The Many (13 page)

Dawn nodded, sensing there was useful information in Lila’s story even though she couldn’t say exactly what. She needed to go home and think things over. “Thank you so much for staying,” she said, standing up to say goodbye. “And I’m sorry again for messing with you.”

“Yeah, well I guess you had you reasons. I hope your mom turns up soon.” Lila went to leave but then paused, turning back to Dawn. “Oh, and you shouldn’t be so down on yourself. You’re a cute girl, and you could be even cuter if you put your mind to it.”

Dawn smiled coyly, feeling a blush spread across her face. Not for the first time, she wished she didn’t like boys.

13

“So what's the story?” Karl asked as soon as he was seated, not even pausing to remove his jacket despite the blasting heat inside Virgil's office. "Do we have any leads?”

“First things first,” Virgil said. “You got something for me?”

Karl pulled out a sealed envelope and handed it over. On his day off, Karl had caught an early bus back to Cave Creek, eaten lunch with his mom, and then for the first time in his life, asked her for a loan. He said it was to pay for an evening class in project management – an important skill in the building industry. When she beamed proudly and reached for her purse, he’d felt like the worst son in the world. 

Virgil slit open the envelope with a nail and thumbed through the bills, nodding appreciatively. “You robbed that 7-11, huh?” he grinned.

“Can we get on with it?”

“Sure,” Virgil said, losing his smile. “I’m a busy man, too.”

He leaned forward and handed Karl a stack of printouts fastened with a paper clip. After the incident at Maxine’s apartment, Karl had asked Virgil to run a background check on Maxine as well as Dr. Reynolds, and to see if there was any connection to a man named Ivan. Karl turned the pages quickly: passport and driver’s license photos, vital statistics, education and employment records – all neatly set out for Adam Reynolds and Maxine Salinger.

On the last page of Virgil’s report was a mug shot of a grim-looking man in his forties. Hollow-cheeked with dark hair and pale, bony features. One of his eyes turned inward, giving an extra intensity to his gaze.

The picture took Karl by surprise. He felt his whole body turn cold. “Who’s this?” he said.

“His name is Professor Ivan Leach.”

Karl kept staring at the mug shot. The arrest sign Leach was holding read Salem, Oregon. The date was 2003 – so he’d be in his fifties now.

“You okay?” Virgil asked.

“Shit, Virgil – you’ve hit pay dirt. This is the fucker who was down in the basement with Stacey. The same guy who came after me in Maxine’s apartment”

“It
might
be the same guy,” Virgil qualified.

“
Might
be? I’m telling you I saw him. His hair is gray now, but it’s the same fucking guy. And his name is Ivan, so everything matches. Where can we find him?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Just listen to what I’ve found, and then we can talk about a way forward.”

Karl nodded, his insides squirming with anticipation
.

“Okay. Basically, Professor Leach is the only link we could find between Adam Reynolds and Maxine Salinger. We checked everything from cell phone records to credit card transactions, searching for a match on a phone number or a restaurant they’d visited on the same day. We even cross-referenced their social networks, looking for mutual friends. But apart from living in the same city and being involved in the medical profession, the only thing they have in common is this guy.”

Karl had been flicking through the document while he listened, running an eye over Dr. Reynolds and Maxine’s timelines. Virgil was right: they’d lived completely separate lives. Adam Reynolds was educated at Cambridge University, England, where he earned his medical doctorate. He completed his internship at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London and then moved to Portland in 2014, where he began an affiliation with the Providence St Vincent Medical Center. Never married, never had kids.

Maxine was raised in Sacramento, studied nursing at California State, and then moved to San Francisco where she worked for five years at St. Francis Memorial Hospital. She became Maxine Dyson after marrying stockbroker Kenneth in 2007, reverting back to Salinger when she was divorced in 2010. She then studied online through Drexel University, graduating with a Masters in psychiatric mental health nursing in 2013. She moved to Salem the same year, taking up a position at Oregon State Hospital (here, Virgil had scribbled two big question marks). She left six months later to take up her current role at the Richmond Heights Psychiatric Hospital in Portland. Karl was only slightly surprised to see she was thirty-nine.

