Dead End Deal (7 page)

Ritter said nothing.

Fisher glanced at the display, saw they were still connected, and decided two could play the same game. He had to draw a line here. Otherwise Ritter would be riding his ass continually. As he listened, waiting for Ritter to speak, his gaze went back out the window. He noticed a layer of grime on the outside of the pane. How’d it get there? Was the air this high up that dirty? And what about the person who had to dangle twenty-seven floors above unforgiving concrete once a year to clean it? No way in hell could he ever do that job. Not for all the money in the world. Not with his fear of heights.

The silent standoff between them was broken when he heard Ritter say, “Oh, that was a stupid question.”

Fisher capitulated with, “A male using the name Warren Mattox signed the papers. We ran his California license but of course it’s bogus. He paid the deposit in cash and didn’t buy insurance. Which I take to mean your assailants knew what they were doing and went out of their way not to leave any sort of trail.”

“You talked to the clerk who rented it? Personally?”

Jesus! “
Let me see if I have this straight: you’re in charge of the investigation now?” He squeezed the bridge of his nose again and shook his head, more irritated at his own lack of patience than Ritter’s accusatory tone. “Yeah, I personally talked to her but she couldn’t remember squat about him.”

“That’s it?”

Fisher pushed out of the chair and arched his back, working on the ache burrowing in between his shoulders. “No, that’s not all. Let me assure you we take this case seriously. Both the University and Seattle cops are also all over it. Last night SPD had two detectives going door to door in your neighborhood asking if anyone remembered seeing anything out of the ordinary the past two weeks. Your assailants knew your routine, so they must’ve had you under surveillance for at least a few days.

“We went a step further, checked the other car rental companies within a block of the airport. Turns out our guy Mattox rented a different car the previous week. Meaning you were under observation ten days or so. But there’s no way of knowing for sure. Satisfied?” Ritter couldn’t possibly know how personal the Avengers investigation was for him, and he wasn’t about to explain.

“Yes, that makes me feel better. Sorry if I seem angry. I am. Gabe meant the world to me. I’m having trouble dealing with it, is all. . . .”

Fisher dropped into the chair again, began drumming a ballpoint on a pad of yellow legal paper. “Understandable. Okay, change of topic. You made a decision yet?”

“About?”

“Shutting down.”

Ritter said, “Which raises a question. When you saw me on their website, why didn’t you warn me? Give me some protection?”

Here we go again
. Fisher flipped the pen in the air without bothering to catch it, turned to focus on the view again. “Hey, blaming me for Lippmann’s death isn’t going to do a damn thing but piss us both off again, so let me put it to you this way: am I qualified to do brain surgery?”

“That’s ridiculous. What kind of question’s that?”

“Here’s the point: I’m not qualified to do brain surgery and you’re not qualified to run this investigation. So back off and let me do my job. Nobody wants to get these shitheads more than I do. Do I make myself clear?”

Fisher took Ritter’s silence as petulant agreement. He mentally patted himself on the back and sipped the dregs of the coffee that had turned cold. “What I’m suggesting is, until we get the situation cleared up, you shouldn’t do anything to provoke them.”

Ritter said nothing. Was he pouting, thinking, or what? Regardless, he needed to get on with his work, so he said, “I’m late for a meeting. Got to go. When I have something new, I’ll call. If you think of anything additional you think is important, call me. You have my numbers. We’ll talk.” And hung up.

8

G
ODDAMN FBI! JON
slammed the phone on the desk. Five days since Gabe’s cold-blooded murder and one fictitious name was the only piece of information the nation’s premier law enforcement agency could dig up. Furious, he stared at the rapidly enlarging list of unanswered emails accumulating on the computer, his temple throbbing with each beat of his racing heart. He absentmindedly probed the puffy ridge of scalp where the sutures had been removed that morning. Pressing the wound now provoked less pain than it did in the ICU, which, he supposed, was a good sign, an indication of collagen knitting the edges together. All wounds heal. Eventually. The flesh just more easily than the mind.

His wound began throbbing again, the result of fingering it.

