Gary Braver - Elixir

Friedman shook his head in total bafflement. "I don't get it either," he said. "My best guess is a speeded-up form of Werner's syndrome."

"What's that?"

"A chromosomal defect that causes people to age abnormally fast and die before they reach forty. Except this guy appeared to have aged literally overnight."

"You're saying that's impossible."

"I'm saying that whatever happened to him has to my knowledge never occurred before. Besides the wildfire cancer, his body was riddled with diseases associated with advanced aging-arteriosclerosis, malignant neoplasms, osteoporosis, cataracts, liver and kidney morbidity. If I didn't know better, I'd say the man was in his ninth or tenth decade of life."

Brown had laid out the fingerprint matches of Wally Olafsson taken when he was booked the other day and after he died. "It's the same man, birthdate February 13, 1943."

"That's the impossible part," Friedman continued. "Because that would mean that in a matter of hours his body experienced a total and cataclysmic decline. Just how beats the hell out of me."

"What about one of those cell-eating bacteria?"

"Negative. Besides, no known bacteria is that virulent."

"How about some unknown bacteria?"

"Bacteria doesn't work that way." He glanced at a photo of the dead man's head. "This guy died from some monstrous genetic catastrophe."

Ben Friedman's bewilderment sent a cold spike through Brown. He was an unflappable professional who in three decades had seen every grisly form of human death. He was a man who was beyond shock. And now he was at a total loss.

But medical anomalies were not Brown's charge. "Any evidence he had been in contact with Glover?"

"We questioned his colleagues, ex-wife, and girlfriend. Nobody ever heard of Roger Glover," Zazzaro said.

According to the Glovers' neighbors, they were nice normal people. They had a son, Brett, a terrific kid. They owned a flower shop. Nothing unusual. No known relatives. And no friend named Wally Olafsson.

"And they disappeared into thin air."

But the fact that Glover had led them down an alley to a getaway car was a well-thought out emergency plan. The bastard was clever, Brown thought.

"I don't know how Olafsson died or if it has anything to do with Roger Glover," Zazzaro said, "but the son-of-a-bitch knew we were after him. He knew we had connected him to Eastern 219. Why else the chase? You don't set up an elaborate escape just to shake tailgaters."

"I want a cross-reference to anything connecting Glover, Bacon, Olafsson, the wife and kids," Brown said. "Keywords, names of places, people, birthdates, anything."

Zazzaro nodded. "We checked the house. Looked like they left at a moment's notice. Closets were full of clothes. Toothbrushes still in the rack in the bathroom. Books in the kid's backpack. Empty suitcases in the cellar. He must have spotted the tail and called his wife."

That was Brown's guess too. The Pierson baseball coach had said she appeared anxious to pull the kid out of the game. Something about her husband at the hospital. They checked and, of course, no area hospitals had a listing for either a Roger Glover or Christopher Bacon. "Anything connecting them to the Bacons?"

"Not yet, but we're still going through letters, old bills, stuff like that. But we found this." From an evidence bag Zazzaro held up a pouch. "Hair coloring-blond for the wife, black for him. What's interesting is, the small jar is theatrical makeup paint. White. For his beard and sideburns."

"Why make himself look older? With a thirteen-year warrant on my head, I'd go the other way, like the wife."

"You'd think," Zazzaro said. "What also doesn't make sense is that the black hair dye and white paint were stored in a box on the back shelf of his closet, but the Clairol was on a shelf in the bath. Like he was hiding the fact he colored his hair."

"Women can spot these things in the dark."

"I mean from the kid."

"It doesn't make sense," Zazzaro said.

According to files, Christopher Bacon was fifty-six years old. And in his shop Glover told Zazzaro that he was born in 1962 which would make him thirty-eight. Why, wondered Brown, would a fifty-six-year-old man posing as a thirty-eight-year-old need aging makeup? Mike was right: None of it made sense.

"How old does the wife claim she is?" Brown asked.

"Thirty-eight."

Brown checked the shots he had taken of her at the Town Day Race. She could pass for thirty-eight, although in a couple closeups she looked older. He slid one to Friedman. "How old would you say she is?"

The phone rang and Zazzaro took it while the others talked.

Friedman studied the photo for a moment. "Mid-forties."

"How about thirty-eight?"

"Possibly, though time's not been generous with her." He studied the other photos. With a pencil he pointed things out. "Look at her neck here. The skin shows creases and folds of an older woman. I'm not saying she is, but it's one giveaway. That's why women with facelifts wear scarves. You can stretch a seventy-year old face like Saran Wrap, but it'll be sitting on two inches of chicken skin."

Zazzaro jotted something down then hung up. "We got a background ID," he said. "Roger and Brett Glover of Wichita, Kansas died in a car accident in 1958. Laura Gendron Glover, age twelve, died ten years later. Three bogies."

"Big goddamn surprise," Brown said.

Friedman picked up the photographs of Roger Glover and Christopher Bacon and studied them. "And this is the same guy?"

"We got a print match."

Friedman held them side by side in the window light. "I see the resemblance. But if it's the same guy, how come this Roger Glover looks younger than Christopher Bacon?"

"I don't know how come," Brown snapped. "And I don't give a damn. But I want these photos printed and flashed everywhere in the universe. We're going to get this son-of-a-bitch no matter what."

At the bottom of the front page of The Boston Globe was a photograph of Roger Glover made from the video shot by the late Walter Olafsson. It was in color and slightly fuzzy, though recognizable. Beside it sat the familiar 1988 media photograph of Christopher Bacon. The caption read: "Same man? FBI claims that Roger Glover of Eau Claire, WI, is Christopher Bacon, a 'most-wanted' fugitive who allegedly blew up Eastern flight 219 in 1988."

On an inside page where the story continued was an additional photograph of Glover doctored by FBI artists to resemble the original of Christopher Bacon. The hair had been electronically cut and lightened and the beard removed. The men looked identical.

An all-points bulletin had been issued in the mid-western states for Glover, who was believed to be armed and dangerous.

The morning television led with the same story. The comment raised most was how Roger Glover appeared younger than when he was Christopher Bacon nearly fifteen years ago. The consensus was that Bacon had undergone facial surgery.

But Quentin Cross knew otherwise.

Sitting in the president's office of Darby Pharmaceuticals, Inc., he felt the old billion-dollar fantasies quicken his heart again.

Even after all these years, the company had not fully recovered from Bacon's sudden disappearance. For five of those years Quentin had gone into great personal debt paying off Antoine and Consortium investors. Even more capital was lost trying to duplicate Elixir from memory.

By 1991, he had given up trying to locate Bacon, assuming he had moved to a foreign country or died. He had also abandoned all attempts to reproduce the compound.

Until that morning.

The news was like a transfusion.

Besides all the financial promise, Quentin at fifty-one was feeling the ever-sharpening tooth of time. And Christopher Bacon had defied time.