Bad blood

by Linda Fairstein

  “So when Bex was angry and upset after the wedding, you didn’t think it was because Brendan-like, Brendan had something going on with her?”

  “Trust me, Detective. I would have known about something like that. One of them would have told me, I’m sure of it.”

  Mike sat up straight and Trish Quillian crossed her legs and rubbed her hands together.

  “I’d like to trust you, Trish. I’d like to believe what you tell me, but I’m having a hard time with it.”

  She looked up at Mike’s face and pursed her lips. “Why is that?”

  “’Cause my damn ankle hurts like hell. I can’t concentrate on what you’re trying to feed me,” he said, ruffling the hair at the back of his neck.

  “That’s not my fault.”

  “You Quillians, you’re a tough bunch. I’d say it’s completely your fault. Wouldn’t be this way if I hadn’t chased you halfway across the elysian fields yesterday.”

  “The what?”

  “The cemetery, Trish. You were there when we went to-to-uh, to Bex’s grave.”

  The slightest bit of color rose to her sunken cheeks. She looked up at the mirror and then glanced over at the closed door of the room. She began rocking again.

  “Now, how did you know that I was going to be at Woodlawn in the morning?”

  “It must have been a coincidence. I go there a lot,” she said defiantly. “I go there to talk to Bex pretty often. I didn’t know any of you was going to be there.”

  “You ought to bring flowers next time you go. Looks pretty bare next to that little headstone. Aren’t you curious about why we had to dig-to disturb her grave?”

  “I’m not a curious person, Detective. Since I called you the first time, I’m finding out it’s safer to mind my own business.” Trish leaned back in the chair and crossed her arms.

  “I thought maybe Brendan told you why. I thought maybe Brendan explained the reason we had to take that poor girl back to the morgue and-”

  “I don’t want to know anything about that part of it. Don’t you get that Brendan has nothing to do with this?” She waved a bony hand in front of her face. “I’ve only seen him at the wake. At the funeral. Brendan and I don’t talk.”

  “Ow!” Mike said, letting out a fake yelp and bending over to grab his ankle. “Every time you tell a lie, my leg just throbs.”

  “What lie?” She looked again at the door, as if trying to get the nerve to walk out.

  Mike leaned in close to Trish Quillian. “Brendan called you on Tuesday. Brendan phoned you after he shot his way out of the courthouse.”

  Her eyes opened wide and she sat upright. She was speechless.

  “What did he tell you, Trish? Bet he didn’t mention that there’ll be no one left to take care of your mother if you get yourself wound up in helping Brendan get away. You’ll be an accessory to this murder. Don’t let him drag you into this.”

  She was looking straight into the mirror now. “There’s someone on the other side of that glass, isn’t there? Someone watching us and listening.”

  “You’re talking to me,” Mike said. “That’s all that matters at this point.”

  “You’ve tapped my phone then, have you?”

  “No, we haven’t done that. I wouldn’t be needing to ask you what Brendan told you if we had. I wouldn’t be asking you where he is.”

  “Well, I’m not interested in helping you, Detective. You didn’t do nothing to help me when I came to you. You haven’t done a single damn thing to find who killed Duke.”

  She stood up. “I can go, can’t I? You’re not holding me?”

  “Yeah, you can go,” he said, giving her a card with his cell phone number on it as he got to his feet, too. “But you call me if you get smart about Brendan. And there’s one more thing I’d like to ask you for, Trish.”

  “What’s that?”

  Mike took a small manila envelope from the pocket of his blazer and removed a Q-tip from it. “Could you just put this inside your cheek for me, dab it around to get some saliva on it?”

  The woman appeared to be as taken aback as I was. She shoved Mike’s arm away. “What are you looking for now?” she asked, raising her voice. “You making me some kind of guinea pig, are you? Is this that DNA stuff you’re trying to get from me, using me against my own brother? Is that what you’re up to?”

  Mike was thinking of the speck of blood-with the genetic markers of a woman-that was on the zipper of Rebecca Hassett’s sweater.