“Okay,” Karl said, looking up. “Where does Ivan Leach fit in?”

“He’s a patient at Oregon State. Or at least, he was.”

“But Maxine was only there for six months.”

“Which raises the question –
why
was she only there six months?”

Karl scrunched up his face, his brain overloading. He felt like he was getting the story backwards. “Can you explain this in a way that makes sense?”

“Sorry, you’re right. I’m jumping all over the place. Maybe I’ll start by giving you some background on this Leach character.”

Virgil picked out another folder from the pile on his desk and started reading from a printout. “Ivan Leach, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oregon from 1997 to 2003. His area of expertise was biological chemistry, with a particular focus on the potential of psychoactive drugs to improve brain function. He’s published extensively on the subject. I won’t bore you with the details but I looked up Leach’s articles online and jotted down a few titles: Stimulant Therapy in the Management of Autism; New Perspectives on Hallucinogenic Drugs in Psychiatric Treatment; Drug Therapy For the Control of Deviant Behavior…you get the picture. He even published a book in 2001 –
Psychoactive Drugs in The New Millennium: Working Towards Healthier Brains.
Creepy, right? Sounds like he wants to eat them or something.

“Anyway, the preface said there were thousands of untapped strains of stimulants, hallucinogenics and depressants that could be used to treat a range of mental health and brain disorders. Apparently it was groundbreaking work but it was also controversial, mainly because Leach suggested drugs could be used to control even mild behavioral issues – such as absent-mindedness or promiscuity. Some of his peers thought he’d ventured onto shaky ethical ground.

“After the book came out, he scaled back his lecturing commitments to concentrate on lab work. He ran a lot of experiments with rats, injecting them with his drug cocktails and monitoring the changes in their brain chemistry. I’m not sure exactly what he was looking for – the research was described as exploratory. But after a while, it seems Professor Leach got sick of testing on rats.”

“I knew it,” Karl whispered softly.

“Knew what?”

Karl shook his head, unable to put his hunch into words. “Sorry, I was talking to myself. Go on.”

“Right. So Leach convinced the faculty he needed more research assistants but it wasn’t because he needed help in the lab. He wanted to run human trials. Basically, he coaxed these poor grad students into taking low dosages of his drug cocktails. And Leach was quite famous at the university, so he didn’t have any problems finding willing participants. They trusted him.”

“How do you know this stuff?”

“It was all over the papers. See, one of the human lab rats developed a serious case of psychosis, cutting herself to ribbons in front of her boyfriend. She lived, but it didn’t take long for her chemistry professor to be implicated. The other kids confirmed the sordid details, and Professor Leach was charged with gross negligence. He pleaded not guilty on the grounds of insanity, because, as it turned out, he’d been injecting himself with his own drug cocktails for the past five years. The toxicology reports backed him up – Leach’s blood was streaming with chemicals. His lawyer argued the drugs diminished his capacity to make rational judgments and he therefore wasn’t criminally liable. The jury agreed, and he was institutionalized instead. That’s how he wound up at Oregon State Hospital in Salem.”

“But he’s not there anymore?”

“No – he escaped in 2013. He hasn’t been seen or heard of since.”

“2013,” Karl repeated. “The same year Maxine was employed there.”

“Exactly – she left two weeks after Leach disappeared. Actually, I’m pretty sure she was pushed. I made a couple of inquiries at the hospital and they weren’t talking. The way I figure it – if she
wasn’t
pushed, they would’ve said so.”

“Jesus. So you think she helped Leach escape?”

“That’s the impression I got. She definitely left the hospital with a cloud over her head.”

“Jesus,” Karl repeated, taking a moment to absorb the disturbing information. A crucial component was missing….

“What about Dr. Reynolds? What’s his connection to Leach?”

“It’s not obvious, but it’s there. See, Dr. Reynolds doesn’t just work out of St. Vincent’s – he has affiliations with six other hospitals and medical facilities in Oregon.”

“Including Oregon State Hospital,” Karl guessed, almost jumping out of his chair. “That’s right. Now you might’ve notice from his photo Leach that has an eye condition. Esotropia.”

“Yeah, he’s cross-eyed.”

