Bone Deep (27 page)

If they hadn’t already
. He was very much aware that Kelly Neil could have been forced to tell her killers where the flash drive was hidden before her fatal crash. Paul had known their time was short, but getting Jill and her family to safety had taken priority.

For the good it had done him.

“I guess I have no choice,” he said, conceding defeat.

Willa Dean reached out to him, placed one weathered hand on his arm. “Be careful, Paul Phillips, there is much evil where you be going.”

He gave her a nod of thanks. As he and Jill made their way back to the Land Rover, he stalled and turned back to the village. Despite the dusk, in the distance he could just make out the silhouette of Willa Dean.

How the hell had she known his name?

A stillness settled inside him.

She knew his name the same way he knew the biggest challenge of his life awaited him back in Paradise.

He turned to the woman at his side.

Awaited both of them.

Chapter 16

Paul stayed within the posted speed limits as they headed back to Paradise. The cover of darkness would be to their advantage. Still, as much as he wanted that evidence, he dreaded exposing Jill to the danger there. If someone else got to the townhouse first, they might just lie in wait. Flashes of what he’d seen in Kelly Neil’s eyes haunted him. The fear. Fear she’d seen in her sister’s dead, unseeing eyes.

Things were going to hell in a hand basket for the chief and his pals. Desperation was making them sloppy. Kelly’s death so soon after her sister’s would attract attention. Of course it could be blamed on her grief. She was distracted and driving too fast. But if they’d made any mistakes, maybe even just one, the state police might notice. A trooper’s cruiser had been among the official vehicles on the scene.

But Paul wanted more than a mere murder rap on these guys. Lots more. He wanted them, all of them, to pay for the untold evils he feared any half-assed investigation would find.

Dammit. After all this time he should be able to recognize a killer when he met one... to know evil when he saw it and be able to point it out. But it didn’t happen that way. He only saw what the victim saw... pieces... fragments of horror.

“That’s why she killed him,” Jill suddenly said.

Paul glanced at her. She looked startled, as if an epiphany of her own had only just occurred to her.

“Karl tried to force her to tell him where she’d taken Cody. Kate knew what he would do if he found Cody so she killed him. Saving her child was the motive.”

The image of the hypodermic flashed.
I’ll use this
...

“That would be my guess.” Paul checked his mirrors, noted the dark SUV or truck—too large for a sedan—in the distance behind them. Tension moved through him.

“The woman... Willa Dean,” Jill went on, “she meant that Cody wasn’t like other kids. Do you really think he’s a clone of the child in Lynchburg or vice versa? Is that even possible?”

That kind of cloning wasn’t supposed to be happening even now, much less more than three years ago. But Paul wasn’t naive enough to think that everyone with the capability followed the rules.

“I think it’s possible. We know Kate discovered something that terrified her enough to hide Cody and to kill her husband. She had access to MedTech files and to Karl’s personal ones. She would certainly know better than either of us.”

“That’s why Connie behaved so strangely.” Jill stared out at the darkness for a moment. “She was scared to death. She’d been helping Kate and after Karl’s murder she probably had no idea what would happen next.”

“It’s all falling into place.” One piece at a time, he mused. But it was coming.

Jill leaned back in the seat and exhaled a tired breath. “You watch things like this in the movies... read about them in books, but you never expect them to happen in your own family. There’s so much controversy... where will this leave Cody? Is he human or is he something else? It doesn’t change the way we love him, but will it change the way the world sees him?”

Her concerns were understandable. When the story broke... children like Cody, if there were more, would be caught in the crossfire.

“Something else, Willa Dean said,” Jill said more to herself than to him, “Kate started having headaches and weakness in her limbs weeks ago. Do you think her coma-like condition could be a symptom of something more serious? Some kind of brain issue like a tumor?”

He could think of a number of troubles that started out with those same symptoms, but he wasn’t about to give her more to worry about. “That’s something a neurologist will have to determine.” He glanced at the rearview mirror, noted the vehicle drawing closer. He readied to make an evasive maneuver.

