guy can do what he does.’ He checked his watch. ‘But you two need to get back to the city. The doctor can’t work without a sample.’

His hit-team nodded.

‘Before you go, get rid of the bitch,’ the man said, jabbing his pistol at the dead woman on the floor. ‘Dump her in the room with the others.’

‘Is there anything you can tell us about why this happened?’ Josh asked the young female doctor gently, sitting beside her. Archer had joined them, squatting on his haunches in front of them. It was still busy across the lobby, office workers, cops and CSU forensic investigators everywhere, but the trio were far enough away that they could have a quiet private conversation in the corner.

The woman looked at Josh and nodded.

‘Call me Maddy.’

‘Can you tell us why this happened, Maddy?’

‘Do you know who my father was?’ she asked.

Josh looked at Archer.

‘No. I’m afraid we don’t.’

‘He was very well-known in our circles. Both here in the States and around the world. He was a pioneer in his field. He gave a lecture at a conference in
Washington
two months ago and over three thousand people attended. He had dinner that night at the White House.’

She paused, looking down at the lukewarm cup of coffee in her hands.

‘My mother died of lung cancer when I was five. The physician attending her didn’t test for it early enough. If he had, she possibly could have survived, or at least lived a whole lot longer. My father could never move past what happened to her. It ate away at him every day. And once he became truly established in his field, much of his career objectives completed, he began trying to find a cure.’

‘For cancer?’ Josh asked.

The doctor shook her head. ‘No. There are many different types. There isn’t just one cure for all. It doesn’t work like that.’

She paused.

‘Cancer is a shocking sickness. It’s something we all fear. It seems to appear out of nowhere and can strike in any part of your body. You have to remember that in the grand scheme of things, modern medicine is still in extreme infancy. We’ve made more advances in the past hundred years than we did in the previous thousand, but it’s still not enough. Thousands of scientists and doctors have tried to come up with ways of combating the disease. Only a few treatments have been proven to work.’

‘Like chemotherapy,’ Josh said.

‘Yes. That’s one. Using radiation to kill the cancerous cells. It’s one of the most commonly used and the one most people are aware of. But ask anyone who has ever endured chemotherapy treatment about their experience. I guarantee it won’t have been pleasant.’

She paused and sniffed.

‘Chemo annihilates the cancerous cells, but it also kills other cells too. That’s why some patients lose their hair for example. It works but it destroys healthy cells in the process. My father was desperate to find a middle ground for treating lung cancer, given what happened to my mother. Something that could combat the cancer without affecting the patient in other ways. He was convinced that it was possible.’

She paused.

‘He tried many different things. None of them worked. He ended up down so many blind alleys, forced to go back and start all over again at square one. Time and again the same insurmountable problem cropped up that he just couldn’t navigate around.’

‘Which was?’

‘The strains he developed were too weak. They either didn’t work, or the cancer just overran them and ate them for lunch. So he decided to use an even stronger pathogen as a base. Something that if he could engineer and cultivate correctly, he knew for sure would annihilate the cancerous cells.’

‘Which was?’ Josh asked.

‘Tubercle bacillus.’

‘What’s that?’

She looked at him.

Then, for only the second time, she glanced at Archer.

‘Tuberculosis.’

Twenty four blocks downtown, the N Train carrying the three men from the
Astoria
diner swept into
Times Square
42nd Street
, the main transport hub in Midtown Manhattan. It eventually ground to a halt with a screech and the doors slid open. People started exiting the train and the three men carrying the bags joined them.

Moving down the platform, they walked up the stairs to the next level, the access floor for the various lines headed to different parts of the city. There were several cops up there, as well as some MTA employees and it was busy as hell, people walking in all directions, focused on getting to their destination.

No one paid any attention to the three men.

Anonymous in the crowd, the trio walked into the middle of the concourse and came to a halt, facing each other, all of them fighting the churning nervousness in their guts.

This was it.

Bleeker looked at his two companions.

‘Do what you need to do, then leave. Don’t hang around. We meet at the safe house, pack our shit and then we’re out of here.’

The men nodded.

Then they parted and headed off in three different directions.

The bags containing the shoeboxes held tightly in their hands.

‘This is bullshit!’
the skinny drug dealer shouted.
‘Bullshit, man!’

He was being led out of a
Harlem
tenement building on West 134
th
towards an NYPD Ford Explorer parked against the kerb. Several people were watching from the street, as well as an audience from the windows of apartments in the building, some of them wolf-whistling, others shouting abuse at the two detectives. Jorgensen had about ninety pounds on the dealer and almost carried him to the car, a large bear-paw of a hand enveloping the man’s upper arms on each side.

Arriving at the vehicle, he pulled open the rear door and pushed the drug dealer inside, sliding in after him and pulling the door shut. Behind them, Marquez had just stepped out of the building carrying a plastic bag stuffed full of various items. She walked around the front of the car to the driver’s door, then climbed inside and shut it, turning to face Jorgensen and the smaller man, the three of them alone and the interior of the car quiet.

‘You can’t do this, man,’ the skinny guy said, his hands cuffed behind him, sitting in the middle seat of the car. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘Oh really?’ Marquez said.

She pulled something out of the plastic bag.

It was a large, thickly-packed transparent bag of marijuana leaves. The bag was about the size of a pillow case.

‘Then what do you call this?’

Pause.

‘That isn’t mine.’

‘What about these?’ Marquez said.

Reaching into the bag again, she pulled up a second thick bag of marijuana and a .45 handgun.

Cantrell swallowed.

‘Well, Pinocchio?’ Jorgensen asked him.

‘They aren’t mine either. You planted that shit.’

‘Do you even understand how finger-printing works, numb-nuts?’ Jorgensen said. ‘That’s how we found you. You’re telling me that if we run one layer of dust over those bags and the gun that your prints won’t show up?’

‘Don’t matter. You’re gonna take me to jail anyway!’ Cantrell said dramatically.

‘Listen!’
Marquez said, firmly, looking him in the eyes. ‘You’re right. You’re going to get charged for the weed and the gun. And I’m guessing this isn’t the first time you’ve worn a set of handcuffs.’

Cantrell didn’t answer.

‘However, luckily for you, we’ve got much bigger shit to deal with today,’ Marquez continued. ‘If you start co-operating, I’ll make sure that this is just a mark on your record. Nothing more. I promise. I’ll say we found just an ounce of weed and no gun. But unless you want to spend Christmas in orange overalls, you better start talking.’

‘About what?’

‘Tell us about the shoebox,’ she said.

Cantrell looked at her, then at Jorgensen beside him. He closed his eyes.

‘Oh shit.’

‘Exactly,’ Jorgensen said.

‘You know about that.’

‘Yes. We do.’

‘Goddamnit. I knew that shit was a mistake.’

‘It would be pretty hard for it not to be,’ Marquez said. ‘A man died last night because of you.’

Cantrell frowned. ‘
What?’

‘
Don’t play cute,’ Jorgensen said. ‘Your prints are all over that box. You just admitted you knew about it. A family man is now lying on a slab at the morgue because of what you did.’

‘What the hell are you talking about? I didn’t kill anybody.’

‘You placed it in the Park!’ Jorgensen said.

‘Yeah, only because some white boy paid me to.’

Marquez flicked a look at Jorgensen. ‘Someone asked you to put it there?’