I state the obvious. “Mind control.”
“Maybe.” He bobs his head a little. “Probably.”
“Nick, there’s a real possibility that Donovan-slash-Carter was using Indie and she’s been completely compromised. Like unrecoverable. Like… she’s not coming back from this. Like—”
“All right, I get it. Stop.”
“Someone has to prepare Adam and McKay. I don’t know if this is gonna work. And I don’t care what that nurse says, Donovan woke up. They were both talking to me.”
Nick shoots me a dubious look. “You were asleep, Merc. I saw you when I came in the room.”
“That can’t be right. I had a recording. I was listening to it. There was a note in the chart if you don’t believe me.”
Nick waves a hand in the air. “Never mind that. And speaking of charts”—he points to them in the box—“these are what I found in the basement. But I’m not sure what they’re referring to. Could be the rats, but maybe not. We need to look through them.”
“What are we looking for?” He hands me a chart and I take it.
“Anything that will shed some light on what he was doing.”
I open my chart, fully expecting to decipher what this study pertains to in the first few seconds, and then let out a sigh. “What the hell is this?”
“Pedigrees,” Nick says. “No names, just numbers.”
“Hmm. Doesn’t look like a human chart.”
“No,” he says. “It doesn’t.”
“I mean, I just looked at Donovan’s and that’s what a human chart looks like.”
“Agreed.”
“But… then again, if you’re doing animal trials, wouldn’t you need the same kind of information? Species, weight, sex—right? Shit like that?”
“Yep.”
I hold up the chart. “So where is that stuff?”
“That’s what I’m asking you, genius.”
I look at the chart again. Flip the page. It’s like a family tree. A generational chart. But no names, just numbers. Which leads one to believe that this information describes animals.
But then Nick says, “Read off your first-generation numbers.”
I flip to the last page, the first crossing, and read off my numbers.
“Nope. Mine are different. Read the next line.”
I close my file. “We’re not gonna get anywhere like this. We need a database so we can cross-reference. And making a database is gonna take me some time. So my first question is—how bad do we need this information?”
“How do we know if we need it if we don’t know what it is, Merc?”
He’s got a point.
“And look at this.” He pulls a old vinyl binder off the pile of charts. Opens it up to a an eight-by-ten picture of a young man, and points to the date. “Nineteen ten.”
“OK. But I’m not following.”
“This is Gerald Couture.”
“He’s the… grandfather?”
“Yeah.”
I wait for him to say more, but he doesn’t. So I say, “OK,” again. “So what?”
“Look how young he is.”
“Hmm. Didn’t he just die in that last take-down?”
“Yep.”
“Hmm. Yeah. He was an old fuck, that’s for sure.”
“No. That’s the point. I mean, yeah, he was old, Merc. But he didn’t look like an old fuck. Not like Doc, right? And he’d be much older than Doc. Gerald Couture was still running that island when they were raided seven years ago. He was not an old fuck.”
I don’t know what to make of that, so I don’t say anything.
“Megan Machette was doing rat studies,” Nick continues. “She was looking for the secret to eternal life—or, at the very least, extended life.”
“So why don’t we ask her? She might be able to take one look at this and say what it is.”
“I didn’t want to bring anyone else in on this, but it looks like we’ll have to.”
“Do you have access to her? Because if not, I can probably get a hold of her through a woman in Fort Collins.”
“I have access to Johnny. It’ll have to go through him anyway, so might as well start there.”
“All right. We’re gonna table this until we can get her eyeballs on it?”
He closes the binder and throws one of the folders into the box and then leans back against the headboard of the bed. “I was actually hoping you’d have answers.”
“Why would I have answers?” I ask. He doesn’t say anything. Just props his hands behind his head and sighs. “Nick?”
He looks at me, still silent. Then, finally, he says, “I want what you want, ya know that?”
“What do I want?”
“For your girls to be… free, right? Free of all this bullshit. I want to find Carter’s base, I want to find all his information, I want to find all the answers and I want to be able to say, ‘Your girls are good, Merc. They’re clear. They’re not gonna be a problem.’”
“Well. Thanks, I guess. I appreciate that. I hope that’s what you find out for Wendy, too.”
He shakes his head. “No. It’s not gonna end that way for Wendy.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, Merc, I do.”
He’s got a look in his eyes. Something that tells me there’s more going on here than I can currently see. But then he’s got his phone out and he gets up and walks down the stairs. I just barely catch him saying Johnny’s name before he trails off, leaving me alone in the room with the box of files.