“I still can’t believe the people I’ve known all my life, the chief, the mayor, they were all in on it. How many others?” She laughed, a dry sound. “My own father.”

She fell silent. No doubt considering that the man she’d loved and called daddy wasn’t her biological father. In Paul’s opinion, she was holding up well under the circumstances. While he clutched the steering wheel, his every muscle taut, ready to react as he watched from the corner of his eye as the vehicle moved up alongside them. SUV. The front passenger window was part way down. His breath stalled. Heart thudded to a near stop. Little arms thrust out, waving, and then a little girl’s face appeared above the glass. He let go the breath he’d been holding.

Paranoia had definitely set in.

“We might be able to trust the senator,” Jill offered, after a minute or so of quiet contemplation. “Mother couldn’t directly connect him to anything. He has tried to be helpful, sympathetic even.”

Paul was glad she hadn’t noticed his moments of tension as the other vehicle passed. One of them on edge was enough. “But he could be in on it. His innocence could be a carefully developed facade. He is a politician.”

“I wonder how many other people have been held hostage, like my mother, by this nightmare.”

Paul had thought about that too. He’d also considered that the far-reaching effects might prove broader than either of them could imagine. “God only knows how far they’ve taken the experimental conceptions, genetic tampering, and cloning. There could be hundreds of children involved.” He glanced at Jill. “Adults too.”

She nodded solemnly, then turned to stare out the window. He knew she was likely wondering what kind of experiments had been done on her and her sister. There may have been genetic tampering on one subject, her sister probably, while the other was monitored as the control.

The control
. A chill thickened his blood. In Mengele’s gruesome experiments with the twins, he’d used one for testing and one for
the control
.

They said they had to have a control specimen
...

Claire’s words rang in his ears. Jill was the control. And now the experimental procedures, whatever the hell they were, on Kate were failing... developing serious side effects.

“I should call Richard,” Jill announced out of the blue. “The battery on my cell phone is low so stop at the next gas station or convenience store. Maybe we can find a pay phone.”

Jealousy reared its ugly head, but Paul ruthlessly squashed it and forced a calm, even tone. “Why call Richard?”

“I think someone needs to know what’s going on just in case we don’t walk away from this able to talk ourselves.”

As much as he hated to admit it, she had a point.

A few miles further down the road he stopped at a convenience store as she had requested, though he didn’t exactly want to. He told himself that it wasn’t jealousy, that he just didn’t trust Richard. But that was a lie. He had no real reason not to trust the man. He’d always gotten concerned vibes from him. But that was before he learned the older man had a relationship with the woman Paul wanted for himself.

Waiting for Jill, he leaned against the hood of the Land Rover. He watched as she spoke on the pay telephone a few feet away. Like any good lawyer, she looked still and calm despite the information he knew her to be relaying. There was nothing calm about any of it.

He could watch her talk... move... just watch her, from now until eternity and never grow tired of looking at her. The wind lifted her blond hair, the silky tresses drifting in the air then falling back around her slender shoulders. She looked soft, fragile, but she had more steel and strength than any woman he had ever known. She made him want the normal life…the nuclear family. His chest tightened at the thought. Paul had never considered himself a sentimental person, not even before that day in that dark cave. But his emotions were on his sleeves now. He could no longer hold them back or pretend he cared about nothing.

He cared about this woman and somehow he had to protect her.

She hung up the telephone and started toward him, her expression grave... frightened. She was very afraid.

He was afraid.

“He’s going to contact a friend in the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and get us some backup.” She peered into Paul’s eyes and said the rest, “He said we should be extremely careful.”

Paul straightened from his casual stance. “He’s right, you should—”

She held up a hand, ending his protest before he could actually launch it. “The answer is no. Where you go, I go. If we die trying to expose this nightmare... we’ll do it together.”

