Beast in the Tower

“I had a run-in with the wall, but it’s nothing serious.” Kit skipped the details and unfolded the blanket to tuck it around Helen’s slight figure. Germane was already listening to the older woman’s breathing and checking for pupil response. “How is she?”

“She’s got a concussion for sure. Hell, they could’ve cracked her skull, as deep as that wound goes.”

Kit turned toward the end of the alley where the footprints disappeared. “The muggers took her purse, and she hasn’t given me her name. I think it’s Helen, but I don’t who to contact or what to tell the paramedics. Do you know her?”

“Keep talking to her,” Germane advised, measuring the woman’s pulse. “All I know is, she lives upstairs. She’s been in a few times, pesterin’ me for my barbecue sauce recipe. Says she used to make as good. She’s always by herself, though, so maybe there isn’t anybody to cook for anymore.”

Or anyone to call. Kit smoothed away the droplets of melting snow from the woman’s cool cheek. “Helen? Can you hear me? Look at me, Helen.”

The rheumy blue eyes blinked. Her pale lips slurred a question. “Are you dead?”

“What?” Kit panicked when Helen’s eyes drifted shut. “No. I’m very much alive. And so are you. Stay with me, Helen.” She pulled the woman’s bony hand between her own and tried to rub some warmth back into it. “Helen? You’re not alone. Stay with me.”

Her cold hand went limp in Kit’s grasp as she murmured, “We’re all dead.”

Chapter Two

The fire was all around him, climbing up the walls and leaping across the ceiling.

Dr. Damon Sinclair crawled toward the emergency exit at the back of his lab. The door where he’d entered minutes earlier to pick up his notes for tomorrow’s board meeting was no longer an escape route. The glass entryway had shattered and the fire was now licking its way into the hallway on the opposite side.

Beakers exploded from the heat and rained glass on his back. Their contents fed the flames. The few sprinklers that had survived the explosion were doing little more than creating steam as they spat out water at irregular intervals.

If he hadn’t smelled the chemicals—if he hadn’t reacted to the searing stench of the volatile combination and dived beneath his desk to avoid the initial blast—he’d already be dead. The milliseconds of warning had left him with a head wound, an armful of research documentation and a chance at survival. But that chance was slim if he couldn’t find a way out.

Blinded by the blood seeping into his left eye, feverish from the blazing heat, he moved forward by instinct alone. When he hit a wall instead of the exit, he knew he had to make a choice. He set the binders on the floor with a reverence for the miracles contained inside. His work could save lives—it had saved lives. And now he’d set it aside to save his own life.

The answers were all inside his head, anyway. Given enough time, he could recreate them if he had to. If he ever got out of this hellfire, he’d have all the time in the world to…

A farewell look at his work elicited a choice curse.

“What the hell is this garbage?” These weren’t his notes. Just pages and pages of numbers and equations that didn’t make sense. He hurled the worthless counterfeits into the growing flames.

Was that what this was about? This treacherous, purposeful destruction, just to hide a theft?

Whoever was responsible… Whoever had planted that damned incendiary… Reams of notes and calculations—gone. Successful equations and rejected experiments he could learn from—gone. State-of-the-art technology designed by his own hands…

His hands…

“Son of a bitch!”

They were on fire.

Damon reengaged his brain and fought off the groggy disorientation that consumed him.

Whoever was responsible for this betrayal would not go unpunished. There were means a man of his intellect and bank account could use to make the bastard who’d sabotaged his life’s work pay.

He let the rage suffuse him. Give him strength. He clutched his arms to his stomach and doubled over to stifle the flames with his own body. “You’ll pay.” The heat from his own hands seared his flesh. “You’ll pay.”

“Help! Damon! Help me!”

“Miranda?” A pain far more cruel than any physical torture twisted in the pit of his stomach. Oh, no. God, no. “Miranda!”

His wife’s screams hurt worse than the scorching agony of the skin blistering on his fingers. Her terror cut deeper than the shrapnel in his forehead. He’d gladly give up any medical secret he could devise, but please, please, spare his wife.