For a distraction, he tried to concentrate on sorting emails, deleting unread the ones he knew were trivial, leaving more important ones to deal with at a time when he could concentrate fully. He glanced at the latte next to the phone, cold now, untouched since . . . ? He checked his watch. Jesus, what time had he come back to the office? Sometime after the suture removal this morning, but when exactly?

Being so forgetful these past few days was irritating, this inability to focus on anything. Okay, sure, he’d sustained a concussion, but still . . .

Three months now since Emily’s death. Now, Gabe, gone too. The two most important people in his life . . . He felt robbed.

As if this weren’t enough, the fucking Avengers were stealing the one remaining part of his life that held any true meaning: his research. This was the activity he buried himself in after Emily died. The place that, in a funny way, he’d felt closest to Gabe. After all, Gabe was how Jon came to be there . . .

Gabriel Lippmann sits across his desk from Jon Ritter, the young medical student applying for residency. Jon is sweating as Lippmann asks why he applied to go to med school.

Ritter laughs. “Long story. Academics never interested me until I got into med school. Being a doctor hadn’t even been a consideration until college. Unlike several of my classmates, my parents weren’t docs. My mom and dad ran a fifty-eight foot purse seiner out of Ketchikan until a storm in the Gulf of Alaska swallowed them up. I was just about to turn nine years old.” He shakes his head, thinking back on it. “No one knew what actually happened because no boat or wreckage, or even survivors, were ever found.”

“So who raised you?”

“My grandparents, on mom’s side, Christina and Chuck, took me in. But Chuck was a pretty bad alcoholic and died before I turned eleven. When I was sixteen the house burned to the ground. I was in school. Luckily Christina escaped. A fireman pulled her out.” Jon shakes his head at his own stupidity. “I was so stupid, I should’ve seen it coming.”

Lippmann sits back in the chair, cups his chin between index finger and thumb. “What should you have seen?”

“Her dementia. The firemen think she walked away from the propane stove with a pot of water boiling on it. In retrospect there were all sorts of little things that had been happening, clues I completely missed, chalking them up to forgetfulness and age. But, I keep telling myself, how much does a fourteen-year-old know about dementia?”

“Probably not much,” Gabe agrees. “What happened to her?”

“She was one of the rapidly progressive ones. I had to put her in one of those awful nursing homes. She never forgave me for putting her there. The only good thing about it was she went pretty fast.”

Gabe asks, “This was in Alaska?”

“Ketchikan. Back then it was nothing more than forty-two taverns within thirty-two miles of asphalt. A coastal village with little to recommend it unless you loved hunting, fishing, and fake scrimshaw carvings the alcoholic store owners peddle to tourists.”

“It’s amazing you got where you are, given that background. But I still don’t understand how you were able to afford to go to med school?”

“I figured the only way out of that place and a future filled with nothing but fishing was to get an education. So I got a job at a Dairy Queen, applied to the University of Alaska, Ketchikan, and discovered I really loved to understand—from a physical rather than metaphysical standpoint—why things happen. I really did well in science. I caught a break and lucked into an advisor who suggested med school. I lucked out again when I received a scholarship to the University of Washington.”

“What got you interested in doing research?”

Jon hesitates, wondering how truthful to be in this interview. What is it Dr. Lippmann is looking for? He is, after all, one of more than twenty applicants for the single first year slot. He de
cides to be brutally honest. “I needed money, so applied for the
fellowship. I wasn’t really interested in doing research but didn’t want to go through another summer of oozing fry grease from every pore in my body.” Also, now blushing, “I thought it’d be a way for you to know me better than just another applicant.”

“So you intended on applying back then?”

Jon nods. “Yes.”

That summer project eventually got written up as a small publication in the journal
Neurosurgery
. To this day, he can vividly recall the breath-stealing rush from seeing his name printed in an international journal. His name!

That summer project continued through the following years and summer breaks until graduation. The experience exposed him to a way of life he never imagined existed, a life of curiosity and questioning. Each unstructured lab day began with him as the first team member to arrive. He’d fire up the espresso machine before starting into whatever tasks needed doing. He worked shoulder to shoulder with other technicians and professors, then spent brown bag lunch breaks in heady scientific debates. Afternoons flew by, quickly becoming evenings, with no worry as to the hour, as ideas were tossed around, refined, and filed away in excited minds. The intellectual stimulation and camaraderie became an exhilarating elixir, a welcome substitute for the home he hadn’t enjoyed for years. He fell in love with the life.

