The Death Row Complex (28 page)

“Hello, this is Roger Gilman.”

“
ROGER!
Get to the Stone lab! Right now!
” a man’s voice shouted.

“Huh?” Gilman asked. “McMullan?”

“Yeah, it’s me!” McMullan answered. “There’s been a murder at Katrina Stone’s lab. Someone killed the guard and then went after her. Katrina burned the dude’s face off with some kind of acid. She says it’s the same guy that attacked her on the beach.

“He’s still in the lab, but she doesn’t know when he’ll pull it together enough to get away. Far as I’m concerned, he
won’t
get away again. I’m on my way and I’m hauling ass, but I’m coming from La Jolla. Where are you?”

While McMullan spoke, Gilman picked up the pants he had just removed a moment earlier and pulled them back on, holding the phone to an ear with his shoulder while he fastened his belt. The pants were still warm.

“I’m at the hotel. I was about to get in the shower—”

Gilman’s sentence was broken by the soft beep of his call waiting signal. He paused, mid-sentence, to glance at the caller ID on the phone. It was Dawn. His plans for attending his friend’s daughter’s wedding would have to wait. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Gilman said, and hung up.

He tossed the cell phone onto the bed while he located the shirt he had worn that day, turned it right side out, and then hastily pulled it on. After double-checking that his wallet and keys were still in the pockets of his pants, Gilman rushed out of the hotel room to his car.

As he started the ignition, the cellular phone still lying on the bed in his hotel room rang again.

The second time he did not answer his phone, Dawn assumed that her husband was really indisposed, even for an emergency. A wife’s emergency didn’t usually equal an FBI emergency, and Dawn had been OK with that for a long time. But this time, she was sure her emergency was important enough for her to keep calling.

When he didn’t answer again, she left an urgent message and then sat down at the kitchen table, the card still in one hand. She was now shaking with adrenaline.

After a moment of thought, Dawn stood from the table. She pulled a ziplock bag out of a kitchen drawer and locked the card, and its envelope, inside. And then called her husband a third time. And again, he did not pick up.

7:02 P.M.
PST

By the time Sean McMullan arrived, a large pool of blood had flowed out into the hallway from beneath the laboratory door. Students and faculty members stood encircling it, stepping backward periodically to avoid the soaking of their shoes as the puddle continued to grow. One of them had called 911, and two police officers followed McMullan off the elevator and toward the scene. McMullan flashed his badge to let the policemen know he was in charge.

The slain guard’s keys were still dangling from the closed door.

“Has anyone gone in or come out of there?” McMullan asked of the crowd that had accumulated.

“No,” said an older man with a mustache. “I haven’t let the students enter, and nobody has come out since I’ve been standing here. I’ve heard noises from inside, however.”

McMullan paled. “And how long have you been standing there?”

“About five minutes.”

McMullan turned back to the officers. “You’re on crowd control,” he said firmly and then turned the key to open the door.

When he entered the room, McMullan glanced down at the body on the floor. There was no reason to take a pulse, nor would it have even been possible at the neck. The guard’s throat was neatly flayed open from ear to ear, his face a ghastly white and frozen in a contorted expression of fear. The cleanliness with which the carotid artery and jugular vein had been severed indicated to McMullan that the man had never had time to feel pain. He made a mental note to relay this as gently as he could to the guard’s family.

There was no way to enter the laboratory without walking through the pool of blood that surrounded the guard. McMullan treaded carefully to avoid slipping on the wet linoleum, stepping through the blood, over the fallen guard, and toward the dry floor inside the room. When he reached the clean space, he stomped on the linoleum a few times in different places to clear the bottoms of his shoes. As he did, he heard a soft moaning coming from beyond a gap in the wall to his right. McMullan quickly approached the source of the sound.

At first, McMullan was grateful to see Katrina standing upright and apparently unhurt. His relief was quickly replaced with anger as he realized that she had willfully disregarded his instruction to get out of the lab and as far away from the scene as possible.

Katrina stood over a large man, who lay on the floor covering his face with his hands. The flesh on both of the man’s hands had corroded to the bone. Beneath, McMullan could somewhat make out the hideous molten mass that had been his face.

As McMullan stood taking in the scene before him, the man moaned again and wriggled slightly. Katrina kicked him—hard—in the back, and he quieted back down and was still again. When she looked up and saw McMullan, she was not smiling. There was no relief in her eyes.

