Away From You Read online

  You created painkillers in the University chemistry lab?

  Vicadin was around. No need to think up a new formula. The moment that gave me an opening was when Jason happened to have a nasty injury in a hockey game against Syracuse. A broken ankle gave me the opening to introduce painkillers.

  How much of an accident was it?

  A few Syracuse players owed me a favor. Wasn’t hard to call on one. Especially because Jason was messing around with one of their girlfriends. He met her at one of my favorite cafes. Made sure we met when she would be there. Knew she was his type.

  You set it up.

  Of course. It took three months to orchestrate circumstances but I did it.

  Why?

  Part of the plan. Jason was susceptible so I took advantage of the right timing.

  Pre-meditated. All those years.

  Ethan suffered for four years until he took his own life.

  So the reasoning was that Jason had to suffer the same amount of time.

  Longer. Ethan never got to become an adult. Jason did. There is a cost to things. Karma was coming. I helped it along.

  What could you possibly have gained from all the mental energy invested in Jason’s demise?

  Entertainment.

  Watching another person deteriorate is fun for you?

  Only Jason’s downfall. The torture of himself from the inside out. It was something else.

  Even if he died from an overdose you would still have done what you did to him?

  That was the ultimate goal. Jason didn’t deserve happiness.

  And how did you conclude that you were the arbiter of who deserved to have a happy life or not?

  I just did. Look Dr. Halloway, I witnessed what Jason did to Ethan for two years. He was relentless. If I did that to a classmate what other purpose other than to drive them to want death as an out.

  Really?

  Yes. Really. Everything starts with an agenda. Even the fun stuff.

  Young teenagers don’t know the consequences of their actions.

  I think they do. It’s the permanence that their minds may have trouble grasping. Even if their brains are far from maturity, don’t you think it’s possible that their conscience already knows enough to make a choice?

  No. Forever is not an easy concept to accept and understand. Jason didn’t act alone. He wasn’t the only guilty person who bullied Ethan. Weren’t there at least five other kids that followed his every command?

  The ringleader had a crew of seven other kids. Wanna-bes. Remember that term?

  I do. If there were seven others why just Jason to feel the brunt of your vigilante justice?

  He wasn’t the only one. Only the worse off. Like I said, he lived to see life as hell.

  What happened to the crew?

  Forever young. Each of them is eternally 17, maybe 18.

  Immature? Peter Pans?

  Dead. A tragic car accident on a July 4 weekend in the Catskills. Terrible. A month after graduation. Poor Jason. All his friends dead. He really shouldn’t have driven home but he wasn’t drunk so who knows what happened.

  Penelope paused and reflected the last sentence David spoke. The recollections had turned into a rant disguised as foolish teenage revenge. Penelope indulged him. She decided not to challenge his assertions. Wasn’t this sarcastic humor used as a defense mechanism? Is David saying me he rigged a fatality of a group of teens?

  Sweat buds started to line up and down her spine. Penelope felt the blood rush to her face. Thank God she didn’t blush. Her throat lost moisture with each breath. She wasn’t afraid. No. It was her natural response to adrenaline shooting through her bloodstream. Subtle movement sounds were louder as hypersensitivity took over. There was a process, a sequence, an internal program that activated. Within five minutes she shifted completely into a state of hyperawareness. Micro-expressions, trace changes in his voice, even the change of how he breathed, she could detect it all. Penelope felt lifted from the objective, rational, point-of-view that governed how she operated in the world. Yes, alive again, she thought.

  Someone knows what happened. Not just Jason. Even if he suppressed his memories.

  Jason hated details. He was lazy. A responsible car owner knows to do an engine check on a Mercedes from that series. Not him. Jason didn’t think it was important.

  How would you know what he did to his car that day?

  The Catskills is a common destination for a July 4 long weekend.

  You celebrated with them?

  I celebrated fireworks in the Catskills that same summer. Not with them. I was near their chateau with some of my soccer team mates.

  Did they know that?

  Maybe. The team and I weren’t next door. The Catskills is a large area.

  Who choose the Catskills as the place to spend that weekend?

  Our Captain. He asked for suggestions. Mine was the Catskills. My family had a long history there and my god-father offered complementary accommodation at one of his cottages.

  You must really like spending time there in the Catskills.

  Not really. I hadn’t spent that holiday in the Catskills since I was 13. Ethan and his parents joined our family that summer. The next summer his family hosted us on Cape Cod. That’s where I still celebrate July 4.

  So why not Cape Cod that year? You could have found a similar deal for the team in Massachusetts.