“Miranda!” He shouldered aside burning tables, melting plastic and shattered glass, desperately searching through the roiling smoke. “Miranda! Ans—” He choked on the toxic gases coating his lungs and crumpled to the floor. A hoarse cough racked his body and ravaged his throat before he could summon the strength to push to his knees. “Answer me!”

“Damon!”

Her screech of desperation drove him on. He crawled through corrosive puddles and ruined work and unknown treachery to find the only thing that truly mattered. “Miranda? Please. Keep talking. I’ll find—” Coughing cut like broken glass through his raw throat. The spasms drained his strength and he collapsed again. But he pulled himself toward her ragged sobs. “I’m coming.” His administrative assistant. His love. His life. Work be damned. “I’m coming.”

“Damon…”

A chunk of ceiling gave way and crashed to the floor, shooting up a snarling roar of white heat and orange flame. Damon rolled to the side, sucking in the last breath of oxygen hovering above the floor. The firefighters and paramedics were on their way. But even if they were already in the building, they had twenty-eight stories to climb. Damon was his wife’s last—her only—hope for survival.

“Miranda!”

He found her curled into a ball in the corner of a storage closet. Her clothes and hair had caught fire, and though she’d managed to douse the flames, she’d already suffered serious burns.

If she was still breathing, Damon couldn’t tell. He could only cradle her in his arms while he carried her to safety. Outside the burning lab, he collapsed and lay her on the floor. His damaged hands couldn’t detect a pulse, but he put his lips against hers and breathed. “Come on, baby,” he rasped. “Live, Miranda. Live.”

The old images faded as Damon twisted in his sleep. But the nightmare wouldn’t end. It merely transformed—into something hideous and ugly. Like him.

They were at the asylum now. Months later. Miranda’s willowy figure was lost beneath the green hospital gown. And she was crying. At least, her shoulders moved with the sounds of sobbing. The tear ducts beneath the bandages that wrapped her face could no longer cry.

“Why won’t you help me?” Her blue eyes pierced him straight to the core, adding to the weight of well-deserved guilt he carried. “How can you make yourself right and not help me?”

She should never have been a part of this. Miranda was an innocent pawn, caught and trampled by someone’s jealous greed. If only he’d been an ordinary man. Less rich. Less powerful. Less of a visionary brainiac. None of this would have happened. His work wouldn’t have been stolen. His lab wouldn’t have been destroyed. She wouldn’t have been hurt.

Damon Sinclair loved like an ordinary man, but he was cursed with being anything but.

“We nearly lost you in the E. R. when you reacted to the treatments. I won’t risk that again until I run more experiments. For some reason the tissue regeneration formula doesn’t work on you. I haven’t figured out why. Yet. But I will. I promise.” He joined her at the window. It was the last time he remembered feeling the heat of sunshine on his skin. “In the meantime, there’s reconstructive surgery—”

“That takes too long. I’ll never be the same.”

He gently stroked her arm. “Money is no object. Whatever it takes. Whatever experts we need—”

“I thought you were the expert.” She shrugged off his touch. “Your hands have healed. But my face…?”

Damon reached for her again, but she slid away, crossing to the far side of the small room whose posh amenities couldn’t completely mask its clinical purpose. “Miranda, you are beautiful to me. Inside. Where it counts. I love you. I will always love you, no matter what.”

“But I’m not beautiful outside anymore, am I?” She faced him then, the bandages masking everything but the accusation in her eyes. “You can’t look at me and say I’m beautiful on the outside, can you?”

His medical breakthroughs weren’t infallible. “I can’t fix my eye, either, and the nerve repair is still incom—”

“But you fixed the skin on your hands. What about the skin on my face? It’s not vanity. It’s humanity. I have no face left. No lips, no nose. Just…scars.”

She hated him. So much. Where once he’d seen love, he saw nothing but blame and contempt. Hell, he hated himself. He’d worked miracles for so many patients. “Miranda—”

“Fix me, Damon. Fix me!”

“I don’t know how.” The admission twisted cruelly through a brain that had always had the answers. Always. Until now. “I don’t know how.”

“I don’t know how,” he muttered, finding no peace in slumber. “I don’t know how!”

Damon lashed out at himself in his nightmare and awoke to the crash of glass.

