Shadows Fall (35 page)

However, something in him just broke a little at the thought of hiding Titus from the world. It had never much bothered Charlie to stay in the proverbial closet—if only at work—because he had no one, he didn’t dare have anyone. Conversely, now that he and Titus were… whatever they were, he constantly fought the urge to say ‘fuck the world’ and just
come out
completely.

Opening his mouth, Charlie fully intended to let it all spill out. He’d trusted Sonny with his life countless times. He could do it again. He took a deep breath, but the words wouldn’t come. Instead, he simply said, “I told you, he’s my friend. I’ve seen him in action and I know he’s the real deal.”

His partner had caught him in an intent stare, broken only by his rapid blinking. It seemed like Sonny was trying to flay open his psyche and pull out all of his darkest secrets, like some kind of human dowsing rod. Yet, as Charlie met the unwavering question that hovered within that gaze, something else wallowed there in those whiskey-brown depths. It looked something like…disappointment.

Chapter Twenty-five

Charlie sat alone in his Charger in the parking lot across the street from the back of the SevenTek building. It was an old building, probably circa 1970’s, on Fifth Street just on the wrong side of the border of the ‘nice’ part of town. Squat and square, the building was all faded brick and gold-tinted reflective windows—ugly as homemade sin if anyone asked Charlie.

While it looked average sized from the road front, the structure extended out the back to form a long ‘L’ shape. Charlie had spent an hour sitting across from the façade in a Fifth Street parking lot, and then another hour around back. Since he’d taken his tour during the day, he had no idea if there was a night watchman, so a brief stakeout was imperative. There wasn’t one, which was peculiar in and of itself. Though he did notice a hired security drive-by every half hour, they would be easy enough to evade.

Charlie jumped a foot off his seat when someone rapped on his car window close to his head. Of course it was Sonny, but Charlie couldn’t seem to convince his thundering pulse of that fact. Concentrating on slowing his blood flow back down, he climbed out of the low-slung car and had to suppress a guffaw when he finally got a good look at Sonny.

DeRossi had never been in the military, but he apparently thought this job called for full on tactical covert ops gear. From his shiny black steel-toe boots and subdued urban-camo pants, to his black plate carrier harnessed over a thin base-layer shirt. The guy even had eye-black smeared around his eyes—as if he wasn’t swarthy enough—and a black knit cap bunched up on the top of his head that Charlie would bet money was a balaclava.

“Um…wow,” was all he could think of to say.

Sonny glared at him, then shrugged. “Fuck it. We’re likely enough to get caught as it is. I don’t have to make it easy for them.”

Charlie’s answering shrug was just as uncaring. “I guess you have a point.” He’d dressed in all black too, only without the tactical gear. He hoped they wouldn’t be in there long enough to use it. “Got everything you need?”

Patting his sling pack, Sonny nodded. “Got it. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. Let’s go fuck up our lives.”

Charlie locked up the Charger and slung his gun belt around his hips. This wasn’t an official department sanctioned maneuver so he hoped to not have to use his weapon, but the belt carried other important items like his LED flashlight, handcuffs, a knife, and pepper spray. Better safe than sorry—well, as safe as they could be while committing a felony.

They made their way silently down the alley that ran alongside the western face of the SevenTek building until they found the light pole on which the meter box was affixed. Sonny opened the box to expose the meter inside, grasped the security seal tag, and shot Charlie a warning glance. “Just so you know, the minute I cut this off, we’re already up to a class one misdemeanor.”

“Least of my problems, really,” Charlie quipped.

Using a light pair of wire cutters, Sonny snipped the tag and threaded it through its hole. After that, he removed the tamper seal ring and pulled out the meter. He put a clear plastic cover on each of the four prongs that extended from the back of the meter, then inserted the device back into its cradle. Last, he closed the meter box and put a heavy padlock on the hasp. “That will slow them down a little when they get out here to figure out what the problem is.”

