Dying Memories Read online

  When he stepped outside the cold air chilled him and the condensation from his breath hung by his face. He held his jacket tight against his throat as he walked down Hanover Street looking for a coffee shop that offered Wi-Fi access. Eventually he found one on a side street. When he checked his email he found one with the subject, ‘Most Urgent’. Opening it, it read:

  You are in deadly danger. Be careful. –yer pal, G.

  The message unnerved Bill, but also made him more determined. He spent the next three hours writing at a feverish pace, stopping only when he needed to check his notes or to do an Internet search for supporting information. When he was done he had four thousand words that detailed his odyssey over the last several days, as well as exposing ViGen’s illegal human trials and their links to the two murders. He read over what he had, and satisfied, he packed up his laptop and headed out to where he had left his car the night before.

  Chapter 39

  Emily rushed to the Haymarket subway stop, at times sprinting. She had a nine-thirty class, and it was now nine o’clock. She could still get there on time. Maybe. If she didn’t have to wait more than ten minutes for her train, if the tracks weren’t too congested and the train actually moved at a normal speed instead of inching along like it sometimes does, and if she’s able to set the world record for a half-mile run from where the trains leaves her off to the University building where her classroom was located, it would still be possible!

  She was making her way down the steps at Haymarket and squeezing through a crowd of commuters who were also pushing their way up those same steps when an insect or something bit her on the back of her neck. Before she could slap at where she was bitten, she almost collapsed on the staircase. Not from the bite, but from the vivid memories that came rushing at her. These memories left her dizzy and sickened. They didn’t seem possible, but they stood out so starkly in her mind. Could she have been so severely in shock that she blocked them out over the past couple of hours until now? Was that possible? Or was it that she was somehow hallucinating them now and they weren’t real? God, she prayed that she was somehow hallucinating them even if it meant that something was seriously wrong with the way her brain was functioning!

  Numbly, she turned and staggered back up the steps moving as if she were drunk. She desperately needed to get back to her North End apartment. It was difficult, though, her legs weak and rubbery as she made her way back to Salem Street. At times she would try running, but she would find herself after only a couple of steps out of breath. After this happened a few times, she accepted that she just didn’t have the strength to do anything more than move in a slow, sluggish pace, the numbness that she was feeling seemingly spreading throughout her body.

  Finally she was back on Salem Street and making her way towards the small side street where she lived, and then soon after that she was outside her apartment building, then walking up the four flights of stairs to her apartment. Several times her legs almost gave out on her, but she made it up those stairs. Her heart turned to cold sludge when she saw the blood smeared over her door, but still, a cold resolve took over, and she unlocked the door and stepped into her apartment. The pile of bloody clothes were there in her hallway as she remembered. There was no use praying anymore that her memories were only hallucinations. They were every bit as real as they were vivid in her mind. What she imagined Bill doing and saying to her had happened. She didn’t need to look in her bathroom to convince herself any further. She knew it would be the same bloody mess as she remembered it.

  Her heart breaking, she walked over to her phone, barely having the strength to even do that.

  Chapter 40

  A few minutes before eleven o’clock Bill left his car a half mile from the Tribune and hailed a cab. When he gave the cab driver the Tribune’s address, the driver groaned, his eyes rolling as he all but said buddy, can’t you just walk this instead of wasting my time with a cheap fare? Three minutes later the cab pulled up to the Tribune’s main entrance, the driver growing impatient as Bill sat in his seat searching the street to make sure it was safe. The coast appeared to be clear with no very pink-faced men or ox-sized thugs in sight. Bill paid the driver, then made a quick dash to the door. Once inside his lips twisted into a hard smile. Go fuck yourselves, he whispered softly to himself as he thought about those who’d been after him. And you, too, my good pal, G. Deadly danger, my ass.

  The adrenaline was pumping too hard in him to pay much attention to the funny looks the other staff members at the Tribune gave him as he made a beeline to his office. He noticed it, but he assumed it was just because he’d been out for a couple of days, and that maybe Jack O’Donnell had been bitching openly about his absence. When he passed Carol McCoy and she nearly fell backwards away from him, he almost stopped to ask her what was going on but was too preoccupied with his plans to slow himself down. The thought occurred to him that maybe Jack had fired him without bothering to tell him, but fuck it, if that happened Jack would be rehiring him quickly enough once he was shown the dynamite Bill was sitting on.

  He made a quick stop at his desk to print out a copy of his story, then headed to Jack’s fishbowl office with the DVD and story in hand. He didn’t bother knocking and, as he entered the office, Jack looked up, his eyes nearly bugging out at the sight of him. Bill felt his grin tightening as he tossed the copy of his story on Jack’s desk.

  “I’ve got tomorrow’s front page right there,” Bill said.

  Jack shook his head and muttered under his breath that he already had tomorrow’s front page.

  “I guarantee you what I have is better.”

  The city desk editor’s eyes shifted up to meet Bill’s, and the look he gave Bill unnerved him almost as much as his earlier email from his pal, G, had. There was something not right about it, a coldness, a falseness, as if they were complete strangers instead of having worked together for the past five years.