He blinked his good eye into the glaring brightness of lights reflecting off stainless steel. Even as he pushed himself away from the lab table where he’d fallen asleep, the frustration and guilt that haunted his nightmares were still with him. He had a shattered petrie dish and contaminated solution on the floor by his feet, to boot. “Damn.”

Another experiment gone to waste. Not that he’d expected this one to work better than any of the others he’d run in the last month. He didn’t know if his equations were off, or if the sample had been tainted. But as he rolled the kinks from his neck and adjusted the black strap that crossed his forehead and held the patch over the empty socket where his left eye had been, he knew the answers would continue to elude him tonight.

A glance out the window of his twenty-eighth-floor lab told him it was well past midnight, even before he noted the time on the clock above the door. Time would forever be his enemy. No formula or device his clever mind could conjure would ever grant him the time he needed. The time he’d lost with Miranda.

Their marriage hadn’t been perfect. He’d worked too much in the lab; she had loved to travel. But she’d given him a beautiful home life and a trusted voice in the Sinclair Pharmaceuticals office; he’d given her everything she’d asked for.

Except her humanity.

He hadn’t found the answer to heal her in time. He hadn’t made her feel whole again. He couldn’t save her from her injuries—or the resulting depression. His skills weren’t enough. His money wasn’t enough.

His love wasn’t enough.

Wide awake, as he searched for a broom and dustpan, he saw the vision—as clearly as he’d seen it that morning at the asylum.

Miranda. Dead.

An empty bottle of pills beside her on the bed.

No stomach pump, no science, no miracle could bring his wife back to him.

The note she’d left him had been brief.

D—

I can’t do this anymore.

M.

Some lousy chromosome in her genetic makeup kept the miracle drugs that had earned his company millions from working. He’d even tested the tissue-regeneration formula on himself. The prototypes might be scarred and ugly, but he’d regained the use of his hands. The fingerprints hadn’t all come back, but he had sensation in almost every nerve, and most of his dexterity had returned. He could do his work. He could type his notes and mix his chemicals and write his equations. He could feel heat and cold and pain.

God, yes. He was a pro at that now. Through and through. Some days, pain was all he could feel.

Damon paused in the center of his new lab. He pulled back the front of his white coat, propped his hands at his hips, tipped his head back and roared at the soundproof ceiling.

It wasn’t fair that he should be alive while Miranda was dead. It wasn’t fair that he should have more money than some small countries and not know happiness anymore. It wasn’t fair that he couldn’t find the solution to Miranda’s Formula—the tissue-regenerating miracle intended to save patients who shared the same genetic predisposition she’d had.

He couldn’t even honor her memory with that.

“So what are you going to do about it, Doc?” he asked aloud, breathing deeply and talking to himself in a way that had always cleared his thoughts and enabled him to concentrate. “For starters, I’m going to see if that persistent bastard has made any progress breaking into SinPharm’s restricted files.”

With something new to engage his brain, Damon was a happier man. He rolled a stool over to his computer and logged in to his company’s database. In just a few keystrokes, he located the illegal activity and grinned. The nosy SOB was back. “Welcome, Mr. Black Hole of the Universe.” Catchy online name. Appropriate since the hacker had tried a dozen different ways to download his research codes. In the middle of the night, when SinPharm’s corporate offices were closed and the satellite labs and production facilities had been secured, someone was trying to hack into Damon’s private files.

It had been another restless night a couple weeks back when he’d first detected the unknown computer geek trying to access his research through online channels. The hacker had broken in three different times to download codes that were misdirecting fakes to begin with. Once the false codes were applied to the data that had been stolen from his lab eighteen months ago, the thieves would realize that they’d been duped. Again. They’d wind up with cotton candy or a laxative—not any of his patented medicines or experimental drugs.

Though he’d had no luck tracing either the location or the identity of Black Hole yet, Damon had led the intruder on a merry chase. He sat and watched the screen as his opponent peeled away layer after layer of security protocols, getting closer to the translation codes that could turn Damon’s equations from gibberish into millions of dollars.

And just when the perp was about to reach the innermost level, Damon pushed a button and scrambled the codes all over again.

His laughter was rare, a rusty sound that stretched the scarred muscles of his throat. SinPharm’s security firm had their way of preventing industrial espionage, and Damon had his.

