Buried, she thought, they would bury her where no one would ever come looking. In a maximum-security mental ward, for instance. Psychiatry preferred to bare its soul behind closed doors. But then why bring in anyone from the outside? Why risk the exposure?
An answer to that had already been given. Wasserman’s desperate attempt to save the hospital had led to his involvement with some very bad people, and he had done every-thing possible to reach Sarah again and pull her out of wherever she had retreated to in her mind.
But that wasn’t all of it. Jess still couldn’t rationalize Wasserman taking such a huge gamble. He had to know the chances were good that she would find out what he was doing and expose him. There was something else happening here, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
She thought of Annie and the abuses suffered at her father’s hands, the years of silence and the birth of an unwanted child. A genetic mutation. Annie carried it, and her father did too; mixing those genes again had produced something far beyond the capabilities of either of them.
Was that it? A twisting of genes, a double helix bent in upon itself, triggering the awakening of something long dormant and nearly forgotten?
Perhaps. But thinking of it in that way reduced Sarah to a lab experiment. She was more than that, much more.
I could petition for a hearing through Child and Welfare. I could call the police. But by the time anything was done, if anyone listened to her at all, she had a feeling Sarah would be gone. One way or another.
As she crossed the bridge and pulled into traffic on Cambridge Street, she glanced in the rearview. A dark blue Crown Victoria ran like a sleek, smooth shark three cars back. She had seen the same car ten minutes earlier. She watched as it turned into traffic and merged into her lane. Two men in the front seat, looked like maybe one more in back. Difficult to tell.
She turned left onto Harvard Avenue as the light blinked to yellow. The Crown Victoria swung across the intersection and through the red, causing others to slam their brakes, honk, and gesture out their windows. Boston drivers. She was worried now, but not much. Yet.
She debated whether to swing into the liquor store lot and see if the Crown followed, but decided to keep going. Traffic was always heavy here, with cars parked along both sides of the street and little stores lining the sidewalks. Thrift shops and unfinished wooden furniture stores attracted the college crowd. People darted and bobbed and weaved in and out of doorways. Nobody was paying any attention to the cars in the street.
She had shopped here herself, buying a lamp and rug and three prints for her walls recently. She had even bought used clothes once from the place on the corner when money was particularly tight, the smell of mothballs and dust mixing with her general discomfort at wearing other people’s things.
Okay, the Crown i still there. What to do?
Two cars back. She was being paranoid. Let’s just see. When it was her turn, she stopped dead at the green light on Commonwealth. The car behind her began to blow its horn. She heard someone shouting out the window. Hold on, girl, easy. She drummed her fingers on the wheel. People were suddenly paying attention. A couple stared from the doorway of the McDonald’s. The man smiled at the crazy woman sitting in the middle of the street, with the line of cars behind her all honking now.
The light turned yellow, then red. She floored the gas. Charlie’s car shot out across the T-tracks and into oncoming traffic. Brakes squealed. She swerved right onto Commonwealth and missed clipping the bumper of an oil truck by inches. More horns and shouting; she ignored them, corrected the car into the proper lane, and risked a glance back.
The Crown had tried to swerve around the cars in front of it by bouncing over the right-hand sidewalk, but it was blocked by the flow of pedestrians. The man in the passenger seat threw his door open and yelled at them to move, move out of the way now. He wore a white shirt and a tie and something black and threatening was clipped to his belt.
Jess turned back to the road and kept her foot on the gas. She swung the wheel hard, swerving around cars that were moving much more slowly. A light up ahead, but it was green, thank God, and she swept around a car in the left-turn lane and through the intersection.
Here the street turned steep, running up the crest of the hill and down the other side. A glance in the rearview told her that the Crown had not yet managed to catch up. She swung a hard left onto Washington, shuddered over the T-tracks, and flew past the Whole Foods Market. Another green light, someone looking down on me right now, yes, sir.
She forced herself to slow as she approached the playground and the Washington Square intersection. Red light this time. A short distance down Beacon on her left was her graduate school, and her apartment. She could not go home now, she did not know what might be waiting for her there. Another glance in the rearview told her that the Crown was nowhere in sight.
The library had an underground garage. When she reached it she pulled down into the lower reaches and switched off the engine. Metal ticked in silence. She heard the echo of a car door slam, the sound of footsteps moving away from her. A man’s voice speaking to someone else in unconcerned tones, both of them drifting away. She sat and caught her breath.
Inside the library she made her way back down into the stacks to a far corner of the lower level. A quick scan told her the area was deserted. She pulled out her cell phone.
A woman answered on the third ring. Jess could hear another voice in the background, a child’s high, clear, breathless laughter. She closed her eyes and leaned against the cool wood of the study cubicle.
“This is Patrick”
“It’s Jess Chambers.”
Suddenly his voice was attentive, crisp. “Hold on.” The phone, muffled by a hand; muttered voices, then silence. “Tell me.”
“I found something in Wasserman’s desk, a bunch of PET scans of Sarah’s brain. They’ve circled what looks like an area of heightened activity in the parietal lobe. Does that make any sense to you?”
“Sure, sure it does. The parietal lobe deals with the sensations of touch and pain, as well as a feeling of where the body is in space and what surrounds it. Sensations in general, so that if a person has damage to the parietal lobe they lose the ability to feel.”
“Would it follow that a person with an enhanced parietal lobe would have increased sensation? Perhaps a heightened sense altogether?”
“We don’t know that. But it sounds to me like your hospital director sure thinks so.”
“It’s not just him. There are others involved in this.” She told him about the man in the blue suit, everything Shelley had said just minutes earlier. “I think they’re following me, Patrick. I saw a car full of men and I managed to lose them, but they were after me from Shelley’s house. She’s sick, but she’s lucid. I think she was telling the truth. I don’t know what we’re up against here. Patrick, what do we do now? What the hell do we do?”
“I’ve done a little digging,” Patrick said. “Called in some favors. I want you to understand that this is coming through several sources, and I have no way to know if it’s accurate.”
“What is it?”
“A little background first. Just bear with me here. The human genome was entirely sequenced a few years back by the NIH and a private company called Celera Genomics. Scientists found that the genome contains less than thirty thousand genes. The function of the majority of these genes is unknown. Only a fraction of the human DNA sequence codes for a protein. The rest is dormant, and some people think it is vestigial or may have some future use.”