CH 5
Lois and Clark weren’t surprised when they drove by Dr. Goldberg’s office to find all the lights on and the doctor obviously still inside. It wasn’t even nine yet and they decided it could be reasonable for him to still be there catching up on paperwork. They pulled into a different vacant parking lot than the previous night. Clark directed her to back into a space in the far left side of the lot. Behind the car was a tall hedge of bushes that blocked anyone from seeing in from the other direction. He wasn’t sure if Lois could see the building from this vantage point, but he could.
“So, I guess we wait. Hopefully, he doesn’t take his time leaving,” said Lois.
“We do have dinner to finish.” Clark held up his to-go box as proof.
“Too bad it’s cold now.”
“Yeah, too bad.” Clark briefly thought about heating it for her, but he couldn’t come up with a reasonable excuse as to why it would still be warm. “Do you have any forks?”
She reached over to the passenger side and opened her glove box only to find three pairs of chopsticks. She removed two of them and handed one to Clark. “Well, at least we don’t have to use our hands. Just pretend it’s Lo Mein.”
Clark unbuckled his seatbelt to get more comfortable, but realized part of the problem was that he was still in the same suit and tie he had worn to work. “Hey, Lois, before we start, how about we get changed? Just in case he leaves while we’re still eating. Then we don’t have to waste time changing later.”
“Sure, you can go first. It’s not a large space but you can crawl into the back and change. I promise not to look,” she said, raising her right hand as to symbolize taking an oath.
“Lois, you’ve seen me in just a towel. I’m not worried about you seeing me in my boxers and a t-shirt,” he joked.
“Oh, I forgot about that.” Not really, she thought. That picture would forever be ingrained in her memory.
Clark put his dinner down on the dash and got out of the car. Lois had backed in too far to open the rear hatch, so he had to crawl over the rear seats to get into the back.
“You know, those seats fold down. You didn’t have to squeeze yourself back there,” Lois teased.
“Sorry, I’ve never been in your backseat before. I’ll remember that for next time.” Clark opened his bag, removing his black pants, shoes, and long sleeved shirt from it and draping them over the back seat. He had taken off his Superman suit while at his apartment before dinner, so even if Lois caught a glimpse of him back here, he wouldn’t have to explain away blue long underwear.
“Hey, Clark, you weren’t half bad at dinner tonight. I bet Linda bought the whole show,” said Lois.
Clark took off his tie, rolling it as to not leave creases and placed it in his bag. “She did invite me to go home with her.”
“She didn’t?” grumbled Lois.
He continued to change, unbuttoning his shirt, removing and folding it neatly into the bag. “Afraid so. She thought that I shouldn’t go back just to have you berate me about not contributing enough in our partnership.” He paused to pull his black sweatshirt over his head.
“Clark, I didn’t mean any of it. You know that, right? It was all just an act.”
He didn’t quite believe her. Some of what she had complained about could be legitimate, whether she believed it herself. Now wasn’t the time to bring it up, though. “I know,” he said as he removed his shoes, leaving his dress socks on. “And I didn’t mean anything by what I said either.”
“So, I haven’t been irritable and mean?” she taunted.
“Well…” He smiled, unable to hold it back even though Lois wasn’t looking. “Maybe just a little. But I didn’t mean any of the rest of what I said. It was kind of fun actually. You should have seen the looks I got after you walked out the door. That should definitely start some rumors.” He finally removed his pants and slipped into his black ones, struggling a bit in the small space to contort his lower body into a position to pull them all the way up. “Okay, I just have to get my shoes on.” He slipped his pants into the bag and closed it before grabbing his tennis shoes and hopping back into the rear seat.
Lois waited for him to exit before entering the rear seat and hoping over it into the back.
Clark got back in the front passenger seat and glanced back just in time to see Lois finish climbing over the seat the way he had. “I thought you said these seats fold down.”
“They do, but I like the wall they provide.”
“What you don’t trust me?” Clark said in mock surprise.
“I do. I don’t know. It just feels more comfortable, having a little bit of separation.”
Clark just nodded in understanding before turning back around and starting in on his dinner. He had ordered farfelle with shrimp in a garlic and lemon cream sauce, which now cold, wasn’t as appealing. The sauce was thick and clumpy and the bowties didn’t cooperate with the chopsticks unless he pinched them right in the middle. He heard Lois still changing in the background, so he dropped his glasses and gave his food a burst of heat, warming the cream sauce enough to break the clumps up. He was halfway through his meal when she returned to the front seat, now also clothed all in black.
