True Evil

CHAPTER 46

Will Kilmer touched Alex's knee and said, "That building was a bakery when I was a boy. Hell, I think it was still one till about 1985."

Alex nodded and kept trying to get her computer to stay connected to the Internet. For some reason, the surveillance spot they had chosen was a cellular dead zone, as far as data was concerned. Will had parked his Explorer in the bay of a defunct auto repair shop, because it commanded a good view of the dog-breeding facility owned by "Noel D. Traver." Traver's building was an aged redbrick rectangle about the size of a Coca-Cola bottling plant, with an even bigger parking lot surrounding it. Glittering razor wire spiraled along the top of the fence. The only vehicle in the lot was a panel truck parked ass-end toward the wall of the building, which put its license plate out of sight. The building itself looked deserted. No one had been in or out since they'd arrived two hours ago, nor had any sound come from the building. The distance was close to a hundred yards, but still. Alex figured they would have heard barking or something.

"Yours again," said Will, in response to the chirping from the seat beside her.

"Kaiser," said Alex. "He keeps calling."

"Just answer it."

"If he knew I was here, he'd flip out."

Will sighed like man fed up with bullshit. He had already checked out Dr. Tarver's pathology lab, and on cursory inspection it had seemed legitimate. Now he was wasting the rest of his day here, probably for nothing.

The SIM card in Alex's notebook computer made a momentary connection to the Internet, then dropped it. She slammed her hand against the door in frustration. It was that or toss her computer out the window. She'd been trying to get online to do research, but now it was late enough for Jamie to be out of school, and he might be logged on to MSN.

"I'm worried about Jamie," she said. "I haven't talked to him for almost forty-eight hours."

"He's all right," Will said. "He's ten years old, and he has to go wherever his old man takes him."

"I'm worried about Chris, too." She felt terrible guilt at leaving him alone in the hotel room.

"How many times have you tried him?" Will didn't know, because he'd gotten out of the Explorer several times to take a leak or smoke a cigarette.

"Five or six. He hasn't answered in the past hour."

"Probably sleeping, huh?"

"I hope so."

"Almost all the victims have taken over a year to die," Will reminded her.

"Not Grace."

The old detective closed his eyes and shook his head.

"I think I should go back and take him to the emergency room," Alex said. "Will you help me get him down to the car?"

"Sure. You point. I'll march him."

Alex tilted her head and pointed at the tall Cyclone fence around the old bakery. "What do you think the razor wire's for? It sure isn't to keep dogs inside. The fence alone would do that."

Will shrugged. "Crime's pretty bad out this way."

Alex's cell was ringing. Kaiser again. She expelled a lungful of air in frustration, then pressed SEND. "Hello, John."

"Christ, Alex, I've been trying to get you for hours. Where are you?"

She grimaced, then recited her lie. "I'm at the hotel taking care of Chris. He's in bad shape. Have you found something?"

"Yes and no. Tyler has really dug in his heels. I think he's basically Mark Dodson's puppet right now. I'm calling in all the favors I can to run deep checks on Shane Lansing, Eldon Tarver, and our mysterious nonveterinarian. I'm also pushing hard for a search warrant on Tarver's residence."

"Thanks," Alex said, gratified to have someone pushing in the same direction at last. "Anything new on the background checks?"

"Lansing looks clean to me. Typical surgeon. Son of a lawyer, big ladies' man. He's moved around a lot, which is sometimes a flag with doctors, but he's only thirty-six, so maybe he's just the restless type. Like Rusk, he's invested in a lot of different ventures, most medical but some not. The radiology clinic in Meridian is a legitimate concern, and Lansing seems to be a passive partner. I suppose he could get access to radioactive material if he really wanted to, but right now he seems like the least likely killer of the bunch."

"And the others?"

"You know Rusk. He's rich, well connected, and on his second wife. Lives like an international playboy when he's not working. The only grounds for suspicion are those business connections you turned up, but all of those are aboveboard. Not even the IRS has a gripe with Rusk."

"And Tarver?"

"Tarver's is a little different. He was born in 1946, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the illegitimate son of an army officer. He was dumped at the Lutheran Children's Home in Greenwood, Tennessee, from which he was adopted at age seven. The adoptive family was from Sevierville, Tennessee. I worked a serial murder case around there twelve years ago. That's the Smoky Mountains. It's commercialized now, but in the 1950s it was rural, with primitive fundamentalist religion. Some of the snake churches were based there."

