JACK LOGAN’S HAND FROZE ON THE REMOTE. HE WATCHED the six o’clock news with growing dismay, as the anchor relayed the gruesome details of a doctor’s killing spree at a hospital in Pennsylvania last week. During his rounds, he’d stabbed three patients to death with a scalpel. By the time their screams brought help, he’d also taken down two nurses and a nurse’s aide before slicing his own throat.
Jack sat transfixed as he listened to the story, bloody images filling his mind. He called over his shoulder to Taylor, who was making tea in the kitchen. “It happened again.”
She carried her mug into the living room and sat down next to him on the sofa, Beau padding closely behind her. “I just heard. A doctor. What in the world is going on? How many does that make now?”
Jack exhaled. “It’s the seventeenth case since the beginning of April. I did some online research last night.” He’d found that in the past month, there had been sixteen instances, all on the East Coast, in which a previously model citizen had suddenly committed a violent crime. This latest was in Maryland; the rest were spread out between Massachusetts and Florida. “Something very strange is going on.” He looked at Taylor, brows raised. “My editor’s good with my chasing this. I just want to make sure you’re really okay with my being gone so much now that you’re working on the Supreme Court story and going into New York more often.”
She nodded. “Of course. You’ve been so supportive of both Evan and me. And since we’re not much further with our investigation into the Institute than when we started, I think it’s time to get out of limbo and back to work.”
It had been two years since Damon Crosse, the head of the immense training facility in upstate New York known to insiders as the Institute, had taken his own life. In the forty years that the facility had been operating, Crosse had placed its graduates in top positions in government, entertainment, and business. He had recruited them from top universities, but some came from the orphanage he ran, and he’d been able to mold them from early childhood. Like a puppet master, he had controlled his network of people and coordinated their efforts to further his corrupt agenda in the United States and around the world. After Taylor found out that her late husband, US Senator Malcolm Phillips, had been part of it, she and Jack had worked with Crosse’s son, Jeremy, to bring Crosse down. After weeks on the run, untangling the web of corruption, they’d found a way to infiltrate his headquarters and gather enough evidence to put him in prison for life. But Crosse had cheated them all, destroying all the evidence from his computer system before poisoning himself, leaving them no way to identify and ferret out all the men and women he’d indoctrinated over the years.
After Taylor’s interview on Newsline had aired, exposing the Institute and the fact that it had been established by a Nazi, droves of people had come forward claiming to have been trained at the Institute or to know someone who had been. Over the past two years, Taylor, Jack, and Jeremy had methodically interviewed each one and had come up with nothing. Most had been cranks, but even the promising leads had turned out to be dead ends. Crosse’s real people were either too entrenched in whatever positions he’d placed them in to jeopardize them, or they were too afraid to come forward. The fact that Taylor and Jack had made so little progress was more than frustrating.
The only solid lead they were still working on was a handwritten list of twenty-one names that Jeremy had found in Crosse’s journal. They had recognized two names on the list—one a member of Congress and the other a federal judge—but they were both dead. The other nineteen had led them down a dead end, and they now believed that the list had been code names or the like, though they had yet to make any headway on that theory.
In the letter that Taylor’s first husband, Malcolm, had left for her in the event of his death, he’d told her that Brody Hamilton, his Senate colleague, was involved with Crosse, but they had no proof beyond that. And to make things more complicated, when the vice president stepped down due to health issues six months ago, Hamilton had been tapped to replace him. He was virtually untouchable now.
Jack and Taylor had hoped that they would be able to trace some of the orphans who had grown up at the Institute, but unfortunately, those records were also wiped out when Crosse erased the network. They did, however, have one advantage. Jonas, Crosse’s longtime valet, had come over to their side after a crisis of conscience and supplied them with the names of churches and organizations Crosse had used to find orphans. Crosse had sent Jonas and his wife to pose as a couple looking to adopt a number of times, and they’d always told the churches the same story: they’d lost a baby in childbirth and his wife had almost died herself and could no longer bear children. They’d had luck with the story and the fact that they were open to an older child. Of course, what looked like altruism was more nefarious: children had to be at least three years old for preliminary testing to determine if they were good candidates for the Institute.
