MIND FIELDS (13 page)

  “Whatever you prefer … Shelly.” She sat down and crossed her legs, as Richie struggled to keep his eyes off them.  “So, Hank tells me you worked at BNI.”

  “Hank would be right, for a change.”  She smiled. 

  “He is on occasion. Was he right in thinking that you suspected something unethical was going on there?”

  “I didn’t think so at first.  I mean, most of those high tech companies are pretty secretive.  They have to be if they want to keep their competitors’ spies away.  I kind of took the paranoia in stride for a while, and then Helen went into status and came out of the hospital a month later with Jello-brain.”

  “Status?”

  “Oh, sorry… status epilepticus … uncontrolled, sustained seizures.  Helen had only worked for the company for a couple of months, but she and I had become real close.  She had some kind of accident as a kid that left her with a seizure disorder.  She took her epilepsy drugs faithfully; hadn’t had a seizure in over twenty years from what she had told me.  Then one day after a routine employee physical, she just collapsed and started jerking around…her whole body, right there in front of me.  I’m a doctor of genetics, not a medical doctor.  I freaked, you know?  I mean, when someone you know collapses like that and you don’t know what to do … I felt so helpless.  I called out for help, but it took them almost a half hour to stop the seizures.  They said the convulsions were so bad that she didn’t get enough oxygen to her brain.  The last time I saw her, nearly a year after she got out of the hospital, she still didn’t know who I was.  God, it’s so sad.”  Her eyes welled up with tears.

  Kincade handed her a tissue.  “I know this is hard for you, but…”

  “No.  No, it’s OK.  I want to get those bastards.”

  “So why did you suspect that BNI was responsible for what had happened to Helen?”

  “Well, at first I didn’t.  I talked to the doctor at BNI who had examined her that day, and he told me she looked fine, but that the test he had done showed the level of seizure medicine in her blood was way too low.  Maybe she got a bad batch of medicine, or maybe her metabolism had just changed, he said, but for some reason, the medicine that had controlled her seizures for years just stopped working.”

  Her green eyes sunk toward the desktop.  “I bought it hook, line and sinker.  That is, until a few months later when Billy Jackson died.”

  “Billy Jackson?”

  “A new programmer that BNI had hired.  Just like Helen, he’d only been there a couple of months when the accident happened.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “His car went off of an icy bridge and plunged into the Middle River near Annapolis.  Everyone figured that he had lost control on the ice.  The car was recovered months later and was too badly damaged for a useful investigation.  Nothing that would raise suspicion.”

  “Then why did it raise yours?”

  “Well, just like Helen, Billy had only been hired at BNI a couple of months before he died, and just like Helen, he had some kind of a brain injury when he was a kid… a football injury, I think.  He walked a little funny, but you’d have never known it otherwise.  I knew that our work had something to do with making nanobots for the human brain, and I started to get a little suspicious.  But what really did it for me was when Janice Saint-Martin got arrested for de-chipping her car.”

  Kincade raised an eyebrow.  “I remember that case.  See, I’m the guy they send to investigate motor vehicle fatalities when the security chips have been removed.  Even though Saint-Martin didn’t die, they called me in because it was such a strange case.  If I remember right, she was pulled over for doing one-twenty in a fifty zone.  When they pulled her over, she claimed she didn’t even remember turning on to State Road 87, and swore that she had never gone even one mile an hour over the speed limit in her whole life.  Even when the mechanic she hired to de-chip the car testified against her in a plea deal, she swore that she’d never met the guy…denied ever taking her car to him even when he presented the security chip from her car as evidence in the case.  She lost the case, but she was pretty damned convincing.  Even I almost believed her in spite of the evidence.”

  “You should have.  Jan was the most honest girl I ever met, and I knew her real well.  In fact, I helped her get the job there.  Jan and I grew up together, went to University of Maryland together, and shared an apartment in Columbia after college.  When I started at BNI, she stayed on at Maryland to do research, but she never really enjoyed it.  I talked her into applying at BNI, but that was before I knew about Helen and Billy.”

  “When I started to get suspicious, I begged her to leave.  See, back in college she had this obnoxious jock boyfriend who didn’t take too kindly to rejection.  He got really pissed when University didn’t want him on their football team, and then when Jan dumped him…well, he really freaked out.  I don’t know what she ever saw in him anyway … well, he did have a pretty hot bod, but he was such a creep.  Anyhow, he beat her up pretty bad … severe concussion the doctors said.  Fortunately, she recovered completely and BNI was glad to get her.  Only, what I didn’t realize until Helen’s brain was turned to Jello and Billy drove his Chevy into the Middle River, was that BNI was glad to get her because
she
had had a brain injury too.  In fact, once I started snooping, I discovered that all three of them had had nearly the same injury…the same part of the brain, that is — the right frontal lobe.  Quite the coincidence, huh?  I begged Helen to quit, but she thought I was just paranoid.  A week later, she was arrested.  She was lucky, I suppose.”