  The Q-tip had dropped to the floor and Trish Quillian had her hand on the doorknob. “You want my saliva, Detective? You and your high-handed girlfriend from the District Attorney’s Office, that’s what you’re after? Like I’m a killer or a criminal?”

  She sucked in her hollow cheeks and wet her lips. Then she opened her mouth ever so slightly and spit at Mike, missing the sleeve of his jacket by only inches.

  “There’s your sample, Detective. Catch me if you can.”

  39

  Mike was on his knees, using a second Q-tip to swab the saliva that Trish Quillian had deposited on the floor of the small room.

  “That’s quite a smooth interview technique you’ve developed, Mr. Chapman. Every day I’m on the job with you is a learning experience.”

  “I’ve picked up samples from worse places than this, Coop. Where’s Mercer?”

  “On the phone. He’ll be right over.”

  “I’m whipped. Going home to get some sleep. I’m supposed to start again at midnight. Teddy O’Malley’s got a whole underground route mapped out again.”

  “If your ankle is still bothering you so much, why don’t you get it checked out?”

  “I’ll put it up when I get home. I’m too tired to wait in an ER just to find out that all I need is the Ace bandage and Tylenol I’ve got in the medicine cabinet.”

  Mike wasn’t the type to complain about minor physical pain. “Maybe it’s worse than you think. I’ll go with you.”

  “Another time.” I followed Mike as he limped to the lieutenant’s office, where Mercer met us. Mike held out the envelope. “Mind taking this to forensic biology? Have them work it up? Coop’ll explain.”

  “No problem. Just made one more check on Duke Quillian. Asked Sloan-Kettering to pull the records on him to get confirmation about what Trish originally told you,” Mercer said, dropping his pad on the desk. “Duke was out of play, too. He was a patient there for close to two months-still in the hospital for more than a week after Bex was killed.”

  “Sounds bad. What kind of cancer?” I asked.

  “Acute leukemia.”

  “Thanks for making the call,” Mike said. “I’ve been up and down on these Quillian brothers like a yo-yo. I’m ready for some sleep.”

  “I think I’ll take the rest of the afternoon off,” I said.

  “C’mon. Let me drop you at the apartment and get this down to the lab,” Mercer said.

  It was three o’clock by the time I reached home, greeted the cops who were sitting in the lobby for the afternoon shift, and went upstairs. I was looking forward to being alone for several hours-for the first time in days-until Ignacia arrived for the overnight detail.

  I put on some soft music, called a few close friends-and my mother-to reassure them that I was okay, and left a message for Luc on his voice mail. It was unlikely that I could keep our Saturday-night dinner date with Brendan Quillian still on the loose.

  I spread out on the floor of the den with every map and guide to the city of New York that I could find on my bookshelves, trying to figure out if any place connected to Brendan’s sandhog heritage might be a safe haven for my fugitive.

  Ignacia arrived with soup and salad, and we had a quiet dinner together in front of the television. Fatigue and anxiety from the week’s events had overtaken me, and I excused myself to go to my bedroom and read a few magazine articles.

  I couldn’t even concentrate on those, so I closed my eyes. I thought of Luc again-the chiseled features, the sexy accent, the kisses t
hat had aroused me as we walked along the cove a short week ago. I wondered if I would ever have the chance to re-create the electricity of those first hours. And I wondered what it would be like if he were beside me now.

  I slept late, and after Ignacia left at 8 a.m., soaked in my bathtub and dressed casually in jeans and a sweater. I wasn’t going to court or meeting with any witnesses today, and I didn’t expect to be in the office for long. I carried a small bag with my ballet shoes and clothes in it, optimistic that I could sneak away early for a few hours of exercise at the barre.

  The patrol car was waiting for me in the driveway when I got downstairs at nine thirty on a cool June morning. I was grateful for the week’s end after days scarred by such tragic events.

  My cell phone rang just as we pulled onto the southbound FDR Drive at Seventy-third Street.

  “Where are you?” Mike asked.

  “On my way to the office. And you?”

