Chapter 25
Her lawyer, Jerry Solange, greeted her with a big smile and a handshake. When he remembered London was an FBI agent, he turned his gaze back to Fern. “Have there been more developments?”
She laughed, took a seat. “Not now, although who knows about tomorrow. But there have been new deaths.”
The lawyer sank into his chair, his face paling. “I think you better tell me what’s going on.”
London filled in the lawyer as much as he could with Fern interjecting bits and pieces. “So, you see, I wasn’t even in the country when these murders were committed.”
“Thank heavens for that. I don’t mind telling you how part of me thinks we got very lucky last time. I’d hate to have to defend you again for similar charges.”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t like that much either.”
“And why did you come back to the States?” the lawyer asked.
“I got a letter threatening Reggie if I didn’t return in twenty-four hours.”
“You what?” London asked, glaring at Fern.
She turned to look at London and frowned at him but faced her attorney to finish her story. “So I booked my flight. But the airline had a problem and delayed my schedule. Even though my flight was changed, I still got here within the warning period. Yet Reggie was already missing.”
London cleared his throat. Loudly. “You do realize that, if somebody has killed Reggie and wanted to make it look like you were the guilty party, they would have checked the airlines and saw the day you were returning, but maybe they didn’t realize you were delayed …”
“And they went ahead with their plans, not knowing I now had an alibi?” With a shudder, she added, “Good for me. Bad for them.”
“Are you withholding any other information from me?” London asked, none too happy.
“That’s it,” she said, watching his expression.
He shook his head. “You got lucky.” Nudging her, he asked, “What about your parents’ research material?”
When she asked her lawyer, he glanced at her in surprise. “I have no idea. My brother handled all that.”
She nodded. “I never thought to ask about it before, but it’s certainly something I could use now.”
He pulled the keyboard toward him and quickly typed. “If there is a storage locker, I would imagine the material is all there. I don’t remember seeing the specifics.” He glanced at the monitor, then at her. “Your parents rented a storage space only months before they passed on. My brother noted the research materials were placed in the locker. The estate pays for it.”
“I didn’t even know there was a storage locker.”
“Back then you were too traumatized to deal with it, so I can understand my brother not bringing it up to you.” He tapped the desk. “I haven’t done more than take a cursory look at the estate details. Now that you’re an expert botanist in your own right, potentially this is the right time to review your parents’ work. Besides storage lockers are cheap. You’d be surprised how many people use them for all kinds of reasons.”
“Where is it? What unit number? And how do I get inside?”
He checked his monitor. “It’s on Rutland Road, Morgan Storage, locker number 247. Apparently the key is in your file.” He got up and walked over to a big set of wall cabinets, pulled out a drawer, slid hanging folders to the side and pulled out a large file. Inside he lifted a key on a long key ring. “This is it.” He handed it to her.
She stared at it as if she’d been handed the key to the world. “Oh my.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t even realize this was here. I could’ve told you about it the last time we met.”
She shook her head. “Last time we met, you were trying to keep me out of jail for the rest of my life. I’m very grateful you focused on that problem, not this.”
He nodded and smiled at them. “If I can do anything else for you, let me know.”
As they took their leave, she said to London, “I want to go to the locker now.”
“I already looked it up on the GPS.”
Fifteen minutes later they walked between rows of storage lockers. Up ahead they found the one they were looking for. She unlocked it. London bent, grabbed the huge garage door and raised it.
They both stopped and stared.
Boxes upon boxes were stacked on the right-hand side. On the opposite side was a desk, tables, office chairs, a filing cabinet and lab equipment, any number of which might’ve come from a lab. Yet it had been arranged into a usable space within the locker, as if it hadn’t just been stored here but was in recent use.
Considering open files were on the desk, that just confirmed her belief. “Somebody else has a key to this place.”
“And we need to know exactly who that is.”
She walked to the desk and the open file. “This is Zanders’s file. And it’s recent. As in last week.” She flipped through to the beginning. “Experiments that had been done on him. It’s a record of the last year.”
She shuffled the pages, seeing just what was happening here. Some of the handwriting was hard to read, which was typical in some cases. But the lab tests, they weren’t hard to read it all.
“He was testing different poisons and their antidotes on rats with some success but hadn’t enough to move to humans. If it did work, he planned to inject himself with the antidote.”
“So he’s either been poisoned or has poisoned himself.” London wandered among the large boxes, opening a box here and there, looking for anything that would give them an idea of who else may have been in here.
She opened a drawer in the desk. Business cards, napkins, gum and pens. “Somebody’s been using this space for a long time.” She turned to gaze around at the rest of the space. “It’ll take forever to go through this.”
“We don’t have to go through it all. Although I imagine at some point you may want to. Right now we’re looking for names. Anyone involved in your parents’ research.”
She nodded. Opening the top drawer of the nearby filing cabinet, she flipped through the files. The second-to-last folder was a name she recognized. “Susan Miller was the niece of the two cousins who were killed, right?”
“Yes.”
She picked up the folder and said, “I have a file on a Susan Miller here.” She read the details. “Thirty-eight years old.”
