The Beach House Read online

  "Not simply because of the nature of the crime, an abhorrent deprivation of the liberty worked upon several individuals, but because of the backgrounds of the defendants.

  "The younger Mr. Mullen is a recent graduate of one of our nation's foremost schools of law, where he had the benefit of exposure to preeminent legal scholars.

  "Ms. Grabowski has spent the past ten years as a private investigator, employed by one of this city's most well-established law firms. She has testified in this very courthouse innumerable times, and has worked with some of our finest practitioners.

  "As for the senior Mr. Mullen, you came to this country seeking economic opportunity for yourself and your family. You spent the majority of your adulthood as a hardworking man of your community. True, you have suffered a tremendous loss with the tragic death of your grandson, but this cannot excuse your conduct."

  When the judge took a moment to catch his breath, Mack seized the opportunity to whisper an old Irish prayer. For the first time, Pauline looked scared. I took her hand and squeezed it. I loved this woman. I couldn't begin to imagine being separated from her.

  "As for the government, young Mr. Marshall here," the judge continued, nodding in the direction of the prosecutor, "and his boss, U.S. Attorney Lily Grace Drucker, have, in their infinite compassion, recommended that I impose only the minimum sentence statutorily available to me, twenty years, in light of the defendants' lack of any prior criminal records. After much consideration, I'm afraid I decline to accept the government's generous recommendation.

  "But before I proceed to hand down the sentence of the court, I wish to comment upon the collateral consequences of the defendants' actions.

  "As I am sure all parties are aware, as a direct result of the defendants' investigative work and expertise at 'trial,' Mr. Barry Neubauer, the main 'victim' here, has been charged with twelve separate counts of manslaughter and is on trial as I speak in the New York State criminal court.

  "As U.S. Attorney Drucker has announced, the FBI is currently investigating William Montrose, esquire, in connection with charges that he suborned perjury and intimidated a witness — Dr. Jane Davis — at the inquest into Peter Mullen's death, again, as a direct result of the defendants' actions.

  "Mr. and Mrs. Fitzharding have left this court's jurisdiction and have refused to assist this court in its presentence investigation.

  "Detective Francis Volpi has recently been arrested in connection with the homicide of Sammy Giamalva here in Manhattan. He is also a suspect in the murder of Peter Mullen.

  "And Campion Neubauer has been indicted as an accessory in the murder of Peter Mullen."

  The judge looked up from his bench, as if to survey the courtroom. "These are dark times for our system of criminal justice. Recent verdicts in so-called high-profile cases have led to the broadly held conclusion that there is justice in this country only for those whose wealth or celebrity can buy it for them.

  "I have sat on this bench for the past forty-four years, since President Eisenhower saw fit to appoint me. In all those years, I have never been as distressed by the socalled administration of justice in this country as I am today.

  "That said, here is my ruling."

  There wasn't a sound anywhere in the court. Pauline's nails were cutting into my palm. Macklin had my other hand wrapped in his.

  "The court," said Judge Blake, "on its own motion, chooses to invoke Federal Sentencing Guideline Five-K-One point one. This section, for the ladies and gentlemen of the press, allows the court to downwardly depart in sentencing those defendants whose cooperation with the government has led to the investigation or prosecution of another person or persons. Given the valuable assistance the defendants have provided, I am sure that I will hear no objection from the government on this motion?" asked the judge. He looked over at the prosecution table.

  "None, whatsoever," croaked Marshall, looking in his fresh-scrubbed youth like a boy who had just been spared a dreaded chore by a forgiving adult.

  "Good answer."

  "Macklin Reid Mullen, Pauline Grabowski, Jack Mullen, the court sentences you each to time served and to six hundred hours of community service, to be performed in the Legal Aid Society, Capital Defenders Unit. From now on, the only trials you will be involved in will be on behalf of indigent death row defendants.

  "This court now stands adjourned."

  As the judge pounded his gavel on the bench and rose to walk down the stairs, the spectator section exploded in applause, cheers, and high fives.

  Reporters crowded around us as Mack, Pauline, and I embraced in a bear hug. None of us said a word to the press.

  "Your brother is proud of you," Mack whispered in my ear.

  As the three of us were leaving the courtroom, arm in arm, I thought of something, an old sacred memory.

  When Peter was just a little kid, after our mother had died, he used to sneak into bed with me just about every night. "I like hearing your heart beat, Jack," he'd say.

  I had liked hearing Peter's heart, too. I missed it.

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  James Patterson!