She looked over at Clark and saw what he had ordered. “You know, Clark, one of these days, food like that is going to catch up with you. You’re no longer slinging bales on a farm to burn that off.”
“I didn’t sling bales on the farm, Lois. We didn’t bale hay or alfalfa nor did we have much livestock. My father mostly grows corn, though sometimes wheat. Both are harvested by combines. We would bale the wheat stocks as straw after harvesting, but those bales would be roughly a thousand pounds and moved by tractor .”
“Thanks, Clark, for the baling lesson, and how could I have forgotten the corn?” she said sarcastically, recalling the ritual crop worship, otherwise known as the Smallville Corn Festival, she had witnessed while in his hometown a few months ago. “Well, whatever it is you did, you’re no longer doing it here in the city. It will catch up to you.”
“Thank you for your concern, Lois.”
Lois picked up her to-go container and frowned at the now cold pasta. It was all Linda’s fault that she was eating cold pasta, she thought. Had Linda not interrupted their meal, Lois could have finished before starting the fight with Clark, or at least she could have taken bites in between criticisms. Lois took a deep calming breath to clear that thought. She didn’t need thoughts of Linda to distract her from her current assignment. She let it go, stuck her chopsticks straight into the pile of angel hair and pulled out a bite full.
She had only taken a few bites when Clark spoke up. “Hey, Lois, it looks like he’s leaving.”
Lois grabbed the binoculars off the dash and peered through them at the house. She could see that the lights were now out and assumed Clark had seen him leave.
“Well, what are we waiting for? Grab the bag and let’s go,” she insisted.
“I think we should wait a couple more minutes before heading over there. What if he forgot something and has to come back?”
“Fine. Five minutes,” Lois mumbled, and then reopened her food container to take a few more bites of the cold pasta.
Five minutes later, they were out of the car heading towards the house with the bag in tow. Having already cased the house the previous nights, they knew that unfortunately the front door would be the easiest to break into, but also the most visible. They opted for the door around the back, which was blocked from view by a tree and a few bushes, but also had a deadbolt. Fortunately, Lois had brought her professional lock picking set with her and went to work.
As Lois was working on the locks, Clark scanned the door for alarms. There was a small door chime but nothing connected to a central alarm system. From what he could see through the door, the chime was turned to off. Clark then started scanning the room behind the door and found two cameras. One was pointed right at the door and the other toward the hallway. He was thinking over how to disable the camera facing the door when he heard the first lock click open. He looked down to see Lois already moving onto the deadbolt. Her skills amazed him and worried him at the same time.
A few minutes later, Lois had the deadbolt open. While she put away her lock picking tools, Clark slowly opened the door and zapped the cameras. He then made another quick scan of the room just to make sure he didn’t miss anything.
“Do you see anything, Clark?” she whispered.
“No, there are some cameras, but they don’t seem to be on,” Clark replied, picking the bag back up and moving into the house.
Lois followed behind him and turned on her flashlight. “I think we’re in a kitchen,” she said as she moved the flashlight around the room. “There’s probably nothing in here, but we should take a quick look just to make sure.” She walked over to the counter and started opening drawers.
Clark went over to the refrigerator to take a look.
“Anything?” asked Lois.
“No, just some takeout and bottles of water. You?”
“Silverware, plates, Pop-Tarts, coffee. Nothing to get excited about. Let’s move on to his office.”
Clark followed Lois down the hall into the office with the skylight. The door was shut but, to their surprise, not locked; they easily entered. From their previous observations, they had a good idea of the layout of the room, which made navigating it in the dark much easier. It included some of the furniture and devices one would find in an exam room but, mostly, it contained what looked like lab equipment.
Clark set the bag down on a counter against the far wall and opened it. He handed Lois the page scanner and transmitter before pulling out the box that contained the test tubes and set it on the counter.
“Lois, why don’t you find a place to hide the transmitter, and I’ll start looking in these?” Clark suggested, pointing to the refrigerator and upright freezer next to it.
“Okay.” She moved her flashlight around the room, surveying the countertops and file cabinets. She paused when her light landed on a tall file cabinet covered with knickknacks. Lois walked over to it and examined the items more closely. Kinetic motion toys, magnetic monkeys, perpetual motion spinning dolphins, and a Darth Vader electric pencil sharpener were just a few of the items she saw. She decided there would be no better place than here to stash a silver disk. She placed the transmitter just behind the spinning dolphins, whose tall base would easily shield it from view.
