Most Wanted

by Lisa Scottoline

  “Why?” Zachary asked, his eyebrows sloping down unhappily.

  “He said that all these conversations are admissible and so are my notes.” Christine gestured at her pad, for effect. She’d practiced this part of the conversation in her mind.

  “We’re not supposed to meet anymore?” Zachary’s lips parted in disappointment.

  “No, this is it.” Christine knew he was disappointed but couldn’t let it show.

  “What about your book?”

  “He said it will have to wait, and I understand that, I really want what’s best for you.” Christine wasn’t lying about that part.

  “But I like talking to you. I like you.” Zachary turned to Lauren and back to Christine. “I like you, too. It’s nice to have somebody to talk to, somebody normal.”

  “I like talking to you, too.” Christine kept her emotions in check. She had a purpose for being here, she was on a mission. “It was so interesting yesterday, to get to know you better, to hear your life story. But I couldn’t live with myself if your defense was compromised because I want to write about you. That wouldn’t be right. I couldn’t sleep at night.”

  “I appreciate that,” Zachary said, blinking. “That’s unselfish of you.”

  “Thanks.” Christine kept her expression impassive, though she felt a twinge of guilt. “He also said you shouldn’t meet with anybody else, no one from the press, none of the other reporters or book people.”

  “Even the movie people?” Zachary frowned. “They were from Los Angeles. They said they’re coming back.”

  “Not even them.”

  “But one of them knows somebody who knows J. J. Abrams. They know really famous people.”

  “I understand, but Griff would say no.”

  “They would totally have the money for a lawyer. They wanted to option my story for a movie. They said they would get me an agent and everything.”

  “Ask Griff when you see him.” Christine hesitated. “Anyway, Griff said I could meet with you this one last time, and I was allowed to talk to you only about your background, but not about the case. That’s all I was really interested in anyway, I really wanted this to be more about you.”

  “That’s cool.” Zachary brightened.

  “We better get started.” Christine picked up her golf pencil. “First, let me say that we were both very moved by your story about your sister. We don’t have to go over that again, because I don’t want you to have to relive that.”

  “Okay. I appreciate that.”

  “We were both amazed that, given the circumstances, you managed to get yourself to college, graduating with honors.”

  “Don’t forget it was magna cum laude.”

  Lauren interjected, “I graduated magna cum laude, but my father always said it was magna cum loudly.”

  They all laughed, and Christine could see that Zachary eased back in his chair on the other side of the Plexiglas.

  “Now, Zachary, you said you always wanted to go to medical school. Why?” Christine held her golf pencil poised over her pad, ready to take fake-notes.

  “I want to help people, to help society. I thought it would be rewarding, to cure something.”

  “So I guess we could say that you’re unselfish, too.”

  “Right.” Zachary’s bright blue eyes met Christine’s with warmth, and again, she couldn’t deny the connection she felt with him, wanted or no.

  “What was your favorite subject in school?”

  “Hmm,” Zachary smiled, tilting his head in thought. “You know, I would have loved gross anatomy. My girlfriend took it first year, and I used to help her study. There’s a lot of memorization, and I used to quiz her. She even took me to lab with her once though she wasn’t supposed to.”

  “Lab?” Christine didn’t understand the turn that the conversation was taking.

  “Anatomy lab. I loved it, even though it’s the hardest because you spend so much time in lab, dissecting and learning the structures you dissect. My girlfriend showed me how they started on the cadaver’s back, then flipped the body over, then you can see the face. That makes the experience seem even more real.” Zachary paused, but his expression didn’t change, almost pleasant. “She told me they dissected the thorax, upper extremities, lower extremities, then the abdomen, then sawed off the leg—”

  Lauren blurted out, “She sawed off a leg?”

  Christine felt troubled by his lack of emotionality but didn’t let her judgment show since Zachary was lowering his guard.

