Tear Me Apart

by J. T. Ellison

  “Bring four. Juliet is still here.”

  Lauren bites back the response she wants to give. “Sure. Be right there.”

  Juliet. Always the fly in the ointment. From the moment she arrived on the scene and cut Mindy’s hair, Lauren has wanted to force her away. She loves her sister; she just doesn’t have the bond she knows some people do with their siblings. From birth, Juliet was obstinate and difficult. A finicky eater, never getting along with anyone, always fighting with her sister, her friends, their mother. And as she grew up, always having to be the smartest one in the room, the little budding scientist. A brainy loner, relentless and intractable.

  A problem.

  Lauren rises, turns toward the cafeteria. She will bring the cocoa, let Juliet drink it, then escort her out herself and make sure Juliet keeps her big mouth shut. She refuses—refuses!—to put Mindy through the ignominy of the idea that she isn’t their child, not for a second. Mindy doesn’t need any more pressure on her than she already has. Her leg is just beginning to heal properly, and the stem cell transplant means all new protocols, new medications, and new stress. Lauren will be damned if she allows the mental stress of this clear mistake to weigh on Mindy, to in any way affect her treatment and its efficacy.

  * * *

  Juliet watches as Lauren comes into the room, a forced smile on her face. Lauren sends her a mental do not dare speak glare and hands her the cocoa.

  “You have to get on the road early to get to work on time, won’t you?”

  “Oh, you’re leaving?” Mindy asks, taking the proffered cup. “I thought we could play Trivial Pursuit. I schooled you last time.”

  Juliet rolls her eyes. “You schooled me last time because you were studying for AP history and the categories were all historical. I’m up for a rematch. Bring it, sister.” And she looks at Lauren with that gleam in her eye that says, I dare you to stop me.

  Lauren wants to scratch her nails down her sister’s smug face, leave runnels of red, then force her into the snow to freeze to death. Maybe she’ll get lucky, and a wolf will smell the blood and come eat her.

  Instead, she hands Jasper his cup, and takes her own, dropping the Styrofoam tray into the trash, and smiles. “Of course we can play, Mindy dear. But your aunt has to go back to Denver and to work. Don’t you, Juliet? We wouldn’t want you to get fired from a job you love.”

  Mindy’s frown is unreadable, but Jasper’s head swings toward Lauren’s in an instant. She blinks at him, and he straightens. The advantage of a long marriage, the marital glance. Words unspoken but messages sent.

  Jasper edges around to the other side of the bed. “Yeah, Mindy, we don’t want Juliet to get busted by her boss. Besides, I think it’s my turn to play hooky. I haven’t gotten nearly enough time with ma leetle babushka.”

  At his horrendously ridiculous Russian accent, Mindy starts to giggle, and he advances on her, opening and closing his fingers like he is going to pinch her cheeks, which sends her squealing under the bedclothes.

  Lauren takes advantage to steer Juliet into the hall.

  “Say your goodbyes, and get out of here.”

  “Lauren, you can send me away, but it’s not going to change facts. This is going to come out.”

  Lauren speaks in a furious whisper. “It won’t if you keep your mouth shut. Now leave, and I don’t want to hear you speak of this again. And if you let this slip, if you tell anyone your outlandish theory, I will make sure your bosses know you were interfering with the files here at the hospital. How do you think that will go over? I don’t think the CBI would take kindly to the news one of their employees was breaking into secure medical documents. Are we clear? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  They face off for a moment, then Juliet exhales a heavy breath out of her nose and sticks her head back into the room. She blows Mindy a kiss. “I’ll be back this weekend, peanut. Try not to beat your parents too badly. Especially go easy on your mother. You know what a sore loser she can be.”

  “Bye, Aunt J,” Mindy calls, still under a puppy pile of pillows and blankets and dad. “Thanks for the candy, and the talk.”

  Lauren’s eyes narrow, but Juliet tosses her a crisp salute and saunters off down the hall.

