Enhancement (Black Market DNA Book 1) Read online

  Chris stared at the reflection of himself in the man’s sunglasses. “I want out of this. I’m not going to do what you want. I don’t want anyone else killed.”

  The man left the car door open but stood up straighter. “You’ll do as you’ve promised or I promise that you’ll regret it.”

  “Fine, send me back to prison. It looks like I’m headed back anyway because of this.” Chris motioned toward the tent poled up over Randy’s grave, where two men filled the hole with dirt.

  Gazing across the graveyard toward where Chris had come from, the man spoke in a calm voice again. “This is no longer just your life at stake, Mr. Morgan. I would regret having to involve someone else. You’ll do as I ask or others will be punished on your behalf. Besides, it’s already begun, whether you know it or not. You can either get on the train or you can lie down on the tracks.” The man pushed Chris back.

  Catching himself against a tree, Chris stood back up. “What’s started?”

  The man stepped into his car and closed the door. Chris slapped the opaque windows of the Lincoln. “What’s started?”

  The car drove away, gravel spitting up from the tires.

  He held up an arm to shield his face. He’d had his chance and ruined it, let the man go. No answers, but more fresh threats.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Having shared a round of beers with Paul and Kristina, Tracy announced she felt under the weather and no longer in the mood to celebrate Randy’s life. Chris and Tracy took a cab back to Chris’s condo, where he stretched out on his couch and situated himself up against the plush armrest. He threw his suit jacket onto the coffee table and loosened his tie.

  Tracy, still in her black dress, sat at the opposite end of the couch. “Can you tell me what happened now?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me anything. Just said that it already started.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “Are you sure you don’t know this guy from before prison?”

  Chris’s forehead wrinkled, his face growing hot. “I have no idea who this guy is. You sound like the police interrogating me.” Looking away, he willed the heat from his face to dissipate. “I’m sorry. I’m a little on edge.”

  “I can damn well tell that.” Her voice was sharp. “I want you to tell me everything about the police and about what the hell happened after the funeral. I need to know what’s going on here. Especially if I’m going to help you.”

  He inched closer to Tracy and put his hand on hers. “I don’t want to get anyone else killed. If you want out, please, I wouldn’t blame you.”

  She withdrew her hand, but her expression softened. “Stop being an asshole. It wasn’t your fault and I don’t want out.”

  Chris couldn’t help but smile.

  Tracy hit him on the shoulder. “Quit it. You’re creeping me out.” But she allowed him to envelop her in a hug.

  “Thanks.”

  ***

  Tracy guessed that if something was going on and Randy had been involved, they might find something out at the lab. Instead of waiting for Monday, they called a cab to head straight to Respondent when the building would be virtually empty.

  Chris ducked into the back of the taxi and Tracy followed. Just to be safe, he entered the Cowboys and Poets street address into the cab’s destination display. He didn’t want an unwarranted late-evening visit to Respondent tied to either of their comm cards. If he could, he preferred to avoid providing any evidence with which Baltimore PD could start to build a case against him in Randy’s death.

  The gloomy clouds above them broke during the ride. A little trickle of rain erupted into a downpour. The pattering of the rain on the roof and windows of the cab echoed inside the small cabin. After a couple minutes, the cab stopped in front of the bar and prompted them for a payment.

  “Do you mind?” Chris asked. “I just don’t want any of this tied to me while I’m on parole.”

  “I get it.” Tracy grinned. “I’m your sugar mama.”

  Chris shook his head but didn’t bother to protest. “Ready to get a little wet?” He opened the door into a sheet of rain. Holding Tracy’s hand as he went, they darted down the street toward Respondent. They passed a storefronts and restaurants, lit up from the inside and full of patrons, but hardly anyone got in their way on the sidewalk. They splashed through puddles as a stream of brown water rushed along the gutters beside them.

  Ahead of them stood the five-story building that housed Respondent. Its iron-trimmed, crested roof directed and concentrated the rain to flow like a waterfall over the sculpted white columns interspersed between wide black windows. As they approached, the main-floor doors parted for them. Puddles of water formed on the marble floor at their feet.

  While the exterior of the office appeared elegant and ornate, the interior had been renovated with a more modern, minimalist undercurrent of exposed beams and decorations bathed in stark blacks and whites. A simple, flat desk erupted from the middle of the empty lobby. The weekend security guard must have been out on patrol or slacking. Either way, they did not bother checking in.

  They shed their soaked coats in the elevator up to Respondent’s research laboratories and offices, which occupied the entire fifth floor of the building, leaving them in the coat closet near the elevator entrance by an empty receptionist desk.

  The halls were dimly lit to conserve energy outside of work hours. The plants that lined the walls cast shadows reminiscent of long, grasping fingers on the white-tiled floor.

  “What do we do now?” Chris asked Tracy.

  Tracy directed them to the labs. “Put on some gloves.”

  He raised an eyebrow as he put on the gloves. “You got an experiment in mind?”

  “We’re not doing anything in here. I just don’t want an ex-con dropping fingerprints over his murdered boss’s office, you got me?”

  “Gotcha,” he said. “It seems like you’re the one that knows how to commit a crime. Why was I the one in prison?”

