Before Rachel could turn, Nicole had grabbed a scalpel and lunged for her. By reflex, Rachel threw herself between Nicole and Dylan to block her aim. But in the scurry, she dropped the pistol to stop Nicole’s hand, which came down, catching Rachel across the forearm.
To keep Nicole from Dylan, Rachel pushed the gurney out of her reach with her back, blood spurting from the gash. But Dylan had not been touched.
As Rachel got her balance again, Nicole raised the blade again and brought it down on Martin’s neck.
Rachel let out a scream as he fell to his knees.
The next moment passed in a flurried haze. Brendan grabbed Nicole from behind and flung her across the room to where Officer Zakarian was cuffing the other two men. Then he dashed toward the rear, snatching the shotgun off the floor behind the officer, and ran out the door.
Malenko was nowhere in sight. But that did not register on Rachel. Only the fact that Dylan was safe and that Martin lay in a pool of blood.
Brendan ran down the corridor, checking all the rooms as he did. Only the children he had seen before. No Malenko.
His head was a wild cacophony of voices—a continuous tape of scraps that kept pulsing with the rhythm of his feet pounding the floor.
He raced upstairs and ran through the house. He was halfway up to the second floor when he heard the sound of an engine outside.
He dashed back down and out the front door.
The dock.
He bounded down the path half-expecting to see Malenko cutting across the lake in the boat. Instead, the floatplane pulled away from its mooring, its props driving it into the black open water, the red and yellow safety lights blinking on the wings, a small cabin light illuminating Malenko’s white hair. The plane made a U-turn in the water to the left to take off toward the southeast and over the ocean.
“No!” Brendan shouted.
The engines revved as the plane picked up speed in the distance.
Brendan dropped to his knees and braced himself against a mooring pole with the shotgun. As the plane lifted off the water maybe a hundred feet ahead of him, he squeezed off a shot just ahead of the plane’s exterior lights, pumped another shell into the chamber and fired a second.
He barely registered the recoil.
For a moment, he had no idea if the shots would even reach at this distance, or merely pepper the fuselage.
But at about thirty feet off the water the nose of the plane suddenly lit up in flames, as one of the engines streamed fuel back over the windshield. The engines roared in protest as they tried to gain altitude. The plane made a tipsy roll to the right and headed back toward the dock. As it came closer, Brendan could see the interior of the cabin awash in flames, and the figure of Malenko frantically flailing his arms. From fuel spraying through the shattered windshield, his head was on fire.
The plane sputtered and rocked, and for one last moment shot up as if taking off to the stars. Then it made a deep curtsy and came down in a flaming streak into the lake no more than fifty feet away.
Fuel and debris burned on the surface for a few minutes and mushrooms of air belched from below, then all was black again, as the night returned to silence. Overhead the sky had opened, and a new moon set the clouds in motion.
Brendan tossed the shotgun on the dock and stood there staring out over the opaque water. He trembled against the cold air, but inside he felt as if something had opened up—like a sac of warm fluid bursting.
He wrapped his arms around himself and cried.
EPILOGUE
SIX MONTHS LATER
BOSTON
The auditorium blazed in colored lights.
The stage was set with Christmas trees, giant candles, and nutcracker soldiers. Large shiny ornaments hung from the rafters. The orchestra, formally attired in black and white, was warming up as the children filed in to take their places on the dais.
It was the Children’s Yuletide Pageant at Symphony Hall, and from all over the commonwealth, young people had been selected to make up the special holiday choir.
Dylan was in the second row dressed like all the rest in a white robe.
Rachel had managed to get tickets in the orchestra, middle section, ten rows back, so that Dylan could see them from the stage. When he spotted them, he broke into a wide grin and waved.
And Rachel’s heart flooded with love.
While the performers got settled, her mind rumbled back to that awful night six months ago.
They had seen things almost too sordid to imagine, and it still sickened her that they had been unwitting parties to it all. Over the course of a decade, Malenko had enhanced over eighty children, kidnapping as many from randomly scattered locales across the country so as not to establish any coherence. He had apparently had a small but organized network of people who did freelance kidnappings almost always from poor rural families where the authorities had neither the resources nor the wherewithal for deep investigations. They were diabolically clever, often staging the disappearances as fatal accidents. On a few occasions they had crossed the border into Mexico and bought snatched street kids from local criminals. They never left tracks or telltale clues connecting the disappearances.
Luckily, the little boy who had been the harvest for Dylan had suffered no brain damage. His name was Travis Valentine, a gifted child with a love of butterflies, who had been safely returned to his mother in Florida.
As for the enhanced kids, some were Malenko’s clients from the Nova Children’s Center. But neither the parents nor other Nova clinicians had any idea of Malenko’s secret practice nor how he had scanned the database for prospective harvests—nor the fact that those children had been stolen, rendered brain-damaged, and disposed of at sea.
As one reporter had written: “The brain is the most wondrous creation in the universe—and, as Lucius Malenko had confirmed, the most frightening.”
The media had dubbed him a latter-day Josef Mengele.
And like his Nazi counterparts, Malenko kept extensive records of his practice. He even had a photo album and full medical report on each enhanced child, allowing authorities to contact the parents. None claimed any knowledge of the harvesting. While nearly all the treated children were exceptionally bright, some suffered serious behavioral problems that were being treated by medication and counseling.
The kids who had made up the surgical team were turned over to juvenile courts. Nicole DaFoe was arrested for the murder of Martin and was awaiting trial as an adult. The surviving cronies of Malenko were indicted for serial kidnappings and murder.
Rachel wore a permanent scar on her arm from the scalpel attack.
Because of the awful associations, Rachel sold her house in Hawthorne and moved to Arlington, which bordered Cambridge and which had a more diversified population. In the fall, Dylan was enrolled in a local school where they had a well-trained support system for LD children. And, most importantly, he was very happy.
When it was discovered that Sheila had recruited Rachel and Martin on the promise of a commission from Malenko, she was arrested for being an accessory to crimes—although her lawyers would probably get her off on a lighter sentence of abetting medical malpractice rather than kidnapping and murder. It was also discovered that she had switched videocassettes the night of Vanessa Watts’s death, having been spotted by one of the waiters.
