The Death Row Complex (35 page)

“How many times have we all wanted to do the same thing?” the voice continued, and Jason located a tall, good-looking young man speaking into a microphone with a large square announcing “News 10” on its handle. A cameraman faithfully recorded.

“I say it’s about time the scientists stopped doing research on helpless, innocent animals, and started letting convicted murderers and rapists finally make a positive contribution to society,” the boy continued. “It’s the ideal justice. The killers on death row have had their chance at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They chose to give up that chance when they chose to commit whatever hideous crime landed them on death row. There are too many of them, and they’re living like kings on our money.

“Did you know that prison inmates are not allowed generic prescriptions? Brand name only. Does your HMO have that rule? I didn’t think so. It’s high time our death row prisoners
earn
those prescriptions and help science to develop the drugs that benefit them. Let’s stop paying those people to avoid the death sentence that has already been handed down to them. Let’s instead use that death sentence to free the innocent animals.”

The shocked reporter stammered a bit as he said, “thank—thank you very much for that, uh, interesting, piece of insight, Mr… ”

“Stein,” the boy said calmly. “Kevin Stein.”

Beside him, a petite girl with auburn hair stood beaming, her arm laced through his. Her deep maroon suit contrasted sharply with the wall of black and white behind her. Jason recognized the suit; it was one Katrina had worn to several conferences in the past. And there was no mistaking the relation between this girl and Jason’s postdoctoral advisor.

“And you, miss?” the reporter asked, pressing the microphone toward the girl’s small chin.

“Alexis Stone,” she said, smiling. “Dr. Katrina Stone is my mother.”

The revelation turned other heads in her direction and in a quick commotion, additional microphones were thrust forward to join that of the 10 News reporter. Several questions were blurted out at once at the girl.

“Is your mother
guilty?”

“How much do you know about Dr. Stone’s illegal
activities?”

“What do you think of your mother’s decision to disregard the law and conduct scientific research according to her own personal code of
ethics?”

“Or lack
thereof?”

The cars behind Jason’s Honda Accord had begun to honk loudly, but he paid them no attention as he strained to lean forward in anticipation. Katrina’s smile. Katrina’s eyes. Clearly, Katrina’s intelligence. All shone through as she glanced patiently from one reporter to the next. She had them in the palm of her hand, and she knew it. They would wait all night to hear what Katrina’s daughter had to say.

“I don’t know if she did it or not,” Alexis finally said, and a collective, frustrated sigh resounded from the other side of the cameras. “But I hope she did.”

The sighs changed to gasps.

“All my life,” she explained, “I have considered my mother a mass murderer. Hundreds—
thousands
—of mice, rats, and even
monkeys
have been tortured and killed to further her work and the work of other scientists. They have excused this practice by swearing that there was
no other way
.

“If my mother did what she is currently being charged for, then I couldn’t be prouder. Because she
found
another way, and she had the guts to show it to the rest of the world regardless of what it would do to her own career. If she did this, she martyred herself for the world’s most noble cause. I just hope the scientific and legal communities will follow her lead.”

“And what if she didn’t do it?” shouted a reporter.

The smile on Lexi’s face morphed into a cynical smirk. “Well, then, she’s just an animal killer without any justifiable cause.”

Alexis looked to her boyfriend, and he nodded his approval. The interviewers continued to shout questions, but Kevin waved them away. He wrapped an arm protectively around Alexis. It was clear that he considered the interview over for the both of them.

Jason rolled up his window and disengaged his emergency brake, and then rolled forward.

11:02 A.M.
EST

For the first time ever, Teresa felt stifled and claustrophobic in her office at the United States Postal Inspection Service national headquarters. And for the first time that the brassy Navy veteran could recall, she was trembling in terror as she examined the printout in front of her.

An identical visual was on the monitor of Teresa’s computer, scanned from the ESDA trace she had just performed in the lab. Just as the message had, in fact, predicted, Teresa was holding a phone to her ear, desperately wishing for someone to pick up at the other end.

The handwritten text was tiny. It completely covered both inner surfaces of a folded greeting card. Even so, the message barely fit. The Doctor had a great deal to say.

Shame on you, Teresa, for you have failed. The convention has begun, and sadly, I must explain myself. From my vantage point within Operation Death Row, I see clearly that my message might never be deciphered. And your time for deciphering it has
expired.

As you read this, thousands at the convention collaborate for a common cause. These efforts will make them thirsty, and they will drink water to quench that thirst. Later, they will realize that they are the chosen prophets. They will writhe and moan and eventually understand. They will see the short-sightedness of their actions. They will beg forgiveness. When this dirty business has run its course, and I have been martyred for a cause you can never appreciate any other way, you will thank me. Because the path of our society, so wrongly paved, will finally be
corrected.

I have given you more than sufficient time. As I had predicted, you wasted that time. Fascinating that none of you could understand the Doctor.