  Jason had never been to the Catskills. When I heard him and his crew were going there, I thought, it was one more chance for us high school seniors to spend one last summer together before college. Odds were, we’d probably never see most of that group again.

  So you socialized? Your soccer team and Jason with his crew.

  No. Too busy. I made an effort. Went to their chateau across the Lake the Saturday morning, the day before everyone would drive back to New York. They had gone kayaking or something but Jason left his car in the driveway. The car had me believe that I’d see all of them hanging around on the porch. Looked around for a few minutes then left.

  Tell me about the car?

  The Mercedes. Why?

  How did you know Jason didn’t do an engine check?

  If he did, then they wouldn’t have died. Once he lifted the hood he would have noticed the obvious nail in the side of the engine.

  Being curious about his car you inspected it.

  Sure.

  No note? Didn’t remove the nail yourself?

  And hand him an invitation to accuse me of tampering with it. No. It was his car. He was driving his friends home. Not my job.

  What happened exactly that night he was driving back to New York when the car accident happened?

  Other than not checking the engine, Jason had a few drinks of Vodka and Orange Juice. He was skilled as a professional drinker because those who had breakfast with them that morning didn’t detect any alcohol on his breath.

  How was that possible? His blood alcohol count was 0.15.

  Time released Russian Vodka from Siberia. The kind that has no scent of itself when mixed with an acidic liquid, like any citrus drink, such as orange juice.

  What brand of Vodka is this? How can a hard liquor be time-released?

  Technically it’s not time-released. It’s a customized thing. A personal biological reaction in the liver. Some livers process at a different pace than the average. So it’s a kind of time released intoxication. Slow, steady, simmering, like slowly heating water to a boiling point. A frog left in cold water boils to death incrementally. It won’t jump out because subtle increases in heat, fail to signal its self-preservation. The final moment surprises it.

  Jason was the frog.

  Metaphor suggests that. I left him and his crew a going away gift. A jock’s care basket which included his favorite drink, Orange Julius. It came in a personalized hard plastic made to look like glass. Enough traces of the Siberian Vodka got mixed with it during the packaging process. I was an amateur or its misplaced guilt. He threw out the can of orange juice at a p
it stop on the road. The Mercedes wreckage had no broken glasses of alcohol bottles. Just some unused Coca-Cola cans.

  Did the engine failing cause the crash or his driving?

  The police report and insurance investigation determined it was the engine combined with the conditions that night. If he had inspected his car before driving off, the conditions wouldn’t have mattered. The nail in the side shaft was gone so there was no negligence legally to him. Even with such a high blood alcohol count.

  No one else took a turn at the wheel?

  Jason wouldn’t let anyone drive his Mercedes.

  So you knew he alone would operate that car. How did you know about his liver’s response to the Vodka?

  We had three years of chemistry class. Three years of observing his reactions in the lunchroom or around the back when he was smoking all sorts of things.

  Where did you find that Siberian Vodka? Was it a common item stocked in the shops during summer in the Catskills?

  No. I picked it up in Boston the week before. We were off to college. Something for the occasion.

  You alone were the arbiter of what’s fair and what someone deserved?

  I decided it was my task.

  What about the families who lost them?

  They were the same people who raised such people.

  No one listens to their parents. Most deliberately do the opposite when they turn 13 and it lasts a good decade.

  Then all of Jason’s crew chose to follow him. Saw the results of their actions. Carried on anyway. No mercy and no mercy goes together.

  Is that how you justify this brand of personal vigilante justice by enacting amateur spy games that left more destruction and tragedy for people.

  Sins are seen despite one’s attempts to hide them. Reap what you sow. Catholic school emphasized all these moral lessons and right under their nose, the pious were a silent enabler of Ethan’s suicide. I didn’t like it so I fixed it.

  Fixing it as it suites your fancy. Just like that. No conscience? Isn’t God the only one who can render judgment on a person’s immortal soul?

  God uses everyone. Divine will is expressed through man. Man being made in his image and reflections of the aspects of God. Justice exacts itself like math. Wild animals by instinct are free from the restrictions of someone else’s morality made into law. They can kill an enemy without free of society’s punishment because of the mass brainwash that agreeing to some formalized moral code is a good idea. At least some countries acknowledge the human animal and its primitive nature when they kill in revenge. Crimes of passion as a defense in Italy is a stronger psychiatric insanity plea than our “temporary insanity” argument for the same offence here in America. The Puritans favored mind over heart. The mind serves the base nature of a person. I am one of those individuals who are aware of the collective conditioning of the masses. But I wear morality like a coat. It’s on me but not inside me.