  “Spent half the night again in a warren of subway tunnels filled with homeless men and the other half in something that vaguely resembles a sewer. What does Mattie Prinzer drink?”

  “Scotch,” I said. “Some kind of fancy single malt. One of those two-hundred-dollar-a-bottle jobs, if I remember correctly. Why?”

  “Well, buy her a six-pack of ’em. She stayed up till dawn with my Q-tip.”

  “And the good news is?”

  “She’s matched the saliva on the cotton to the blood on Bex Hassett’s zipper.”

  I sat bolt upright. “The same DNA? Trish Quillian’s blood is on the sweater her best friend was wearing the night she was killed?”

  “Don’t get too excited, Coop. It may not be what you think.”

  I was usually the one curbing Mike’s enthusiasm. I’d urge him not to jump the gun, so I thought immediately of the contrary arguments that had to be considered. “I know, I know. The girls were best friends. Trish’s blood could have been left on that sweater some other day or time.”

  “It’s not just that-”

  “But after more than a decade?” I said. “Don’t you think it’s fantastic just to get the match? Whatever the issue is about when and how the blood got there, the fact is that Trish Quillian is the only person in the universe with that genetic profile.”

  “Tell the boys in blue to get you over here to Mattie’s office as soon as possible. There were actually two people in the universe with Trish Quillian’s DNA. That’s the first problem we’ve got to deal with. I’ll tell you the other one when you get here.”

  40

  Mattie’s small office was tucked away at the end of the hall, past the lab in which forensic biologists sat elbow to elbow at their tables, interpreting data that cooked overnight in the robots-the giant machines capable of running dozens of DNA samples at a time.

  “I wanted you to see this for yourself, Alex,” Mattie said.

  Mike was pacing behind her; three steps in each direction was all that the space allowed. He looked up as I entered, but didn’t bother to greet me. “The bastard would never have had the chance to escape.”

  “What have you got now? I hear you did a brilliant job on Trish Quillian’s gob of spit,” I said to Mattie. Mike was talking to her about Brendan Quillian, and I didn’t understand why.

  “That’s old news already, Coop. Get with it.”

  “Last week, the night of the blast in the water tunnel,” Mattie said, “we were so proud of ourselves for showing off the mobile lab. Getting the crew up there and having results in less than ten hours.”

  “The guys did a great job.”

  “I think so, too. From bits and pieces of flesh, they matched the two sandhogs from Tobago to items they found in their lockers and their home.”

  “Sorry. I never even focused on those men,” I said. “We’ve all been assuming they were caught in the wrong place at a very wrong time, not that they were the targets of the killer.”

  “That’s quite possible. Yes, one had tissues in a jacket pocket in the shed. Cut himself on a piece of metal a day or two before the explosion. The other one was identified from his toothbrush.”

  “And then there was Duke Quillian,” Mike said, locking his thumbs in the rear pockets of his jeans.

  I frowned and looked at Mike for an explanation. “Don’t tell me he wasn’t down there in the tunnel? He was certainly identified, too. Wasn’t he?”

  It was Mattie who spoke. “Yes. Duke Quillian is dead. But the day he was identified, it wasn’t actually done by a DNA analysis of his blood.”

  “Why not? I thought…”

  Mattie spread the reports in front of her. “For one thing, we had the severed digit,” she said, pointing to an eight-by-ten blowup of the large finger with its ragged edge.

  “They just scraped skin cells off the surface of it, and of course, they also had a perfect print to match.”

  “Duke Quillian had no record. No fingerprints on file with the NYPD. Mike checked that the first day.”

  “Yes, but the union required all the sandhogs to be fingerprinted after 9/11. It was mandated as a security issue, for some of the jobs they had to work on near Ground Zero-rebuilding subway stations and such,” Mattie said. “The prints were delivered to the ME’s office within hours of the blast, so that confirmed his death.”

  “All that confirmed,” Mike said, correcting Mattie, “is that it would be a struggle for him to use a rotary phone. It was only one finger.”

  Mattie shook her head at Mike. “And the dental records. A piece of Quillian’s skull was picked up at the scene. That fragment was also matched to his dentist’s files.”