  “You have to, to dissect the pelvis, then the face, which had a bunch of tiny sets of dissections. Eyes, nasal cavity, ear canal, and a bunch of nerve structures run through the face, especially the facial nerve and all its branches.” Zachary paused, reflecting. “She told me it took forever. Then she sawed off the skull with a bone saw and removed the brain. She used the brains and brainstems in neuroanatomy in the spring semester.”

  Christine felt her stomach turn over, and it wasn’t only the graphic nature of what he was saying. Zachary seemed to go into loving detail about the human anatomy. “I would think that would be difficult to hear about at dinner, much less see.”

  “No, I could compartmentalize it. When she showed me the cadavers, they were all lined up in steel boxes and each had an index card with their occupation, cause of death, and age taped to their case. She didn’t even know how to put the scalpel blade on the shaft, I had to show her.”

  “How did you know?”

  “From work. I know all about scalpels. Brigham makes thirty-seven different types, at three different product lines and price points.” Zachary nodded. “For the first slice into the flesh, and depending on where the flesh is or how thick, you use a different scalpel. I won’t bore you with details, it’s shop talk. But once you pierce the skin, the scalpel should glide with ease until you hit a bony structure or muscle, with the exception of the face. You really have to peel that, and fat is yellow and greasy, almost like a really ripe mango.”

  “Yuck,” Christine heard herself say before she could stop herself. She understood that a prospective medical student would revel in the details of human anatomy, but Zachary was sending shivers up her spine. Lauren must have felt the same way because she leaned away from him.

  “Sorry you asked?” Zachary smiled, warming to his topic. “My girlfriend showed me her notes, and the professor said that the trick to anatomy is finding the right fascial plane, the layer of fascia where you could freely separate the muscles from one another or from a structure. My girlfriend said, finding a good plane could be the difference between a two-hour dissection and a four-hour dissection that she had to superglue together.”

  “Superglue?” Christine asked, thinking she had misheard him.

  “Yes, everyone in med school stashes superglue in their table.” Zachary chuckled in a knowing way. “It’s inevitable you’ll rip a nerve when you’re moving a muscle out of the way, or working too fast with your scalpel down a fascial plane. A little bit of superglue, and the nerve will innervate the muscle again.” Zachary leaned back, relaxing. “You know what I’d love most of all? Heart dissection. It’s probably the coolest of all. I’d have loved to be in cardiology research.”

  “Why?” Christine asked, shocked. She was remembering the detail about Gail Robinbrecht’s murder and the other nurses, killed with a single stab wound to the left ventricle. She didn’t understand why Zachary would even go there, given that he must have read the same accounts, but she didn’t stop him. She wrote a note, cardiology, so he couldn’t see her expression.

  “You cut the rib cage open to get into the thorax, then go through the pericardial sac, which the heart sits inside of.” Zachary made a cutting motion with his hand, demonstrating by holding an imaginary scalpel. “You cut one major vessel at a time—coronaries, aorta, pulmonary vein—and once you’ve cut all of the connecting structures, you deliver the heart from the pericardial sac.” Zachary paused, his smile spreading. “And then you’re holding a human heart in y
our hands.”

  “How do you know this?” Christine asked, horrified. “Did your girlfriend tell you?”

  “Yes, and then I got to observe heart surgery in the hospital. The surgeons let me, and my boss came, too. We had to see how the instruments performed in the OR. The most surprising thing? The heart is small. It seems so small to have such a huge role in your life, it’s smaller than your liver and your lungs by a lot.” Zachary’s blue eyes lit up. “You examine the outside and the four chambers, and how they circulate from the body to right atrium, then to the right ventricle, via the tricuspid valve.” Zachary made a loop de loop with his hands, in the air. “Then to the pulmonary artery and lungs, then back via the pulmonary vein to the left atrium and to the left ventricle, via the mitral or bicuspid valve. The left ventricle is the powerhouse. It pumps to the entire body’s systemic circuit, via the aorta.”

  Christine couldn’t take it any longer. “You know, that’s the way Gail Robinbrecht was murdered, the way they all were murdered, stabbed in the left ventricle.”