Now, it was being taken from him.

Fucking Avengers
.

He brought up Google on the computer, queried, and then watched the screen change to the Avengers website. Just as Fisher had said, the first page listed WANTED targets, the “enemies” of the unborn, as they labeled it. He scrolled down until he found his picture. Another click took him to a list of detailed personal information, including his office and home addresses, plus a physical description.
Great!
Making him a target for any wacko pro-life fanatics who deputized themselves in the cause. What really pissed him off was that he and his work didn’t use human tissue. Didn’t those crazy bastards understand the difference between a mouse and a human?

A telephone ring made him jump, flooding him with a jolt of adrenaline. He pressed a palm against his chest and drew a deep breath before answering, “Ritter here.”

“Jon. Margaret Sorenson.”

“Hey, Margaret.” Relief—at what, he wasn’t quite sure— swept through him. Meg was the NIH bureaucrat overseeing the human trial he and Wayne were about to start. “How are things?”

“Not good. I have bad news, I’m afraid.” Her words came across as crisp and emotionless; this call meant bad news, something to do with the study. A funding delay? That had to be it. Why else would she call? After a few beats she said, “We’re pulling the study, Jon. I’m sorry.” Just like that.

The gut freeze worsened. Then again, maybe he misunderstood. “Pulling the study? What do you mean? Canceling it?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Wait a minute, what are you saying? There’s a delay in funding, or is it terminated?”

“It’s canceled, done, as in it’s not going to happen.”

He wanted to say that wasn’t fair. But when did fairness have a thing to do with federal funding? And, he didn’t want to whine. Still . . . “Why?”

“I shouldn’t have to explain. It’s the Avengers thing, you know, the ultimatum?” Her words carried a hint of compassion this time, like maybe she really did care and was simply following orders.

“How did you find that out?” Far as he knew, the ultimatum hadn’t been released to the press.

“You’re kidding me, right? Lippmann’s murder got national coverage.”

True, but . . . to deny that the press knew anything about it would, in effect, be to admit that it was true. “Hey look, we both know how inaccurate the press can be. What the hell does a news story have to do with the scientific importance of a research project?” Aw shit, that did sound like whining. His face warmed with embarrassment.

“Aw cripes, Jon, c’mon, don’t make this harder than it already is.” The crisp efficiency of her voice was replaced by the warm tones so familiar to Jon. She sighed. “You know darn well with the present political climate we want all stem cell funding to fly below the radar. Well, thanks to all the national coverage, you can kiss any hope of that goodbye. You’re now being tracked by everyone from the White House to your local crack house, meaning the institute brass doesn’t want to risk any political blowback, no matter how small it may seem to be. Especially if, ah, something should happen to you or Dobbs.”

“You mean if one of those assholes kills me?” Goddamn bureaucrats, always covering their back, always worrying about the political implications of every damn decision. In their hearts they really didn’t care if he or Wayne were shot. Nor did they care about the ten years of work already invested in the project. The only thing they cared about was one or two bad press days from the
Washington Post
and Congress’s impression of them.

“Hey, Jon, don’t shoot the messenger. I’m as upset about this as you.”

He couldn’t stop himself. “Bullshit! Tell me this: did anyone even try to reason with whoever’s responsible for this decision? Did
you
? You know how important this study is.”

“I do. But, after all the discussions we’ve had you know darn well what a political hot potato stem cell research is.”

“This is unfair! We finally have a great shot at being able to do something about Alzheimer’s disease and you’re killing the project?”

“Not my decision, Jon. You don’t like it, talk to Murray,” referring to the head of the Neurological Disorders Institute. “Know what he’ll say? He’ll say senators and congressmen don’t really give a hoot. It’s what their constituency believes that warms their hearts and their constituency believes stem cell research is ungodly. And you know it.”