  “Am I fired? Is that it?” Bill asked, the heat rising up his neck as his temper leaked out. He couldn’t believe this shit. If he didn’t have a very pink-faced man and a couple of thugs chasing after him he would take the story to the Globe and screw the Tribune. “For Chrissakes, I’ve been out the last couple of days chasing down the story of the year!”

  “Bill, just calm down,” Jack said, his tone as humoring and artificial as the look he had given Bill. “Take a seat and calm down.”

  Bill took a step away from Jack’s desk. “What the fuck’s going on?”

  “Just calm down,” Jack repeated, mumbling more to himself than to Bill. He stumbled out of his chair, looking as if he were uncertain about what he was going to do next. “Bill, it’s best that you came in like you did. It will be safer for everyone, you in particular. And I promise you the Tribune will help in any way we can. So please, just take a seat. This will all be over soon.”

  Sirens wailed off in the distance. At first Bill had to strain to make sure that’s what they were, but it didn’t take him long to realize the noise was growing louder. They were coming fast.

  Chapter 41

  “Is that the police?” Bill asked.

  Jack didn’t answer him. Instead he walked slowly around his desk, moving in a way that made Bill think of how you’d approach a wild animal without spooking it. “Just sit down, okay?”

  “You’re part of it?” Bill asked. He backed up several steps. “How?”

  “Bill, please, stay calm. We’re your friends here.”

  Jack stepped forward and grabbed hold of Bill’s arm. Without any conscious thought, Bill’s military training kicked in, and with a quick, simple rotation of his hand he had his boss in a joint lock so that he was bending his boss’s wrist and forcing him onto his knees. When Jack gasped out in pain, Bill released his hold and fled the office.

  He could feel his coworkers watching him as he moved past them. He stopped at his desk to pick up his jacket and laptop, then realized that he no longer had his DVD showing ViGen rounding up the homeless for their illegal drug te
sting. He dropped it when Jack made a grab for him.

  He turned back to retrieve it. Jack’s voice cried out from his office for someone to grab him, that the police would be there any minute. Out of the corner of his eye, Bill saw someone rushing him from behind. He moved to the side, at the same time sticking out his hip. Carl Phillips, their twenty-eight-year-old computer guy fell over him and let out a loud grunt as he landed awkwardly onto the floor. A small mob had gathered between Bill and Jack’s office. The police sirens sounded almost as if they were right on top of him. He turned and ran.

  A half a block from the Tribune building was a metal staircase that led to the street below. Bill took it, flying down the steps several at a time. When he reached the bottom he kept running so he could backtrack to where he had left his car. The sound of the police sirens were screaming now. Then doors were slamming and voices shouting at each other. Bill looked up and saw that three police cruisers had pulled up to the Tribune’s front entrance. Uniformed officers were rushing out of the police cars and moving fast into the building. Bill kept running, slowing down only when he had turned the corner and was out of sight from anyone searching for him from above.

  All he could think of was Emily. That they had done something to her. It had to be something like that. Winded, he waited until he could catch his breath, then pulled out his cell phone and called Emily at her apartment. The phone was picked up but nothing said. A horrible dread filled him as he imagined the worst. In his mind’s eye he could see the very pink-faced man listening patiently on the other end of the line.

  “Emily, is that you? Are you okay?”

  There was a tortuous silence. Then Emily spoke. “Don’t you dare ever call me again,” she said.

  Her voice sounded so strange to Bill that he barely recognized her. There was something very wrong. “Are they with you?” he asked.

  “You need help.” An iciness came off her voice that devastated him. “For God sakes, turn yourself in before you hurt anyone else!”

  She hung up. Bill stood confused. Slowly it dawned on him what was happening. The way Jack had acted made Bill at first think that he was somehow in on the conspiracy. But that didn’t make any sense, not with the police in the picture, and not with the way everyone in the office had acted towards him. And now this. Something else was going on, something that they thought he did. G’s message about him being in deadly danger flashed in his mind. He started running again.

  When he reached his car he turned on an all news radio station hoping to hear something, but they were talking about the presidential race. Howard Beasman, the third party candidate, was at it again, questioning the major party candidates’ patriotism and whether they had the resolve to preserve the American way of life. Bill only half listened to the news report; still though, he found himself hoping Beasman would just go away already.

  He turned off the radio. On impulse, he pulled the car over and took out his bug detector. When he switched it on the thing started beeping like crazy, but as he moved it back and forth across the hood it indicated he was moving further away from the transmitter. He took a step away planning to test the back of his car, and the thing beeped louder again. He took several steps away and the beeping didn’t change. He was holding the detector near his chest. While he was testing the engine area he had his arm extended. They bugged him! The sonofabitches bugged him!

  He flung his jacket off and the beeping softened. It didn’t take him long to find a thin quarter-sized device that had been pushed into his jacket lining. According to the bug detector it was a GPS tracking device. He took a tire iron from his trunk and pried off a wheel cover of a car parked nearby and placed the tracking device inside the wheel base, then reattached the cover.