After stepping back to make sure it was well hidden, at least from people her height, Lois glanced over at Clark. The freezer door was open, and he was bent at the waist examining the lower shelves. She noticed the test tubes still sitting on the counter and decided he must not have found anything yet.
Lois stepped back up to the file cabinet and opened the top drawer. It contained folders listed A-F and she assumed that they were patient files. Glancing through the first few A files, she didn’t see anything interesting and closed the drawer. She opened the next drawer down and headed straight for the H’s. Locating Gage Hager’s file, she quickly removed it and took it over to the counter to begin scanning it with her portable page scanner. She returned his file to its appropriate place and then repeated the process for both Dillon Ladner’s and Sergio Cabellero Ramirez’s files.
After returning those two files, she then glanced through the G-L and M-R drawers and removed a few of the thickest files she could find to scan. “Clark, I found the files of the three patients listed in the article and scanned them in. Now, I’m scanning a few random files. How are you doing?”
“There wasn’t much in the freezer that looked useful or easy to extract, but the fridge has a false back on all the shelves.”
“Really? How could you see that in the dark?”
Clark hesitated, searching his thoughts for a reasonable explanation. The truth was that he spotted it when he had scanned the room for anything tied to the video surveillance system or a security system. “Well, ah, when I reached in to see the samples in the back, I noticed my arm didn’t go as far back as it should have. Once I took a good look, I noticed there’s a little tab on the side of the false back, which easily pops the panel out. Plus there is a light inside.”
“Oh, so anything good back there?”
“There’s not much, but since he took the time to hide it back here, it must be important. I haven’t pulled all the false backs out yet, so there may be more. I’m working on labeling all the tubes first before I extract anything. Once I do that, we have strict time limit to get this stuff back into refrigeration.” Though a little freeze breath might prolong that in case we get delayed, Clark mentally added.
“You didn’t see a false back in the freezer, did you?” she asked.
“No. Its back is at full depth.”
“Well, maybe you should still take something from there, just in case.”
He knew she was right. It wasn’t going to hurt anything to take a sample. “I’ll see what I can do. Did you place the transmitter?”
“Yep, it’s hidden behind some dolphins on top of his filing cabinet.”
“Dolphins?” asked Clark, needing more clarification.
“You know, one of those spinning things that you see on top of desks. Like those pendulum balls that just bounce back and forth. He’s got a collection of that stuff over there.”
“Do you mean the perpetual motion dolphins?”
Lois didn’t answer, but glared at him to show her annoyance that he always seemed to know the proper term for everything. She wasn’t sure he could see her in the dark, but still hoped that her non-response conveyed her message.
She heard Clark resume his task in the refrigerator and, therefore, she started scanning the room with her flashlight. She stopped on another filing cabinet that was attached to a small desk in the corner. The desk was bare, except for a power cable and telephone cord coming up from the behind the desk. The filing cabinet had two drawers; the top was unlocked and was empty, the bottom was locked. Lois opened back up her lock picking set and had the bottom drawer open within a few minutes. She was hoping to find the laptop computer that the power cable belonged to but instead found a small spiral notebook. She didn’t recognize it as the one he had been writing in the other night but, being that it was locked securely in the drawer, thought it might be important. She picked it up and flipped through the pages. Only a few dozen of them had been written in, and not in English. She guessed it was in German. Between the bad handwriting and the foreign language, she couldn’t decipher anything in the book. She set it on the desk and scanned it anyway.
“Hey, Lois, I’m about done in here,” said Clark as he removed his surgical style gloves. “I’m going to check out those other three exam rooms real quick.”
“Okay, I’m going to finish scanning this notebook and then I’ll join you. Did you get something from the freezer?”
“Yeah, I swabbed something off a Petri dish. It wasn’t labeled and I couldn’t identify anything about it from looking at it.” That wasn’t entirely true. Clark had looked at it very closely and determined that it was organic material, possibly skin or some other tissue, but couldn’t tell much more than that.
