Kenneth King, aka Excalibur, refused to sit down. He’d taken off his coat and thrown it on the marble counter top. His wool cap remained perched atop his head. They had taken the kitchen. Sofia and Isla were in the living room with Lars, where they sat on the couch, legs swinging, unaware of the activity going on outside—Nicole had drawn the curtains as uniformed officers secured the house and grounds. Violet King was with her nurse. The woman had been sleeping in an upstairs bedroom.
“Was your father distraught?”
“What?” Kenny turned on his heel and paced toward her. “You mean like upset? Yeah.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “A lot of reasons.”
“Start with one,” she suggested.
So far, Kenny King was holding up. Frenetic energy hummed inside his wiry body, and she often had to ask a question twice before she broke through the white noise in his head.
“Violet,” he said.
“Your sister?”
“She’s dying. Has been since the day she was born.”
“And your father wanted to do something about that?”
“He was driven by it. Obsessed with it.”
“Your father mentioned she was declining.”
His eyelids fluttered, and Nicole remembered the smile on the young man’s face when he’d entered the kitchen with a shovelful of snow for the girls.
“She’s lived longer than the doctors thought she would.”
“What’s her medical condition?”
“Primary mitochondrial disease. It’s genetic. Lots of people look at her and think it must have been trauma at birth, but that’s not true. They think she can’t hear or see. But she does. Still.”
And Nicole remembered the look in the girl’s eyes when she’d first entered the room—alert, intelligent.
“How old are you, Kenny?”
“Seventeen.”
“How did you know Beatrice?”
“We’re friends.”
“You live miles apart.” With several states between them, it turned out. One of the first things Nicole had asked Kenny was his address: Kalispell, Montana.
“That doesn’t matter. We talk, Skype, FaceTime, see each other at least once a month.”
“Because your fathers were working together?”
“Yes.”
“Were you more than friends?”
“She was too young for that. But maybe, in a year or two—”
He sounded like he was repeating the promises of a dead girl. “We have some of the text messages you sent her, Kenny. I think you loved her.”
“No.”
“You wanted more than friendship,” she continued.
“Well, yeah,” he said. “Beatrice was beautiful.”
“But she didn’t want you.”
“Yet,” he insisted.
“You think she was going to change her mind?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what she used as an icon for you, Kenny?”
“Excalibur,” he admitted.
“She thought of you as her King Arthur.”
“No, not me,” he said, and his tone had turned, become snarly. “That was my father.” He started pacing again. “It was more than just a play on our name. She really thought he was amazing.”
“She said that?”
“Yeah, she did.”
“So if he was King Arthur, what did that make you?”
“An extension of him, of course. You know, the sword of a knight is his pride or his shame.”
“And which are you, Kenny?”
“My father loved me,” he said. “That was one thing he was really good at, you know? He loved us.”
His voice wobbled with emotion, and Nicole changed the course of her questioning, drew him away from personal loss.
“Did Beatrice’s father love her?”
“Yes.”
“But?”
“He loves his work too. He was divided.”
“Were you here Christmas night?”
He nodded. “Bea came over to help with the girls. She was good at that kind of stuff—fixing their hair, telling stories—and she talked to Violet like my sister understood her, which she does.”
“Your sister wanted a sleepover?”
“She still believes in Santa. She’s thirteen years old, but really like five or six. She’s never had a sleepover or friends. Everyone needs a friend, right?”
“Right,” Nicole agreed, and then rocked his world further. “Your father confessed to killing Beatrice.”
“My father?” He froze.
Reality chose that moment to come crashing down on him. His shoulders shook. He sank to his knees, his head bent, sobbing.
Nicole called for the EMTs. She put a request through for the unit psych. Nicole needed to speak to Kenny. He needed to process. He needed a soft place to land. She stayed with him, occasionally laying a hand on his shoulder so he’d know he wasn’t alone. And she spoke, about the snow he’d brought inside for Violet and for Bea’s sisters. The looks on their faces when he opened the door and pitched in that magic. He had delighted them and he had wanted to—that look had been genuine in the young man.
Talk of the girls seemed to wind past his turmoil. He quieted and rose to his feet.
“I love my sister,” he said. “She’s pure, you know? Like I don’t think she ever thought a bad thing about anyone. She’s like no one else on this planet.”
“She loves you too. I saw it,” Nicole agreed.
He nodded. The emotional fog was clearing from his features.
“Why do you think your father killed Beatrice?”
He shook his head, confused. “Bea was it. Our last chance.”
“Was Beatrice Nueva Vida?”
He nodded. “I can’t believe she’s dead. I hear the words. I know what they mean. But that’s not Bea, you know? She was meant to live forever.”
“You and Beatrice have a lot in common,” she said. “You love your sister as she did hers. You were born to be doctors. Joaquin told me your father was preparing you for that the same way Dr. Esparza was preparing Beatrice.”
“Yeah. It’s expected, you know? Those who have been given much are expected to do much. Our fathers agree on that. They’re raising us that way. To do much.”
Contribute. Carry on the family name. Elevate it. The creed of the wealthy.
“Did Beatrice resent that?”
“No. Absolutely not. She wanted it. She saw how other people lived, a lot of them without the medical attention they needed. People die every day from need of an antibiotic or simple surgery. Beatrice wanted to change that.”
“Is that how you feel?”
But he shook his head. “She saw people as individuals. Their suffering. I see people globally. You can get stuck on the needs of the one. It’s better to meet the needs of many.”
He paced across the room and leaned back against the island. He crossed his arms over his chest. His nerves were jumping, and Nicole gave him the time he needed to regroup.