“Right,” Charlie said, clapping him on the back. “Now we gotta move. No idea how long it will take them to be alerted about the power outage. I’m sure they have some backup power, but I’m willing to bet they’ll have diverted it to security lights, refrigeration units, and machines that maintain the status quo of their experiments. It’s also possible that the security system could send a power outage message to the monitoring company.”

Sonny nipped one more wire that ran up the same post. “There, that might help.”

“What was it?”

“The phone line,” Sonny answered with a shit-eating grin. The bastard was enjoying this just a little too much.

“Nice. Let’s go.” Charlie led the way to the maintenance door he’d spotted, eyeing the security camera mounted above it. There were no lights on it, so he hoped the backup power wasn’t running the cameras. Sonny pulled his balaclava over his face and stepped up behind him. Charlie rolled his eyes and yanked a crowbar off of his belt.

He jabbed the pronged end of the tool into the crack of the door and put all of his strength into levering the door open, accompanied by a chorus of groans from Sonny.

“We’re going to jail,” Sonny muttered as Charlie popped the lock and opened the door with a creak.

Just as he’d suspected, the door opened to a landing at the top of a staircase. The facility was built onto an incline, and the maintenance staircase was situated at the lowest point of the foundation. Because of this, while the elevator ride down to the underground lab had been a fairly long one, the flight of stairs was significantly shorter.

They descended quickly and found themselves faced with another heavy metal door. This would be the tricky part. If the alarm panel had a battery backup, Charlie would have only thirty seconds to destroy it before the security company was notified of a break-in. It was that thirty-second window that allowed the owner of the property to make it inside and punch in their code without sending a false alert.

Charlie was poised with the crowbar, ready to break through the second door just as he had the first, when Sonny stepped in front of him and pulled it open. At Charlie’s narrow-eyed stare, he just shrugged. “It’s not unusual for an inner stairwell door to be unlocked, or to sometimes not even
have
a lock.”

Cautiously Charlie poked his head through the door, into the observation area of the underground lab. The area was dimly lit by emergency lights. He saw nothing and heard nothing but the incessant beeping of the alarm panel, signaling the thirty second warning. He had no idea how much time they had left—if the alarm had started when he broke in the first door or when they opened the second—but he wasn’t going to waste any more of it.

Stepping fully inside with Sonny right behind him, Charlie raised the crowbar and knocked the control panel off the wall. Once it was hanging just by its wires, Sonny stepped in and deftly disconnected them. Charlie spared a glance at the cleanrooms, taking in the heavy deadbolts and keypads for access codes. They wouldn’t be getting in there with the time and the equipment they had, but that was okay—for the moment. It was records he was after.

Charlie led Sonny across the observation deck to the elevator, and then it hit him. “
Fuck
. How the goddamn hell did I not think of this. With the power out, the elevator won’t run.”

Sonny shot him a raised-brow look and shook his head. “I’m telling you, man, I don’t know where your head has been at. Come on, let’s look around. There has to be a stairway to the top somewhere—fire codes and all.”

Charlie winced, running a hand through his hair. It wasn’t like him to miss such a stupid detail. Something about this place…it just made him anxious, disoriented, and he didn’t know if it his instincts trying to warn him of something or if he was just fucking losing it. “Yeah…yeah, you’re right. Let’s go through here.”

There was only one other door in the observation area, and it spilled out into a narrow, pitch-black hallway.
No emergency lights here
, he thought. He slipped his flashlight out of his utility belt and shone it around in a sweeping arch. His shoulders slumped with relief when he quickly located the door marked ‘stairs’ right across the hall.

“Up we go,” Sonny said.

And so they did, trudging up two flights of stairs and through a door that opened up into the long hallway Charlie had toured earlier. Holding up a hand for Sonny to stay still, Charlie listened to the sounds of the vacant building. He heard the whirring of computers and high-tech machines, obviously running on the emergency power, but he heard no voices or footsteps.

It was like being in a carnival funhouse—an endless hall with a dozen mostly unmarked doors that led to god-knows-where. Charlie glanced at Sonny, then tipped his head towards the end of the hall. “These first three sets of doors are labs and the animal housing area. The rest, I have no idea. You take the right, I’ll take the left?”