Jack, Taylor, and Jeremy had been getting in touch with anyone who had past ties to those organizations to try to track down any records. But this line of inquiry had yielded very little, as back in the sixties and seventies, record keeping was sketchy at best. Many of the children had been left on doorsteps or given false names. But they did have one lead that Jack thought might be worthwhile.
He clicked the remote, turning off the television, and nodded at Taylor. “If you’re sure. I was planning on heading to Baltimore to talk to the husband of the woman who killed her son’s coach. Which means I can also stop by St. Katherine’s High School, where the nun from the orphanage we’re interested in works now. Jonas believes she might remember something about the child he pretended to adopt.”
Taylor smiled. “We’ll be fine while you’re gone.”
“I’ll head out in the morning then.” He leaned over and kissed her, and Beau, their golden retriever, jumped up and nudged himself between them, not wanting to miss out. Taylor laughed and rubbed the dog’s head.
“Now that we’re both knee-deep in these stories, it might be too hard to coordinate our schedules so we’re not gone at the same time,” Jack said.
Taylor nodded. “I’m glad you convinced me to try the daycare at the network. Evan’s always happy when I pick him up from there.”
She had been reluctant to leave Evan with sitters, but the truth was, Jack felt better not leaving either Evan or Taylor. Despite Crosse’s death, he couldn’t shake the feeling that there were still people after them. That first year, he had constantly looked over his shoulder and hardly ever let them out of his sight. But after another year had passed uneventfully, they were both trying to get back to a normal life. He didn’t want Evan growing up in a bubble. They couldn’t let what had happened to them turn them into parents who suffocated their child.
“Yes, it’s good for him to have other caregivers,” Jack said. “Eventually, he’s going to go to school. We can’t be with him twenty-four hours a day.”
She rolled her eyes at him good-naturedly. “I get it.”
He watched Taylor as she walked away, thinking again how grateful he was to have finally made a life with her. He had lost her once, and even though the breakup had been his fault, he’d been devastated when he learned she had married Malcolm Phillips. As he’d followed her life from afar, reading about them in the Washington papers and magazines, it looked like she’d found her happily ever after.
Until the night Malcolm had showed up at Jack’s apartment, telling him that he would soon be a dead man and that he needed Jack to look after Taylor. Jack had thought he was nuts—but then Malcolm had ended up dying a few weeks later, and Jack had raced to her side. After Taylor and Jack had come out of hiding, Taylor had finally held a funeral for Malcolm. Eight months later, she and Jack had married quietly at the Greek Orthodox church Taylor’s mother had loved so much, with only close family members in attendance.
Less than a year later, they’d been out for a Sunday drive and come across the house they were living in now. It was a Greek Revival they’d both fallen in love with immediately. Located on the Hudson River, the views were magnificent and the house was bright and airy, with a casual elegance that suited them both.
Taylor was thrilled to be back on Karen Printz’s team, an anchor she had been a producer for years ago. So far, Taylor had been mainly on the ground here in New York; she hadn’t taken any assignments requiring travel. But at Jack’s urging, she’d accepted Karen’s recent offer to produce a story on a class action suit against an insurance company that had made it all the way to the Supreme Court. Evan was eighteen months old now and thriving. It was time they all got used to their new normal.
Jack leaned back and closed his eyes, planning his next steps. He needed to confirm his two meetings. If he left early, he should be in Maryland before noon. He also wanted to talk to a few people who he’d left messages for who had witnessed the incident, so he might end up having to spend the night if the interviews spilled into the next day. In the meantime, he had some more research to do before he took off. He pulled up one of the latest news stories online and read over it again. Just two days ago, a local teacher had shot up his own school. Then, in another incident a few days later, a man had driven his truck through the glass window of a restaurant, killing eight people. What was the possible connection among all these events? They couldn’t be random. Jack was reminded of one of his father’s favorite expressions—Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Well, Pop, you might have liked clichés but that doesn’t make you wrong. He thought about Damon Crosse again, and a shiver went up his spine. If he didn’t know that Crosse was dead, he’d swear this was his handiwork. But that was impossible. And why was he assuming there was some mastermind behind it? More likely there was a simpler explanation. But still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that things were going to get much worse before he found any answers.