“Beatrice didn’t think about medicine the way her father does. For her, it was as much about listening to a person as examining them. It was more about how a person feels and less about what’s making them feel that way. She led with her heart, and medicine is science.” But he was smiling, and Nicole could tell that he’d liked that about Beatrice.
“Sounds to me that Beatrice would have been a good doctor.”
But Kenny disagreed.
“She thought medicine should be a calling, but it’s really big business.” He shook his head in a patronizing gesture that irritated Nicole. “She just didn’t get it. Dr. E had something—something big—and Bea thought he should just give it away.”
“But there are problems with his super cell,” Nicole pointed out.
“There are always problems with great advancements. That’s why he wants it in the biggest, most badass lab available.”
“Your father’s company?”
“That’s just one option.”
“If Nueva Vida is so great, why isn’t it already in a badass lab?”
Kenny peeled himself off the counter and paced back across the room. Flurries had started again. He stood in front of the window and watched.
“My father’s dead,” he said. “And you think he killed Beatrice?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, Kenny,” Nicole offered, but the young man was looking for something else.
“He shot himself? Really?”
Nicole nodded, but she was staring at the back of Kenny’s head, and he wasn’t following her reflection in the window.
“I was there,” she said.
“Why? Did he tell you that?” He turned to her. “It wasn’t just Violet. He’s known from go that my sister wouldn’t live long.”
“He lost hope in Dr. Esparza’s cure.”
But Kenny shook his head. He wasn’t buying it. “Sometimes you can borrow time. The wealthiest can even buy it. That’s how Violet’s lived so long. It’s also what upset Bea so much—the disparity. Another kid like Violet, with the usual family resources, they get maybe two years. Five at the most. My father didn’t lose hope in Dr. E’s super cell; he lost hope that Esparza would ever sell it to him.”
“Your father extended Violet’s life expectancy because he got her the medical treatment she needed?”
“Cutting-edge medical treatments,” Kenny clarified. “Violet has been the launch pad of a lot of different medical trials over time. But he was really counting on Dr. E’s super cell.”
“So what happened?”
“Bea told me the paperwork was bogus,” he confided. A frown rippled over his brow. “She checked, you know? When she was getting sicker and her father was having a harder time curing her. By the third round, she knew something wasn’t right. She was scared, but she was committed.”
“What paperwork?”
“From the FDA. No clinical trial can start without permission, and no credible pharm company will work with a doctor who doesn’t have the paper.”
“Do you think Dr. Esparza had permission?”
He turned back to the window and pressed his fingertips to the cool glass. “It’s not hard to counterfeit documents. You could probably buy a set online.”
“Did your father think they were bogus?”
“My father wanted Nueva Vida for Violet,” he said. “He wanted it bad. Bad enough maybe he ignored some things he shouldn’t have. But in the end, if all of Dr. E’s experimenting was without regulation, the FDA would never approve a trial based on the results of his work.”
“And that meant Violet wouldn’t get her chance?”
“Exactly. But if Bea wasn’t in the picture anymore, if there was no evidence of Dr. E’s success outside the lab, then maybe my dad could get the super cell into the human gene pool, open clinical trials that are legit.”
Motive. If Kenny was right about Nueva Vida.
“Does your sister have that kind of time?”
He shook his head slowly. “It doesn’t look like it.”
“And that saddened your father too.”
“Yeah. Nueva Vida has enormous potential, but medicine doesn’t move at the speed of light.”
She’d known as much. Anything she’d ever read about medical advancements put it at a snail’s pace.
“What did Dr. Esparza do when Beatrice confronted him about the paperwork?”
“He told her he had preliminary permission. That he was extending himself beyond that, but with good results. And Beatrice could see he was right. But she could also see that with each round, she was getting sicker.”
“And she wanted out?”
“She worried there would be a cancer the cure wouldn’t fix.”
“Because not all cancers are created equal?” she asked.
“Right, but Dr. E has gone a step above that. He created a cell impervious to the disease.”
“A cell that can never get sick?”
“A cell that can never get cancer,” he corrected, and he liked the idea so much that a smiled bloomed on his face as certainty infused his words. “Never.”
“So why was Beatrice sick so much?”
“Clinical trials,” he said. “Through the summer and fall. Sick and then healed. Dr. E had to do it, and then apply new data to the next trial, and so on. That’s how he built his super cell.”
“He perfected it on Beatrice.”
“Exactly. The cell is synthetic—man-made—and doesn’t exist naturally in the human body. Beatrice got sick because her cells are human in every way. And she was stage one.”
“So Dr. Esparza gave Beatrice cancer?”
“Four times, to be exact,” Kenny agreed.
“How?”
“He preserved cancerous tumors he removed from the body of his patients and implanted them in Beatrice. And then he watched them grow. Each trial he waited a little longer to launch his super cell. And each time the cell went to work.
“Nueva Vida is like a legion of knights, armored, prepared, on-the-spot execution. The moment a cell in the human body starts to go bad, it’s eliminated before it can contaminate neighboring cells.”
“Dr. Esparza told me Beatrice doesn’t have cancer,” Nicole said.
“That’s right. He tried to do it again. Twice, actually. He implanted, each one larger than the one before, but they disappeared almost immediately.”
“How?”
“Because he created an army of super cells inside Beatrice and they were waiting, already in formation. And he did it from one single cell. He got it to replicate. And that’s Esparza’s great discovery. A synthetic super cell that replicates like organic cells. No one else has ever done it.”
“And the super cells eliminate disease before it can take hold?”
“They eliminate cancer,” he clarified.
“Because the super cells were coded for cancer.”
“One central code, boiled down to the deadliest commonality among cancers,” he agreed. “Before Dr. E could even set up a microscope and take a tissue sample, the cancer was gone.”
“Hours.”
“Less.”
“Beatrice was a miracle,” she said.
“She should have lived forever.”