The Death Row Complex (32 page)

“
I don’t know!
” Oscar yelled. He stood again and lunged toward her, but then there were three more guards upon him.

Katrina stood immobile as the guards subdued Oscar Morales. Each of the four men pinned a powerful limb to the floor, and then one of them withdrew a needle and syringe. The guard uncapped the needle and plunged it through the prisoner’s pant leg into his massive upper thigh. With all four guards still holding tightly, the inmate began to relax, and then he was quiet. They picked him up by the limbs and carried him out of the room.

Katrina sat down heavily at the visiting room table once again.
He really did not know who I was
, she thought, and the connection she thought she had made—between the twins, herself, and the anthrax attack at the prison—was broken.

Katrina was still sitting in the visiting room, staring absently at the floor in front of her, when the door opened. She did not turn around to see Sean McMullan and Roger Gilman approach her from behind. When McMullan placed a hand lightly on her shoulder, she jerked and then looked up into his face, dazed. “I’m fine,” she said. “You guys didn’t need to come here.”

“Actually,” Gilman said quietly, “we’re not here to help you.”

Katrina looked from one agent to the other, questioning.

Gilman and McMullan glanced at each other and Gilman nodded to McMullan. “Go ahead,” he said firmly.

McMullan sighed. “Dr. Katrina Stone,” he said. “You’re under arrest for sixty-eight murders in the first degree. You have the right to remain silent… ” And as he rattled off the Miranda monologue as if in a trance, Sean McMullan took out his handcuffs.

9:13 A.M.
PST

“How can you possibly think I killed all those inmates?” Katrina asked on the plane back to San Diego.

“How can we possibly think you didn’t?” Gilman replied. “We found your schedule on the greeting card.”

“I sort of figured,” she said, remembering how, in her haste leaving the house, she had stupidly left her calendar app open on her computer. “Obviously, I’m being framed. I had nothing to do with that card.” Her eyes bored into McMullan, and he looked at the floor of the airplane. For a moment, Katrina thought it was embarrassment on his face.

“Actually Katrina,” he said, “that’s not all we found.”

“What, then?”

“Well,” McMullan continued with an air of reluctance, “you knew we were monitoring you when we started this investigation. You were amply forewarned, and your staff was amply forewarned. You all signed agreements acknowledging this.”

“Yeah? So?”

Gilman interrupted. “In fact, the grandiose salary increases you all received were negotiated because of your so-called endangerment and the privacy loss you willingly accepted. So the government was operating completely within our rights.”

“What are you
talking
about?” Katrina asked.

“You knew we had placed guards around your lab,” Gilman continued, “and that these guards were there to monitor the activities in the lab as well as to protect you and your staff. What you weren’t told is that there were also bugs placed throughout your facility. We knew that if there were guards most of the time, you’d be lulled into thinking that the guards were your only surveillance. The guards were a decoy.”

“
Oh my god
,” Katrina said quietly.

“Katrina,” McMullan said, “our San Diego agents have been to your lab and they have collected the bag of notes that you fished out of your liquid nitrogen tank. Our specialists have read those notes. And they agree that those pages describe in detail the discovery of the molecular activator that comprises the Death Row Complex.”

F
EBRUARY 8, 2016
1:04 A.M.
EST

In the main forensics laboratory at USPIS headquarters in Dulles, Virginia, Teresa Wood shook her head as she viewed the results of her initial PCR analysis. This time, she was not looking for a suspect. She was looking for evidence against Katrina Stone; she was looking for the data package that would put the rogue scientist away forever. And two more pieces of data had just been provided. Two new greeting cards.

As Teresa had suspected, there was no infectious material present on the greeting card from Roger Gilman’s house or the one from Sean McMullan’s post office box.
Same result, same MO
, she thought to herself, reflecting on the similar result—or lack thereof—that had been obtained from the original card mailed to the White House.

Teresa stared blindly at the fluorescent pink bands for a moment before switching off the UV light that allowed them to show through the DNA gel in front of her.
She’s playing with us
, she thought.

Until last Friday, Teresa had felt a certain kinship toward Katrina Stone. Both women were laboratory researchers, both immersed in the constant uphill battle to succeed in male-dominated fields. Both women supervised several other people, stepping into the lab themselves occasionally to don gloves as required by the current situation.

But that kinship was shattered last Friday, when Roger Gilman discovered that the ESDA trace was a snapshot of Stone’s online calendar, and when Stone was caught red-handed hiding the data that led to the Death Row anthrax strain.

Teresa closed her eyes and envisioned Stone’s office desk, which she had never actually seen but could imagine well enough. In Teresa’s mind, the desk resembled her own workspace three floors above where she now sat. In the postal inspector’s vision, Stone sat at her desk in San Diego doing similar work to that done daily by Teresa in Dulles. Reviewing the data of her subordinates. Reading the scientific literature. And like Teresa’s own desk, she saw Stone’s desk piled with raw notes, loose reports, data-stuffed notebooks, and scientific journals.