~*~

It was late when they got back to Paradise. Jill could feel the tension in the air as thick as the humidity and every bit as suffocating. It was as if the evil that waited knew she and Paul were coming.

The streets were quiet. There was very little traffic. She wondered as they passed house after house if those inside had any idea what was happening around them. They sat in their quiet little houses, the lights on, the television blaring, while some lab technician just a few miles away determined the genetic make-up of their future offspring. Did the conspiracy end with MedTech and LifeCycle? Or had it spread to the regular clinics, like the one in Tullahoma where Sarah Long had gone for female health care as she and Paul suspected? Hundreds, maybe even thousands of patients, completely unaware and trusting their physicians to serve them with compassion and integrity.

How would she ever be able to go to a physician or a hospital again and assume that all was as it should be? What did they do with the vials of blood they drained... what had been added to seemingly helpful medications?

Even if she and Paul survived this night and exposed the evil in Paradise, the nightmare would only be beginning for many. The innocence of all the unsuspecting ones shattered. Suddenly those nightmares she’d had as a kid made sense. Dark corridors with pipes snaking overhead. Whispers and moans. Jill shuddered and pushed the memories aside.

Paul rolled through town, taking his time, too smart to risk drawing attention. When they were two blocks from Connie’s townhouse, he parked the Land Rover.

“We’ll approach from the trees at the back of the houses. We don’t want to be seen on the street.”

She nodded. At this point, everyone was a suspect, even harmless neighbors.

Paul reached into the glove box and retrieved a small penlight, then set the vehicle’s dome light to the off position. When he opened the driver’s side door no telltale light blinked to life. Jill slid out into the moonlit night and hugged her arms around her middle to ward off the chill. It was a balmy night, ninety degrees according to the bank’s thermometer they passed only a minute or so ago. But the chill had nothing to do with the climate. It was deep inside her. She surveyed the trees over the rooftops of the long row of townhouses up ahead. She prayed this would not be the last place she ever went with Paul.

“Stay close behind me,” he said moving around to her side of the Land Rover.

It was too dark to see him clearly, but she could just make out the lines of his face. “Wait,” she said, pleaded really. She needed one more moment with him before... before they plunged headlong into whatever waited inside.

He turned toward her, moved in closer, chasing away that awful chill. “I wish you’d stay out here.”

She shook her head. “I’m not afraid to go with you, that’s not why I asked you to wait.”

He moved closer still, until his body brushed hers. She inhaled sharply and savored the essence of Paul Phillips one more time. How she wanted to get to know this man better. A few days would never be enough time.

And she wasn’t about to risk death without telling him.

She’d made far too many similar mistakes in her life. She wouldn’t make this one.

“I know you didn’t want to take this case.” She peered up at him in the moonlight, feeling his strong body all around her as he braced his powerful arms on the vehicle on either side of her. “I couldn’t let you go. I needed you to help me with all this. But it’s different now” big breath “I can’t let you go because you mean a great deal to me—beyond all this insanity…I care about you.” She shrugged and reached way down deep for her courage. “I wanted you to know.”

The silence dragged on for several beats with him just looking at her, searching her eyes as if he feared she might retract her words.

When she could bear the tension no longer, she added, “I’m not asking for a commitment here and it’s all right if you don’t feel the same way about me. I just wanted you to know so if for some reason...”

“The feeling is mutual.” He leaned down... almost in slow motion... and kissed her. It ended way too fast, but even in those fleeting moments she lost her breath, felt the truth in his words.

Then he let her go and disappeared into the darkness of the trees. She followed, praying that God would grant her just one more miracle.

The miracle of life.

When they reached the small patio size yard behind Connie’s townhouse he stopped abruptly and leaned close to her. “Someone’s in there,” he whispered against her ear.

Her heart pounded so hard she couldn’t possibly breathe. Jill followed as he eased closer, past the partition that divided the small patches of lawn. The bedroom window was raised, the screen torn away. Light spilled into the yard.