She continued to read through it. “The woman came to my parents somehow, but I can’t tell exactly what they were doing with her. Or why.” At the end of the file she said, “I found the last entry.”
“What is it?”
“She became quite ill, and they had to stop working on her.”
“Poisoned?”
“Not that I can tell. I believe it was cancer. She left the study approximately six months before my parents’ death.”
“Anything else in the files on the cousins? One was Teresa. Her maiden name was Miller.”
Fern checked the drawer. “There’s a file here on her, but it’s very thin.” She read through the notes. “She was tested to see if she’d fit the program but didn’t. So they didn’t bring her into it. But it was somewhere around the same time they brought in her niece.”
“And yet Teresa was murdered as well.”
She nodded. “Zanders tested her.” Fern opened Susan Miller’s folder. “Zanders is named as the tester on Susan as well. He was attached to the program, working for my mother. I don’t even know for sure if my mother met either of these people. It would’ve been Zanders doing the work directly.”
“So why kill them a decade after your parents died?”
“No idea. Unless he was hiding their participation in this earlier program.” She turned to stare at the filing cabinet, hating what she would likely find. “We also don’t know if this is my mother’s work or if this was Zanders’s work on the side.”
“Is that likely?”
“It’s possible.” She shook her head. “All kinds of scenarios come into play here. The bottom line is, they weren’t allowed to do human testing yet, and they might have been found out. Maybe Zanders decided to kill them off because they were the only ones who knew what he was involved with.”
“Or maybe he gave them something he wasn’t supposed to give them.”
“Or he tapped the patients my mother dealt with and offered them a new treatment, a sure result.” On a hunch, she opened the middle drawer of the filing cabinet. Two fat files rested inside. She pulled out both, set them on the desk and opened them.
“He was working with the Millers himself,” she announced. “After my parents’ death, he either contacted the patients, or they contacted him, but he started working with them directly then. And, according to the date here, it was less than thirty days after my parents’ death.”
“So your parents died. He takes over their work, starts doing experiments. Something goes wrong, and he’s forced to kill them to hide his tracks?”
An exhausted voice from behind them said, “I was forced to kill them to hide somebody else’s tracks. Your mother’s in fact.”
Fern spun around to see a man leaning against the edge of the doorjamb. Sweat poured off his forehead, and his body shook so badly he could barely stand.
London strode over to him. “Zanders, I presume?”
The man nodded. “I was carrying on Dr. Bethany Geller’s research. She was worried about your father but didn’t realize he would be as dangerous as he turned out to be. We would’ve done something about it earlier if we’d known.”
Fern stayed silent. The last thing she wanted now was confirmation that her father had killed her mother, killing himself too.
“Her work was important,” Zanders whispered. “She was so damn close to finding antidotes for some of these major poisons. Poisons affecting people from common uses. Arsenic on treated lumber. It’s an antifungal, but some people reacted more severely than others. Just a simple example. Another is pesticides. Some of those were incredibly powerful, having long-term effects. But, in her case, she worked on the more common medicinal ones.”
“Where did she find her patients?”
“Hospitals and clinics. She had several doctors who she met with on a regular basis.”
“Did they know her experiments were without approval from the regulatory bodies?”
He shrugged. “Of course she didn’t tell anyone exactly what she was doing. Only that she was searching for subjects with certain parameters. And, if there were any, to send them her way. I don’t think the doctors knew what she was doing, but also I don’t think they cared.”
“Why the Millers?”
“I don’t know who or what Dr. Geller did her original testing on. She was very secretive about all that. I’ve spent the last dozen years trying to duplicate her results, only I didn’t see the same effects. I gave up the research until somebody at AMAX contacted me. They said they knew exactly how your mother got her results. They wanted me to continue her work, but they wouldn’t tell me who the original lab subject was.”
London asked derisively, “How did that help?”
“They wanted to know if I could duplicate the results.” He smiled. “I was so excited for a while. I really thought I could do it. But I had no success. Finally they told me how she’d been using the same subject for years. And that person had the ability to produce the proper antibodies. When I realized that, I started testing myself.” He held out his hands. “As you can see, my results were less-than-positive. And, as my patients started dying, I realized only three of Dr. Geller’s patients were alive from before. If I wanted to wipe the slate clean, I needed to take them out too. Chances where they would die somewhere in the next ten years, but I couldn’t wait.”
“What do you mean, you couldn’t wait?”
“AMAX. They wanted me to bring them in for testing, like lab rats. I couldn’t do that to them. It seems like all we’ve done was give these poor people hope and then take it away again. AMAX was insistent—threatening to pick them up on their own if I didn’t cooperate. I told them how I had been testing on myself, but none of the research was working. That’s when they promised they knew somebody who could give me the type of results they wanted. And they wanted to know if I could develop it from there.” He shook his head. “But I didn’t trust them. Too many years had gone by with too many promises and too much had happened. I was not interested at all.”
“So you turned around and killed your last three patients?” Fern stared at him in shock. “That makes no sense.”
“AMAX would pick them up and take them to their labs anyway.”
“That’s kidnapping,” London said. “Holding them against their will. While drugging them, keeping them as test subjects, is illegal as hell.”
