Shadowlands.

Disclaimer - Don't own 'em, don't make money from 'em but damn, I love to play with 'em.

Chapter 1

'You have the right to remain silent and refuse to answer questions. Do you understand?' The older cop leaned in and looked the young blond man in the eyes. Crystal blues stared back at him.

'Yeah.'

The cop – his name badge read Pattinson – continued, speaking clearly as though he was talking to a five year old. 'Anything you do say may be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand?'

Again the young blond man nodded. 'Yeah.'

'You have the right to consult an attorney before speaking to the police and to have an attorney present during questioning now or in the future. Do you understand?'

'Why ask? I didn't do nothin' so I don't need an attorney.'

'Are you saying you want an attorney or not?'

The blond sighed. 'No, I don't want an attorney.'

The cop sighed too. 'Just answer the questions huh? We're gonna be here long enough as it is. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you before any questioning if you wish. Do you understand?'

There was a nod and the cop slammed his hand down on the table top. 'A nod don't show up on the tape. Answer yes or no. Do you understand?'

'I understand' the young man's voice sounded tired and uneasy.

'If you decide to answer questions now without an attorney present you will still have the right to stop answering at any time until you talk to an attorney. Do you understand?'

'Sure.'

'Knowing and understanding your rights as I have explained them to you, are you willing to answer my questions without an attorney present?'

'I just said so.'

The cop shook his head. 'Yes or no, for the record.'

'Yes.'

'Ok. State your name for the tape.'

The young blond cleared his throat. 'Hutchinson. Ken Hutchinson.'

'Can I call you Ken?' Pattinson perched himself on the corner of the table and took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. He tapped one out and offered one to Ken. The blond shook his head and watched as the cop disappeared behind a cloud of acrid blue smoke.

'Call me whatever y..you like.'

'So just for the record Ken, tell me why you think you're here.'

Ken Hutchinson took a deep steadying breath. 'You think I murdered Daniel De La Vigo.'

'We found his body in an ally way. He was dead. We found a wad of money on him with a note from the clinic where you work. Care to explain that?'

For the first time Ken twitched. 'Did anyone t t touch him?'

'Do we look like rookies? No, we didn't touch him and by the time the coroner had been over him, his body was put into quarantine. "Highly contagious" is what he put on the death certificate, along with a whole bunch of medical mumbo jumbo. Care to explain that?'

'I can't.'

'Can't, or won't? You're lookin' at 20 to life for the cold blooded murder of De La Vigo. As my friends in Chicago would say, sing, an' I may be able to whittle that down for ya.'

Ken Hutchinson wriggled uncomfortably in his seat as his mind took him back two weeks to the laboratory at First Minnesota Medical and his partner Ryan Shaw.

Shaw looked up from his microscope as Hutchinson came into the room. The darker haired man pinched the bridge of his nose with the finger and thumb of his left hand and yawned loudly.

'What've you got?' Ken asked.

'Only fame and fortune buddy. Fame and fortune.'

'You mean you isolated it?'

'Your idea of exposing it to liquid nitrogen and then dissecting was perfect. Worked like a charm. See for yourself.' Shaw moved away so that Ken could look down the barrel of the microscope at the tiny wriggling entity caught in the crosshairs. It seemed so benign, almost cute like a woolly teddy bear in appearance, and yet... Ken looked up. 'We did it' he said tiredly.

'That we did pal, that we did. Like I said fame and fortune.'

Ken snickered. It had taken the pair of medical students 12 months of hard graft to get to this point in their search for a cure for the common cold and now they had isolated the one common thread to each and every variety of choriza virus. This was it – the epitome of their research and the key to more money than they could dream of.

'So what now?'

'We test it' Ryan said.

'We tested it already. On rats. As I recall two out of three of the suckers died before we had time to "cure" them.'

'Rats are rats buddy. Their body chemistry is so different from ours...'

'So what? A pig?'

Ryan's face lit up with an almost religious zeal. 'Think bigger.'

Ken frowned. 'We don't have enough money for a chimp, and even if we did, I don't like the idea of cutting' the thing up afterwards. I'm supposed to be a doctor, not a butcher.'

'No pig, no chimp. We isolated the virus Ken. We don't need to pussy foot around with the small fry. With this breakthrough, all we need is a willing volunteer.'

Ken's face clouded. 'No, no, no and did I mention no?'

'Why not? We have the stuff here. We can whistle up a batch of the toxin, infect the subject, wait twenty four hours and then harvest the serum.'

Again the blond shook his head. 'There are a thousand reasons Ryan and the top of the list is it isn't exactly ethical. The medical board would never buy it...'

'The medical board don't even have to know about it.'

'No, but I do and I say no. Give it a few more weeks. By then we'll have done more tests and gotten more familiar with the little sucker. By them we'll know its genome from one end to the other and we can manipulate the DNA and create a serum that way.'

Ryan shook his head. 'I don't understand you Ken. Why wait? We infect a subject, care for him in the lab, take his blood and with a little polygenic splicing we have the perfect serum. No waiting, no trial and error. The government will love us because there'll be no more weeks off work with a cold and think of how we sell his to Beechams, Reckitt and Bowser...'

The blond man cocked his head on one side. 'It's taken the best medical minds in the world to study the common cold Ryan. We make one breakthrough and suddenly you think you're God? We've taken this is far as we can and now we turn the research over to the big guns and let 'em work on through.'

'What? And let them take all the credit?'

'We have our notes, our papers. We'll get credit.'

'Yeah, and what about reapin' the benefits huh?'

Ken sighed. 'Sure the money would be good, but if we get the lawyers on board, we'll get a fair cut of the proceeds.'

'I don't want a fair cut. Don't you see Ken, we have the world at our fingertips and you're just gonna turn it all away because you're too yellow to take the final step.'