  She scoffed. “Because I’m also the one that knows how to get away with committing a goddamn crime.”

  He laughed as they exited the lab and passed by the cubicles where their desks sat. Tracy yanked on the doorknob to Randy’s office. “It’s locked.” She knelt down eye level with the lock and tied her hair back. “Good thing we’re cheap around here.” Using a paperclip she had grabbed from her desk, she fiddled with the lock as she slid her comm card into the space between the door and the doorjamb. With a gratifying click, the door opened.

  Everything appeared just as it had the Thursday they had all left for happy hour together. Randy’s faded print of Georgia O’Keefe’s Manhattan hung on the wall. The bottom right border of the print was labeled with the Smithsonian National Art Museum logo. Besides the one odd print, the walls of the office were bare. On Randy’s desk, a large node for a holodisplay rested quietly like an oversized black beetle. A single folder on the corner of his desk contained a few papers.

  Tracy placed her hands on her hips and scanned the desk and bookcases along the edges of the room. “So, what do you think we’re looking for?”

  Chris shrugged. “Hell if I know. Anything out of the ordinary is great.”

  She pointed to Manhattan. “That’s pretty out of the ordinary.”

  “You know what I mean.” He rolled his eyes.

  “Seriously, Randy was an odd dude. You must have picked up on that since you got here. I mean, the guy worked at a technology company but had a thing against technology.”

  Chris stopped flipping through papers in a folder and cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

  As Tracy started scanning the bookshelves, she held up her hand and counted on her fingers. “For one, he never went to the automated coffee shops. Needed to speak to a real barista. Two, he hated holodisplay art.” She glanced back at the O’Keefe print. “Case in point. Three, he always printed off results instead of just storing them on our servers.” She patted th
e bookshelves. “That’s what all this shit is. He even handwrote in a lab notebook instead of using our computer notebooks. Kind of tedious, if you ask me.”

  “I didn’t know he did that.” He slumped into Randy’s chair.

  Tracy stopped searching through the bookshelves and put a hand on the cold glass window. It extended from floor to ceiling. Rain still poured down, splattering and streaming down the glass pane. “Isn’t that one of the cars from the funeral?”

  Spinning around in the seat, Chris peered out the window. “The black one?”

  “Well, yeah. The Corvette,” she said. “ I wonder what they’re doing here.”

  “There were a lot of black cars at the funeral. Besides, I didn’t see a Corvette.”

  “Maybe you didn’t, but I did. Remember what I told you? My dad obsessed over them. I can name the year, special edition, give you specs on total motor wattage or even horsepower on the old fuel-injection models. You name it.”

  “Even if it is the same car you saw, and the exact same people in the car, it was Randy’s funeral. It makes sense, right? It’s not like we were the only people from Respondent there today.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense,” Tracy said.

  “Wait a second.”

  “You recognize the car now?”

  “No,” Chris said. “What did you say before about Randy’s lab notebook?”

  “The paper one?”

  Chris nodded. “Yes, yes. Do you know where he kept it?”

  She shook her head. “No. He always took it out of the lab—which I think is against standard research policy, right?” Her face lit up in comprehension. “Wait a second, do you think...?”

  “Yes.” He stood up. “My bet is that if Randy was involved in something, working on something illegal, something he didn’t want on the company servers, it’d be in a notebook like that.”

  “That’s so stupid of him,” Tracy said. She stared at the O’Keefe print dubiously. “But that might be right.”

  With renewed fervor, they scoured the bookshelves, looking for notebooks that seemed out of place. They skimmed through research reports and printouts of experiment results. Unfamiliar with the lab’s work before he’d started his job, Chris became frustrated with having to ask Tracy over and over if each project was a legitimate effort that had been pursued in the lab or if that might be the one project that Randy had been involved in under the table.

  “Why don’t you just let me deal with the shelves?” Tracy said.

  Chris agreed and flopped back onto Randy’s chair. He turned on the holodisplay to see if there might be anything on the computer, but a security prompt asked for Randy’s fingerprint. He slammed his fists on the desk. The holodisplay module jumped and the image distorted.

  Tracy frowned at him. “Keep it together.”

  Sighing, Chris searched the desk a second time. He took out the pens, random Respondent marketing materials, and loose-leaf paper. Reaching for a stack of notecards in the back of the deep bottom drawer, he shifted his weight. The chair rolled out from under him. “Shit, shit.” He fell forward, his hand punching through the flimsy wooden bottom of the drawer. Through the fracture, he saw a worn red leather cover. “I think I found something.”

  Tracy stopped her searching and knelt down beside him, peering into the drawer. “Shit. Yeah, you did.” She peeled back the broken wood and pulled out a nondescript laboratory notebook.

  As Chris gloated over his clumsy find, the elevator down the hall dinged. The grinding of the opening doors carried into the hallway, filling the empty corridors and piercing the drone of rain falling against the roof of the building. Footsteps clacked against the tiled floor and echoed against the walls.

  “Shit,” Tracy said.

  Chris sat frozen in the seat, listening to the footsteps. Muddled voices carried down the corridor, sounding confused, angry.

