Replica (Replica #1)(96)
All three accusers who have come forward were, at the time of the incidents in question, heavy substance abusers. Sarah Mueller was only nineteen and a crack-cocaine addict when a woman she claims was from the Home Foundation offered her the sum of two thousand dollars for temporary custodial guardianship of her infant child, Diamond.
Speaking from the state-run rehabilitative halfway house where she currently lives, Mueller told the Highland News: “I didn’t think it was for good. I thought I could have her back soon as I got clean.” But when Mueller sobered up, after a long period of bouncing between the streets, jail, and rehabilitation programs, she found that the Home Foundation showed no record at all that Diamond had ever come through their system.
Mueller’s story has eerie parallels to that of Fatima “Tina” Aboud, who was barely out of her teens when a woman she describes as a Home Foundation “nurse” came knocking. Aboud claims she was offered three thousand dollars for her son, then two years old. Aboud, who suffers from schizophrenia, agreed, believing that if she didn’t, the CIA would come for her child. Ten years later, Aboud is stabilized through medication and has tried to locate her son, Benjamin, only to find the trail completely cold.
The last plaintiff to come forward is Rick Harliss, and his story is the most difficult to untangle. The Highland News has learned exclusively that Harliss, a sometime-handyman, was in jail after an altercation involving his then-employer, Geoffrey Ives, formerly of the pharmaceutical giant Fine & Ives.
Gemma’s stomach dropped through the soles of her feet. For a second the words blurred. She blinked, trying to make them come into focus again. Still her father’s name was there.
Harliss left his daughter in the care of his ex-wife, Aimee (now deceased). Aimee subsequently claimed their daughter, Brandy-Nicole, was kidnapped from the car while she was at the grocery store. But Harliss became suspicious when her account of the story changed, and when he noticed that she came into a large sum of cash at the same time Brandy-Nicole vanished.
After the Highland News officially broke the story of Sarah Mueller’s accusations more than a year ago, Rick Harliss claims to have recognized two people from a photograph of the Home Foundation staff, including a staff nurse, Emily J. Huang, whom he claims to have seen several times with his ex-wife.
Adding to the difficulty of disentangling the truth—and fueling the idea that these claims are fraudulent—is the fact that Sarah Mueller and Fatima Aboud may have known each other previously. Both women were in a state-run rehabilitation facility during the same period of time, although counselors from the program do not recall the women being friendly. . . .
Gemma stopped reading. Her head was pounding again. She couldn’t make sense of any of it. Rick Harliss had once worked for her family. Why didn’t she remember him? It must have been when she was young. But how did the story of those missing children connect to Haven, to the clones, to the charity, to her father?
All she knew was that it was connected. Jake had originally believed Haven was doing drug experimentation on orphaned children—and he was 50 percent right. But why, if Haven was also manufacturing clones?
She did some more Googling and found out most of the alleged disappearances had occurred during the exact same three-year period as her father’s lawsuit against his former business partner. The facts, then, were these: Dr. Saperstein got control of the institute the same year Richard Haven died and was, potentially, murdered. Around the same time, her father sued for control of the company, possibly because his business partner wanted to invest in Haven. He lost.
Meanwhile Dr. Saperstein was busy “misplacing” children through his charity, possibly stealing them for some unimaginable purpose. Then Fine & Ives swooped in and took ownership of Haven, at least financially, and the institute began to breed clones in large quantities for its own sick purposes.
Her father had said follow the money. She was sure she was missing something, and she was sure it had to do with money, with the flow of cash from the military to Fine & Ives to Haven.
She Googled Rick Harliss, but although he was mentioned several times in articles related to the Home Foundation, he’d done a pretty good job of avoiding the photographers. She found a Rick Harliss who was a lawyer in Tallahassee and a Rick Harliss who had his own personal training business, but she could not find a single picture of the Rick Harliss who believed his daughter, Brandy-Nicole, had been sold to the Home Foundation. Then, remembering that he’d been in jail, she added mug shot to the search terms. Almost immediately, she was bounced to a website unimaginatively named Mugshot.com.
For one, two, three seconds, her heart failed to beat.
He was younger in the picture, and although his eyes were raw-red and his expression ferocious, he was handsome. She thought of his stale, coffee-breath smell, the curtained greasiness of his hair. He had aged terribly. And yet despite the differences, there was no mistaking him.
It was the guy from the gas station. What do you know about Haven? And she remembered now that she had had the impression of familiarity. She’d remembered him, at least vaguely, and now she knew why. He had done work for her father. Probably he’d been one of the rotating series of guys who kept the grounds, or cleaned the pool, or painted the house.
Always she came back to her father and Haven. That was the center of the mystery, the original cancer, the tumor that had metastasized into a hundred other mysteries.
“Gemma?”