Clark placed the now full test tube box carefully back in their duffel bag along with all the used pipettes, gloves, and swabs that were now stored together in a plastic bag. He then quietly walked back into the hallway and dropped his glasses to scan the three exam rooms. All three were basic exam rooms. They each contained a wall cabinet with a sink and small desk, an examination table, a few chairs, and the essentials for taking vitals hanging on the wall next to the examination table. He wouldn’t be able to explain to Lois why going in there would be a waste of time, so he wandered in and poked his head in a few cabinets before she came to join him.
“Find anything?” she asked as she stuck her head in the room.
“No. It looks like a basic examination room. I’m guessing the other two are the same. Do you see anything else you want to look at?”
“What’s left?” she asked.
“I think there are the waiting room and a bathroom. This isn’t a very big house, which has been converted into an office.”
Lois looked down at her watch. “We’ve been in here for almost an hour. Who knows when or if the doctor will be back tonight? Do you think we should head to the roof and plant the recorder, and then get out of here?”
“Sounds like a plan, though, why don’t I go on the roof while you lock the deadbolt?” he suggested.
“Don’t think you can get it locked?” quipped Lois.
Clark smiled. “Not as fast as you can.”
“Fine.”
Clark followed Lois back down the hall to the kitchen. They both took one last look around to make sure everything was as it should be and that nothing looked disturbed. He couldn't do anything about the cameras he had shorted, but to most people they would look like an electrical surge had burnt them out. After both were satisfied that nobody would know they had been there, they opened the back door, locking it behind them as they exited. Lois then crouched back down and began her work on the deadbolt as Clark headed to the roof. It took him only a minute to hide the device up on the roof. He had already spotted the perfect place the night before.
Lois was slightly startled by his speedy return, but she covered it up. “That was fast.”
Clark changed the subject to hide the fact that he might have been too fast. “You just about done? I think we need to get out of here. I could see some people in the distance from the roof.”
“Were they headed this way?”
“Not sure, but I’d rather not find out,” answered Clark, trying to add a sense of urgency.
“This should just take another moment. I’ve had it a few times but it keeps sticking when I try to turn it.”
“Here, let me help.” Clark reached over her and put his hands over hers. With his extra help, the bolt slid back into place easily.
Clark's hearing picked up on voices headed in their direction.
“Do you think the Doc's in?” said voice one.
“Let’s hope he is. My knee’s not feeling that good. He assured me it would be all right for the game,” replied voice two.
Clark snapped out of listening in when he saw Lois start to head away from the building. He pulled her back and put his finger to his lip before pointing to his ear. Lois understood the message as she now also could hear the chatter and shrugged her shoulders, asking him what he thought they should do.
On the first night they were there, they had seen the teenagers enter through the back door. Guessing that was where these men were headed, Clark stepped behind her and placed his hand on her back to lead her to the ladder for the roof that was just around the corner. They quietly climbed up and hid as the men came around to the back door and knocked.
“Dude, the lights are all out. The Doc’s not here. We’ll have to come back later tonight,” said the man Clark had identified as voice one. From the voice, he could tell that these guys weren’t men, but teens. Probably one of the teens, who they had seen here a few nights ago.
“Just try again. I don’t know if I can get out again tonight. Mom’s been on my back about studying and she’s been checking over all my homework to the point that she’s stayed up until three, two nights ago just to make sure I had it all done,” replied voice number two. Hearing his voice up close tickled Clark’s memory, but he couldn’t place it.
“So finish your homework early tonight.”
“I can try but I’ve got that book report due tomorrow. I haven’t even finished the book.”
“Slacker. I don’t know what to tell you, man. I guess you’ll just have to trust that the doc’s right and the knee is fine. No pain, no gain, man. Besides, you’ve still got some time for it to quit hurtin’; just take a pain killer.” Voice one knocked one more time before they gave up and headed back in the direction they came.
Once the kids were out of earshot, Lois spoke, “Clark, did you set the timer to record tonight?”
“Yeah. I set it from 1:30-3:30. Why?”
“Just checking. How’d you hear those guys, anyways?” Lois inquired.
“I don’t know. I guess I was already on alert since I spotted them from the roof.”
“Well, good thing you did or we’d have been caught red handed.”
“You ready to get out of here? We’re running out of time on the samples,” he reminded her.
“How much time is left?” she asked.
“Less than forty-five minutes.”
“I can easily get us back to your place before then,” boasted Lois.
“Like I said before, I’d like to make it to our destination in one piece. We’ve got time. There’s no need to rush.”