  I don’t follow your argument.

  When the situation calls for it, I remove the coat, but don’t strike opponents with brute force. I prefer to be the archer who is precise and patient enough to take the time to plan the best retaliation. Subtle and dramatic was the style I preferred. My investment strategy evolved from my personal project with Jason. He was excellence practice. Quick kills make a fast name on the street but always gives you a high profile. High profile increases the odds that people can predict your next movements. Eventually they see your play-by-play before you do. That’s how one becomes what the street calls a dinosaur.

  Is that why you approached Stanford and volunteered to be a human test subject? You felt like a dinosaur.

  Sometimes the medication becomes ineffective. Quality control issues

  Thank you for meeting with me Dr. Halloway. As I mentioned on the phone, the reason for seeking you out doesn’t imply putting you in the uncomfortable position of violating HIPPA. I have no intention of violating patient privacy.

  Yes, that was understood. Usually I would not agree to such an unusual request. We already spoke as part of my research which is under the standard confidentiality laws. You did say that there was data that could be of clinical significance to patient safety. So with that being a first priority always, I am interested in what you have to say.

  The street is worried about the implications of your treatment being so effective so rapidly. Successful treatment of David Ambrose is a blessing and a curse. He had many secret dealings. The details of which went away during his illness. Now that he appears to be well on his way to full recovery of the David Ambrose that we all know, it poses a threat to many people who can’t afford to be at the effect of what he is capable of.

  How so?

  David was a cold-blooded reptilian genius. In that years since his decline, before he became your patient, he was human. Even if he had to semi-retire at least he was human in his judgment.

  Are you saying that David is a danger to himself or others if he gets better?

  Others. David Ambrose was always edgy and suspicious, paranoid under pressure, around people whom he didn’t have full influence over. Combined with his high intelligence it often caused him to overthink. The last five years he was in New York, before selling off all his shares in his former company to move to California, his paranoia was the worst.

  A natural by-product of the accumulated stress of a finance career and his advancing age.

  Not really. David had closed a few deals which left him exposed to greater risk. The liability he faced was in the hundreds of millions. More people knew about his unusual fraud activity. Even for him, he was unusually hypervigilant and resorting to intricate sorts of emotional blackmail to prevent people from leaking what they knew to the Feds. He had that photographic memory which helped him remember where all the personal skeletons were in the closet.

  Secrets can be dangerous or an asset depending on who can play them to their advantage. The street breathed a sigh of relief when David’s memory declined. His threats were quickly becoming promises with a deadline.

  What kind of threats? Alpha-male chicken fights? Posturing?

  The kind where David could exact a one man military-industrial complex style of destruction on someone’s entire existence. Pull a loan to cause someone to comply or use his various contacts at high levels within industry to create havoc like it was a form of torture.

  Had he ever acted on these threats?

  Yes, but the degree of damage he posed was escalating. People felt endangered.

  So the street fears that David will pick up where he left off and then act accordingly in a very organized way.

  Yes but more than just cause someone to be in chaos. David had the art of subterfuge and sabotage down to an art form.

  How would these acts of destruction look like?

  Car breaks tampered with, computers and cell phones being wiped of critical data at the worst time, or other lethal malfunctions, espionage orchestrated by a corporate raider determine to take back his throne.

  You have evidence it was him?

  Yes. Several hedge fund managers who knew of David’s dealings hired private investigators to uncover the cause. Everything traced back to him.

  Then why didn’t any one of them bring all their hard evidence to the police?

  Timing. David’s medical status had been diagnosed just as we were about to enter the headquarters of the NYPD with our legal team ready to file charges. When word of David’s condition made it to the street, our advisors felt it was an uphill battle, and with his memory deteriorating as it did, most of us believed we were in the clear if he couldn’t remember and recuperate his memory.

  After five years why do you believe that David would resume his diabolical plans?

  That was his M.O. What he was planning to do was violent, our investigators uncovered plotting that was intended to kill us.

  And you didn’t think it was a good idea to leave the evidence in the hands of the police or the Feds? In the event he ever recovered.

&
nbsp; David still has friends and supporters strategically located. We were not interested in leaving memory prompters for him. The authorities would have had to interview him.

  What did your investigators find?

  David was making substantial payments as donations to a number of medical research societies or foundations. They look like standard philanthropic monetary gifts made because of his dedication to fostering the advancement of medical science. Underneath the surface, there was patron access to the research labs.

  Access for what purpose? He was seeking a cure a long time before approaching us at Stanford.