  “I think we need to get out of here,” Tracy said. “Grab the notebook and let’s go.”

  Nodding, he crept up from the desk. The voices continued as they fled the office. He pointed at a glaring red exit sign. “We should take the stairs.”

  He risked a glance down the corridor, but whoever had ridden the elevator up remained beyond his line of vision. The voices had quieted, and the footsteps retreated down a hallway toward the Regulatory division of the research labs.

  “Doesn’t sound like they’re headed our way,” he said.

  Tracy didn’t appear convinced. “Maybe they don’t know which way they’re supposed to be heading.”

  The sound of rain on the roof intensified as they tiptoed toward the exit stairwell closest to their lab.

  “We don’t have our coats.” He stopped and grabbed Tracy’s hand.

  She shook her head. “We’re going to have to deal with it.”

  “Fair enough.” He eyed the notebook in Tracy’s hands. The voices had gone silent. No footsteps could be heard. These unknown visitors must have been lost in Regulatory. “We should look at the notebook before we leave.”

  Tracy shot him a skeptical look. “Seriously? We don’t have time for that.”

  “For one, we don’t even know if whoever is here is even after us. We could just be paranoid. Might just be someone on FDA duty getting called in on the weekend.”

  “Sounded like at least a couple angry people to me.” Tracy raised an eyebrow.

  Chris shrugged. He tried to maintain a look of nonchalance despite the doubt welling up in his mind. “Who knows? In any case, what if whatever Randy wrote about in the notebook is still in the lab?”

  “You mean like samples or something? Those specimens the killers mentioned, huh?” Tracy’s harsh demeanor melted into something between curiosity and disbelief. “God, yeah, you’re right.” She flipped open the notebook, scanning it with her forefinger. She read, mouthing the words to herself.

  Chris look over her shoulder, nudging them behind a partition in the cubicles that would shield them from any vantage point from the hallways. He peered at the open pages of the notebook. “Holy shit.”

  Tracy stopped and turned to him. “What’s up?”

  “This is mine.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? This notebook is yours?”

  “No, the vector.” He underlined the description of the DNA-based materials with his finger. “This...this is from when I dealt enhancements.”

  “What do you mean when you were dealing? Didn’t you use these materials for the colon project?”

  “I did, yes. But this is different. This—I struggled to remember this. They confiscated all my enhancement documents. I thought the police had locked it all away in evidence somewhere.”

  “Whatever this is, these materials appear to be a pretty damned good delivery system, if Randy’s results in here are real.”

  For a moment, Chris swelled with pride. He smiled at Tracy. “Hell, yes. They’re great.”

  “That’s fantastic, but it would be better if we could find actual samples.”

  Tracy flipped through the pages, scanning the words. Watching her progression through the notebook, Chris stood beside her, his eyes darting between the notebook and the hallway. If they could just find a canister number and location for something that might be suspended in liquid nitrogen, or a drawer number for the walk-in four-degree cooler, they might find something worth pursuing. Something that would give them a clue as to what the businessman wanted from Respondent. Something to use as a bargaining chip.

  “This is odd,” Tracy said.

  “What is it?”

  Tracy pointed to a series of letters and numbers in a nonsensical list. “This appears to be the same numbering system we used to use on the old negative-eighty-degree freezer.”

  “Okay. So when you say ‘old,’ does that mean it’s not around anymore?”

  She shook her head. Chris could see the disappointment in her eyes. “I’m afraid not. When we moved all the samples and reagents to the new freezer that’s in the lab now, we changed to a
different labeling system.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, shit.”

  For a moment, neither said a word. Chris listened for the sound of footsteps or voices down the hall. No sounds greeted his ears.

  “These numbers seem familiar to me.” She squinted and traced her upper lip with her tongue, her brow creased in lines of thought. “They’re definitely mine.”

  Chris cocked his head and joined her again, peering into the lab notebook. “Are you sure?”

  “I kind of have a thing for threes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Tracy shrugged, a reddish hue coloring her cheeks. “Can’t explain it. But I always kept my samples in ‘three,’ ‘six,’ or ‘nine’ canisters in the shelves of the old freezer.”

  “Great,” he said. “But you’re going to have to tell me why that’s interesting.”

  “Because I stored my experiments in these locations. Extra viral vectors, results from synthesis.” She scanned the list with her finger. “Not all of them, but a few of them.”

  “What are all the experiments from?”

  “There’s an old hemophilia one, CFTR gene delivery for cystic fibrosis, bladder cancer—all projects that ended a few years ago.”

  “Those canisters that aren’t yours—do you recognize them?”

  Tracy shook her head. “I bet they’re all Paul’s. He was the only other one in research around the time we worked on those projects.”

  “Strange,” Chris said, looking down at the book. “The date on that page is from just a couple months ago.”

  With a grin, Tracy picked the notebook up. “You know what he was doing, don’t you?” Before Chris could answer, she continued. “He was storing these samples—whatever they are—in all the old lab projects.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Come on, you have to be smarter than that.” She opened the lab door and motioned for him to follow. “We never use those old samples, but we’re supposed to save them in case we get an FDA audit or something.”

  “And if we did get an audit, Randy would be the first to hear about it.”