  Lauren sags a little inside but doesn’t move an inch until she sees the elevator doors close behind her sister.

  This is a problem. A very big problem.

  Juliet is always a problem.

  Later. She’ll deal with it later.

  Pasting a smile on her face, she goes back into her daughter’s room to join her family.

  13

  UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL

  NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

  1993

  VIVIAN

  The new roommate doesn’t talk to me for the first week. She doesn’t talk to anyone, really, though she’s relatively polite to Ratchet, as if recognizing a kindred spirit straight from hell.

  I’m in the art room, painting a seascape copied from a book, when I realize I’m not alone and look up to see my phantom roommate standing to the left of my easel, a thoughtful look on her face.

  “You’re good. But you might want to mix in some vermilion. Your greens are all off. They lack depth.”

  “Red won’t work.”

  “It will tone your blue. Add it to the blue, then redo that line, right there.”

  I bite back the response I prefer to give—fuck off, psycho—and try it. All part of my new life plan to be cooperative so I can get the hell out of here.

  Damn if it doesn’t work.

  The crests of the waves are suddenly alive, and the froth they churn now looks like proper seafoam instead of dead gray ice.

  “How did you know to do that?”

  “I paint, too.”

  “Are you ever going to tell me your name?”

  “What’s in a name? Names are stupid.”

  “Or is it you don’t want me to ask for a newspaper so I find out what you did to land in here?”

  She stares, and I mentally give myself a point. She’s afraid of what I might think.

  The painting is done. There’s nothing more I can do with it. I step back and admire the new depth.

  “I killed someone,” she says, softly, her voice barely a whisper.

  I don’t look away from the painting, but a chill crawls down my spine. “How?”

  “With a knife.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she didn’t clean her brushes right.” She grins and rushes out of the room.

  I do a good job on my brushes, just in case. The last name on our door now reads Thompson, L.

  Inside, I lean against the wall. Thompson, L is fussily making her bed.

  “What’s the L stand for?”

  “Liesel.”

  “What kind of a name is Liesel?”

  “German.”

  “You’re American. Thompson isn’t a German name.”

  “So?”

  “Who did you kill?”

  “No one of consequence.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  She stares at me for a brief moment, then she leaves the room.

  I don’t doubt she’s telling me the truth about what she’s done.

  Who is my new roommate?

  * * *

  Now that I know I’m sleeping next to a murderer, I am desperate to find out what’s happening. I ask at the desk for the newspaper and am rewarded, but can’t find anything about someone named Liesel Thompson. I ask for the past week and am denied. Perhaps there is something in them they don’t want me to see.

  I wait until shift change, when Ratchet heads home. Roger is on tonight, and he likes me. He gives me Marlboros and lets me smoke in their lounge instead of out in the hutch.

  Once the first bed check is done, and Liesel is snoring, I head down the
dark hallway to the nurses’ station. I jerk my head toward the lounge. Roger, thin, blond, wispy mustache and ropy arms, unlocks the staff lounge and hands me a smoke. Once we’re lit, I say, “Can I have last week’s newspapers?”

  “Why?”

  “So I can see why my roommate is in here. She scares me. She said she...”

  “Yes?” He leans forward, interested now. I take a drag, breathe in the smoke, down deep in my lungs, hold it there until I start to cough and Roger whispers, “Be quiet. You’re going to get me in trouble.”

  I swallow the cough, choking, my eyes watering. I suddenly don’t want to share my strange roommate’s words.

  “So? What did she say?”

  “She said she would never tell. I just want to be sure I’m safe. I don’t like not knowing.”

  Roger says, “You know what it will cost you.”

  I tap my fingers on the table, ash tipping off the end of my Marlboro onto the scarred wood.

  “Quid pro quo, kid.” He doesn’t leer. This is a business transaction. I have no money to pay him, nor favors to bestow, nor property of any kind that’s worth anything to him. Except me. And that I’m not willing to give. Not for this.