  “Lucky?  How do you figure?”

  “Well, she was supposed to die.  Don’t you get it, Detective?  That’s what BNI was working on, I’m sure of it.  They were looking for a way to control people’s brains so completely that they could get those people to kill themselves. If you don’t believe nanobots can do that, look up Dr. Sandra Fletcher at Hopkins.  She’s the real expert.  BNI just stole their ideas from her. “

  “Look, Doc, I may be suspicious of BNI, but don’t you think that’s a little …”

  “Paranoid?” she finished his sentence, once again.  “I don’t think Lester Hanes would think so.  Have you checked his medical records?  I’ll bet you dinner and a bottle of wine he had some kind of head trauma in his life that damaged his right frontal lobe.”

  “I don’t think Hank would approve of that bet,” Richie Kincade said.
Don’t imagine my wife would appreciate it too much either,
he thought to himself.

 
“Screw Hank,” she smiled as she unfolded her hands and ran a finger up the side of her thigh, curling it under the hem of her short, tight skirt.

 
I’m sure that’s just what Hank has in mind, honey,
Richie thought as he struggled to divert his gaze. 

___

  Detective Kincade slept poorly that night.  He had been at this job a long time and he usually left his cases at the office, but every once in a while one of them would just get under his skin.  This was one of those times.

  He couldn’t get Shelly Lange out of his mind.  It wasn’t so much the emerald eyes staring out from under her long brunette hair, though they were mesmerizing.  It was the thought of BNI being able to control the minds of unsuspecting subjects.  Even if they could find a way to do it, which Kincade doubted, how could anyone hire good, hard-working people like Helen Jensen, Billy Jackson, Janice Saint-Martin and Lester Hanes, just to kill them off in the name of a scientific experiment?  And if they were willing to do something like that, what was their end-goal?  It must be something awfully sinister if they had to
practice
the killing first.  The thoughts were too disturbing to sleep through.

  Richie was grateful to see the light of day creeping through the bedroom curtains, and rolled out of bed around six, tired of trying to find a way to doze off.  He gave Lara a light kiss on the cheek, careful not to wake her completely.  He was antsy to get to work, but saw no need to make Lara get up early to fix him breakfast.  He’d grab a cup of coffee at the station.

  Not surprisingly, Richie was the first one in that morning.  He turned on the coffee maker, and strode over to his desk.

  “Mornin’, Daisy.”

  The computer recognized Kincade’s voice, and awakened from sleep mode.  He could hear the hard drive whirring into action.

  “Good morning, Detective Kincade.  Did you sleep well?”

  “Not a wink, Daisy, but thanks for asking.” Kincade chuckled.  He was glad he had programmed a little bit of humanity into Daisy.  It somehow made it a little easier to talk to a plastic box.

  “What can I do for you, Detective?”

  “I don’t suppose you could get me glazed donut or two, now.”

  “I could call out for a delivery.”

  Kincade was caught off guard by the practical reply to his rhetorical question.  “Not a bad idea, Daisy.  Why don’t you make it a dozen mixed?  I’ll treat the boys today.  And when you’re done, see if you can get me an appointment with a Doctor Sandra Fletcher in the nanotech department at Hopkins for this morning.”

  “Right away, sir.”

  “Thanks, Daisy.”  Kincade went over to check the coffee while Daisy made the calls, and returned a few moments later with a piping hot mug in his hand.

  “The donuts will be at the downstairs desk in ten minutes, but Dr. Fletcher’s office won’t be open until nine.”

  “Damn, you’re good.” 

  Kincade couldn’t wait to make an appointment with Dr. Sandra Fletcher.  He poured his coffee into a road mug, and headed down to the front desk. 
The heck with the boys
, he thought to himself as he paid the delivery boy and tucked the box of donuts under his arm.

  “Check me out on Unit Five, Jake,” he said to the guard at the motor pool.  It was hardly necessary.  Unit Five was the only car Richie Kincade ever took, and it was always available.  The unit was a ’43 Chevy Malibu two-door sedan with light tan paint that was peeling away around the prominent dents in the left front panel from a memorable chase, one of the few in Kincade’s career.  He mostly dealt with dead people who weren’t too hard to catch up with.  The car held sentimental value for Kincade; to everyone else, it was a junker.

  “Early start this morning, eh Richie?  It wouldn’t have something to do with a certain green-eyed brunette, now would it?”  Word of Shelly Lange’s visit had spread through the station like fire on kerosene.

