Panacea (5 page)

After a long pause with a nakedly suspicious expression, the kid turned his chair and wheeled away.

“See you tomorrow, Chet,” he said over his shoulder.

“You got it, buddy!”

As soon as he was out of sight, Mrs. Cochran tried to press the vial back into Chaim's hand. “I know you mean well, but I can't take this.”

But he wasn't having any of it. “You've got to, Mrs. Cochran. It's his only chance for a normal life. Just promise me one thing: If, like, he suddenly gets a whole lot better, don't mention my name, okay? Just say it's a miracle and leave it at that.”

“Miracles come from God, Chet. This isn't from God.”

He'd spotted her crucifixes and rosaries when she brought Tommy to PT and knew she was Catholic. A praying Catholic. Didn't see a whole lot of those these days.

“Th … God works in mysterious ways, Mrs. Cochran.”

Whoa! He'd almost said “the All-Mother.” That would have totally blown it.

He backed out the storm door onto the porch, pleading as he moved. “Just one dose, Mrs. Cochran. Half an ounce. I'm begging you for Tommy's sake. One dose is all it will take.”

He closed the door and hurried away. His first glance back showed her staring at him through the glass, her hands clutched around the vial. When he looked back again the door was closed.

She had to believe him. She
had
to.

 

5

A miracle … Tommy had stopped right around the corner from the front hall and listened. He'd heard Chet and Mom mention a miracle. Tommy
craved
a miracle.

As soon as he'd heard the door slam, he'd wheeled his chair up behind his mother. The rubber wheels made no noise, so when she turned and saw him there she jumped and gasped—and almost dropped the little glass tube in her hand.

“Tommy! You startled me!”

“What did Chet give you?”

Her fingers tightened around the tube, hiding it. “Nothing.”

“Mo-om.” He drew out the word. “I heard him say ‘miracle.' If he—”

“Oh, Tommy, dear,” she said, kneeling beside his chair and getting eye to eye with him. Usually he liked when she did that, but he had a feeling he wasn't going to like this. “Chet means well. I'm sure he believes his folk remedy can help you, but it's just some herbs and things that might do more harm than good.”

“Chet wouldn't hurt me.”

“Not on purpose.” Now she showed him the tube, holding it up between them, just inches away. Tommy had to admit the liquid in it looked yucky. “But I'm sure even he doesn't know all the ingredients in this stuff. It might not hurt a regular person, but who knows how it will mix with the meds Doctor Sklar is giving you. It might even cause an infection.”

“But what if it really can cure me?”

“Don't you think Doctor Sklar would know about it? He's spent his whole life treating children like you.” She shook the tube like she was shaking a finger at him. “All this is is false hope. If you drank it, you'd be expecting a miracle that would never come. And when it didn't, you'd be so terribly disappointed. I don't want you to go through that.”

“But—”

Tommy couldn't help it … he began to cry. He was tired of the swollen knees and the bent fingers and being in a wheelchair and hurting ALL. THE. TIME.

Finally, when he found his voice, he said, “I don't want to be like this forever, Mom! I'm sick of riding the short bus! I wanna play soccer, I wanna ride my bike, I wanna WALK!”

Now she was crying too.

“I want that too! This is why I sent you to set up the chess. I don't want anyone making promises that won't come true, because it's so much worse when they don't.” She pushed herself to her feet. “Now … we won't talk about this anymore.”

The glass tube disappeared into the pocket of her sweatpants.

Tommy wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his Giants shirt. “Okay.”

“Want to play chess?”

He didn't. Not really. But since she'd kept him home from school today …

“I guess so.”

“Good. Set it up and we'll play, okay?”

He set it up, and they played, and he won only one out of three games because all he could think about was that tube in his mother's pocket.

Afterward he kept an eye on her. He pretended to go watch
SpongeBob
in the living room, but peeked back around the corner and saw her shove something deep into the kitchen garbage pail.

He bided his time, waiting until she went upstairs to use the bathroom. As soon as she reached the second floor he wheeled himself into the kitchen and opened the cabinet under the sink. He pawed through the wet paper towels and remnants of breakfast until he found the glass tube. His gnarled fingers had trouble with the rubber stopper, but finally it came free with a soft pop.

He hesitated for a second—what if Mom was right and it made him sick?—then upended it into his mouth.

Gah!
It tasted awful!

He forced a swallow, then restoppered the empty tube and jammed it back into the garbage. By the time his mother returned he was playing
DNA Wars
on his old PS3 …

 … and waiting for the miracle.

 

6

“He's
dead
?” Nelson Fife said, staring at Chaim Brody's body, facedown on the floor.

The inside of the run-down, double-wide trailer was almost a carbon copy of Hanrahan's front room: virtually no furniture and the same array of long wooden trays filled with strange little plants basking in artificial sunlight.

He'd rushed out here to the North Fork from the city, fighting traffic on the LIE, then following his GPS onto secondary roads, then this gravel path to a double-wide trailer on the edge of what would be a potato field when growing season began. All to question a dead man.

Add that to his endless headache and his patience had just about reached its limit.

Nelson didn't know who he wanted to kick more—Bradsher or Brody.

Brother Bradsher, dressed in the same sack-cut suit he'd worn in the recording, nodded. “Just … keeled over. I don't think I was here ten minutes when he said, ‘Good-bye,' and he was gone. Just like Hanrahan.”

He turned on Bradsher. “What did you say to set him off?”

“Nothing. I swear. I didn't even get a chance to set up the camera. But he knew we were coming.”