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  THE LAKE

  HOUSE

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  It surprises some readers that When The Wind Blows (featuring Max and the gang) is my most successful novel around the world. Who knows why for sure, but I suspect it's because an awful lot of people, myself included, have a recurring fantasy in which they fly. They treasure it. On the other hand, there are plenty of folks who won't fantasize or play make-believe. They wouldn't have gotten to Neverneverland with Peter Pan. There is one other thing that might be interesting to those who read this book. When I researched it I interviewed dozens of scientists. All of them said that things like what happens in The Lake House will happen in our lifetime. In fact, a scientist in New England claims that he can put wings on humans right now. I'll bet he can.

  So settle in, you believers, and even you Muggles. Let yourself fly.

  —James Patterson

  PROLOGUE

  RESURRECTION

  The Hospital; somewhere in Maryland

  At around eleven in the evening, Dr. Ethan Kane trudged down the gray-and-blue-painted corridor toward a private elevator. His mind was filled with images of death and suffering, but also progress, great progress that would change the world.

  A young and quite homely scrub nurse rounded the corner of the passageway, and nodded her head deferentially as she approached him. She had a crush on Dr. Kane, and she wasn't the only one.

  "Doctor," she said, "you're still working."

  "Esther, you go home, now. Please," Ethan Kane said, pretending to be solicitous and caring, which couldn't be further from the truth. He considered the nurse inferior in every way, including the fact that she was female.

  He was also exhausted from a surgical marathon: five major operations in a day. The elevator car finally arrived, the doors slid open, and he stepped inside.

  "Goodnight, Esther," he said, and showed the nurse a lot of very white teeth, but no genuine warmth, because there was none to show.

  He straightened his tall body and wearily passed his hand over his longish blond hair, cleaned his wire-rimmed glasses on the tail of his lab coat, then rubbed his eyes before putting his glasses back on as he descended to the sub-basement level.

  One more thing to check on . . . always one more thing for him to do.

  He walked a half-dozen quick steps to a thick steel door and pushed it open with the palm of his hand.

  He entered the dark and chilly atmosphere of a basement storage room. A pungent odor struck him.

  There, lying on a double row of gurneys, were six naked bodies. Four men, two women, all in their late teens and early twenties. Each was brain dead, each as good as gone, but each had served a worthy purpose, a higher one. The plastic bracelets on their wrists said DONOR.
<
br />   "You're making the world a better place," Kane whispered as he passed the bodies. "Take comfort in that."

  Dr. Kane strode to the far end of the room and pushed open another steel door, an exact duplicate of the first. This time rather than a chill blast, he was met by a searing wave of hot air, the deafening roar of fire, and the unmistakable smell of death.

  All three of the incinerators were going tonight. Two of his night-time porters, their powerful working-man bodies glistening with grime and sweat, looked up as Dr. Kane entered the cinderblock chamber. The men nodded respectfully, but their eyes showed fear.

  "Let's pick up the pace, gentlemen. This is taking too long," Kane called out. "Let's go, let's go! You're being paid well for this scut-work. Too well."

  He glanced at a naked young woman's corpse laid out on the cement floor. She was white-blond, pretty in a music video sort of way. The porters had probably been diddling with her. That's why they were behind schedule, wasn't it?

  Gurneys were shoved haphazardly into one corner, like discarded shopping carts in a supermarket parking lot. Quite a spectacle. Hellish to be sure.

  As he watched, one of the sweat-glazed minions worked a wooden paddle under a young male's body while the other swung open the heavy glass door of an oven. Together they pushed, shoved, slid the body into the fire as if it were a pizza.

  The flames dampened for a moment, then as the porters locked down the door, the inferno flared again. The cremation chamber was also called a "retort." Each retort burned at 3600 degrees, and it took just over fifteen minutes to reduce a human body to nothing but ashes.

  To Dr. Ethan Kane that meant one thing: no evidence of what was happening at the Hospital. Absolutely no evidence of Resurrection.

  "Pick up the pace!" he yelled again. "Burn these bodies!"

  The donors.

  PART ONE

  CHILD CUSTODY

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was being called "the mother of all custody trials," and that might explain why an extra fifty thousand people had poured into Denver on that warm day in early spring.

  The case was also being billed as potentially more wrenching and explosive than Baby M, or Elian Gonzales, or O.J. Simpson's battle against truth and decency. I happened to think that this time maybe the media hype was fitting and appropriate, and even a tiny bit underplayed. The fate of six extraordinary children was at stake.

  Six children who had been created in a laboratory, and made history, both scientific and philosophical.

