She dared him with her eyes. Her memories of the Monkey House tangled in oscillating bands of terror and violence, but she was incapable of such terrible acts. His accusations were even more proof that his condition was deteriorating.
“I saw a drug that had a potential to help ease people’s suffering,” Alexis said. “But you had to play God and take it out of the hands of science. You had no right to make that decision.”
“Making people’s lives better by helping them forget? It hasn’t helped ours very much, has it?”
“Two months of law-enforcement training, and suddenly you’re the world’s morality cop.”
“If it wasn’t for you and your Frankenstein complex, I would still have a career. But at least you have your career, right?”
“Mark, you know why I stayed on in the neurosciences department. It was our best chance to find a treatment for-”
Mark slammed his fist down on the table, causing his glass to jump. Mark and Alexis watched the white wine quiver a moment before settling down. Then he looked at her.
“Sorry,” he said, lifting his palms in supplication. “I’m not angry. Not anymore.”
At least this time he noticed his outburst. I don’t know if that’s an improvement or not.
“We’d better stop fighting each other,” Alexis said. “Soon we might be fighting to save our lives.”
They fell into silence at the thought. They both lifted their heads as if expecting to hear something in the woods outside. A truck rumbled down a distant street and a jet swept over on its way to RDI.
“If it was Burchfield, what could he possibly want in your lab?” Mark asked, taking a half-hearted bite of salmon. “Halcyon’s dead. Seethe’s dead. Briggs is dead. There’s nothing left.”
“That’s what has me stumped. We’re working on fear response, sure, but nothing like what Sebastian Briggs was doing. All those brain scans I’ve been looking at, all that mapping? That’s just tracking basic emotional and motor responses, grunt work.”
“I don’t see what Burchfield would want with that, unless he plans on clubbing his Republican challengers over the head with a budget ax.”
“Exactly.” Alexis wondered if she should tell him the rest. But his rages had become more sudden and uncontrollable over time, and she was increasingly reluctant to risk riling him.
If he found out I’d been lying to him for the past year, there’s no telling what he might do.
“Okay, maybe there’s another possibility,” Mark said. “I just can’t see Burchfield adding a couple of corpses to his resume. At least not until the primary’s over.”
“Very funny. You do gallows humor so well.”
“I’ve had lots of practice tying my own noose. So, is there anyone else from your closet of horrors that might be popping up now?”
“You know about the other Monkey House subjects. Anita is struggling…” Alexis twisted her napkin in distress.
“Is David Underwood still in Central Regional?” Mark asked, not allowing her to wallow.
“Yeah.” The state’s largest hospital for the mentally ill was in nearby Butner, where Alexis had conducted some post-grad research. “He’s probably being blasted with psychosocial modalities, and they’re still doing pharmacological clinical trials for schizophrenia. Sort of like what Briggs was doing, except this is sanctioned and funded by the state.”
“You think his shrinks found out about the Monkey House?”
“Even if David remembered anything, I doubt if he could communicate it clearly. If they asked a question that hit too close to home, he’d probably start singing ‘Home on the Range.’”
Mark shuddered, no doubt recalling the man’s incessant broken warbling after enduring years of Briggs’s sadistic research.
“Okay, so Anita and David haven’t spilled the beans-or the pills. That leaves Wendy and Roland. Are they still together?”
“Unless they lied, they headed for some peace and quiet in the Blue Ridge Mountains.”
“I thought you and Wendy stayed in touch.”
“We did for a while. I haven’t seen her since we had them over for dinner last year. But she quit calling a few months ago. Unfriended me on Facebook and everything. She even took down the website where she was selling her art.”
“Not surprised. I figured Roland would turn into one of those survivalist nut jobs and head for the back country.”
“You barely even know him.”
“When you kill people together, you kind of learn a thing or two about each other.”
“Nobody killed anybody. I don’t know why you hang onto that particular delusion when there are so many others to choose from.”
“Because it makes me feel better about being a heavily armed lunatic,” Mark said.
They’d had this argument so often that she might as well have read straight from the script. “Briggs and the others were killed by Burchfield’s bodyguard.”
Mark pushed his plate away and stood, going to the window. “You remember it different every time, so there’s no point in talking about it now.”
She studied his reflection in the glass as he looked out. The scar zigzagged from his mouth where he’d injured his face during their escape, later explaining that the pain from the self-inflicted wound had helped him focus. He was still handsome, maybe even more so than before, because his cuteness had taken on a hard, bad-boy edge. However, his eyes were dark and troubled, and occasionally they flared as if some black magic potion was bubbling away inside his skull.
“You think they’re watching the house?” she asked.
“Depends on who ‘they’ are. I don’t think Burchfield’s people would, but the CIA and FBI were watching him. That was a year ago, though. I don’t know what the hell’s going on now. I’m so far out of the loop I might as well start believing the Internet.”
“There’s one other possibility. One of my research assistants was doing some work on frontal-lobe activity. She was measuring response to various stimuli, showing violent, erotic, romantic, or pastoral photographs and then noting the electromagnetic activity resulting from each.”
“Let me guess. The neurons got busy when they saw the dirty pictures. Always works for me.” Apparently satisfied no one was approaching the house, Mark turned away from the window and went to the closet to check his firearms. It was a nervous compulsion he engaged in with increasing frequency. Alexis wondered if his decision to become a cop had merely been an excuse to pursue a higher grade of weaponry.
“It wasn’t controversial, but if somebody got wind of it, they might have thought I was trying to revive Halcyon,” she said.
“They can’t be that dumb. They know you know they’re watching. Therefore, they should be looking for the things they don’t see.”
“Wow, you did spend too much time in Washington.”
“In a way, we’d be lucky if these guys are federal,” Mark said. “At least then, they’d be reporting to someone, which would mean accountability up and down the chain.”
“But what if it’s rogue? A terrorist group or a tech company? Maybe even CRO?”
“Fuck CRO.” Mark pulled his Glock from the top shelf and checked the clip. “And terrorists aren’t that patient, whether they’re domestic or foreign. Part of their gig is to make a big splash. ‘Subtle’ doesn’t appear anywhere in the training manual.”
“So they’re teaching homeland security at community college now?” She knew she was provoking him, but she was on edge, and in a sick way, mutual uneasiness had become a comfort zone. Once they fell into the routine, they both relaxed a little. Fear had become safe.
Their marriage had remained solid through the crazy travel schedules and their hectic careers, but the past year had taken its toll. Alexis missed her romantic, goofy, ambitious husband, who had been replaced by this tight- jawed, nervous gun freak. The man she’d married had somehow become a stranger.
One more casualty of the Monkey House.
“Here’s all the homeland security you need.” He took a weapon from the closet that looked like a machine gun from a war movie and spoke in an instructional tone, as if she might actually have to use it one day. “This AR-
