Human Remains Read online

  I lunged for the silver handle.

  The office door buzzed before I touched it. I flinched, but I yanked on it.

  No.

  No matter how I struggled, the door shifted only a millimetre before it hit an invisible lock.

  No.

  How had he managed that?

  I was now sealed in the lab.

  On the third floor. With no phone.

  And the man who'd masterminded a genocide.

  You chose … poorly.

  "—right now. Get rid of that UFO I told you about." His voice grew louder behind me. I could hear his footsteps.

  I glanced over my shoulder. He strolled up the aisle with his phone to his ear, watching me as he spoke. I was getting cornered by a guy who was so crazy, he was chatting to his buddies about UFO's before offing me.

  At last, he pocketed his phone in his jeans, his eyes never leaving mine. I wanted to lunge for his key card, which stared at me from his front pocket, as unsmiling as the real, live man who'd trapped me. "What made you suspect me?"

  I licked my lips. If I started talking, would I be like Scheherazade, buying time with my stories? Or would he figure, Yep, I've learned everything I needed to know. Time to kill this bitch, too.

  Jamais deux sans trois.

  Lawrence had died. Ducky had died.

  I'd counted Baby Hope as the second death, but she hadn't expired directly as a result of Stephen Weaver.

  Or had she? Stephen Weaver must have rejoiced when he met Joan Acayo, a black pregnant woman who already had Zisa and herpes. Why not add a third virus?

  Like Zisa, Rift Valley disease was usually spread by mosquitoes, but it could also be transmitted by close contact with tissue or bodily fluids. It was not a coincidence that a butcher died from Rift Valley disease in Kabale.

  Stephen Weaver could have infected Lawrence, or Joan, or both of them, plus their twins.

  A 100 percent pregnancy loss rate.

  I flashed back to that bathroom. Angella's too-small head and desperately gasping chest. Baby Hope never got to take a breath, never opened her eyes.

  I could be spreading Rift Valley myself right now. They'd tested me for pregnancy and Zisa and herpes, but not Rift Valley disease.

  "No," I said, aloud.

  Stephen Weaver's mouth twisted. "No, you didn't suspect me?"

  "I did suspect you. Someone was scaring Dahiyyah, stealing her condenser and her papers. Someone in her lab would have access. That person kept going after Lawrence died."

  He smiled.

  I began to move. I wasn't truly cornered yet. He'd left three feet of space between us, maybe because he didn't want to get too close to the gook. "Between you and Dr. Hay, she was the loudest, but you were the one with the fruitarian diet and all the apricot pits."

  He snorted. He let me edge past him, probably because he didn't consider me a true threat. He was the lion who could pounce on a rat any time by stretching out a paw. "She could have misplaced her condenser."

  "No, you were gaslighting her. Driving her crazy. You knew exactly how to do it." I backed down the central aisle, toward the benches at the rear of the lab. "You stole her equipment to boil cyanide, and then planted it back on her so people would think she'd killed Lawrence. You added the cyanide extraction paper. But Lawrence was beaten before he died. Dahiyyah wouldn't beat anyone up. She couldn't even beat me up."

  The next lab bench, on my left, belonged to Stephen, judging from the name plate on the shelf. I kept backing up. Maybe I could run a big circle around him at the perimeter. My ankle twinged, but not severely, at slow speed.

  I threw out a question to distract him. "Why did you put the bag over Lawrence's head?"

  "I didn't," he said.

  "Oh, come on. You logged on to 14-88 and drew them a new flag. I assume you put a bag on Lawrence as a reference to the lynching that you love so much. Maybe you were too much of a coward to look him in the face. Or you needed a handy way to suffocate him. How about all three? Collect 'em all!"

  He nearly smiled. "I didn't kill him."

  "Right. You knocked the phone out of my hand and chased me in here because you need a few more steps on your pedometer?"

  "No."

  A two-toned noise ding-donged through the air. I jerked my head up, trying to pinpoint the source, but Stephen Weaver ambled up the outside aisle, over to the frosted glass door, and waved his badge at the sensor.

  The closest hallway lab door opened. A huge man stomped into the room, more sequoia than human, if sequoias wore black balaclava masks. Even under the mask, I detected greyish eyes and a prominent nose. The dude was white.