"Snake churches?" echoed Alex, and Will cut his eyes at her.

"Congregations that use poisonous snakes in their worship services. Drink strychnine, that kind of crap. I don't know if Tarver saw any of that, but his foster father was a pig farmer and lay preacher. Eldon went to the University of Tennessee on full academic scholarship. That got him out of Vietnam. While I was running through rice paddies, Tarver was doing high-level graduate research in microbiology at UT. Data's pretty scarce for that part of his life, but in 1974, he went to work for a major pharmaceutical company. They fired him less than a year later on sexual harassment grounds. It must have been something pretty bad to be fired for that in 1975. He didn't actually go to medical school until 1976, but he definitely found his calling there. He's board-certified in multiple specialties, including pathology and hematology. He took the job at UMC in 1985, and he married a biochemistry professor there two years later. She died in 1998, of cervical cancer. You know the rest. He opened a free clinic with the money he inherited from his wife. He's had the pathology lab for over fifteen years. So far, no information about girlfriends or live-in lovers. The sexual harassment thing gives me a little pause-"

"And the birthmark," Alex cut in.

"Yeah," said Kaiser. "It looks pretty severe in photos. I wonder why he hasn't had a buddy take it off for him."

"I don't think he can. He told me it's some sort of vascular anomaly. It's dangerous to mess with."

"I think we've got a weird one, all right," Kaiser said thoughtfully. "My antennae are quivering. We may find some kinky stuff in Tarver's house, if we ever get inside it. Webb Tyler's starting to piss me off. He's a bureaucrat to the marrow of his bones. If he has any bones."

"He sure doesn't have a backbone," Alex grumbled.

Will grabbed her knee and pointed through the windshield. Sixty yards away, a red van was pulling through the gate of the parking lot. The gate must have been unlocked, because the driver simply nosed through it without getting out and drove slowly toward the side of the building.

"Chris needs me," Alex said, trying to make out the license plate of the van. It was too far away and the angle was bad.

"One more thing," said Kaiser. "Noel Traver is a real mystery man. On paper, he didn't even exist prior to ten years ago, as far as I can tell. He's got a driver's license but no car, and his residence appears to be the same address as that dog-breeding facility."

"I really need to run, John. Anything else?"

Kaiser laughed. "Yeah, one thing. I've really been calling to make sure you don't do something stupid, like break into Tarver's house or that breeding facility."

Alex laughed, hoping it didn't ring hollow. "I wish," she said. "Keep pushing for that search warrant." She hung up before he could reply.

"Did you hear that?" asked Will. "The driver just honked his horn."

The red van had pulled up to a large aluminum door set in the side wall of the old bakery. As Alex stared, the door rose until it was high enough for the van to pull inside the building.

"Son of a bitch," said Will. "I think somebody's been in there all along."

"He may be using a remote. Did you get a look at the driver?"

"No, the damn windows are tinted."

The overhead door stayed up, but the van did not pull inside.

"What should we do?" Alex asked.

Will stuck out his lower lip. "You're the boss."

"I want to know who's in that van."

Will laughed softly. "I do, too. And we can find out. But it sure won't be legal."

"I don't give a shit." Alex reached for her door handle.

Will caught hold of her wrist. "Hold on, now. Let's don't get you in worse trouble than you're already in."

She pulled her arm free. "The bastards have already fired me. What else can they do?"

Will lowered his head and looked at her with seven decades of accumulated wisdom. "Well, honey, there's fired, and then there's fired fired. You just got off the phone with a special agent of the FBI. If you were fired fired, he wouldn't be talking to you at all."

Alex forced herself to sit back in the Explorer, anger boiling in her gut. Immediately after Grace's death, she had felt she was at a great disadvantage in her quest, but not powerless. She may have acted irresponsibly, but at least she'd been doing something. Now she was being restrained by the possibility that the agency that should have been investigating all along might finally get off its ass and do something.

She grabbed her computer from the floor and took it out of hibernation yet again. This time her toolbar showed a three-bar data connection. She'd already searched the names Eldon Tarver and Noel D. Traver so many times in the past few hours that her eyes blurred when she looked at the Google search page.

"I'm missing something," she said.

Will grunted.

She checked MSN Messenger, but Jamie wasn't logged on.

"What did Kaiser tell you?" Will asked.