  “I can’t,” I say, looking away.

  “Suit yourself. One of these days, you’re going to change your mind. Now finish that smoke and get to bed.”

  In our room, Liesel is having a nightmare. I lie on my bed, on top of the scratchy covers, and listen to her moan and pant. She murmurs “No, no, no, no” and punches in the air, and I can’t help but wonder what—who—she’s fighting.

  14

  DENVER, COLORADO

  CURRENT DAY

  Juliet drives back to Denver, her mind in overdrive. Lauren is hiding something. She is sure of it. Her reaction, so vehement, so visceral... Juliet hasn’t seen this side of her sister since they were children. Before Lauren became a mother and her life turned into a fairy tale.

  Because make no mistake about it, Lauren is living a fairy tale. Great husband, utterly devoted. Beautiful, talented daughter who is also a hardworking athlete who makes them all proud. Lauren herself, an artist who makes her own hours, does whatever she wants. Travel, money, looks. She is totally and completely free.

  Juliet isn’t. She has none of these things, only a career she loves.

  She isn’t jealous. Of course she isn’t. She has plenty of time for her own happily ever after. And how could she be jealous, now, especially? Now that she knows what she knows?

  As she speeds down from the mountains, the evergreens and rocky slopes covered in snow as familiar as the back of her hand, she begins to see things with new eyes. She’s never noticed that sheer drop-off. She’s never seen that frozen waterfall. When did they put up that netting so the rockslides wouldn’t make it across the entire highway?

  She is so used to the drive, so used to—so desensitized to—the reality in which she is living, she’s been in a fugue state. If all of these things along her path are new and different, what does this mean? Is it possible that Mindy too is simply new and different? Or has she been a wolf in sheep’s clothing her whole life, seventeen years a stranger in their midst, and none of them knew it?

  It makes her uncomfortable, at best. The idea that their family is an outlier, suddenly different, being unmade, rocks her to the core. Juliet likes the known. The quantifiable. Theories that can be proven, not imagined.

  And with that, she knows exactly what she needs to do. She isn’t going to report this, not yet. She will find Kyle Noonan. Get a sample of his blood, let Cameron run it. If he isn’t Mindy’s father, then she can go to Lauren with empirical evidence and make her see sense, make her see reason. It is the only way.

  * * *

  Back in the lab, she answers some email, forwards two mitochondrial profiles to the team of agents she’s been working with who are on a unique manhunt, looking for a suspect of both Asian and Scottish descent, then shelves all her projects. She gives herself an hour. She is law enforcement. She has access to all the databases. If anyone asks what she is doing, she’ll chalk it up to research.

  Juliet has more leeway than most simply because she is breaking new ground with her techniques. Entranced with the idea of familial DNA to solve crimes, she set out over a year earlier to perfect the method known as DNA phenotyping. Instead of searching for an exact match in CODIS—the combined DNA index used to identify and match a criminal’s DNA with crime scene evidence—phenotyping is a more organic, environmental approach: decoding the DNA source sample itself.

  The idea is simple. As Juliet told Lauren, blood doesn’t lie. Blood is its own witness. A tech can take a blood sample and within twenty-four hours have a full-blown profile of who it belongs to: white, black, blue eyes, green, blonde, brunette, red, male, female. In theory, if a witness says she was raped by a man of African descent, yet the DNA sample belongs to a white male of European descent, the police will know immediately a mistake has been made; that the witness is wrong, her memory fuzzy, or she has an agenda.

  Juliet’s phenotyping method is gaining traction, too, turning profiling on its ear. It is becoming exceptionally useful in murder cases. If law enforcement officials are looking into a serial killer, and all the signs pointed to a specific type of person, the phenotype DNA can help prove or disprove their theory.