  A smaller, skinnier guy slid around the sequoia, wearing the same black balaclava.

  #1: Caucasian male, heavy build, 5'10"-6'0"(178 cm -183 cm)

  #2: Caucasian male, 5'6"-5'8"(168 cm -173 cm)

  #3: Stephen Weaver

  Chapter 49

  Stephen Weaver pointed at me. "Take care of her."

  Take care of her.

  Rage hummed through my veins.

  He couldn't even come out and say, Kill her. He had to disguise it with vague language. Murder and maim at a safe distance: from a lab bench, a conference pulpit, or a United Nations consensus statement.

  These three men had killed Lawrence. They'd killed Dahiyyah. But hell if I let them take me without a fight all over this lab. They'd never write me off as a suicide.

  This was a case of three on one, in a single room with three locked doors, two to the hallway and one to the office. I was alone and injured, so I'd better strike fast. "Hey. You must be the ones Stevie calls in to the dirty work."

  Fat Guy shook his head from the aisle next to the hallway. Like a sequoia, he didn't move fast.

  Skinny made up for it. He snapped, "Shut up," as he prowled toward me.

  "Me or him? The police are looking for you, you know."

  Skinny was only ten feet away. Close enough that I noted the paler skin around his eye holes and the way his mouth shifted underneath his balaclava. He moved through the central aisle, like me. Stephen Weaver stalked behind him.

  Okay, this is bad. But guess what, honeys? Hostage-takers don't fuck with me. You seriously think the three of you will do it, with your bare hands?

  I retreated to the fume hood resting against the back wall of the room. Its contents were protected by the glass sash drawn most of the way down. Signs on the stainless steel doors beneath warned of acids stored on the left and the flammable components on the right.

  I heard a click.

  I lifted my head.

  Fat Guy creeped toward me from the hallway aisle, still fifteen feet away, but he cocked his gun and aimed it at my head like he knew how to use it.

  Fucking guns.

  I stared down the barrel. It was like a small, black eye trained on me. I thought, All this time, I've been running away from pregnant women and infectious diseases. But this is what I'm really scared of. Isn't it.

  The humour drained out of me. I remembered the 14/11 Medical Post article about what to do when an active shooter enters the room.

  Run.

  If you can't run, fight.

  If you can't fight, hide.

  Right now, with a gun aimed between my eyes, hiding was not an option. They knew exactly who I was and where I was.

  Running? When I was trapped in an enclosed space, surrounded by lab benches?

  Theoretically possible. Fat Guy might shoot me, but in times of stress, shooters miss up to 80 percent of the time. Often they want you alive. The gun is a prop to make you come with them quietly. And hell no, I wasn't going.

  Security could have noticed the two strangers who'd entered the Lab of Death.

  If I herded the bad guys close to the doors, Harold might spot me on his cameras. The cameras were pointed at the entrance, not inside the lab, but, worst case, my blood hitting the frosted glass doors should raise a domestic 911.

  Or I could dash in the opposite direction, to the outdoor window
s. Smash through double panes until I made a Hope-sized hole and hurtled from the third floor.

  But I could die from a three-story fall. I once looked after a woman who'd jumped off a bridge. Not pretty.

  I bet those windows were made of security glass, too. I might not crack through them before I got shot.

  More importantly, if I jumped, they'd write me off as a suicide.

  Door it is, then.

  I had three advantages over Lawrence and Dahiyyah.

  One, I hadn't partaken in any cyanide. This trio might force it down my mouth after I was unconscious, or smear it over my skin, but my neurons and my cardiac muscle were still firing for now.

  Two, I would not go quietly. I would smear my own blood and intestines over those walls before I'd let them take me.

  Three, I knew exactly who my enemies were. Cowards.

  Racists want to beat people up. Skin colour is a convenient excuse. They band together, they hurl words, they paint graffiti, they torch synagogues and mosques, they jump on a poor Muslim woman trying to pick her kids up from school.

  But most of them won't pull a trigger point blank. Some of them will, like that crazy guy in South Carolina who opened fire on a black Bible study.

  Most of them won't.