“More or less. And Dr. Reynolds specializes in the treatment of amblyopia and esotropia – lazy eye and cross-eyed vision. Unfortunately, I can’t get hold of the hospital records, so I don’t know how many times he visited or who he saw. But there wouldn’t be too many patients at Oregon State with rare eye disorders – it’s a mental institution, not a regular hospital. So I think it’s a fair assumption that Ivan Leach and Adam Reynolds came into contact.”

Karl nodded.
Absolutely.

“And that’s what we have so far. A disgraced chemistry professor, an eye doctor and a psychiatric nurse who all crossed paths at Oregon State Hospital in 2013.”

“They both helped him escape,” Karl blurted, unable to contain his excitement. “Maxine and Dr. Reynolds. And now they’re hiding him somewhere in Portland. Fuck, if we could just follow them for a week, they’d lead us to him.”

“No, I doubt they would. Don’t forget, we couldn’t find any connection between Maxine and Adam Reynolds outside of the hospital. They’re smart, careful people. They’ll be keeping contact with Leach to a minimum.”

“Except when they bring him girls to rape.”

Virgil stared at him. “I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.”

“What do you mean? Isn’t that where all of this is heading? Leach is an ugly old creep who sends out younger guys like Adam Reynolds to do his spadework for him. The girls are then drugged, hauled back to a basement somewhere, and he rapes them.”

“Like I said, that doesn’t sound right to me. Professor Leach isn’t a date rape sort of guy. I can see you don’t believe me, but listen – out of all the weird stuff that came to light during his trial, there was never any talk of sexual violation or physical abuse. He was pumping those kids full of drugs but he never once tried to get down their pants. It’s just not his thing. He’s a mad professor, not a sexual predator.”

“Then what’s he doing to them….” Karl’s voice drifted off, guessing the answer to his own question.

“Human guinea pigs,” Virgil confirmed. “My hunch is that Leach is conducting live drug trials again. And just like that girl who cut herself at college, your sister was injected with something nasty.”

Karl jumped to his feet, suddenly feeling claustrophobic. He went to the corner of the office and slapped the wall hard, burning his palm. Virgil’s theory made sense yet he couldn’t quite believe it. Stacey – the victim of some psychotic drug? He’d been sure her ordeal was sexual in nature. The fact they’d tied her up and undressed her. Her vulgar comments the next day. It all pointed to rape or sexual assault.

“The pathologist’s report came back negative,” Karl mumbled into the wall.

“And so do ninety-nine percent of doping tests on football players – but do you think they’re all clean?”

Karl spun around, determined to find a flaw. “The pattern’s all wrong. Doesn’t Professor Leach need to monitor his human lab rats after he’s juiced them? Why would he let them go after he’s gone to the trouble of capturing them?”

“Too risky. If he held them for a week, or even a couple of days, people would ask questions. A date’s the perfect cover. They’re only gone for a night and everyone assumes they’re having a sleepover. As for Leach monitoring his lab rats, who says he doesn’t? He might be watching them from afar. Observing their behavior.”

“
Fuck!
” Karl cursed through clenched teeth, his brain overloading. “This is too much,” he said, returning to his seat. “I can’t get my head around it.”

“It’s only a theory. There’s a lot of extrapolation here.”

“But you believe it, don’t you?”

Virgil waited a long time before answering. “Yeah, I do. But Karl, it’s only a hunch. And hunches don’t stand up in court.”

“They’re enough to investigate, though.”

Virgil shook his head. “I’ll talk to Walt – Detective McElroy – about what I’ve found. But he won’t be happy to open a case file that’s already closed. You sister’s death was a suicide – as far as the police are concerned, there’s nothing more to investigate. I can maybe persuade Walt to hand over some information on Leach’s hospital breakout but other than that, he won’t be any help.”

“But they could bring in Dr. Reynolds and Maxine for questioning. You found a connection between them and Professor Leach, and he’s an escaped convict. Surely that’s a lead worth investigating.”

“Maybe for the cops in Salem, but even if they hauled them in, what would they learn? Those two aren’t going to roll over and admit to harboring a fugitive. Without proof, there’s no way forward. You need something concrete to take to the police.”