Silent Night - By Tom Barber Page 0,17
captives saw a tall man behind the front desk in a guard’s uniform.
‘Morning, sir,’ Drexler said.
The man didn’t respond.
He looked at the woman whom Drexler was holding.
‘Who the hell is she?’
‘Think she’s his girlfriend.’
He looked at them, then nodded. ‘So take them up. He’s waiting.’
Twenty seconds later, they arrived on the third floor. The large man with black curly hair was standing by the doors of the elevator, a pistol in a holster on his hip. Wicks and Drexler pushed the two captives out onto the level and they stumbled forward. Regaining his balance, the man immediately put his arm around the woman protectively, both of them uncertain and scared, glancing around nervously.
The curly-haired guy looked at the newcomers and grinned.
He focused on the man.
‘Good morning, doctor.’
The male captive didn’t respond. He was distracted, puzzled by the lack of activity around him. The large man jerked his head, indicating the two captives should move forward. They walked slowly across the polished tiled floor towards the main laboratory. As they passed him, the large man grabbed the woman and motioned the doctor to keep walking. He came to a stop just outside the main lab.
It was empty.
‘Inside,’ the man ordered.
The doctor turned. ‘What is this about?’
The large man’s face darkened.
He grabbed the pistol from his holster and put it to the woman’s head. He pulled the trigger and the weapon buzzed angrily, a cloud of blood and brains spraying in the air.
‘NO!’ the man shouted in horror.
Her body dropped like a stone, blood spattering all over the white floor. Then the curly-haired man swung his pistol to the doctor, aiming at his legs.
‘Get in there and wait, asshole. You move or make a sound, you lose a kneecap.’
Numb with shock, the doctor stumbled backwards into the lab behind him. He stepped just inside the doors, which slid shut again in front of him. Behind the glass, he stared at his girlfriend’s corpse on the tiled floor.
Outside, the man with the gun turned to Wicks and Drexler.
‘Tibbs?’
‘Handled,’ said Drexler.
‘Were you seen?’
She shook her head. ‘Used the fire escape.’
‘But we had a problem,’ Wicks said. ‘Kruger wasn’t home.’
The man thought for a moment, then shrugged. ‘This guy can do what he does.’ He checked his watch. ‘But you two need to get back to the city. The doctor can’t work without a sample.’
His hit-team nodded.
‘Before you go, get rid of the bitch,’ the man said, jabbing his pistol at the dead woman on the floor. ‘Dump her in the room with the others.’
EIGHT
‘Is there anything you can tell us about why this happened?’ Josh asked the young female doctor gently, sitting beside her. Archer had joined them, squatting on his haunches in front of them. It was still busy across the lobby, office workers, cops and CSU forensic investigators everywhere, but the trio were far enough away that they could have a quiet private conversation in the corner.
The woman looked at Josh and nodded.
‘Call me Maddy.’
‘Can you tell us why this happened, Maddy?’
‘Do you know who my father was?’ she asked.
Josh looked at Archer.
‘No. I’m afraid we don’t.’
‘He was very well-known in our circles. Both here in the States and around the world. He was a pioneer in his field. He gave a lecture at a conference in Washington two months ago and over three thousand people attended. He had dinner that night at the White House.’
She paused, looking down at the lukewarm cup of coffee in her hands.
‘My mother died of lung cancer when I was five. The physician attending her didn’t test for it early enough. If he had, she possibly could have survived, or at least lived a whole lot longer. My father could never move past what happened to her. It ate away at him every day. And once he became truly established in his field, much of his career objectives completed, he began trying to find a cure.’
‘For cancer?’ Josh asked.
The doctor shook her head. ‘No. There are many different types. There isn’t just one cure for all. It doesn’t work like that.’
She paused.
‘Cancer is a shocking sickness. It’s something we all fear. It seems to appear out of nowhere and can strike in any part of your body. You have to remember that in the grand scheme of things, modern medicine is still in extreme infancy. We’ve made more advances in the past hundred years than we did in the previous thousand, but it’s still not enough. Thousands of scientists and doctors have tried to come up