"What the f.u.c.k?" McMullan said, shoving his partner away and regaining control.
"Turn!" Gilman said, and McMullan did.
"Change of plan," Gilman said. "Get to Stone"s house. Right now."
It was unnecessary for the two agents to kick in the front door to Katrina Stone"s house. The door was unlocked. Guns drawn, McMullan and Gilman burst through the door but then stalled.
Sitting at the kitchen table was a young man. Lying across the table was Alexis Stone. Both of them were stark naked, and the boy was holding a can of whipped cream over a small mound of strawberries and raspberries, arranged delicately on the girl"s stomach. When the door opened and the two agents came in, both teenagers looked up.
After her initial start, Alexis scrambled off the table and hastily tried to hide her naked body behind her boyfriend.
McMullan and Gilman exchanged a confused glance and then bolted past the two teenagers and up the stairs. "Get some clothes on," Gilman mumbled as he pa.s.sed.
Given the scene in the kitchen, neither agent was surprised to find Stone"s bedroom empty. She should have been in bed, finally sleeping after the eventful last twenty-four hours. Instead, her bedroom was disheveled, clothing thrown haphazardly across the bed, along with a small array of toiletries. A small collection of luggage had been thrown out of the closet and was still strewn across the floor.
"s.h.i.t!" McMullan said.
Gilman stepped out to sweep the rest of the house, avoiding the front area where two embarra.s.sed, h.o.r.n.y, and sticky teenagers were dressing.
McMullan stepped into the bedroom and rifled through the mess on the bed, and then through the adjacent bathroom, looking for evidence of where she might have gone. Katrina, this can"t really be you. He withdrew his cell phone and speed-dialed San Diego FBI headquarters.
"Now what?" the agent asked.
"She"s leaving the country," he said. "Alert TSA."
"Sean!" Gilman"s voice rang through from the next room.
McMullan stabbed at his phone to end the call, cutting off the other agent"s voice. Following the direction of his partner"s shouting, he raced into another bedroom, where Gilman was looking at a computer monitor. McMullan stepped up behind him and stared for a moment.
On the screen was an electronic calendar. The month displayed was July of the previous year. It was obviously Katrina Stone"s schedule. The calendar was filled with dates and times of seminars, lectures, and experimental timelines-next to each, the name of one of Katrina"s students or her postdoc. Lab meetings. Departmental meetings. And days with Alexis, versus days that Alexis was to be at Tom"s house.
McMullan studied the calendar for a moment, seeing nothing of interest. Confused, he looked at Gilman, and Gilman pointed to a specific date.
"Recognize this section?" Gilman asked.
"No."
The area to which Gilman was pointing read: Seminar: World Health Organization: 1:15 Hosting Dan Russel: Pick up at 4:30 Pick up Alexis: 6:00 "I give up," McMullan said. "What?"
"You didn"t obsess with that piece of paper like I did," Gilman said, and picked up a pen off the desk.
On a yellow Post-It note in front of him, replicating the handwriting on the ESDA trace the best he could, Gilman scrawled: WHO1315.
DR1630.
AL1800.
"The first greeting card from the White House. The ESDA trace. It was a section of Katrina Stone"s schedule." Gilman looked up from the computer monitor and into his partner"s dumbfounded gaze. "You still think your girl didn"t do it?"
FEBRUARY 5, 2016.
7:36 A.M. PST.
Oscar Morales was pleasantly surprised when he saw the woman who was there to see him. He had not been expecting anyone, not today, and was annoyed at having to leave his cell in the first place. At least this chick was a looker. d.a.m.n, she"s hot, he thought as she approached.
The woman was in jeans and a T-shirt and was holding a file. She didn"t look very happy.
"Who the f.u.c.k are you?" Oscar asked.
"Who the f.u.c.k are you?" the woman snapped in return.
"Don"t jerk me off, b.i.t.c.h... you came here to see me."
"What do you want with me?"
"Lady, I don"t even know you, so f.u.c.k off," Oscar said and stood up from the visiting table to leave. As he turned and began walking away, she asked, "Recognize this person?"
Just like that, the nightmare returned to the forefront of Oscar"s mind. His heart was in his throat as he turned around.
Suddenly, Oscar felt like he was in a movie-the kind of movie where a cop comes to someone"s door and shows that person a photograph, and then says that the person in the photograph is dead. Oscar stepped toward the woman and looked at the page in her hand.
The person in the image was unidentifiable, lying in a hospital bed with his or her face completely covered in a fluffy white envelope of gauze. "How the f.u.c.k am I supposed to recognize that person?" Oscar asked. His heart was still in his throat.
"How about now?" the woman asked casually, and showed another picture. In this one, beneath the gauze, the camera had caught the upper half of the hospital bed. A bare chest was exposed, and the large tattoo across it was still intact.
MORALES.
"You f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h!" Oscar screamed and lunged at the woman. She ducked quickly away and Oscar crashed across another of the visiting room"s tables.
The guard on duty rushed forward, reaching for his nightstick.
"What did you do to him?" Oscar demanded, whirling around to face the guard instead of the woman. He managed to land a forceful blow upon the guard"s jaw, but the nightstick still collided with his knee and sent him to the floor.
"Your brother did this to himself," the woman shouted through the commotion. "What did he want with me?"
"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 ma.s.sive 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 embarra.s.sment 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 G.o.d," 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."
FEBRUARY 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 a.n.a.lysis. 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 works.p.a.ce 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 a.s.say 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.