  As he drove away he tried to think of when they could’ve planted the bug in his jacket and all he could come up with was they had to have done it while he was at the Tribune. Which meant they had someone out by the Tribune’s front entrance watching for him. That person must’ve snuck into the Tribune building after he went in. It had to be that.

  He turned the radio back on. The all news channel had moved from the presidential race to financial news, but Bill was barely aware of what they were saying.

  He pulled into an open parking spot off an alley a few blocks from Downtown Crossing. It didn’t take him long to find a shop whose Wi-Fi signal was strong enough that he could pick it up from outside. He tried to keep his face shielded and his back to the crowd rushing past him while he searched the Internet.

  He found on the Tribune’s front web-page why the police were after him. At five-thirty in the morning a guy delivering newspapers spotted a broken door panel outside the waterfront townhouse where Bill’s ex-girlfriend, Karen, was living with her fiancée. When the police arrived they discovered the fiancée dead, having been stabbed over a dozen times, and Karen badly beaten and unconscious. She has since recovered enough to blame Bill for the attack.

  Bill had to read the story several times before he was able to make sense of it. His head reeling, he called Emily again at her apartment. She didn’t pick up this time and he started to leave a message on her answering machine, telling her what they were saying about him was a lie—

  She picked up, cutting him off. “It’s not a lie,” she said, her voice even icier than before. “You admitted to me what you did.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This morning when I caught you with all your bloody clothing. You told me all about it then. What you did to both of them.” There was a long silence, and when Emily spoke again her voice had a despairing quality to it. “I thought I could’ve loved you,” she said.

  “Emily, please, you have to believe me none of this happened.” A sickening thought struck him. “Did anyone inject you with anything?”

  She laughed sadly at that. “You think I’m high on something? That I’m only hallucinating what you said and did?”

  “Please, check your arms for any hypodermic needle marks. This is what happened to Gail Hawes. Somehow they found a way to brainwash people through an injection.—”

  She hung up on him.

  Chapter 42

  Bill stared blankly at his cell phone, then was hit with the realization that just as his picture was on the Tribune’s front web-page it would soon be all over the news, if it wasn’t already, and people passing him would be recognizing him.

  Trying his best to hide his face, he headed off towards where he had left his car. Before he could get too far his cell phone rang. It was Boston City Detective Chuck Boxer. Bill sucked in his breath and answered the phone.

  “You need to come in,” Boxer said.

  “I had nothing to do with this. I swear.”

  “I believe you,” Boxer said in a false, mollifying tone that all but said he didn’t believe shit. “But you need to come in so we can clear this up. Tell me where you are and I’ll send over a police cruiser. This way you don’t get hurt.”

  “Was there any physical evidence left behind? Blood, semen, skin, anything that could clear me? If there was I’ll come in.”

  Boxer didn’t say anything right away. Then in a tired voice, “Come on, Conway. Let’s quit this bullshit. You were a crime reporter for five years. You’re smart enough to know not to leave any physical evidence at the crime scene. Deep down inside you didn’t really want to do this, otherwise you would’ve killed your old girlfriend instead of leaving her alive to identify you. But that doesn’t even matter. Your new girlfriend called us also. And guess what? I’m with her right now. I listened in on your call with her. So why don’t you just stop this bullshit before anyone else gets hurt?”

  The thought of Boxer being with Emily in her apartment left him dazed. He didn’t blame her for not warning him that Boxer was listening in. How could he?

  “This isn’t what it looks like,” Bill insisted weakly. “It’s all tied in with Gail Hawes. It’s got to be. Look, you found that needle mark on Hawes, right? Whatever she was injected
with made her kill Kent Forster. Same with what Karen and Emily are now saying. If you check them you’ll find hypodermic needle marks on both of them.”

  “Yeah, sure, so why don’t you come in and we’ll check for that and see if we can get this cleared up.”

  Bill looked around to see if anyone was watching him. “If you’re humoring me just so you can trace my call you’re wasting your time,” he said. “I’m not staying on my cell long enough for you to do that. But if you really want to clear this up, check both of them for needle marks. And go to the Tribune office. I dropped a DVD somewhere there that shows ViGen Corporation rounding up homeless men for illegal human trials for some sort of flu vaccine they’re developing. Whatever is going on, they’re behind it.”

  “Sure they are—”

  Bill hung up on Boxer. Talking to him any further was pointless. When the phone rang seconds later, he turned it off without bothering to check the Caller ID.

  He reached the alley where he had left his car, but after he got behind the wheel he realized he couldn’t drive it. The cops would be looking for it. He could try exchanging plates with one of the cars parked nearby, but that wouldn’t buy him much time. He sat in utter despair, first staring blindly around him, then lowering his head as he buried his face in his hands. He thought about what they had brainwashed Emily to believe. That he had walked into her apartment this morning covered in blood, telling her that he had killed two people. The cruelty of that after what had happened with her father was sickening. And those bastards must’ve left a pile of bloody clothes behind in her apartment to further convince both her and the police.