“Clark, my driving’s not that bad. I only get tickets when I’m parked, not moving.”
“Let’s just get out of here,” said Clark, not wanting to debate her driving skills anymore.
They quickly and quietly headed down the ladder and back out to the car. Clark carefully placed the duffel bag in the seat behind him while Lois cleaned up their dinner boxes that they had left open and unfinished from earlier. On exiting the parking lot, Lois headed in the opposite direction from where they arrived. They had now been driving down this street several nights in a row and it wasn’t worth the risk of being noticed in case more kids were headed towards the office, just to save a little time.
“You didn’t say much when we were in there. What did you find?” asked Lois.
“Most of it, I’m not sure.” Clark shook his head before continuing, “They weren’t marked with any names or what they contained. It all seemed to be in some sort of labeling code. A few vials were obviously blood, but most were clear or hazy. There was the frozen sample I took from that Petri dish and there was another Petri dish sample in the refrigerator that I also swabbed. But Petri dishes are used for cultivating things like bacteria. What would he be cultivating? It’s all very strange.”
“I guess we’ll just have to wait for STAR Labs to tell us what all you took. I hope it doesn’t take them too long.”
“Me, either. I have a bad feeling about this. Something about what that kid wanted to see Goldberg for tonight didn’t seem right. What did you find?”
“Other than the three patients we already knew about, I’m not sure.” Lois had scanned over a hundred pages but she hadn’t read any of them. “I definitely didn’t find the doctor’s secret list of patients, but I copied a notebook that was locked in his desk. It’s all in German, so we’ll need it translated.”
“I can probably help with that,” Clark offered as if she should have already thought of that.
“You read German?”
“And French and a few others.”
“Okay,” she said skeptically before moving on. “I’ll get the book printed out then and give it to you.”
“Was it the book we saw him writing in the other night?”
“I don’t think so. But I’m trying to compare something that I saw in the dark to something I saw far away, so it could be the same. My initial gut instinct is that it’s not.”
“Humm…I’ll take the box over to STAR Labs first thing in the morning before I head over to The Metropolis Star. I’ll let STAR Labs know to contact you immediately when they find out something.”
“Sounds good,” Lois said quietly.
“Lois, I’m going undercover; I’m not going away,” Clark reassured her for the hundredth time today. “I need you to continue working on this story. It’s important. It may be more than just illegal performance enhancers. These kids could be in trouble from whatever he’s doing to them.”
“I know all that, Clark.”
“Then why do you get quiet every time I bring up tomorrow?” beseeched Clark.
“I don’t know,” Lois paused to collect her thoughts and find the real reason for her insecurity in this matter. “I guess I don’t like the idea of you working for someone else or with someone else. I like our partnership.”
“I like it too, Lois. Trust me; no one is going to replace you as my partner. This is all going to be very temporary.”
“Well, then maybe you can annoy her some with your little disappearing acts.”
“Would that make you happy?” Clark inquired.
“No, but it might make me feel a little better.” Lois didn’t want to continue this conversation. She had spent enough time thinking about Linda and working alone tomorrow, so she remained silent until she pulled up to Clark’s apartment and parked in front of it. She stepped out of the Jeep and opened the back to retrieve his bag of clothes for him. Clark opened the passenger door and picked up the duffel bag to set it on the seat. He unzipped the top and removed Lois’s page scanner, and then zipped the bag back up. When he turned around, Lois was waiting for him with his clothing bag. He traded the scanner for his bag.
“Thanks, Lois. Can you wait a moment while I pack another stakeout bag for you to keep?”
“Sure.”
“Just give me a minute.” Clark rushed up the stairs to his apartment and disappeared inside.
He returned a few minutes later with the same clothing bag she had just handed to him. She was back in the car, waiting the driver’s seat with the window down. He handed her his bag, briefly causing his finger to brush against her open hand. She quickly closed her hand around its handle and tossed the bag into the seat next to her.
“I’ll call you tomorrow night.” It was Clark’s final attempt to reassure her that she wasn’t going to lose him permanently to the Star.
Lois ignored his statement. “Don’t forget the tape.”
“I won’t,” Clark said with a smile, before he turned and went back inside his apartment.
Lois took one last look at Clark’s apartment, hoping it wouldn’t be long until she saw it again. With a sigh, she rolled the window up and pulled away from the curb, heading back to her place.
***End of Chapter 5***
