Blind Eye (33 page)

Nuclear Fusion Test Facility

O
ne hour, fifteen minutes.

All nine containers were out of the test fixture. Two had gone completely through the cementation steps. Another one was ready to come out.

There were repeated blows against the door. Marion tried to shut out all other sound and focus on what she had to do. Minutes ticked by and she continued to work steadily.

She knew the time left was under an hour now, but she didn't want to look at her watch.

Suddenly, the wall just above her head exploded, showering splintered fragments of concrete around her. She looked up at the hole in the wall and then back at the door. The bullet had missed her head by two inches.

“Close,” she snapped. One of the men had an entire arm inside the door. In his hand, he was waving a gun.

She threw the gloves aside and grabbed the torch again.

“I'm trying to save your miserable life—your children's lives,” she screamed, not knowing where this energy was coming from.

The man squeezed the side of his head in and fired
another shot that clipped the sleeve of her shirt. Not giving ground, her eyes focused on the torch as she lit it. Marion saw his eyes widen and she rushed toward the door. Instead of firing again, he backed away.

Marion didn't slow up, hitting the table again with her hip and driving the cabinet hard against the door, shutting it. Extinguishing the torch, she dropped it on the floor and moved back to the samples.

The third one was ready to come out of the oven. Using the overhead lift, she carefully took it out and began to move the others along in the process.

Suddenly, there was another shot. She glanced over as three more shots were fired in rapid succession. They were outside the door.

“Mark?” she asked under her breath.

Marion looked down at her watch. She had only fifty-six minutes left. She had to finish pouring the cement into the last container and get it at least to the curing stage before time ran out.

The sound of more gunfire outside drew her attention. It sounded like it was farther away, in another part of the facility.

Marion kept working.

There was more gunfire, somewhere nearby again…and then nothing. It was this silence that almost killed her.

A knock came at the door.

“Marion?”

It was Mark's voice. Her heart began to race.

“Marion, are you all right?”

“Mark! I'm here! I'm fine,” she cried out. “Don't come in. I need to finish sealing these containers. Forty-nine minutes…that's all I have left. Please…go up. Wait for me up there…”

“No,” he called through the door. “I'll be waiting for you here.”

He had come for her. He was waiting for her.

With tears of relief and happiness streaming down her face, Marion turned and went back to her work.

Nuclear Fusion Test Facility

M
ark Shaw was a seasoned cop. He'd been to war. He'd seen death in every form. But nothing he'd ever seen or experienced matched up with what Marion had lived through in the past five days down here. The bodies of her fellow scientists were scattered throughout the facility, every one of them bloated and decomposing. The stench was horrific.

The three others that were not in such an advanced stage were equally dead, nonetheless, two by his hand.

A phone rang in the Control Room, and he answered it. It was Special Agents Harvey and Botello. He told them briefly what had happened and what they were going to face down here. He also told them that Marion was apparently continuing to work on stopping some kind of radioactive leakage.

Harvey told him that they'd already contacted the NRC and the DOE. They were bringing in emergency teams from Los Alamos, and a team from Roswell was on its way.

Mark sent the elevator up and went back to his place by the door of the lab where Marion was working.

He looked at his watch. He'd been keeping track of
the time since the text message he'd received from Marion. She had less than two minutes left.

He leaned against the wall across from the door. He had a million things that he wanted to tell her. He glanced down at his watch again, wondering vaguely if he was going to have the opportunity.

“One minute,” he whispered, looking up at the door again.

The muffled sound of furniture scraping across the floor came to him.

He stood up straight.

The door opened slightly. “I can't do this. I can't move them.”

“Back up,” he said.

Mark threw his weight against the door and it opened a few inches. Putting his shoulder to it, he pushed, feeling it move again. He could hear her pulling at the furniture, trying to help him from the inside.

And then the door was open.

At first, Mark didn't recognize the battered shape that limped toward him. Dried blood, dirt, drawn eyes, chapped and bloodied lips.

“You waited,” she said through her tears.

He gathered her into his arms. He knew who she was.

“Too long. I've been waiting for you way too long.”

Gaylord Hospital, Wallingford, Connecticut
Ten days later

“I
just came from speech therapy and she's not there yet,” Sid said accusingly to the nurse on the floor where Amelia was situated.

He didn't have to mention the patient by name. They all knew who he was and why he came here seven days a week. The study that Sid and his partners from UCONN were doing was a topic of interest to everyone. But of more interest to the staff was the fact that they all believed there was a romance blooming between a certain patient and a certain doctor.

“She has a very special visitor today,” the nurse told him with a smile. “I thought it was more important for the family to spend some time together. Don't you agree?”