  “I’m aware, and the newspapers say the killer must have been a doctor or a med student, but if he was, he wasn’t a very good one.” Zachary’s tone turned superior. “It’s true that you can kill somebody by stabbing the left ventricle, but that takes a lot of force. The heart is tucked in under the lungs, and the left ventricle is the bottom right, here, called the ‘apex of the heart.’” Zachary pointed at his chest. “The killer would have to aim between the second and fifth intercostal space, between the ribs on the left side, then angle it up and in to reach the apex of the heart.”

  Christine kept her expression impassive, but Zachary continued, oblivious.

  “The intercostal spaces are only an inch or two between each rib, that’s why it would be hard to have perfect aim with the first stab, without getting stopped by a rib. That’s why your ribs are there, after all, to protect your thorax and mediastinum.” Zachary’s eyes lit up. “The human body is a beautiful thing, the way it’s designed, all of it intended to protect the heart, to keep the person alive. So obviously, you could kill somebody that way, but it doesn’t make sense.” Zachary shrugged. “That’s how you know I’m innocent. I know better than this serial killer. If I wanted to kill somebody with a stab wound, I would stab the carotid, or the second-best, the right kidney. It’s above the right hip, lower than the left kidney. If you stab somebody there, that would send them into shock, and they’d bleed out and die.”

  Christine flip-flopped, changing her mind. Zachary might have known about anatomy, but maybe he truly was innocent. He seemed to be saying that someone who knew about anatomy wouldn’t have killed the nurses the way they’d been killed, meaning he was innocent.

  “The other problem with stabbing someone in the left ventricle, or anywhere in the heart, is that the heart is so strong it will initially try to contract to hold the gap closed, but the more wide and gaping the stab wound to the heart wall, the more blood will leak out. It would pump out of the chest with each heart beat after the stabbing.”

  Christine recoiled.

  “Then the heart will start beating harder and faster to try to get blood to the aorta and to the body. Most of it would be leaking out of the wound, of course, but it’s a beautiful thing, the way the entire body is structured to protect the heart and the way the heart would try to save itself, save its body. Once you know the anatomy, you appreciate it even more, don’t you?” Zachary seemed to come out of his reverie. “I would have loved med school. I would’ve done anything, worked any job, to get the money for tuition.”

  Christine hoped she could get him back to her point. “What did you do, to get the money?”

  “Everything, anything. I had three jobs. I was a movie usher, I was a math tutor, and I waited tables. I sold a futon on eBay. I sold my car, too. I even sold my plasma.”

  “You can sell plasma?” Christine sensed they were getting closer.

  “Sure, I sold blood, too. I even sold—” Zachary stopped himself, and Christine held her breath.

  “You sold what?” she asked lightly, though her heart was thundering.

  “I’d tell you, but you can’t put this in the book. This is off the record.” Zachary glanced over his shoulder, then leaned closer to the hole in the Plexiglas. “I sold sperm, too. They call it donating, but I don’t know why. They pay you.”

  Christine felt her heart stop. She had rehearsed this moment last night, how she would react if he told her, yes or no. She was this close to finding out the answer, she could feel it within her grasp. She was dying to know, and she was terrified to know. She told herself to get her act together. She made herself continue. “You were a sperm donor? I always wondered how that worked.”

  “I assume you know how it works.” Zachary chuckled. “Hey, it’s random, but I did it. It paid really well. They put you in a program, you do it for a year. I didn’t tell anybody. I thought it would help people, but I really needed the money. I knew my parents would kill me if they found out. My parents thought if people aren’t meant to get pregnant, they don’t get pregnant. They would think that was playing God.”

  Christine felt herself reeling, as he spoke. Everything he was saying corroborated his online profile. She had to keep him going. “Zachary, how much did they pay you?”

  “I made a thousand dollars that year, and I liked the people at the bank.”

  “Bank?” Christine said, as if she were unfamiliar with the term.

