| General Fiction posted August 29, 2025 | Chapters: |
...6 7 -8- 9... 
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Brian pays Vivian Delacroix a surprise visit
A chapter in the book Beating the Devil
Beating the Devil - Chapter 8
by Jim Wile
The author has placed a warning on this post for language.| Background A cancer researcher invents an early cancer detection system. |
Recap of Chapter 7: At the kids’ insistence about getting a puppy, Julia calls Maddy for information about breeders, then calls and makes an appointment to see Lab puppies on Saturday.
While Brian is planning what to say to Mal, Mal calls him, and Brian tells him he will write a confession, which they will get notarized. He also tells Mal to give him the $25,000 he was paid by Vivian Delacroix up front and that he will get Vivian to pay the other $25,000 he was promised on completion of the job. With the $50,000, Brian will take charge of paying for Mal’s daughter’s heart transplant bills.
Mal is extremely regretful for betraying Brian and overwhelmed by the fact that Brian won’t notify the police or press charges against him. Brian is willing to give him a break since he, himself, had many second chances in his youth.
Brian also makes plans to pay Vivian a surprise visit.
Chapter 8
Brian was eating a sandwich in his office when Mal arrived at 1:00. He handed Brian a cashier’s check for $25,000. He’d also prepared a timeline with details of all the interactions he’d had with Vivian Delacroix and her brother to make his handwritten confession complete and accurate. He had included names, locations, dates, techniques used, and the results.
Brian scanned the timeline and said, “Mal, why don’t you sit here and write the confession, including how you voluntarily gave up the money? I’d like you to provide a statement that the events are truthful to the best of your recollection and that you aren’t writing this under duress. Don’t sign it, though. We’ll have you do that in front of the notary. As I told you, I don’t plan to do anything with this confession other than hold it over Vivian Delacroix’s head.”
Mal nodded. When he had finished, Brian looked it over. Satisfied with the results, he made a copy for Mal. Together, they headed for the bank in Brian’s SUV.
They drove for a few minutes without speaking. When the silence became awkward, Mal broke it by saying, “You didn’t run another test. What convinced you there was contamination? I didn’t think you could figure it out so fast.”
“Believe it or not, it was a cancer-sniffing dog who came over to double-check the results. We knew immediately there were at least 10 false positives. The dog identified almost all the ones we induced cancer in and none of the others who had tested positive.”
“That’s amazing. I know dogs have great noses, but smelling cancer? Where did you get the idea for that?”
Brian told him the story of meeting Maddy and Bo and the thought processes he and Abby had gone through to narrow the contamination down to sabotage.
Arriving at the bank, they headed in to meet with the notary. She checked Mal’s ID and watched him sign his confession, noting that he did so voluntarily without a word from Brian. She affixed her stamp to the document, and they were on their way in a matter of minutes.
They said little on the way back to Brian’s, but shortly before arriving, Mal started to say, “Brian, I—” but immediately began choking up. He paused for a few moments to compose himself. “I know I’m going to agonize over this for being the worst decision I ever made. You’ve been nothing but kind to me, and there’s no valid excuse for what I did. And even when you found out, you’ve continued to be kind about it. I don’t deserve it, and I’ll never forget it.”
“Mal, I believe you. And as someone who has made many mistakes and poor decisions in my past, I also believe in second chances. Learn from it and become a better person for it, and someday I hope you’ll forgive yourself for this one lapse of judgment. My thoughts are with you and your family as you face a much more significant event that will make this incident pale by comparison. Give all your attention and your love and support to your wife and daughter now. They’ll need you to be strong for them.
“I will.”
Brian held out his hand, and Mal shook it.
Vivian Delacroix was in a foul mood. One of her more mediocre students had just left her office after having wasted her precious time and energy attempting to explain tumor heterogeneity to her. The girl left, practically in tears, but Vivian had little sympathy. That was a half-hour of her life she would never get back. Maybe it’s something in the food supply because these Gen Z kids seem to be stupider than past generations.
Her research was not going well either. Her most recent experiment had been a failure, and she had no idea why. She had a few minutes before her next student was scheduled to bother her again, and she simply sat brooding about how rotten things were lately.
She was an attractive woman of 55, tall and athletic-looking but with an imperious demeanor that her students found off-putting. Not that she particularly cared what they thought.
She honestly didn’t give a shit about teaching and taught as few classes as she could get away with. She routinely got poor evaluations from her students, which she fully expected and couldn’t care less about. Her true value to the department was her reputation as a cancer researcher, and in that, she was cutting edge and highly successful.
She was feeling the pressure of her recent failed experiments, though. She was even beginning to have doubts about her blood-based approach to early cancer detection.
And why hadn’t she heard anything from Malcolm Roberts for over a week? She had paid him good money to slow Brian down, and she expected to hear the results of the test he had helped sabotage two weeks ago. She would call him as soon as office hours ended and give him hell.