“Family?” Sid asked, just as he saw Mark come out of Amelia's room.

He forgot about the nurse and went to the other man, shaking his hand happily.

“I didn't expect you back on the East Coast until tomorrow.”

“They couldn't keep Marion in the hospital for an
other day. She was threatening the doctors and nurses with violence.”

Sid had been talking to Mark every day. They had hospitalized Marion because of the bullet that was still lodged in her skull and because of the radiation she'd been exposed to while working in the lab during the last hours before being rescued. Mark seemed happy for now to stay with Marion. As far as what he planned to do in the future, he'd told Sid that it all depended on which part of the country Marion ended up settling in. Because of her involvement in the research in New Mexico, she would have options, that was for sure.

“How is she doing, physically?”

“Good, for now. As you know, she's being operated on here in New Haven next week to get that bullet out, but the doctors that we talked to yesterday sound confident that they'll have no problem with it. Recovery will take a while, but they all say she'll mend just fine. She couldn't wait to come East and see Amelia.”

And see their mother in the bargain, Sid thought.

Kim Brown was far from perfect, but he had to give her credit, she was trying hard. He could see a dramatic change in Amelia, knowing that Kim was there and that she cared. Most surprising was the friendship that had sprung up between Kim and Jennifer Sullivan, who'd stopped in almost every day to check on Amelia.

“Where are they now?” Sid asked.

“I think I heard something about a solarium? Someplace Kim said Amelia likes to be taken to?”

Sid knew exactly where that was. He'd already spent many hours there with Amelia. And he was happy to say that the two of them had no problem communicating.

As far as Amelia's memory, there were gaps in what she could remember. She had no memory at all of being
dumped on a highway on a winter night. Sid hoped that whenever the time came that she remembered that, he'd be there with her and help her through it.

Amelia's rate of recovery was something for the record books. She'd already given up the feeding tube. Her speech was progressing. She could sit upright in the wheelchair and had a much greater range of motion with her arms. The physical therapists were now working on building her leg strength. Mark knew all of this, as Sid had been giving a daily report over the phone to Marion.

The two men started for the solarium.

“Any more news about the investigation?” Sid asked.

“That's why I stayed behind just now. I was on the phone with the FBI in Albuquerque.”

“What's going on?”

“Apparently, they're tracking a number of criminal activities across the country that all seem to be related. They think there's a single figure behind it all, and they have a good idea who it is, but they've been frustrated in nailing him.”

“They have no leads?” Sid asked.

“Leads?” Mark repeated. “They have leads. Like the secretary to the director of R & D at New Mexico Power, who was found dead in her apartment the same night that Marion was found. There were packed suitcases next to her body. She was obviously going somewhere, but hadn't given any notice of it to her employer. Also, that same night she'd spoken to a member of the company's board of directors on the phone. Now, that guy claims that he'd been speaking with Nellie Johnson regularly because of the reshuffling of staff at the company.”

They went through a set of double doors.

“And that's not the end of it,” Mark continued. “The assistant to this same board member was killed that same night in his apartment building in Washington, D.C., the victim of an apparent robbery. It's just too coincidental that the two homicides, Nellie Johnson and Joseph Ricker, were in contact with each other almost constantly during the days before their deaths.”

“So the suspect is the board member,” Sid said.

“Suspect, yes. But they have nothing solid on him,” Mark said. “I'm glad that I'm not working on the investigation. These guys feel like they're chasing their tails.”

Sid forgot what they were talking about the moment they came around the corner into a sitting area, where large glass windows let in golden shafts of warm afternoon sunlight. Sitting in a wheelchair facing him was Amelia. Her gaze immediately lit up when she saw him. She smiled and he felt that familiar tightening in his chest that he'd been getting lately.

The two women sitting with Amelia stood up.

Sid said hello to Kim before turning to Marion.

“Finally, we meet in person,” the young woman said, taking his hand warmly in hers.

The resemblance between the two sisters was astounding. He could now better understand Mark's reaction the first time he walked into Amelia's room.

“I can't thank you enough for everything you've done for my sister,” Marion said.

Sid smiled at Amelia and put his hand on the arm of the wheelchair. “I didn't do a thing. It was the two of you, working together.”

“We needed a lot of help,” Marion corrected him.

“They couldn't have done it if you hadn't been able to decode what Amelia was trying to tell everyone,” Kim told him.

“Dr. Future Hotshot,” Mark teased him. “Take the credit.”

They all knew he hated to take credit for anything this special. Sid believed the bond between the two sisters would triumph over any difficulty.