"Not much." She thought back to Kaiser's brief biography of Eldon Tarver. "He said there was a gap in the years when Tarver was in college or grad school. During Vietnam, I guess. When did the Vietnam War end?"

"They scraped the last chopper off the roof of the embassy in '75, but for all practical purposes, the big show was over by '73."

Vietnam…

"Late Vietnam," Alex murmured.

"What?"

"Something Dr. Tarver said to me in his office. It was about a research project he worked on…something about combat veterans and cancer." She closed her eyes and saw the photograph on Tarver's office wall again, the black-and-white snapshot of the blonde bookended by Tarver and the military officer. "VCP," she said, scrunching her eyelids tight. "Those letters were embroidered on Tarver's lab coat. Also painted on the building behind him."

"What are you talking about?" asked Will.

"An acronym," she said, suddenly recalling Tarver's explanation. "The Veterans' Cancer Project."

Alex typed "Veterans' Cancer Project" into the Google search field. Google returned over 8 million links, but not one in the first fifty referred to a formally named Veterans' Cancer Project. Most of the links led to sites dealing with various types of cancer in Gulf War or Vietnam veterans. But the Vietnam links dealt almost exclusively with Agent Orange, which Tarver had said his group had not looked into.

"There's not a Veterans' Cancer Program," she said, puzzled. "Or at least it wasn't a big enough deal for anyone to remember it."

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. "But Veterans' Cancer Project isn't what I saw," she thought aloud. "I saw VCP."

She typed "VCP" into the search field and hit ENTER. What appeared was a plethora of results related only by their sharing the same acronym. Next she typed "VCP" plus "cancer." The first few hits concerned a research project in India. But the fifth started her pulse racing. The first words following the acronym were Special Virus Cancer Program-not Veterans', as Tarver had claimed-which the link description defined as a scientific program that had begun in 1964, consumed 10 percent of the annual budget of the National Cancer Institute for some years, then was renamed the Virus Cancer Program in 1973. Alex bit her bottom lip, clicked the link, and began to read.

The VCP was a massive research effort involving some of the most distinguished scientists in the United States, all probing the possible viral origins of cancer, particularly leukemia…

"My God," Alex breathed.

"What is it?" asked Will.

"Wait," she said, reading as fast as she could.

A small but vocal number of physicians have suggested that simian-related retroviruses like HIV and SV 40 (which has been proved to have contaminated batches of human polio vaccine) were in fact created by the scientists of the Virus Cancer Program. While this is disputed by the medical establishment, government records confirm that tens of thousands of liters of dangerous new viruses were cultured in the bodies of living animals, primarily primates and cats, and that many of these viruses were modified so as to be able to jump species barriers. In 1973, a significant part of the Virus Cancer Project was transferred to Fort Detrick, Maryland, the home of the United States biological warfare effort. No one denies that the VCP involved an active alliance between the NIH, the U.S. Army, and Litton Bionetics…

"This is it," said Alex. "Holy shit, this is it!"

"What are you yelping about?" Will asked, staring hard at her screen.

"Dr. Tarver lied to me! He told me that VCP stood for Veterans' Cancer Project. It doesn't. It stands for a government project that researched the links between viruses and cancer, especially leukemia. It took place during the Vietnam era. And Eldon Tarver worked for them!"

"Jesus."

"He's killing people," whispered Alex. "He's still doing research. Or else he's using what he learned back then to make money off of Andrew Rusk and his desperate clients." Her chest swelled with fierce joy. "We've got them, Will."

"Look!" Will said, gripping her wrist. "Son of a bitch!"

Alex looked up. The panel truck and the van had disappeared, and the big aluminum door was sliding back down to the concrete slab.

"You know what I think?" said Alex.

"What?"

"Tarver is shutting everything down. I went to his office and declared myself as an FBI agent. I went to his so-called free clinic. I even gave him a list of the murder victims, for God's sake. Nobody on that list surprised him, either. Christ, I even asked him about the VCP picture! He knows I'm going to figure it out eventually. He's got to run, Will." She laid her computer on the backseat and reached for the door handle again. "I'm going down there."

"Wait!" cried Will, restraining her. "If you've got him nailed with evidence, there's no point in screwing the pooch by going in without a warrant."

"I'm not going into the building."

"Be sure, Alex," he said gravely.

"Are you coming or not?"