  “So Duke’s dead, right?” I asked.

  “Very dead, Alex,” Mattie said. “And I know we never do things fast enough for Mike, but you’ve got to remember the backlog we have. No one else was reported missing, so we knew we had the deceased-our three victims-identified.”

  With the expansion of the capability of DNA to solve crimes-well beyond murders and sexual assaults-the lab was inundated with dozens of investigative requests a day, some of them presenting dozens of samples per case.

  “Thousands of pieces of skin and tissue were collected in the debris from the tunnel,” Mattie went on. “The techs have been doing extractions on them as fast as they can, in between all the new work that’s brought in every day. They’ve been running samples in the robots. One of my guys got a result yesterday that had him stymied. It didn’t make sense to him, so he brought it to me to discuss last night, after Mercer left.”

  “What didn’t make sense?” I asked.

  “This-this anomaly.”

  “Anomaly?”

  Mike leaned over Mattie’s shoulder. “Yeah, Coop. Anomaly. That’s a scientific expression that usually translates as ‘Detective Chapman, you’re screwed.’ Show her.”

  There were pages of reports from the various biologists who had worked on the tunnel samples. With the tip of her pen, Mattie pointed to the profiles that repeated themselves on different test results.

  “Here’s Tobagan Number One, as we’ve called him.” His tissue fragments had been identified again and again from remains within the blast site.

  She lifted her pen and moved to Tobagan #2, making the same point.

  “This,” Mattie went on, “is the genetic profile of Duke Quillian. We obtained it, of course, from the skin cells of the finger that Mike recovered on the first day. It matches skin cells from microscopic pieces of flesh that were in the debris. There’s no question that Duke was blown to bits.”

  “Then what’s the anomaly?” I asked.

  “You can look at every single blood sample-hundreds of them-that we’ve been running these last two days to wind up the investigation. Not one of them-not one drop of blood-matches the DNA of Duke Quillian.”

  “You’ve got the man’s skin, but you don’t have his blood?”

  “Exactly, Alex.”

  “Can you explain-”

  “It turns out there is DNA from a fourth person,” Mattie said, waggi
ng her pen in my face. “A different profile that several techs developed. Something that didn’t match to any of the deceased.”

  “But there are no other reports of missing persons.”

  “Right, there haven’t been any, and it’s actually much easier than that, Alex. It’s the DNA of a woman in this fourth profile,” Mattie said. “One peak only. Again, there’s no Y chromosome.”

  “But there were no women working in the tunnel. It’s bad luck-the sandhogs won’t have it.”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Coop,” Mike said.

  “The blood in the tunnel,” Mattie said, pushing several pieces of paper toward me. “You can see for yourself what I mean. This profile was sitting on my desk last night, right next to my folder on the Hassett case.”

  She slid two pieces of paper together-one from Bex Hassett’s file and the other from the water tunnel evidence-and pointed to the alleles that aligned with each other at thirteen loci within the cell to create a distinctive genetic profile.

  “You want to talk anomaly, Coop? The DNA in that blood sample from evidence in Water Tunnel Number Three-it’s a perfect match to the DNA of Trish Quillian.”

  41

  The windows in Anna Borowski’s office overlooked York Avenue, the stretch of East Side real estate from the Queensboro Bridge to Seventy-second Street-once tenements-now known as Hospital Row. It had taken us only twenty minutes to get here from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner forty blocks downtown.

  “What made you think to call me?” the doctor, whose medical specialty was blood cancers, asked Mike.

  He had known Anna for several years, he told me on the ride uptown, from the time Valerie was in treatment. Mike had met his fiancée while he was giving blood at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where Val had undergone extensive chemotherapy, as well as her surgery.

  “Bad blood, Doc. You know more about it than anyone in town.” Mike was looking out at the campus of Rockefeller University on the far side of the street. He turned back to the oncologist and flashed his familiar grin. “I figure I’ve given you a few pints of my best stuff. That maybe you’d go undercover for me. Get me a peek at the patient’s chart, at least.”