  “Sperm bank. It was called Homestead.”

  “Oh?” Christine squeezed her golf pencil, masking her reaction, which was almost violent, her emotions in tumult.

  “It had an office near campus. I donated anonymously. That’s the only way I’d make the deal. I gave them two pictures of me, because they kind of pressure you to do that. But they don’t release your name when they put it online. They give you a number.”

  “A number?”

  “Yes, a donor number.”

  “What was your number?”

  “Why?” Zachary frowned, surprised.

  “I’m just curious.”

  “My number was 3319.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Christine heard Zachary answer, confirming that he was Donor 3319, and she understood that he was her donor, their donor, the father of their baby, the biological father of their baby, yet she had a million thoughts flying through her head, setting her brain on fire, electrifying her senses, overloading her circuits.

  She didn’t know what to say or do. She felt herself falling away from the world, the way she had the other day, having an out-of-body experience, observing herself hearing the news at the same time that she experienced hearing the news, and it was all she could do not to throw up, faint, start crying, or otherwise show her hand.

  Her reaction felt like it lasted ten minutes, but it must’ve only been a moment or two because she noticed that Lauren was taking over the situation, leaning close to the Plexiglas, smiling at Zachary, and asking him a question, and then Zachary was smiling back and saying words that Christine was too freaked out to hear. Her heart hammered, she broke a new sweat in the sweltering booth, and her mouth went completely dry.

  She had been right, all of her research and even her hunches had been right, and Zachary was Donor 3319, and now she didn’t know what to do. Because the father of her child was wanted for murder, even a string of serial killings, and she thought he might be innocent, but she also thought he might be guilty as sin.

  The corrections officer walked over on the other side of the Plexiglas, and she realized that it was time to go, time to leave Zachary, even to say good-bye. She wanted to get her act together, to be wholly present, but she felt such a powerful conflict of emotions, like two gargantuan waves crashing into each other, because she had just found out that he was her donor at the same time that she would have to let him go, forever.

  She could see Zachary turn to the guard behind him, and the guard bringing the handcuffs forward, and Lauren continuing
the conversation, and Zachary talking back to her, the two of them smiling, and Christine struggled to come around, tuning in the sound of their talking, but she couldn’t fake joining them, stricken. The handcuffs made a jangling sound as the corrections officer carried them over, and Christine watched as Zachary offered his wrists, and the handcuffs snapped mechanically into place, ca-chink, and somehow that sound brought her to her senses and she realized that if she didn’t get it together, she wouldn’t get to say good-bye.

  “Zachary?” Christine rose.

  “Bye, Christine.” Zachary smiled. “Please, can you please lend me that money for the lawyer? When my trial’s over, we can get the book done, and I’ll pay you back out of the royalties, I swear. Please?”

  Lauren interjected, “She’ll look into that, and we’ll get back to Griff. Hang in there. Best of luck. Bye!” Lauren stood beside Christine, turning to her and flaring her eyes meaningfully. “Say good-bye, Christine.”

  “Good-bye, Zachary,” Christine said, on cue, her heart in her throat.

  “Please!” Zachary called back, as the corrections officer took him by the elbow and escorted him out of the booth, locking the door behind them.

  Lauren grabbed her arm and escorted her from the booth, almost the same way that the guard had escorted Zachary on the other side, and neither woman said a word because the other corrections officer was sitting on his chair and the visiting room was already beginning to fill up, with families seeing inmates.

  Christine felt herself in a sort of shock, stunned enough to let Lauren steer her down the aisle through the mismatched chairs, past the oil paintings on the left, and the windows overlooking the courtyard on the right, with the mural CHERISH THE CHILD.

  My number was 3319.

  A corrections officer at the door of the visiting room led them in silence up the stairwell and through the metal detector to make sure they weren’t smuggling out contraband, and Lauren guided Christine out of the security room through the locked door and into the waiting room full of men, women, and children, talking among themselves in a variety of languages.