Will sighed, then opened the glove box and took out his.357 magnum. "I guess."

As she got out of the Explorer, Will said, "Wait. The gate's open, ain't it? We're better off driving up to the front door and telling them we're lost than sneaking in there with guns shoved down our pants."

Alex grinned and climbed back into the Explorer. "I knew I brought you for a reason."

Will cranked the Ford, pulled across the street, and drove down to the gate of the old bakery. As he slowed down to nose through the fence, Alex dialed John Kaiser's cell phone.

"Hey," said Kaiser. "What's up?"

"I've cracked it, John! The whole case. You need to check out something called the Virus Cancer Program. It was a big research project in the late sixties and early seventies. It involved cancer, viruses, and biological weapons. Tarver was part of it."

"Biological weapons?"

"Yes. There's a photo in Tarver's UMC office of him wearing a lab coat that says VCP. The building behind him has the same acronym."

"How did you find out what it stood for?"

"Google, believe it or not. It was the picture in his office that did it, though. I'd never have known what to look for otherwise. But Tarver lied to me about what the acronym stood for. He tried to make it sound noble."

"I'll get on it. The SAC is still stalling on the search warrant for Tarver's house. Maybe this will tip the scales."

"Even Webb Tyler can't ignore this. Call me when you get the warrant."

Kaiser hung up.

The Explorer was only twenty yards from the old bakery.

"Where do you want to go?" asked Will.

"Those casement windows in front."

"They're blacked out."

"Not all of them. Look to the right. A few have been replaced with clear panes."

Will swung the wheel, and the Explorer came to rest opposite one of the windows with clear glass.

"Get out and keep your hand on your pistol," said Alex.

"You think they'd try something?"

"No doubt in my mind. This is a deeply fucked-up individual we're dealing with."

She got out and walked up to the windows. Each pane was about eight inches square, but the clear ones were too high for her to look through.

"Can you give me a step up?"

Will walked over, shoved his pistol into his pants, then bent at the waist and interlocked his fingers. Alex stepped into the resulting cradle, feeling as she had as a little girl when Grace used to boost her up to the lowest branch of the popcorn tree in their backyard. The memory pierced her heart, but she caught hold of the brick sill and pulled herself up to the clear windowpane.

"What do you see?" Will grunted.

"Nothing yet."

The pane was caked with gunk. She spat on the glass and wiped a circle with her sleeve, then pressed her eye to the glass. When her eyes adjusted, she saw a wall of cages. Dozens of them. And inside each one, a sleeping dog. Small dogs, maybe beagles.

"You see anything yet?" Will asked. "My back ain't what it used to be."

"Dogs. A bunch of dogs asleep in cages."

"That's what they breed here."

"I know but…there's something odd about it."

"What?"

"They're asleep."

"So?" Will was wheezing now.

"Well, they can't all be asleep, can they?"

"Haven't you ever heard, 'Let sleeping dogs lie'?"

Alex almost laughed, but something stopped her. "There must be a hundred of them. A hundred and fifty maybe. They can't all be asleep."

"Maybe they drug them."

As Alex peered into the darkened room, the sound of a distant engine reached her, its tone rising steadily. Even before she saw the red van racing down the fenced perimeter, the spark of instinct that had guided her through so many successful hostage negotiations roared to flame.

"Run!" she shouted, leaping backward out of Will's hands.

"What is it?" he gasped, trying to straighten his back and grab his gun at the same time.

"RUN!" Alex grabbed his arm and started dragging him away from the building.

"What about my truck?" Will yelled.

"Leave it!"

They were thirty feet from the building when a scorching wall of air slapped them to the ground like the hand of God. Alex skidded across the cement, the skin tearing away from her elbows. She screamed for Will, but she heard only a roaring silence.

It took most of a minute to get her breath back. Then she slowly rolled over and sat up.

Will was on his knees a few yards away, trying in vain to pull a large splinter of glass out of his back. Behind him, a vast column of black smoke climbed into the sky. All the windows in the front wall were gone. Behind the smoke, Alex saw a blue-white flame that looked more like the glow of a Bunsen burner than a roaring blaze. The heat emanating from the building was almost unbearable. As she struggled to her feet, an inhuman shriek of terror echoed across the empty parking lot. Then a dark simian shape burst from the building, running on all fours, trailing smoke and fire. Alex staggered three steps toward Will, told him to leave the splinter where it was, then fell on her face.