chapter fifty-five

“Lost him.” My call to Shin went through as I raced back out across the station. I scanned the parking lot outside Union Station for Shin and the car. “He’s on the Red Line.I think he’s got the third detonator wired already.” I told Shin what Nieto had written on the fogged glass of the train.

“Roger that,” Shin said. “Any idea where? Or where he’s heading now?”

I shook my head and alerted security on the Red Line.

Nieto could have left the country days ago, but he hadn’t. That meant he had more loose ends to tie up. Sandy Rose had been one. But she was already on her way out of town. There was another loose thought. If she was still alive, Nieto would be worried about the woman whose genome started it all. He’d try to take her out too. But since I didn’t know who or where she was, there was no way to warn or protect her.

“Don’t sweat it,” Shin said. Shin had already issued an APB and an alert at all train stations and airports. “One of the cameras will pick him up.”

But from his expression I knew Shin was thinking what I was thinking. Before or after the next explosion?

“Where’re you?” I said, glancing down at Shin’s face on my phone.A movie trailer flashed past on the wall outside the windows where he sat. But I knew it wasn’t the image of Batman chasing Dracula that moved. It was a Sidetrack ad—hundreds of LED lights hung over a quarter-mile span of familiar train tunnel.

“You’re on the Gold Line?”

“The damn train took off before I could get through the crowd,” Shin said with a sheepish frown. “Get the car. I’ll take a black and white back to Nokia.”

But the call that went out over the police radio and web news twenty seconds later made my heart sink.

On my glove phone I watched the footage.

Boom was an understatement. A tower of flame burned bright against the tarmac of the Santa Monica Airport. The explosion had taken out a Mercedes and four other cars plus a parking lot attendant.

The Mercedes’ license plate was scorched, but I could still make out the letters: ROSE-1. The car itself was now a pile of burning wreckage. A funeral pyre. For Sandy and her security guards. I wasn’t a fan of Sandy Rose, but it was a bad way to go.

“Guess we know where that third nano-bot detonator went,” Shin said.

I gave him a grim nod. “But where’s Nieto?”

Metro Security still hadn’t spotted him. Back at Nokia PD, I hunkered down, scrolling through the killer’s files, searching for any hint to his whereabouts.

Shin had been right. Nieto had a fat file on me. I skimmed through the usual news stories about the Sphinx case and my promotion to Homicide Special. But Nieto’s file was much more detailed. It went as far back as public records would take him, and then some. He had a copy of my birth certificate at KP Medcenter in San Diego.

Ping. There it was—that familiar sensation, the slight tightening of the muscles at the pit of my stomach.

A crazy thought flickered through my mind. Nieto’s research on me would have helped him anticipate our moves, but this was over and above. Could Nieto have had more than one reason for tracking me?

Sandy Rose had said the genome resistant to Alz-X came from a blood sample taken from her old company, the Global Baby fertility clinic. That inventory dated from 2010-2020. So the blood spot could never have come from Britney Devonshire. She hadn’t even been born. Neither had I.

Except. My stomach did another little twist and flop as I remembered my mom’s confession at my father’s funeral—about her IVF. Her OB-GYN had been named Singh, and Singh was the doctor implicated in the Global Baby scandal that closed the clinic. It’s a common surname, but I don’t believe in coincidence. Could my mother have been a patient at Global Baby?

I did a quick search through Nieto’s files for the name Lagos. There it was: Calista Lagos. Her blood spot was included. I texted Jim Mar and sent him the partial prelim.

“Who’s Calista Lagos?” Shin said, looking over my shoulder.

“My mother,” I said. “I think she’s the source genome.”