Tunnel Vision

73

The Kashian kid was missing.

After dispatching Morris Stern, Roman drove to Kashian’s apartment on Hemenway Street in Boston—a four-story redbrick building for college students. When nobody answered, he hit other buttons on lower floors until someone blindly let him in. Before that party came out to investigate, Roman was already above and jimmying the lock to Kashian’s door.

The apartment was dark and looking as if the kid had left in a hurry. Bureau drawers were open, and underwear and tops were strewn about. His laptop was on his desk. No toothbrush or toothpaste in the bathroom. The kid was planning overnights.

He left and drove to Harvard Street in Cambridge. Sarah Wyman was also nowhere to be found, and the downstairs neighbor said she had seen her leave the building before eight that morning.

An hour later, he was at the address given him by Stern. GodLight Tabernacle Church sat at the front of a wooded compound in the suburbs of Medfield, about an hour southwest of Boston. A large empty parking lot separated the church from the road.

Roman pulled in and drove to the rear of the structure. Sitting behind a shiny new chain-link fence was a large white house with an extension on the back. Its blandness masked the kind of research that apparently went on below—Warren Gladstone’s personal Manhattan Project. That explained the guard shack and barbed wire atop the fence.

The shack was empty, and the gate was closed and padlocked. Because of the weekend, the place was abandoned, except for a single blue Volvo against the building.

Roman had rented a Ford Explorer with a grille guard, which could have pushed his way through the fence. But that might set off an alarm. He had packed sundry paraphernalia in the back, including flashlights, rope, duct tape, and a variety of tools, including a long-handled cable cutter capable of snipping through half-inch steel wire. It took him only seconds to cut through the padlock.

He drove through the gate and parked beside the Volvo, which was unlocked. On the upper corner of the windshield were parking stickers for Harvard Medical School faculty. He cut around to the main entrance, which to his surprise was unlocked, although he could have cut his way inside. The door opened to a security desk and gate with no one in attendance. Behind it was a door leading through a corridor to another entrance leading to the basement.

With his pistol drawn, he descended the stairs.

Halfway down, he detected a faint high-pitched electronic sound. At the bottom of the stairs was a corridor lit by a bank of fluorescent lights. Coming off either side of the corridor were rooms, some with windows. But the only one that was lit was toward the end—and the source of the electronic squeal.

It got louder as he approached the room, his pistol gripped in both hands.

The sound was some kind of alarm, and the piercing shrill was making him anxious.

He reached the knob of the door, turned it, and, gripping the pistol, kicked it open.

The alarm was emanating from a rack of electronic equipment that sat beside a gurney on which lay the body of a woman. She was hooked up to an IV and the various monitors on which alarm lights pulsed with the squealing. Clutched in her hands was a photograph of a young boy.

From the various video images, he recognized Elizabeth Luria.

And like the Kashian kid in the videos, she was hooked up for suspension from an IV. But unlike in the Kashian videos, the monitors were blinking red and squealing because all the vital function lines on screen were totally flat.

The woman had suspended herself to death.