  Six adorable, good-hearted kids whom I loved as if they were my own.

  Max, Matthew, Icarus, Ozymandias, Peter and Wendy.

  The actual trial was scheduled to begin in an hour in the City and County Building, a gleaming white neoclassical-looking courthouse. Designed to appear unmistakably judicial, it was crowned with a pointy pediment just like the one atop the U.S. Supreme Court building. I could see it now.

  Kit and I slumped down on the front seat of my dusty, trusty beat-up blue Suburban. It was parked down the block from the courthouse, where we could see and not be seen, at least so far.

  I had chewed my nails down to the quick, and there was a pesky muscle twitching in Kit's cheek.

  "I know, Frannie," he'd said just a moment before. "I'm twitching again."

  We were suing for custody of the children, and we knew that the full weight of the law was against us. We weren't married, weren't related to the kids, and their biological parents were basically good people. Not too terrific for us.

  What we did have going for us was our unshakable love for these children, with whom we'd gone through several degrees of hell, and their love for us.

  Now all we had to do was prove that living with us was in the best interest of the children, and that meant I was going to have to tell a story that sounded crazy, even to my closest friends, sometimes even to myself.

  But every word was true, so help me God.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The amazing story had actually started six months ago in the tiny burg of Bear Bluff, Colorado, which is fifty or so miles northwest of Boulder on the "Peak-to-Peak" highway.

  I was driving home late one night when I happened to see a streaking white flash—then realized it was a young girl running fast through the woods not too far from my home.

  But that was just part of what I saw. I'm a veterinarian, "Dr. Frannie," and my brain didn't want to accept what my eyes told me, so I stopped my car and got out.

  The strange girl looked to be eleven or twelve, with long blond hair and a loose-fitting white smock that was stained with blood and ripped. I remember gasping for breath and literally steadying myself against a tree. I had the clear and distinct thought that I couldn't be seeing what I was seeing.

  But my eyes didn't lie. Along with a pair of foreshortened arms, the girl had wings!

  That's correct—wings! About a nine-foot span. Below the wings, and attached somehow were her arms. She was double-limbed. And the fit of her wings was absolutely perfect. Extraordinary from a scientific and aesthetic point of view. A mind-altering dose of reality.

  She had also been hurt, which was how I eventually came to capture her, in a "mist net," and sedate her, with the help of an FBI agent named Thomas Brennan whom I knew better as Kit. We brought her to the animal hospital I operate, the Inn-Patient, where I examined her. I found very large pectoral muscles anchored to an oversized breastbone, anterior and posterior air sacs, a heart as large as a horse's.

  She had been "engineered" that way. A perfect design, actually. Totally brilliant.

  But why? And by whom?

  Her name was Max, short for Maximum, and it was incredibly hard to win her trust at first. But in her own good time she told me things that made me sick to my stomach, and also angrier than I'd ever been. She told me about a place called the School where she'd been kept captive since the day she was born.

  Everything you're about to hear is already happening by the way. It's going on in outlaw labs across the United States and other countries as well. In our lifetime! If it's hard to take, all I can say is, buckle up the seatbelts on your easy chair. This is what happened to Max and a few others like her.

  Biologists, trying to break the barrier on human longevity, had melded bird DNA with human zygotes. It can be done. They had created Max and several other children. A flock. Unfortunately, the scientists couldn't grow the babies in test tubes, so the genetically modified embryos had to be implanted in their mothers' wombs.

  When the mothers were close to term, labor was induced. The poor mothers were then told that their premature children had died. The preemies were shipped to an underground lab called "the School." The School was, by any definition, a maximum-security prison. The children were kept in cages and the rejects were "put to sleep," a horrible euphemism for cold-blooded murder.

  Like I said, buckle up those seatbelts!

  Anyway, that was why Max had done what she'd been forbidden to do. She had escaped from the School. Amazingly, we succeeded. We even got to live with the kids a few months at a magical place we all called the Lake House. Kit and I listened to what Max had to tell us, then we went with her to try and rescue the children still trapped at the lab called the School.

  When the smoke cleared, literally, the six surviving children, including Max and her brother, were sent to live with their biological parents—people they'd never known a day in their lives.

  That should have been fine, I guess, but this real-life fairy tale didn't have a happy ending.

  The kids, who ranged from twelve years old down to about four, phoned Kit and me constantly every single day. They told us they were horribly depressed, bored, scared, miserable, suicidal, and I knew why. As a vet, I understood what no one else seemed to.

  The children had done a bird thing: they had imprinted on Kit and me . We were the only parents they knew and could love.

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