  I looked Fat Gun Guy straight in the eye and declared, "Is that a firearm I see before me?"

  Fat Guy's eyes darted toward Skinny, then toward Stephen Weaver. I wasn't fighting him like Lawrence, or cowering like Dahiyyah. He didn't know what to do with me. And maybe he didn't want to pull the trigger on a little Asian woman. Hey, I'll take any advantage I can get.

  "Shut up," repeated Skinny.

  Me talking made Skinny uncomfortable. He obviously preferred his victims unconscious, with bags over their heads.

  That meant I should talk more.

  Fat Guy shook his gun to seize my attention. He growled, "You. Come with me."

  "'Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove!'" I shouted back at him. Why poetry? Why not. My brain was unhinged. If they were going to kill me, kill me, God damn it. I wasn't going to live in fear anymore.

  Fat Guy's gun hand wavered. He didn't shoot.

  "She's crazy," said Stephen, lurking behind Skinny's left shoulder. "Get rid of her. Now."

  "Why should they? Why don't you do it, Stevie?" I offered him an open-mouthed clown smile, a rictus of mock delight.

  "That's Doctor Stephen Weaver to you, dog-muncher."

  Dog-muncher? "That's Doctor Hope Sze to you, loser." I could've come up with a better insult, but at least we had the same rank. Almost. "Dr. Hope Sze, M.D."

  Stevie's hands curled into fists.

  I would have chortled, except Fat Guy and Skinny had ringed around me, almost within arm's length. Fat Guy pointed the gun at my chest.

  Tucker had been shot in the lungs and in the bowel.

  He'd almost died, except the police and the medical crew had saved him.

  No police lurked outside the door this time.

  I swallowed, or tried to. There was almost no saliva left in my mouth. I made eye contact with the underlings. The balaclavas made them look like low rent versions of Spiderman. "Stevie's ordering you to do it. He never gets his hands dirty. He's not going to jail for killing

  Dr. Lawrence Acayo. You are."

  Fat Guy's mouth twitched under his mask. He was listening. "Maybe he poisoned Dr. Acayo first, but you're the ones who beat him to death. Doctor Stephen Weaver gets to sit here with his Ph.D., while you guys end up in jail. It's like he's the master and you're the slave."

  "Shut up, slit," said Stephen, but I thought his forehead gleamed under the fluorescent light. The guy had apocrine sweat glands after all.

  "If I were you, I'd get some evidence against him. Save his texts. Figure out where he got the cyanide. That way, if he gets you arrested, he'll go down with you."

  Stephen Weaver charged forward, his face so red it bordered on eggplant.

  He knocked Skinny against a lab bench, who hollered "What the hell?", but Stephen's hands were already swiping for Fat Guy's gun.

  Fat Guy yanked his arms up, keeping the gun out of Stephen's reach.

  Meanwhile, I thrust my hands under the glass sash of the fume hood and snatched a flask from the acid side.

  The stoppered flask contained some transparent liquid. Nothing too remarkable-looking, except for the HF 16/12/14 marked on the side, which inspired me to say, "Who wants some hydrofluoric acid?"

  All three thugs jerked to a halt. Fat Guy held his arms in the air. Stephen Weaver's claws froze.

  Skinny held on to the edge of his lab bench.

  Wow. Bad guys knew hydrofluoric acid. I didn't learn about it 'til med school. But maybe all they heard was the word "acid." I'd have to educate them.

  I advanced toward them, holding the flask above my head so that its contents caught the light. "Hydrofluoric acid. One of the most dangerous acids in the world."

  "Shoot her," said Stephen.

  I tsk-tsked. "Stevie, do you want hydrofluoric acid flying in your eyes? It's one of the most frightening inorganic acids known to mankind." Usually, I'd use a non-gender-specific word, this group luuuurved mankind. Parts of it, anyway.

  Stephen snorted. "No one leaves HF inside a fume hood."

  "They shouldn't," I agreed. "It burns through glass. If I get this in your eyes, it will blind you. If I get it in your lungs, they will fill with fluid until you stop breathing. Your skin might seem to protect you, because one little splash doesn't hurt much. But it seeps down right to the bone, leaching out the calcium, so that you go into cardiac arrhythmias."