“That should keep you busy for a few more days.” Hell, if the enemy wanted to reproduce his formulas and market competitive medical treatments without doing their own research, then they were damn well gonna have to get past him. Unless he tracked them down first and introduced them to the FDA, the FCC and any other government organization whose laws they’d violated.

And if Damon discovered the hacker was in any way responsible for the theft and fire that led to Miranda’s suicide, then he would personally put him out of business.

Permanently.

While he relished the image of the unknown spy throwing up his hands and cursing at the computer screen, Damon knew he had problems closer to home he needed to deal with. He glanced at the broken glass and dissipating chemical on the floor. “Like you.”

Damon rolled his stool over to another desk, where two rows of monitors helped him keep an eye on the Sinclair Tower through adjustable interior and exterior security cameras. He typed in a command and brought up a view of the main rooms in the penthouse upstairs. Good. All was quiet. His housekeeper’s seemingly intuitive ability to know when he’d screwed up and needed a little extra help hadn’t awakened her from her sleep.

But by morning, if he didn’t clean it up tonight, then she’d somehow know. She’d be down here at first light, cleaning and tutting herself into a worried state until she verified for herself that he hadn’t been cut or injured in any way.

Corporate spies he could handle. But it was funny how such a tiny little woman, who’d once changed his diapers and sent him to his room, could transform six feet, three inches of brains and testosterone into a guilty little boy, as eager to please as he was to cover his tracks and stay out of trouble with her.

But the bonded cleaning crew he hired to sterilize the lab once a week brought their own supplies, and if there was a broom to be had, he wasn’t finding it.

Mental note: buy cleaning supplies for the lab.

In the meantime, he could raid his housekeeper’s private stash. Damon draped his lab coat over a hook beside the rear exit, swiped his key card through the lock and hurried up the back stairs to the penthouse where they lived on the top two floors.

His plan was simple: sneak into her unguarded kitchen to borrow a broom and dustpan, then dispose of the evidence and hide the fact that he’d spent yet another sleep-deprived night working in his lab.

Yet as he tiptoed past the darkened hallway that led to her quarters, something made Damon stop. Everything was as neat and tidy as it had appeared on the monitor downstairs. But something was off. Perhaps it was the absence of any familiar sound that pricked his senses and put him on alert. There was no humidifier running, no television chattering on after his housekeeper had fallen asleep. He heard no soft, denasal snore. Damon leaned the broom and dustpan against the wall, turned the corner and gently knocked on her door.

There was no answer. The woman had raised him after his mother’s death, had stayed on after his marriage. She’d been there through his father’s passing. Had remained with him past her own retirement, the accident and Miranda’s suicide. They were as close to being a family as two people who shared no bloodline could be. Squashing a flare of panic beneath cold, rational purpose, Damon opened the bedroom door to check on her.

“Helen?”

“MISS SNOW?” A nurse joined Kit at the ICU window, looking through the criss-crossed steel filaments inside the glass to the fragile, wan woman in the hospital bed on the other side.

“There’s no change, is there.” Kit had stayed as close as the hospital staff would allow while surgical and neurological teams stitched up the elderly woman’s head wound, monitored cranial pressure and vital signs, and tucked her into the sterile room for observation. Until she regained consciousness, there was no way for the doctors to completely assess how much damage the three attackers had done. No way for the police to get any more information on the mugging beyond Kit’s concise—but all too incomplete—statement.

“We’re doing everything we can.” The plump nurse shrugged. “The rest is up to her.”

The mysterious Helen didn’t look strong enough to fight off a pesky fly, much less fight for her life. We’re all dead?

Where was the hope in that? Was that going to be Helen’s last, despairing thought? Kit splayed her fingers at the edge of the cool glass, wishing she could hold Helen’s thin, bony hand again, and share whatever warmth and encouragement the woman needed to survive. Truman Medical Center was already a dim, ominously quiet tomb at three in the morning. Walking away and leaving the elderly woman in the care of staff who knew even less about her than Kit did felt like abandonment.

