Replica (Replica #1)(107)
“What happened?”
He took a deep breath. “I went digging around your dad’s office, through his emails.” He squirmed. “Like I said, I was out of my mind—”
“Go on,” Gemma said. She felt weirdly breathless, as if a giant hand were squeezing her lungs.
“I couldn’t figure a way into his work files. Too much security. But I was looking for dirt closer to home, anyway. I got into his personal account. Trouble. That was the subject header of one of the very first emails. Trouble.”
The air in the motel was very still. Gemma had the sense that even the dust motes were hanging motionless in the air, suspended and breathless.
“I didn’t understand any of it. Not then. It was all about some kind of investment your father had made. Your dad was pulling out. Said he’d given plenty of money already and wanted nothing to do with it anymore, said he’d figured out it was wrong. And this man, Mark Saperstein, wanted more money out of him. He said with Haven going in a new direction, it was going to make them all rich in the end if only your dad would get Fine and Ives on board. I remember one phrase exact: They die early anyway. That was at the end of Saperstein’s message.”
Gemma felt the space between her heartbeats as long moments of blank nonexistence. What had they learned in biology about clones? Imperfect science. Cancers, tumors that grew like flower buds in manufactured lungs and hearts and livers. It was as if the growth of their cells, unnaturally jump-started, couldn’t afterward be stopped.
She wondered how old she would be when her cells began to double and triple and worse.
“Your dad caught me. Not then, but another time, in his office. High as a kite. He was pissed. After all he’d done for me, giving me another chance. Don’t blame him. Cops found some of your parents’ stuff back at our place, too. A watch and other stuff. I’d been too fucked up to offload it all. Getting careless. They booked me for theft and possession, too, since they found a few bags around my place. This time I got sent away for longer, because it wasn’t the first time. But first I spent a couple of weeks in a detox unit.
“Detox nearly killed me. I was so sick. I prayed that I would die. But I didn’t.” His hand moved again to the cross on his neck. “Afterward I swore I’d never touch none of that shit again. And I haven’t. That was fourteen years ago. I haven’t even taken a sip of beer and I won’t, never again.” Those eyes, surprisingly warm, surprisingly attractive, buried in that damaged face: Gemma could hardly stand to look at him. “It’s my fault Brandy-Nicole got taken. If I hadn’t been high, if I hadn’t got sent away, she’d still be here. With me. My baby . . .” His voice broke again and he looked away, pressing the heel of a hand into each of his eyes in turn. “Aimee said she’d been snatched from a grocery store.” He shook his head. “Didn’t make any sense from the start. That woman never went to a grocery store in her life. Only a corner store for more cigarettes and beer. Besides, why’d she wait two days to call the police? She kept changing her story, too. First Bran was snatched from a cart. Then from the back of the car. She came to visit, all hopped up, told me crackpot stories, couldn’t even bring herself to cry.” Harliss stared down at his hands, now clasped again. Gemma wondered how you could have faith after a loss like that. How you could pray.
“At first I thought Aimee might have just dumped her somewhere. Maybe even hurt her. The cops looked into it but not for long. They thought I was just mad, you know. The ex and all that. Aimee had a new guy, or at least it seemed like she did. She had a lot of money all of a sudden. New clothes, better car, and she was partying hard and heavy. Well.” For the first time, he smiled. But it was a horrible smile, thin and sharp and mean, like it had been cut there by a razor. “She got hers, I guess. OD’d just a few months later. All that dirty money. It’s true what the Bible says. You reap what you sow.”
“You think she sold Brandy-Nicole,” Gemma said, but Harliss took it as a question and nodded.
“I didn’t know what to think, not then,” he said. “But a few years later I saw the story of this woman, Monique White, who’d given over her kid to some group when she was a junkie and then cleaned up and tried to get the girl back. But the girl was gone. And she was only an hour from Durham, where we lived. Might not have thought much of it, except one of the hotshots on the board of the Home Foundation gave a quote, the woman was out of her mind, blah blah, the usual BS. Saperstein. The name jumped out at me. It was the same guy your dad had been writing to.”
Gemma was starting to see it. Dr. Saperstein, brilliant and ruthless and cruel. Her father, Mr. Moneybags, and his sudden change of heart. He must have been one of Haven’s early investors, one of their angel investors.
Had he decided he wanted nothing to do with it as soon as Gemma came home? Or was it not until she started talking, started showing her defects, revealing imperfections that rendered her, in comparison to the daughter who’d died, so disappointing? And Richard Haven had been killed, maybe by Dr. Saperstein, maybe because Saperstein wanted to go from simply making clones to using them for bigger reasons. The institute was in danger of shutting down just when Saperstein got control of it. He must have been desperate.
“I don’t understand.” That was Pete again, hugging himself, as if the room was cold, which it wasn’t. It was stifling, airless. “If Haven was making clones, why would they be after regular kids? What was the point?”