But there was one discrepancy. In Teresa’s vision, there was an item on Stone’s desk that should never have been there. Beneath a stack of pages in front of Stone, there was a greeting card with a computer graphic on the front, the graphic copied from one of the scientific journals on the shelves above the desk. A card with a threatening message written in Arabic. A card that had not yet been mailed to the White House.

Teresa pictured Katrina Stone going through her daily activities. She saw Stone glancing from her computer screen down to the pages she was reading at the moment. She saw her clicking into her computer to bring up her schedule. She saw her making a note on a piece of paper to remind herself of her obligations that afternoon. She saw her pen making indentations through the page being written on, indentations into the card that lay beneath.

History repeats itself
, Teresa thought, and made a decision. She threw the DNA gel in front of her into the trash and removed her gloves. The next assay she performed on the new greeting cards would be the ESDA.

8:36 A.M.
PST

The San Diego County jail system is currently comprised of seven facilities. Male inmates are generally booked at San Diego Central downtown, where they may be held or transferred to one of the others. Female inmates are typically taken to the Las Colinas Detention Facility in Santee.

In response to a truly surreal phone call from his postdoctoral advisor, Jason Fischer had only to drive four blocks from his Santee apartment to visit Katrina at the Las Colinas facility. More than an hour after his arrival, Katrina was finally brought out to see him.

Jason was shocked at her appearance.

Like Jason himself, Katrina had always excelled under pressure. The two had collaborated brilliantly from Jason’s first day in the lab. Without ever needing to try, they understood each other. Both worked hard at all times, but it took a deadline to bring both Jason and Katrina to top form. When a grant was due, when a revised paper was due, or when a milestone was approaching, Jason and Katrina functioned as one mind. More than her postdoc, Jason was her colleague, ally, and good friend.

It was obvious to Jason that right now, Katrina was at her breaking point. The inmate uniform covering her body was way too large, and in it, her diminutive size was accentuated. In looking so small, she also looked exceptionally vulnerable. Her thick auburn waves, streaked with the occasional gray strand, were tangled and unkempt. Several frizzy, unruly strands sprang outward from her face in a crazed, electric halo. Her normally animated blue-gray eyes were swallowed in deep black cavities. The look on Katrina’s face was madness.

And the biotechnology convention was eminent. The opening keynote speech was scheduled for the next morning. The scheduled keynote speaker was Katrina Stone.

“What’s going on?” Jason asked.

“Jason, it’s a long story,” Katrina said nervously. “In a nutshell, the FBI found the activator data, along with some other stuff that gave them reason to think I was the person who released the anthrax at San Quentin and killed the whole death row wing.”

Jason was immobile.

“I need to ask two favors of you,” Katrina continued. “You’re the only person I can trust right now.”

Without hesitation, Jason asked, “What do you need?”

“First, I need you to give my keynote speech at the convention tomorrow. Obviously, I can’t be there. Obviously, the fact that I won’t be there because I am in
jail
is going to put a minor wrinkle in my credibility and my career as a scientist. I’m trying like hell to negotiate a release, but it’s not looking good. So if I can’t be there, I want you to be there. My talk is on the desktop of my computer. If the FBI has confiscated that, you can still find the presentation in the Cloud. You know the password. Give the talk, and do the best you can to control the damage when people start asking questions about why I’m not there. I don’t know if it’s going to be public by tomorrow that I’m in jail. So far, I don’t think the press has caught wind of it.”

Katrina paused. “I know this is a lot to ask,” she said. “If word gets out about where I am, I’ll be crucified at the convention. And you’ll be crucified based solely your association with me. So I’m begging you—just do what you can.”

To Katrina’s surprise, Jason smiled. “Dr. Stone,” he said, feigning formality, “as the resident death-metal-head of the SDSU biology department, I’m no stranger to being judged out of context. I’m also no stranger to conflict. I look forward to the convention.” His smile widened when he saw the look of gratitude on Katrina’s face, and the tear that streaked down her cheek. She gently wiped it away with one forefinger.

“What is the other thing I can do for you?” he asked.

“I need you to look into someone. His name is Oscar Morales. He is a prisoner at San Quentin. The man who attacked me—twice—was his monozygotic twin. I don’t know the twin’s first name but he had a vial of the Death Row strain of anthrax
on him
when he came after me in the lab.

“I think he was in the lab to poison me with it or just kick my ass, whichever became more convenient. I also think that Oscar had to have been the one on the inside who released the bug in the prison. If you can find out Oscar’s story, and who gave it to him, and why, you might be able to save my reputation. And by association, your own.”