“OK, McMullan,” she said authoritatively. “It’s time you fill me in on the details of this story that I haven’t been told. And I don’t give a fuck how classified your information is.”

10:53 P.M.
PST

“Who are you
?”

Hours after the attack in the lab, Katrina whispered to the man in the hospital bed beside her. Of course, he could not answer. The patient would remain unconscious for at least the remainder of this night, his face grafted with someone else’s skin and encased in cotton gauze, his breathing labored through a tube in his nose and another in his mouth. His hands were also heavily bandaged. They would never produce a viable fingerprint again.

The steady beep of the man’s heart monitor clashed with the ticking of the wall clock beside the hospital bed. The two noises synched up for a moment and then staggered again, two reminders that time would not stand still for Katrina to solve the mystery before her. A mystery that clearly held her future, if not her life.

Katrina tore her eyes away from the man who had now attacked her twice, and glanced up at the wall clock. From the first moment she had stared into his dark eyes in the lab, she had known that this was the man from Black’s Beach. Confirmation of this, in the thickness of his body and the style of his movements as he chased her through the lab, had been redundant.

The man’s DNA had already been fast-tracked at FBI Forensics, but Katrina was not hopeful. She hated the idea that his identification relied on the possibility that he would already be in the database. That he had to have a criminal record. That she had so little control over the situation. In her head, Katrina heard Tom calling her a control freak.

So what?
she said to herself.
It’s my own life I’m trying to
control.

Katrina looked up from her thoughts when the door opened, and the two armed guards beside it parted to allow Roger Gilman and Sean McMullan into the room. McMullan held a thick file and an expression of concern. He dismissed the two police officers, and they stepped out and closed the door without asking questions.

“What’s that?” Katrina asked.

“It’s the information you want,” he said. “And you are
not
about to see this file. Understood?” His eyes locked on hers for a moment, and Katrina could see the struggle within Sean McMullan as he handed her the Manila envelope.

“There’s something else that isn’t in there yet,” Gilman said. “The DNA results have come back.”

Katrina was shocked. The PCR analysis had obviously been performed with amazing speed, and for the analysis to already have reached a conclusion, they must have found the man in the database.

“Great!” she said. “So who is he?”

“Well, there’s a problem,” Gilman continued. “We think we need to do the analysis again. Part of the reason we’re here right now is to obtain another blood sample.”

“Why?”

“Because according to the DNA evidence, this man is currently incarcerated and has been for the last eight years solid. I don’t suppose you want to guess where.”

The clock and the heart monitor synched again, and then staggered. Katrina’s vision blurred as she stared absently at the rise and fall of the unconscious man’s chest.

Then she blinked and looked up. “Do you have a mug shot of the San Quentin inmate?” Gilman reached into his briefcase and removed an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph. He handed it to Katrina. “Yep, that’s him all right,” she said, exasperated.

For a brief instant, she struggled with the question of how the man could have been in two places at once, and then suddenly, understanding dawned. Katrina looked again at the photograph and her eyes narrowed, but then, she was smiling.

The scar. The scar over the man’s eye in the photograph. It was subtle. But it had not been there in the laboratory.

Quietly, Katrina began to chuckle to herself. The two other investigators exchanged a confused glance, and then they, too, began to laugh.

“How could we have missed it?” Gilman asked.

“Because we weren’t looking for it,” McMullan answered. “In fact, I bet they’ve been masquerading as one man for a long time.”

F
EBRUARY 4, 2016
4:01 A.M.
PST

In his shared minimum-security cell at San Quentin, Oscar Morales lay awake in a rare state of insomnia.

Two hours earlier, it had been a dream that awakened him. In his dream, Chuck had been at the prison. Oscar had handed his brother two vials of anthrax across the table of the visitation room. And with a smile, Chuck had opened one of the vials and swallowed its contents like a shot of whiskey. Oscar had been powerless to stop him.

Chuck’s grin quickly decayed from sweet into freakish as an eruption of black sores obscured the flesh of his face. As Oscar watched, helpless, the sores grew together and began bursting, leaving behind a blackened, bloody nightmare of devoured flesh. Chuck raised his hands—also corroding—to his face and began to scream.

But the scream that awoke Oscar was his own.

“
Shut the fuck up!
” his cellmate shouted, and Oscar snapped out of the dream.