Page 67 of Undertow

Wade took one of the bags. Opened it. The smell of kung pao chicken filled the empty lab, absurdly domestic in a space that had been used to design a drug that stole people’s memories.

“At least we’re not going back empty-handed,” Wade said.

They drove back across the Bay Bridge with Chinese food for six on the back seat and nothing else. Saturday afternoon in San Francisco was a postcard—sunshine, sidewalk cafés, someone busking saxophone on the corner of 16th and Valencia. Gabe parked three blocks from the apartment.

With two blocks to go, his phone buzzed. Tyler Price.

Gabe stopped walking. Wade took two more steps, turned back. Read his face.

“What.”

“Graham filed the missing person’s report.” Gabe read from the screen. “Elena Whitfield. Vulnerable adult. Left treatment against medical advice. Last seen in the company of unidentified individuals. Price says it’s been forwarded to the FBI field office in Portland.”

Wade was quiet for a beat. Then: “How worried are you.”

“Ask me tomorrow.”

They walked the last block in silence. The blue Honda in the lot had been registered to a rental company. Tom would trace it. It would lead nowhere. Everything in this case seemed to hit a dead end.

Gabe thought about the deadline for the chief’s application, which had now passed. He thought about the empty lab and the fresh solvent, and a lab tech named Danny who ordered kung pao chicken every Saturday and vanished without canceling his takeout. He thought about Tyler Price’s text and his career dissolving in his hands.

He thought about Tom’s question: Who has that kind of reach?

At the apartment, Piper opened the door. Her face went through three expressions in two seconds—hope, confusion, disappointment.

“The lab was empty,” Gabe said.

“Not good.” She took the bags. “Is this—did you bring us Chinese food from a crime scene?”

“Technically, from a crime scene’s lunch order.”

Piper stared at him. Then at Wade.

“I’m telling this story at every Thanksgiving for the rest of my life,” she said, and carried the food inside.

35

It took a few hours for Cara to notice that Elena had stopped coming out of the bedroom.

Saturday night after Gabe and Wade brought back the Chinese food and the news that the lab was a ghost, Elena had eaten a few bites of fried rice and said she was tired. Sunday morning she didn’t come out for coffee. By Sunday afternoon the door to the small bedroom—the one with the fire escape and the hummingbird mural—stayed closed, and when Piper knocked, the voice that answered was thin and flat and far away.

“I’m fine. I just need to rest.”

She wasn’t fine. Elena had been holding herself upright through sheer will since she’d stumbled into their lives on a rain-soaked highway, and the Corvallis results had been the thing that finally cut the wire. Knowing the name of what had been done to her—knowing it was a product—had finally cut the wire.

Piper sat on the floor outside the closed door for an hour, not speaking, just being there. Tom watched his daughter do this and didn’t stop her.

The argument started at the kitchen table over cold coffee and Tom’s laptops.

It wasn’t a fight. It was worse—the kind of tense, circular conversation that happens when smart, tired people run out of good options and start defending the bad ones.

“We hand it over,” Reagan said. She was standing by the windows, arms crossed, professional to the bone. “We give the drug analysis to the FBI. We give them the shell company records, the shipping invoices, everything Tom’s pulled. Let them build the case.”

“With what?” Tom didn’t look up from his screen. “We have a compound analysis and a financial trail that dead-ends at Graham’s name. No medical records. No administration logs. No proof that Elena was given anything, by anyone, ever. The FBI gets this package and the first thing they do is call Pacific Crest, and the first person who picks up the phone is Graham Whitfield.”

“So what’s the alternative?” Reagan’s voice was tight. “We break into a medical facility?”

“We go back,” Wade said from the desk chair. Quiet. Final. “We get what’s on those servers and we bring it out.”