  Kincade raised an eyebrow.  “Geez, you guys are gonna get me in deep with the missus with that kind of talk.”  He shook his head.  “It’s not the green-eyed doc, OK?  Keep it mum on that, would ya?  It’s hard enough to make up to the wife for all the weird hours I work without having to explain away a thing like that.  It’s like having to deal with all the down side of a torrid affair without ever getting to touch the mistress.”

  “And here I was giving you credit for scoring with a perfect ten,” Jake smiled.

  “I got all the perfection I need at home, Jake.  Work’s just work.”

  Jake could only stare in admiration as Kincade drove off toward the lab at Hopkins.

___

  Sandi and Guy had gone to Ocean City for the season-ending weekend, and had decided to extend their vacation by an extra day to avoid the returning traffic along Route 50 on Labor Day.  They enjoyed a leisurely drive back on Tuesday, taking in Saint Michaels’ peaceful streets for a long lunch stop.  It was a bit out of the way, but it was the kind of offbeat thing that Guy liked to do.  Sandi had a harder time relaxing than Guy, but she found it refreshing to be confronted with the unexpected now and then.  Instead of the usual tense traffic battle to finish the weekend, the drive back from the beach turned out to be the most relaxing day of the trip.

  She did not feel like getting up for work on Wednesday morning, but she was so far behind from the long weekend, that she fought her way out from under the covers and made her way to the lab by nine-fifteen.

  Richie Kincade stopped after the third donut, but saved a few sips of the now-cold coffee to keep him occupied while he waited.  He knew what Dr. Fletcher looked like from the file he had accessed on the car’s computer.  He compared the picture on his monitor with each of the young women who entered the nanotech research facility that morning.  He had decided it would be best to intercept the doctor on her way in.  He had a better chance to get her to agree to an impromptu meeting if he caught her off-guard, rather than in the confines of her lab where the excuse of work or the moral support of co-workers might give her the courage to put him off.  He needed to see her right away.

  Kincade was sure he had missed her.  It seemed out of character for an academic ladder-climber to be late for work at her own lab.  He got out of the car and stretched, then reached in to grab his coffee and take one last big swig to finish it off.  As he lifted the mug, he spotted Sandi running up the steps of the nanotech building.

  “Shit!”  He tossed the mug in through the open window and chased after her. One of the advantages of Unit Five was that no one really wanted to steal it.  It was as loaded with sophisticated electronics as any other vehicle in the motor pool, but Unit Five’s exterior kept any would-be thieves from ever noticing what was inside.

  “Dr. Fletcher!”  He called after her as he raced up the steps.  “Dr. Fletcher,” he shouted a bit louder as she grabbed the door.

  Sandi turned and raised a hand to shade her eyes from the low-lying morning sun.  She squinted to focus on the silhouette Kincade created against the bright background. 

  “Thank you, Dr. Fletcher.”  Kincade panted, and paused to catch his breath as he stopped on the step below her.

  “Do I know you?” she asked.

  “No.  No, I doubt it.”  He pushed his right hand out toward her.  “Detective Richard Kincade, Baltimore P.D., Motor Vehicle Division.”

  “Was I speeding?  Boy, you guys are really dedicated, but …don’t I still need to be in my car for you to arrest me?”

  Kincade detected the hint of facetiousness, which Sandi made no effort to hide.  He let out a long deep breath, having finally caught his wind.

  “OK, OK.  I guess I left myself open for that one, Doc.  To be more precise, I’m with the Motor Vehicle Tech-Tampering Division, but that’s kind of a mouthful, you know?”

“Motor Vehicle Tech-Tampering Division?”  Sandi asked.

“Yeah.  We’re the guys that investigate when people de-chip cars for criminal activity.  Things like auto theft, burglary, homicide, that kind of stuff, but when I use words like
homicide
it kind of scares people, puts them on the defensive, you know?  So I try to avoid it on first introductions.”

  Sandi looked him straight in the eyes.  “Now look, I know I was speeding, but I’m sure I didn’t run over anyone.  I’d have felt the bump.  A body feels different than a pot hole … at least that’s what they tell me.”

  Sandi squirmed a bit as Kincade met her gaze with an inquisitive look. “Uh, I guess I should stop trying to be funny, huh, Detective?”

  Kincade nodded in agreement without saying a word.

  “I’ve always had a bit of a wry sense of humor … gets me in trouble every now and then.  I guess this is one of those times.”  She turned to face him directly, stood erect and pulled down at the edges of her wrinkled silk jacket, smoothing it against her body.  “Can we start over?”  She thrust her hand toward him.  “I’m Dr. Sandra Fletcher.  What can I do for you, Detective?

  Kincade motioned her to a bench by the front door.  It was a particularly pleasant late summer kind of day, and Sandi liked the idea of staying outside a bit longer before committing herself to the confines of the lab.