At his partner’s nod, Charlie turned to the first door on the left side. He jiggled the handle and it miraculously opened. Inside was a Spartan office, with a large oak desk, a bookcase, a small file cabinet, and little else. The placard on the desk read Dr. Ariana Keyes, PhD.

Charlie did a cursory search and found nothing of much importance. The file cabinet just held personal financial documents and other odds and ends obviously not related to any experiments. The bookcase held a few textbooks and science journals, some tacky tchotchkes, and a few pictures of three dour dark-haired, dark-eyed children. Charlie sighed heavily.
Strike one
.

He popped out of the office just as Sonny came through the door across from him, shaking his head. “Nada. Just a supply room.”

“Mine was Dr. Keyes’ office, but it’s clean. I’m hoping some of these offices might belong to the other six investors. It would be good to know who they are since I couldn’t get Keyes to cough them up.”

Sonny tried the next door on his side. “Fuck. Broom closet.”

When Charlie tried to open the door beside Dr. Keyes,’ it wouldn’t budge. “Locked,” he grumbled. Upon trying another one, he realized it was locked too. It was then that he noticed a card reader affixed to the door frame. “Shit, these need an ID to open.” A quick glance down the hall told him that all of the remaining doors on his side had readers.

Suddenly, an idea came to him. He retraced his steps back to Keyes’ office and began rummaging through her desk. He didn’t find what he was looking for, so he moved on to the file cabinet. He brushed his fingers along the file folders, reading the tabs. Finally, he found something useful. He found a folder full of copies of Dr. Keyes’ personnel documents along with—
halle-fuckin-lujah
—a spare ID card.

“Jackpot,” he said to Sonny, waving the card as he stepped back out in the hall.

“Nice. The next two on my side are the bathrooms, and the last two are locked with sliders just like these, so I might as well come along with you.”

Charlie approached the second door on the left with Sonny on his six. He swiped the card and prayed for a green light. He got one. As soon as the reader lit up, he pushed on the handle and the door swung open. Between the two of them, they were able to search the office in just a few minutes. Either the owners of these offices had been coached to keep no important information in their easily accessible workspaces, or there just wasn’t anything untoward going on. Charlie still had the ominous feeling that this lab was conducting illegal studies.

“Dr. Joshua L. Murphy, MD, PhD,” Sonny read from the nameplate on the desk.

Charlie whipped out his tiny Moleskine notebook and jotted the name down. They didn’t have a lot of time to waste trying to find more information about each individual investor. More research could be done from the station, consulting professor Google.

The next five offices were nearly mirror images of the first two, except they found placards with the names Dr. Major Cosentino, PhD; Dr. Katashi Suda, MD, PhD; Dr. Olbrecht Svenson, PhD; and Dr. Karl E. Sever, FACMG, MD, PhD. There were a total of seven offices for seven investors, and Charlie had each name tucked inside his trusty notebook. Hell, he’d even swiped business cards from a couple of them.

“Damn, that was a lot of letters,” Sonny mused.

Charlie could tell that his partner was wilting, losing faith that Charlie’s hunch was right. He wasn’t ready to give up, though, not until they found where all of the medical records and experiment data were stored. He was hoping they were old school and still kept hard copy files, though he’d use the four-terabyte flash drive he brought if he had to.

Taking a deep breath, Charlie swiped the stolen ID card into the reader and pushed the door open. The room was completely dark except for the triangle of light that shone inside from the open door. He clicked on his flashlight and shone it around the room. “Jackpot.”

The room was small, probably no more than ten by twelve, and the far wall was lined with floor to ceiling bureau-style file cabinets. There was a computer on the opposite wall, but Charlie figured he’d be quicker at finding what he was looking for with paper and ink. He and Sonny both turned on the flashlight apps on their phones and placed them at opposing corners, then used their hand-held lights to search through the files. In the second drawer from the top of the middle file cabinet, Charlie hit pay dirt—patient files.