As she sat stewing about all the things troubling her, in walked Brian Kendrick. She was startled, and her heart fluttered briefly, but she quickly plastered on a smile.
“Brian Kendrick. What a surprise! What brings you to town?”
“Vivian, let’s cut the crap. I think you know what brings me here. I noticed that look on your face when I came in. I know all about Mal and what he attempted to do for you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Drop the act, will you? I’ve got a signed and notarized confession from Mal about what you paid him to do. It wasn’t hard to figure out from the way you had him go about it. You really could use some lessons in sabotage. But there isn’t going to be any more of that.”
“Let me see that,” she said, reaching her hand out for the document.
“And don’t bother trying to shred it; it’s only a copy.”
She looked it over and noted the part where Mal stated he had been paid half the money up front but gave Brian the cashier’s check for the $25,000.
“This document will never hold up in court. My lawyers could make mincemeat out of it.”
“I’m not planning to go to the police or press charges unless you force me to. Here’s what you’re going to do instead: In exchange for my keeping quiet—both to the cops and, more importantly, your employer—you’re going to give me the other 25 grand in the form of a cashier’s check, and you’re going to promise me you’ll leave both me and Mal’s family alone from now on. Hassle me about the check, or if I find out you’ve come after Mal or me, your reputation will be in the toilet. There are several other people in the know about this, so if something were to happen to me, you’ll never get away with it.”
“I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you turn around and get the hell out before I call security? I’ve got plenty of goods on you too, Brian. How about your addiction to painkillers and those stints in rehab my investigators discovered about you?”
“Won’t work, Vivian. Old news. If your investigators were worth their salt, they would have learned there’s no traction there. Already been many articles about the irony of a teenage opioid junkie inventing an opioid replacement that has brought addiction-free pain relief to millions.”
“So, Mr. High and Mighty. You want me to pay you 25 grand, or you’ll go blabbing? You’re no better than a common blackmailer.”
“Hardly. I’m not keeping it. I’ll be paying Mal’s daughter’s medical bills with the money I collected from him and now you.”
She was silent for a moment with no ready retort.
“Why do you do cancer research, Vivian?” Brian asked.
This had come out of nowhere, and she was at a momentary loss for words. “What’s it to you?”
“I’m just interested in what motivates people. In my case, my mother-in-law, who I’m very fond of, was diagnosed with breast cancer five years ago and was already at stage 4. There are so many cancers like that, which often don’t present with symptoms until it’s too late, as you well know. That’s what got me interested. So, what was it for you?”
Brian’s question gave her pause, and pictures of her father’s excruciating pain flashed through her mind. She was an only child to two doctors. A daddy’s girl, she had loved him dearly. When he developed brain cancer while she was a senior in high school, she took the last semester off to care for him until hospice was required and then simply to be with him. She had already been early-admitted to Duke University and had plenty of credits to graduate high school, so she could afford the time off.
She watched her father deteriorate rapidly with a fast-growing glioblastoma for which he refused treatment. He had known enough patients whose quality of life during treatment was little better than without it—sometimes even worse—and only prolonged life for a few additional months. He decided to let nature take its course and was dead before she graduated in the spring.
She had once planned to pursue a career in art, but with her father’s illness, and her mother’s relentless pressure, she changed course and studied medicine, leading eventually to a highly successful career in cancer research.
She simply said to Brian, “My father died of brain cancer when I was 17. It was too late to do anything about it. It was a very painful death.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Let me leave you with this thought: If someone were on the verge of a discovery that could have saved your father, but someone else attempted to slow it down for whatever reason, how would you have felt? Isn’t preserving life, be it your father’s or someone else’s, the most important thing?”
She could only stare through him with a faraway look in her eyes.
“I’ll be waiting for the check in the mail,” Brian said and turned toward the door.
 Recognized |
Brian Kendrick: A 41-year-old neuroscientist and cancer researcher
Julia Kendrick: Brian's 41-year-old wife. She is also a world-class violinist.
Johnny Kendrick: Their 6-year-old son
Lindsay Kendrick: Their 4-year-old daughter
Dr. Marie Schmidt: Julia's mother
Madison (Maddy) McPhail: Owner of Bo
Bo: Maddy McPhail's cancer-sniffing therapy dog
Abby Payne: Brian's partner on the project. She is 65 and a brilliant mathematician
Callie Bennett: The programmer on the project. She is Abby's cousin.
Malcolm Roberts (Mal): One of Brian's two lab assistants
Larry Posner: One of Brian's two lab assistants
Vivian Delacroix: An oncology professor at Wake Forest University also doing early cancer detection work
Picture courtesy of Imagen-4-Ultra-Exp
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© Copyright 2025. Jim Wile All rights reserved.
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