“He told you that? How—?”

“No.” He pointed to the side of one of the growing trays. “Look.”

Nelson stepped around and stared in shock. Someone had written a number in black Magic Marker on the unfinished wood.

536

“But how could he know?”

Bradsher shrugged. “Maybe he saw what happened to Hanrahan's house and guessed.”

Uncle Jim had studied these panaceans. He'd said they were like the old communist cells—independent functioning units, minimal knowledge of each other, connected by third parties. Maybe that was changing.

“Perhaps. But I still don't understand why he died so quickly. You sure you didn't—?”

Bradsher held up a pair of glass test tubes. “Maybe it was because I came up with these.”

Nelson felt his knees wobble. “You've found some?”

“I peeked in before I entered and saw him with his arm behind the refrigerator. So that was the first place I looked.”

Finally … finally!

Thrilled, he cupped his shaking hands before him to receive the vials. Each was three-quarters filled with a cloudy fluid. He had it … he finally had the panacea.

“What are we going to do with them?”

“I'm going to use them to prove to someone high up that we're not crazy. And once we convince him the panacea is real, we'll have all the resources we need to track it to its source.”

Bradsher gestured around. “And what about all this?”

“Same as with Hanrahan.”

With a curt nod, Bradsher hurried out. Nelson wandered over to Brody's cooling corpse. The NSA phone-and-text surveillance had found a number of “miracle cure” hits connected with a Moriches physical therapy facility. Chaim “Chet” Brody had been easy to trace. The backgrounding had made a good case for his being the panacean connected with the cures, and the trays of plants confirmed it. But Nelson needed to see the final piece of the puzzle.

He pulled a knife from his pocket and unfolded it as he knelt beside the corpse. He grabbed the back of Brody's long-sleeve T-shirt and slit it top to bottom, then spread the edges.

Well, well, well … another of those strange tattoos. The final confirmation.

Bradsher returned with a red metal can.

“You know the protocol,” Nelson said.

The fumes that filled the air as Bradsher began sloshing the accelerant onto the plants bumped the intensity of Nelson's headache from four to six. He headed for the door. Outside in the twilight, he seated himself behind the wheel of his car and dug into the pocket of his suit jacket—the same herringbone he'd worn to the meeting with Pickens—for the bottle of Advil he'd taken to carrying everywhere.

As with last night—or rather, early this morning—no trace of the plants would remain, and the panacean himself would defy identification for a while. Not indefinitely, but it would take time to determine that he belonged to no gang and was not connected to any drug traffickers. As the local yokels scratched their baffled heads, Nelson would be well on his way to tying up the panacea and its makers once and for all.

Less than a minute later the trailer burst into flame with a loud
woomp!
Nelson saw Brother Bradsher hurrying across the yard, silhouetted against the flames. They'd faked the incendiary booby trap on the video he'd shown Pickens. No need for a repeat performance. Tomorrow he'd report a similar story: The panacean dropped dead and then his incendiaries exploded, taking the camera along with everything else. The only new wrinkle would be that Nelson had obtained samples of the panacea before everything blew to hell.

Nelson dry-swallowed three of the Advil as he put the car in gear and drove away. Was that irony? Taking Advil when he had something in his pocket that would cure his headaches forever?

He thought about it—he could take one dose and use the other to convince Pickens. No more headaches. Even better, the panacea wouldn't limit itself to his headaches. It would cure Nelson of
everything
—these migraines and all other maladies, known and unknown. Really, who knew what was lurking in one's body? He took care of himself, got a checkup every couple of years, and led a life rigorously free of risky behavior: didn't smoke or do drugs, ate a vegetarian diet, drank only wine, and that sparingly. But that didn't mean a cancer couldn't be smoldering somewhere in his body—say, his pancreas, for instance—hiding, waiting until it had progressed to a terminal stage before revealing itself.

Tempting, but no. That would be just plain wrong. He had a higher calling. But perhaps …

He exited the LIE and took the Northern State Parkway toward East Meadow …

 

7

“We've got to stop meeting like this,” Deputy Lawson said. “Three times in one day. Tongues will be wagging.”

You wish, Laura thought, as she surveyed the chaotic scene before her.

She was tired. She wanted to be home. But instead she'd felt compelled to drive out to the North Fork to view another crime scene. Jeff Hager, one of her fellow MEs, had been on deck to take this one, but Deputy Lawson had said the scene was so damn near identical to the Sunken Meadow fire that Laura just had to see it.

Long Island's South Fork was the crowded home of all the sundry Hamptons—South, East, West, and Bridge—and their moneyed inhabitants. The North Fork was still relatively rural and had reinvented itself, morphing from corn and potato farms into wine country.

Smoke drifted from the charred ruins of a double-wide trailer situated on the southwest corner of a ten- or twelve-acre rectangle of plowed earth. Two fire trucks and an EMS rig idled around it, red and blue flashers lighting the night. Their work done, the Cutchogue firemen were winding up their hoses while the EMTs hung out.

Waiting for her most likely.

What appeared to be a corpse lay on the brown grass under a plastic sheet.

Also waiting.

Phil waved toward the firemen. “These boys were just on their way back from Southold when they spotted the smoke and turned in for a look-see. Good thing they did. They managed to pull the body from the trailer but weren't able to kill the blaze. We don't have a crime scene—well, not in any useful sense—but at least you've got an uncooked DB to work with.”

“Was he growing something too?”

“Yep.” He popped his neck as he led her over to the embers. “And it looks like the same kind of super accelerant as before.”