  They didn't know whether or not to believe me. I said, impatient, "You might have seen it on Breaking Bad. They tried to dissolve a drug dealer's body with it."

  Whoa. That, they'd heard of. They all stiffened and looked to Stephen to boss them around.

  Stevie's weakness was that he had to be top dog, but he didn't want to kill me himself.

  The thugs needed someone to order them around.

  Solution: disrupt that chain of command, so they had neither head nor muscle.

  Cut them off like CRISPR identifying their villainous asses and dropping them to their motherfucking knees.

  I said, "I'm not lying. I'm a medical doctor. He's a chemist."

  "I'm a Ph.D." Stephen raised his voice.

  "Yes, probably because you couldn't get into medical school." His hands thrust into the air like he was going to strangle me. He had such big hands, he probably could've encircled my waist and squeezed my small intestines out through my mouth.

  Except I held up the vial between us. "Oh, good. I have my first volunteer for hydrofluoric acid."

  "That's not HF," he said, more to his buddies than to me. "We follow the lab safety rules. All dangerous chemicals have to be secured."

  "You would think. But you know, Ducky was running scared after you killed Dr. Acayo. She knew what you were up to. Maybe she even told Dr. Acayo, and that's why you killed him. Or maybe he figured it out first. Either way, Ducky needed to protect herself. And one way she did it was by weaponizing her lab. She's still careful enough to label her work, though." I twisted the flask so the neatly-written HF was most prominent.

  "Bullshit," said Stephen. "Shoot her."

  I unstoppered the flask and launched its contents at his face.

  Chapter 50

  He screamed so loudly, I was afraid it really was hydrofluoric acid.

  Which was a problem, because now he was writhing at my feet, spraying droplets of transparent liquid and howling.

  I pressed myself against the fume hood, which wasn't the safest thing to do, but I didn't want to brush against him while I tried to escape.

  From the look of it, the thugs didn't want to touch him, either. They backed away from him and me, their eyes wide behind their masks.

  The antidote is calcium, even if it is HF, I told myself, but that was no comfort. I didn't want to go blind or get flash pulmonary
edema either. Even if we were next door to a hospital, I could die before I made it to the ER. Just like Baby Hope.

  I scrambled up on the deserted lab bench next to the window, knocking down pipettes and flasks as I managed to hoist my legs and feet out of immediate splash range.

  The Fat Guy withdrew, putting the safety back on his gun before he holstered it at his ankle.

  I breathed a little easier, even though Stephen was screaming, "Get her!" and swiping at me like a sea monster.

  I climbed to the window side of the lab bench while the thugs backed toward the closest door to the hallway.

  Skinny pushed the door. Nothing.

  Right. They needed Stephen's swipe card to get out, and none of us wanted to touch him.

  The good news was that they couldn't get away.

  The bad news was that we were all trapped together, unless someone could grab Stephen's card. Even with gloves, that was a risky proposition.

  "Shoot it out!" said Skinny.

  "What?" Fat Guy glanced back at us. "I don't want to shoot a girl."

  "Not her, the lock!"

  "I could break the glass."

  "I said shoot it!"

  I wouldn't know where to shoot out an electronic lock, either. But I couldn't worry about it, because Stephen Weaver lurched upward to seize my right ankle with his bare hand.

  Acid sizzled my skin in the bare patch between my skinny jeans and socks.

  My turn to scream. I snatched an empty glass flask and smashed it over his head. The shards cascaded into his eyes.

  He yowled. His hands flew toward his orbits to shield them, or to rip the fragments out of his corneas.

  And then I heard barking. Powerful, do-not-fuck-with-me barking, growing louder and louder.

  I shook my head. Had I gone crazy?

  The fire alarm started screeching. It made me feel like screaming, too. Over here, over here!

  The barking cut through the alarm. Short, sharp, deep, commanding barks.

  Rottweiler barks.

  The thugs shouted, pointing at the shadows forming on the frosted glass panels.

  One form barked, placed her paws on the window, leapt off, and barked some more.

  The other simply raised a foot and kicked the glass pane. Once. A solid kick. One that made the room reverberate faintly.