Ken stood up so suddenly that the chair he'd been sitting on overturned. He glared at Ryan, his face pale and his lips a white line across his face. 'As I recall, the last rat we tried this so called cure on went crazy, turned on all his buddy rats and killed 'em one by one. As I recall we finally euthanized the poor critter because we couldn't stand seein' it in so much pain. Do ya really wanna do that to a fellow human bein'? Do ya? Coz let me tell you, I came into the world of medicine coz I wanted to save lives, not because I wanted to torture someone or something.'

Ryan held up his hands in defeat. 'Ok, ok, you made your point. I had to ask. I had to see what you'd say, but I guess you're right. No one ever made a fortune from medicine and I guess they'd never believe a pair of med students anyhow. Fine, we take it slow, just like you said.'

Ken looked at Ryan with a sense of disbelief. It was Ryan's drive that had got them so far; Ken's brains, but Ryan's drive and to hear the other man give in so easily didn't sit well with the blond.

'You're gonna give up the argument just like that?'

Ryan shrugged. 'The voice of reason. You're right, we should take this slow. I bow to your better judgement and now I better bow out. Proff Petersen awaits and I can't be late for another one of his riveting microbiology lectures. See ya later Blondie.'

Ken looked up at Pattinson and said, with all honesty. 'I have no idea about the body. I don't know the poor guy, I've never met him and there's no way on God's green earth that I'd want to kill him.'

'But you know someone who might?'

'No. I don't know anyone who'd want to kill him.' It was the truth. Ken's gut feeling that Ryan had cooked up some of the toxin and given it to De La Vigo may have been right, but even Shaw wouldn't have wanted to kill he guy. Far from it. Ken suspected that his medical partner had simply been skipping a few hundred steps in his attempt to make his name.

Pattinson stared long and hard at the young blond in front of him. He'd been around enough to have seen thousands of suspects sit at that very table. He'd watched most of them sweat, fidget, twiddle with their clothes or pick imaginary skin from their fingers. Some bit their nails, some asked for another cigarette. Most, at some point during his questioning would call a halt to proceedings and ask for an attorney. They were all signs of guilt and Pattinson could list them all. This young "boy next door" blond however, displayed none of the signs. Ken Hutchinson was nervous, of course. Who wouldn't be with a murder rap hanging over his head, and yet Ken sat calmly, answering questions clearly, almost dispassionately. Either he was an Oscar rated actor, or Pattinson really did have the wrong guy. He changed tack.

'Where's your friend? Ryan Shaw?'

'I don't know.'

'When was the last time you saw him?'

Ken cast his mind back. Ryan had made himself scarce after their talk in the lab. Ken had wanted to talk to him – to discuss how they were going to take the next step in their research. Sure, they'd isolated the virus, but the animals they'd infected had all died. Whilst they'd all displayed the symptoms of the common cold, sneezing and wheezing, they'd also shown some more aggressive traits. As Ken had reminded his buddy, the one rat that did survive had to be put out of its misery after turning violent and then experiencing such terrible pains that it quite literally went crazy. These were not the symptoms usually associated with a head cold and they needed eliminating before the experiments went further. But try as he might, Ken had been unable to find Ryan Shaw. His door was locked, he didn't attend for lectures or ward rounds and his phone went unanswered.

'I last saw him about two weeks ago' Ken said softly. His mind was already thinking about De La Vigo and the horrific death he must have suffered. They'd had to make the serum powerful enough to take and that meant that it was far more contagious than the usual virus. Thank God the coroner had got there in time.

'Don't give me that. You two were inseparable. If anyone knows where he is, it's gonna be you.'

Ken lifted troubled crystal blues to look Pattinson in the eye. 'I swear, I haven't seen him for two weeks. No-one has. We were working on somethin'... a project and we were gettin' close to the end. We had...a disagreement and I haven't seen him since. I swear.'

'And this "project". What exactly was that?'

Ken opened his mouth to speak, thought twice and then decided. 'I need to see my lawyer' he said quietly.

3 months later.

The bailiff held the book and Ken Hutchinson placed his right hand on it. 'Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?'

Ken looked up into the public gallery. His Mom and Dad sat on the front row and as he looked, his Mom smiled encouragingly.

'I do.'

'State your name for the court record.'

'Kenneth Richard Hutchinson.' Ken sat back on the hard wooden seat and took a deep breath. The last three months had taken it out of the 23 year old. He'd been initially held in jail whilst investigations took place. Eventually Ryan Shaw was found, arrested and told the cops that he knew nothing of the death – that Ken Hutchinson had insisted on going ahead with the experiments. By then, Ken had been questioned and had answered consistently and eventually Shaw was charged with the murder, Ken was released and was now going to give evidence against his former partner.

Ryan Shaw sat next to his attorney, handcuffed to his chair. He glared at Ken but the blond was adamant. Shaw had tried to lay the blame at Ken's feet. An innocent man had died because of Ryan's impatience and now the blond man was about to set the record straight.

For almost a day Ken Hutchinson answered questions from his own lawyer, from Ryan Shaw's lawyer and from the Judge. At the end of it he was wrung out both physically and emotionally and as the bailiff told him he was free to go, he stood shakily and walked from the courtroom without a backwards look.

Ryan Shaw was sentenced to 9 years in prison for the "accidental" death of Daniel De La Vigo.

Ken Hutchinson quit medical school against his Father's wishes. He packed his bags soon after the end of the trial and enrolled in the Police Academy as far away from Minnesota as was possible to get.

Within 9 months of his incarceration, Cadet Ken "Hutch" Hutchinson was out on parade in Bay City California, his black uniform and new short haircut proclaiming to the world that his past was behind him and he was a new man.