Very shortly, McMullan and Gilman will receive frantic phone calls from you, Teresa. They will race to the convention center. Like you, they have already failed. You all share a common fatal flaw. You do not speak my language. Shame on you. The
Doctor

8:13 A.M.
PST

When Sean McMullan cleared security and entered her cellblock at Las Colinas Detention Facility, Katrina was pacing her cell like a caged animal. Her surprise to see him quickly turned to shock as he approached. Beneath his leathery tan, McMullan’s face was a ghastly, bloodless shade of whitish yellow.

“What are you doing here?” she asked through the bars of the cell. Wordlessly, he reached into his pocket and removed a key ring, found the appropriate key, and unlocked the cell door.

She only looked at him questioningly. She stood dumbfounded while he entered the cell and produced his handcuffs, linking them around her wrists, but leaving them loose enough to be comfortable.

Neither spoke as McMullan led Katrina through the cellblock, her hands cuffed behind her back. He signed the appropriate transfer paperwork and collected her belongings, and then she was free.

As they drove away from the county jail, he unclipped the handcuff key from his key chain and handed it to her. She unlocked the cuffs and dropped them into the center console of McMullan’s sedan.

“Well?” Katrina said at last.

McMullan took a moment to carefully select his words. It would take approximately twenty minutes to get downtown to the convention. Not much time to bring Katrina up to speed. And to find out what else she had been lying about. “Explain something to me,” he finally asked. “How could your inhibitors block the Death Row strain of anthrax without being designed against it?”

“Because they block both normal and Death Row anthrax. My team designed the inhibitors against normal anthrax. It’s a fortunate coincidence that they bind the Death Row strain. The original inhibitors that were in my grant application provided the starting point that I used in designing the final antidote.”

Her explanation was consistent with the opinions of Johnson and Wong. But McMullan was still not reassured of her innocence. “Have you ever reviewed an NIH grant written by a researcher named James Johnson?” he asked then.

“No,” she answered without hesitating.

“How can you be so sure?”

Katrina looked sideways at McMullan. His eyes were straight ahead as he drove. “Johnson is a legend in the field of infectious diseases,” she said. “I would remember reviewing one of his grants.”

McMullan hoped his frustration was not showing through to the woman next to him. Her answers were only raising more questions. If she was lying, she
could
be guilty of plagiarizing Johnson’s data. If she was telling the truth, then Johnson’s motive for framing Katrina in the Death Row anthrax attacks was an illusion.

He took another approach. “I have to ask you a hypothetical question about research grants. What would happen if a reviewer got an idea for work he wanted to do by reading someone else’s grant application? Could the reviewer steal the idea?”

Katrina took a moment to respond. “Well, to alter one’s entire research program based on something you’ve read in a grant application is probably pretty stupid. For one thing, the researcher proposing the studies in an application would already be set up to conduct those studies. Frequently, he would have already begun and completed some of the work, but he would have held off on including information that is still too preliminary in a grant application. So, if you tried to beat him to the punch, you’d lose—especially if he was well funded and you were not.”

Why did she say that? Why did she even
think
of that?
McMullan took a deep breath. “But what if you got the funding and the other researcher didn’t?” he asked. “Or, what if you
were
already set up to do the work, and you could just alter your program slightly based on his idea?”

She shrugged. “I guess if you were already funded and set up, you could scoop someone else’s idea. And then it would come down to ‘first-to-file’ law: whoever files the patent first gets the intellectual property, regardless of whose idea it really was. Why? What are you getting at?”

“Never mind.”

“No!” she snapped. “You’re asking me these questions for a reason, and I want to know what it is!”

McMullan sighed. He had just broken a federal prisoner out of jail under a false pretense—without the approval, or even the knowledge, of his partner on the case. But he could no longer trust Gilman. Gilman had his own agenda. He could no longer trust Johnson. Johnson, most certainly, had his own agenda. He didn’t even know for certain that he could trust Wong or Wood. McMullan was out of allies in the FBI.

But he needed Katrina for his next move, and one thing was certain. If the Doctor was telling the truth—if the water supply at the biotechnology convention had really been poisoned—Katrina Stone was the
one
person who could not have done it. She had been in jail the entire time.

“Ah, hell,” he said, and pulled a folded, two-sided sheet of paper from his pocket. He handed it to her, and while he drove, Katrina began to read.

“The front of that page is the Xerox of a
second
greeting card from our perp,” McMullan said. “I got one copy and Gilman got one copy. The back side is the trace writing that was picked up by the ESDA trace our postal inspector did. It seems to be a message from the person who is orchestrating this whole thing.”

She read the text on the front of the page, flipped it over, and read the reverse. “Oh my god!” she yelled suddenly. “They’re going to poison the water supply at the convention!”

“I know, we’ve gotten that much,” he said. “The rest is still a bit of a mystery.”