Thankfully, the conversation moved on. Kim started saying something about how incredible it was to have both her daughters here, together. She also told them that, next week, the girl's grandfather was flying to Connecticut to see them. Dr. Baer, Amelia's physician in Waterbury, had even arranged for the older man to get outpatient therapy at Gaylord while he was here.

Sid felt Amelia's fingers move over his. He took her hand and looked down. Her lips were moving. He brought his ear down to her lips and heard the slight murmur.

“Thanks,” she whispered, pressing her lips lightly against his cheek.

Rancho Bernardo, California
Three weeks later

“A
re you sure you're ready for this?” Shawn asked.

Sitting in the passenger seat of her fiancé's car, Cynthia looked up at her condo. This was her first time back here since the day of her accident. She'd been released from the hospital last week and had moved to Shawn's apartment. She was selling the condo. The real estate agents were supposed to go through next week. Shawn had already spoken to a moving company that was going to take care of what she wanted to keep. She was leaving behind some of the big furniture.

The police had found Helen's body in a Dumpster behind a grocery store twenty miles away. The reports confirmed that she'd been taken by force from the condo. She was strangled, they told her.

Cynthia had lost both her parents in a matter of weeks. Both of them murdered, she knew now. Everything was related. The death of the scientists in the research lab, the plane crash, her parents' homicides. It went on and on.

The authorities knew that the destruction of the platform in the Gulf had been a cover-up for the killing
of the researchers, but there were so many unanswered questions. They still didn't know who was responsible for it all.

Cynthia knew the answer lay with the report she'd held in her hands the day of the accident. The same report that her neighbor had handed to Helen the morning her mother was taken from here and killed. The same report that undoubtedly was destroyed.

“Honey?”

Cynthia realized Shawn was waiting for an answer.

“I'm ready. I really want to go through this place one last time before I get rid of it.”

He came around the car and helped her get out. She would be on crutches for another three weeks, at least. Shawn opened the front door and helped her in. She knew the condo had been dusted for prints after her mother's body was found. Shawn had told her that the police had done a clean job. There had been no damage to her personal things at all.

At this point, Cynthia didn't care. What was important to her was gone. Her parents were gone.

It was a challenge to climb the steps, but—as he'd been the entire time—Shawn was an angel, helping her along.

In the kitchen she had to sit down to catch her breath. One of the injuries she'd sustained in the accident was a perforated lung. The doctors said she would eventually get back to normal. For now, though, she was easily winded.

“I called Karen Newman this afternoon and told her we'd pick up Shadow tonight. Do you want me to go get her?”

Cynthia nodded. She'd been so grateful that her neighbors had held on to her cat for all this time. She missed the little monster.

“I'll be right back,” Shawn said, trotting down the stairs.

Sitting on the chair, Cynthia looked around the place. From the police reports, she knew this was where her mother had been taken from. Her eyes burned with tears as she imagined Helen's horror during the last minutes of her life.

For once, Cynthia hoped that her mother had been completely drunk.

Pushing herself to her feet, she walked toward the cabinet where she kept her liquor. In a way, it was ridiculous to even look, but she needed to know. Perhaps, knowing for sure would somehow lessen the guilt she was feeling.

Cynthia leaned against the counter, reached up, and opened the cabinet doors. She moved one of the bottles of wine and smiled.

The vodka was gone.

Looking up at the bottles of wine, she thought that now was as good a time as any to take them to Shawn's. As she dragged down the first bottle, however, the corner of a sheet of paper appeared. Curious, she reached for it.

“What are you doing?” Shawn asked, startling her.

He was standing at the top of the steps, trying to hold the squirming animal. Cynthia immediately reached out, and as Shawn came closer, Shadow jumped right into her arms.

“I thought we could bring some of this wine to your house,” she said.

“But you couldn't wait for me to get it, I see.”

She smiled and hugged her pet as she sat down. She looked up at the triangle of white paper peeking out from the cabinet.

“There's a piece of paper up there. I don't know, maybe it's an IOU from my mother,” she said, trying to sound cheerful. “Could you get it for me?”

Shadow was snuggling in against her, lifting her chin to be stroked. Cynthia thought this was the most warmth Shadow had ever shown in seeing her.

Shawn reached up for the piece of paper and took it down. As he glanced at it, his expression grew serious.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It's a page from a New Mexico Power Company classified document.” He shook his head in disbelief. “It's from the file that your father sent you. He has a note written in the margin.”

Helen must have put the sheet up there. No one else could have done it.

“What did he write?” Cynthia asked.

Shawn stared at it for a long time before looking at her.

“He's written the name of the person who arranged for the change of test facilities. It was Martin Durr.”