  Which is all well and good, but Juliet wants to take it further. She is working on a new kind of phenotypic analysis, looking for facial features and familial traits, and applying them to the possible perpetrators of the crimes committed. She’s been matching DNA samples with the FBI’s NGI facial recognition system. So far, she’s helped the CBI close twenty cold-case murders, and she has another massive stack in her to-do pile.

  She is an unconventional leader in her field. Not to mention the program she has written allows her to input DNA material into a 3-D printer and have it spit out a face. Completely unusable in court, for now, but she’s been using it to double-check her work once a suspect is caught. A third control, as it were.

  Thinking of this, the idea glimmers in the back of her mind, there but not acknowledged. It is this phenotypic method she can use to narrow down Mindy’s true biological parents, should it come to that. But she can’t do it without permission from all involved, including her bosses. Working on the project behind everyone’s backs is unethical, at best; illegal at worst, and quite possibly a waste of time. There are better ways to prove her theories.

  Lauren and Kyle didn’t part on good terms, but her famously private sister never let any other news leak. All Juliet knows is he was furious about the pregnancy, filed for divorce, and requested a transfer to another office, preferably as far away from Lauren as he could get. How he ended up in California was beyond her, but it worked to get him away as well as if he’d decided to join the space program and go to the moon.

  Kyle wasn’t smart enough for that.

  Catty, Juliet.

  She racks her brain—what firm did he work for before he took off? Spencer something... Spencer Landry. That’s it. She grabs the phone and looks up the number on the web, dials it. The receptionist answers, her long vowels a dead giveaway that she’s from the north.

  “Good morning, Spencer Landry and Associates. How may I direct your call?”

  “I need to speak with your HR department, please.”

  “Oh, I don’t think we’re hiring right now—”

  “This is Juliet Ryder, CBI.”

  “Oh! Well, certainly, ma’am, hold one moment.”

  She bites back a laugh. Sometimes it is good to be with the CBI, even if she is using the title for nefarious purposes.

  A moment later, a man’s voice comes through the phone. “This is Eres Patrone. How can I help you, Agent Ryder?”

  She doesn’t disabuse him of the title. She holds a Ph.D. in microbiology and genetics and is not an agent pro forma
. But Agent Ryder will get farther than Dr. Ryder.

  “Good morning, Mr. Patrone. I’m looking for some information on a former employee of yours, a Kyle Noonan. I have a record of him leaving the firm in 2000 to take a position elsewhere. I was hoping you had the name of the firm he went to so I can reach out to him.”

  “Wow, 2000. I wasn’t here then, but let me look into the archives and I can give you a call back. Will that work?”

  “I’m in a bit of a hurry, actually. Can you put me on hold while you look? Surely a firm as advanced as Spencer Landry is all online.”

  “We are, but...um, this is personal information, and I think I may need to talk to my supervisor—”

  “Really, there’s no need for that,” she says, warmly now, conspiratorial. “I’m just looking for the forwarding address. You would have to send the man a final W-2. I could get a warrant, but that’s going to waste everyone’s time.”

  “You do know we are a law firm, right?”

  She laughs and hopes it doesn’t sound as stilted as it feels.

  “All right, I was hoping not to have to do this, but here’s what’s going on. He’s my brother-in-law. He and my sister are divorced, but she’s sick, and I need to get in touch with him right away. She’s in the hospital, and I’m in charge of getting in touch with everyone. Please. I wouldn’t normally throw my title around, but I thought it was the most expedient way.”

  “Oh, wow. That’s terrible. I’m sorry to hear it. But I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  “Okay, then, I’ll go get the warrant—”

  “No, I mean, I can’t help you, because there’s nothing here. He transferred to our San Diego office, then he must have left the firm because his records with Spencer Landry end in 2000. I’m so sorry I can’t be more help. And I’m sorry about your sister. I hope she gets better soon.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Patrone. You’ve been a great help. Have a good day.”

  She hangs up the phone, mouth slightly agape. What has she just done? She’s just tried to extort personal information, without a warrant, without any probable cause, only to further her own goals. And has hit a brick wall to boot.