Kit’s parents had been found holding hands when their bodies were discovered after the fire, with debris from the explosion blocking their escape. According to the arson team who’d combed through the diner afterward, Matthew and Phyllis Snow had most likely succumbed to the toxic smoke long before they’d been burned or crushed by the collapsing ceiling. But they’d had each other—they’d known love and a hopeful connection to something outside themselves—right until the end of their lives.

Kit curled her fingers into a fist. Someone should be in there, holding Helen’s hand, giving her hope. “She shouldn’t be alone.”

But the nurse hadn’t come to give a medical report, and she had no clue about Kit’s frustrated sense of justice for all. “It’s long past visiting hours. And since you’re not family, well…I’m sorry.” Her apologetic frown didn’t ease the sting of dismissal. “Our Jane Doe needs her rest.”

“She’s not a Jane Doe,” Kit insisted, fighting for her neighbor the only way she could. “Her name’s Helen. She lives in the Sinclair Building. You put Helen on her charts, didn’t you? I can’t imagine how disoriented she’d feel if she woke up and you started calling her by someone else’s name.”

“Yes. We have her listed as Helen Doe. Sorry to alarm you. We passed along all the information you gave us to the police. I’m sure they’re checking their missing persons files right now.” The nurse’s rueful sigh recaptured Kit’s attention. “Go home. It’s late. You’ve already done more for her than most Good Samaritans would.”

“Someone had to be here to answer questions.” That was the practical excuse she’d given for climbing into the ambulance while the paramedics worked on Helen.

“I heard you chased away her attackers. It’s all over the hospital. She might be dead if it wasn’t for you.”

“That’s not why I’m here.” Kit had left Germane back at the diner to wait until Matt showed up. She intended to call him before she left, to see if her brother had gotten home safely. In the meantime, Helen’s needs had been more pressing. Kit had held the older woman’s chilly hand until the staff chased her away. Now all she could do was keep her distance and watch and wait. “People shouldn’t be alone. Especially when they’re hurting or afraid. Someone needs to be here for her.”

Her brother might not appreciate her vigilance. The neighborhood might think her more busybody than philanthropist. But the unconscious Helen couldn’t stop her from caring.

The nurse nudged her toward the lobby. “One of the staff will check her regularly throughout the night. But until we get word from her family, or visiting hours resume at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait someplace else.”

Kit exhaled a deep breath and finally acknowledged the aches and fatigue of her own banged-up body. “I should have lied and said I was her granddaughter, shouldn’t I?”

The nurse offered a sympathetic smile. “Come back in the morning. You need your rest as much as she does.”

Without further argument, Kit nodded and dragged her feet toward the deserted lobby. Since she hadn’t paused to grab her purse before climbing into the ambulance, Kit’s cell phone was still back at the diner. Posted signs warned her she wasn’t allowed to use her cell on the ICU floor, anyway, but out here she could access a bank of landline telephones to call Germane and Matt.

Maybe she should phone for a cab instead, and head on home as the nurse had suggested. After a few hours’ sleep, she could search out which apartments above her were occupied, and start knocking on doors. Other than the model apartments, the rooms above the fifth floor weren’t finished. But someone had to know Helen. Maybe one of the construction workers had met her and could provide some information. Kit would ask them when they came in for lunch the next day.

But the cops were probably already going through the building tonight. Hopefully, they’d have better luck getting hold of her landlord at Sinclair Pharmaceuticals than she’d ever had, as well. Though she’d never had any contact with the man beyond letters and leases and rent checks, Easting Davitz, Esq., had her entire financial history on file. Chances were he’d have files on the other tenants, as well.

And, if the cops and Mr. Davitz couldn’t find out anything more about Helen, Kit would still have plenty of time to come back to the hospital to visit in the morning. She could spend a couple of hours holding the woman’s hand—maybe read a book or just talk—before she had to get the ovens fired up and the diner opened for lunch at eleven.

With that much of a plan giving her legs a reason to move, Kit picked up the receiver on the first wall phone and deposited fifty cents. When Germane’s cell number kicked her over to his voice mail, she hung up and called Matt directly. When his voice mail answered, Kit spoke the familiar words. “Matt? It’s way past curfew. If you’re there, pick up. I just need to know you’re okay. I’ll see you at work tomorrow. Right?” If she was lucky. “I just need you to answer me and let me know you’re safe.”