He nodded. “Yes. Exactly. So what I did was a service to them. I put them out of their misery,” he said. “Ben’s death wasn’t planned. Susan told him about the treatments. And me. He contacted me a few days after AMAX turned up the pressure. I felt I didn’t have a choice, but it made it easier knowing he was a bastard. He’d been harassing women for decades but never was punished for it.”
He glanced at Fern apologetically. “I’m sorry that those deaths were laid at your feet.” He labored to bring in his next breath. “I need to finish off the nightmare. If your father hadn’t killed your mother, Bethany and I would’ve done wonderful things. But, in the meantime, I became less of a researcher, less of a scientist without her. Who knew?” He held up a syringe, stabbed himself and shoved the plunger home before Fern or London could reach him. He gave her a bitter half smile and said, “It’s better this way.”
“Who in AMAX was doing this?”
His eyes glazed, and he went into convulsions. She heard London on the phone behind her, calling for help.
“Who?” she whispered. “Please tell me who.”
But he died in her arms.
“Who is it?” London asked in a hushed voice at her side.
She lifted her wet gaze to his. “I have no idea.”
*
London checked the man’s pockets, confirming he was Zanders. London made more calls. Before long they had both an ambulance and the coroner on site. At least now there would be no problem getting a warrant for Zanders’s official lab. London would meet Steve there as soon as the paperwork went through.
In the meantime, as much as London hated it, Fern’s life would get flipped as Zanders’s confession meant the bulk of his material here had to be gone through. And London knew how little of her own personal life would remain private if her name was mentioned anywhere.
As he studied her face, drawn and pale, her arms tight across her chest, he realized she already understood just how intrusive this would be for her. He walked over and stood at her side in silent support.
The local cops were less concerned about all the paperwork on the right-hand side of the storage unit, once they understood it was her parents’ research. But they were very interested in knowing what kind of work Zanders had been involved in. As far as anybody could tell, the files on the left-hand side were his. Fern flipped through them and confirmed the bulk were lab tests.
The female cop shook her head. “Mad scientists. They keep popping up everywhere.”
Fern then stood off to one side, flicking through the folders in her hands, looking for anything that would give her answers.
London also watched the cops as they avoided any interaction with Fern, other than several guarded looks. A huge divide still existed between law enforcement and her. That wouldn’t be an easy bridge to cross.
Some of the cops took most of the boxes, leaving the rest of the officers to handpick items of interest out of what was left.
Fern curled up on the office chair, completely disassociated from what was going on around her.
“Are you ready to go?” London asked.
She lifted her gaze to his. “I was ready to go a long time ago.”
He nodded. “The police are moving Zanders’s files to the station.”
“Technically this should all belong to me because it’s in my locker. I don’t have a problem with the cops looking at the stuff, but I do want it all back.”
“Do you think it’s of any value to you in research terms?”
She shrugged. “I don’t even know what my parents were working on. But, if they made progress, I would like to know what the data supported. That Zanders carried on some of the same research and quite possibly crossed ethical lines at every turn doesn’t mean the experience and the knowledge he gained should be lost.”
“That makes sense.” He made a mental note to talk to the cops about returning all paperwork to Fern.
She stood. “It’s late. I need food soon. Did the warrant come through for the lab?”
He nodded. “I’m meeting Steve there. The local police will be with us.”
She stiffened slightly. “Of course. It’s a law enforcement issue. I don’t belong there.” She glanced around. “Maybe I’ll pick up some food and return here to go through some of my parents’ material.”
He hesitated.
She shot him a look. “You can’t stay here with me, and I can’t go with you. Cops should be all around here for quite a while, so I’ll be safe.”
He glanced toward the men busy taking photographs. He knew they still had a lot of forensic evidence to look at. He nodded. “I’ll speak to them about keeping an eye on you.”
Her voice dry, her tone hard, she said, “Sure. Keep an eye on me. But not for my safety. For theirs.”
He winced. “They don’t know you like I do.”
She chuckled. “They don’t know me at all.”
On that note, he walked to a pair of detectives, comparing notes. London explained he was leaving, but Fern was staying. “Keep her safe.”
One detective nodded and said, “No problem.”
“Any idea how long you will be here?”
The detective looked at the size of the space. “We’re stuck here for a few more hours.”
“Then I’ll head over to the main lab, look at what we find there. I’ll be back.” He turned toward Fern. “And I’ll bring some food.”
“I’ll pick up something and then come back.”
“I don’t want you going alone.”
“A sandwich shop is around the corner. That’s hardly anything to fuss about.”
He turned back to the detective, who held up a hand. “We’ll make sure somebody goes with her.”
With that confirmation, London walked to the car. He’d be as fast as he could.
It was hard not to be excited about the breaks in the case. Maybe they would finally get answers. And possibly Fern could get her life back.
*
Why couldn’t he get answers? He needed answers. The damn cops were blowing up over the case. He needed to know what they knew.
How could he forward his own agenda if he couldn’t get direct and accurate information?
He picked up his phone and sent off a flurry of texts. Normally he’d get someone else to take care of this shit, but right now was touchy. He couldn’t afford to have anyone else know….