The Immortality Plot

The Immortality Plot - chapter 10

The sun slanted through the curtains and Delaney woke up with a start, initially uncertain where he was. Then he remembered. He lay still, listening to the morning awaken and tried to assemble the jumble of information he had pieced together and decide where his priorities lay. It was possible that the murders of Maria and Lisa Chalmers were just two of many. Maybe this so-called Priest was a genuine serial killer. The notion that he might be a hired contractor still nagged at Delaney. To suddenly announce your presence and boast about your murders in full public view showed either an extremely acquiescent employer or a supreme confidence in your abilities and belief that you would not be caught.

It could be possible also that the employer had hired The Priest but there had been no contact between them. It could have been arranged on a drop-ship basis. In which case, even if the killer was caught he would be unable to lead anyone to the real villain – the one who wanted these women dead to begin with.

Delaney needed to focus. He could easily be dragged all over the country checking out murders and disappearances but he had no official position. Nobody had to talk to him, although from experience he knew that people invariably did. Right now, it was impossible to say how many women – and he was assuming here that women were at the center of this – had been killed or had vanished or both. Maybe they vanished first and were then murdered. This made Maria an exception. She hadn’t been on an expedition and she hadn’t been to a fertility clinic. She had attended pre-natal appointments and Delaney had been with her.

So he needed to stay in a tight geographical area. The keys to unlocking this mystery lay in establishing the link between disappearances and murders and discovering common denominators, connections between them, like Lifeforce for instance. The FBI, local and State police could look after the rest.

And who was Ruth Velasquez?

And where was Rachel Maclean?

These were his priorities. By following the trail of Rachel Maclean, Delaney would be led inexorably to The Priest.

Delaney checked his emails before getting out of bed. He found a long mail and an attachment from Ashok. The hard drive had been damaged almost irretrievably but some odd files had been salvaged. He was sending a CD to Bob Messenger as requested and attached the saved files in no particular order. Delaney opened up the attachment and scrolled down a long, single of page of notes and comment on all kinds of topics, as if they were being saved until needed, some personal jottings and emails, texts of professional letters written to Miles Dunning and then a list of names, some phone numbers and addresses including, Delaney saw with sudden excitement, the address of Ruth Velasquez.

It was her place of work, The Fertility Clinic of Massachusetts in Boston. There was no phone number.

A connection at last, thought Delaney.

So, he had two visits to make, one in New York and the other in Boston. Delaney checked out the website. There had been many posts expounding theories. There had also been a couple of posts from ‘investigators’ that had dug up some information.

Three names were listed: Annabel Evanstone from Dayton, Ohio; Raylene Mills from New Orleans and Mary-Ann Miller from Dallas, Texas.Each was a young woman in her late teens or early twenties. Two had attended fertility clinics privately, presumably surreptitiously, and one, Mary-Ann Miller, had signed up for an adventure trip to Peru with a company called Overseas Evolution. No addresses were given for the clinics. All three young women had been declared missing persons stretching out over the last four years. No trace of them had ever been found. Chances are they were dead but their bodies had never been discovered, or at least reported.

But, if you looked at it another way, the girls who had gone for advice of some description to a fertility clinic may have had pressing personal reasons to leave home and never return.