Mayhem, Mystery and Murder

by John A. Broussard

“What?”

  “The Lewison case. Remember? The noise the trucks made going by his house? We both assumed that that was the reason the neighbors didn’t hear a struggle or gunshots—if there were any—or all that smashing of equipment, which there most certainly was.”

  “Makes perfect sense.”

  “Except that I can’t believe the city allowed the trucks to drive by there at all hours of the night.”

  “There’s one way to find out,” Jackson said, reaching for the phone by the bed.

  The conversation was brief. Jackson’s comment afterwards was equally brief. “You’re right. The street was closed to truck traffic between eight pm and eight am. That 911 call was before eight— seven-five to be exact.”

  “Which really tells us nothing,” Van Damm said with a frown.

  “Maybe the neighbors were just used to all the noise and didn’t think anything of it.”

  Van Damm shook her head emphatically. “I don’t think so. I just don’t get it.”

  Jackson managed to divert her attention from the truck problem for a while. As they were recovering from their exertions, she stared up at the ceiling and said, “And what about that six months rent? Why would anyone pay six months ahead if they don’t have to?”

  It was the better part of three weeks before either of them again spoke more than a few words about the Lewison case. The trigger was a sudden call for blood donations. Chief Wajinski had sent out a bulletin to all employees. A fellow officer had been badly wounded by a gunman when answering a holdup call. Several transfusions were needed, and the hospital had asked for replacement amounts.

  “C’mon Low,” Van Damm said as she peered into his office. “I know Carraher. He’s a hell of a nice guy. The least we can do is to donate some blood.” As she spoke, she noticed a strange expression on Jackson’s face. “What’s up?” she asked.

  “I’ve given blood before,” he answered, “and I usually pass out.”

  A grin was the reply. “This, I gotta see.”

  There was no responding grin. “Can’t I hire a substitute?”

  The gaunt, gray-haired, no-nonsense nurse herded the motley crowd of uniformed and plainclothes officers into a large room set up with gurneys. Jackson immediately thought of his last visit to the morgue, with corpses stretched out on slabs.

  Van Damm managed to maneuver herself onto a bed next to Jackson’s, giving him a smile of reassurance as the nurse’s aide approached with a mobile pole equipped with a plastic bag, a sharp needle in his hand and a grim look on his face. The movement from cot to cot was obviously routine, consisting of little more than an orderly providing minimum attention to the assembly line. Raucous comments filled the room, but Jackson had closed his eyes and seemed oblivious to the bustle around him.

  Plastic bags filled quickly, and the attendant returned to remove the needle, tape a cotton ball over the puncture and go on to the next in line. The nurse came by with a plastic cup of orange juice for the donor. Van Damm swung her legs over the side and kept her eyes on her neighbor, who was still supine. One of the black police officers came by, and his comment on seeing Jackson brought others around.

  “Hey, Lieutenant, you’re turning into a white man.”

  Van Damm noted that Jackson’s color was in fact several shades paler than what she was accustomed to seeing. The nurse reappeared and said, “OK you ghouls. You’ve made your contribution. Now scat! Some donors need more time, and they certainly don’t need unnecessary comments.”

  Jackson’s eyes opened slowly, and Van Damm resisted asking how he was feeling. Thinking to take his mind of his current condition, she made a wry comment about the contents of a trolley piled high with plastic containers of blood being rolled by. “What happens if one of those bags bursts?”

  The nurse, still standing by Jackson’s cot, shrugged. “They’re tough plastic. Not much danger of any of them just breaking open. But one did fall on the floor a month or so ago. The lab tech rolled his chair over to pick it up and scrunched the unit by accident. God, what a mess. A real gusher. Splattered all over the place. Took half-a-day…”

  Jackson’s eyes flew open and he caught Van Damm’s expression. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked.

  “I sure am.” She reached for her phone, saying to the nurse, “I know we’re in a cellphone-free area, but this is an emergency.”

  His condition forgotten, Jackson sat up and reached for his phone as well.

  “Emergency!” the nurse commented wryly. “Looks more like a phone conference.” She shrugged and moved off.

  Van Damm punched in some numbers. “King?” Jackson asked. She nodded. He went on, “I’ll contact BioGem.”

  Their calls continued out of the hospital and onto the parking lot. Jackson finished first and got behind the wheel of the cruiser. Van Damm slipped into the passenger seat, replaced her phone and said, “King’s convinced we’re right. He’s going to meet us at the station. You should hear him. Is he ever excited! I’m sure he’s going to give us a complete rundown. What did you hear from BioGem?”

  “Cartlett confirmed that Lewison could easily have drawn his own blood, probably from his leg rather than his arm, so he could use both hands. He regularly drew blood from animals and occasionally from human volunteers.” Jackson grimaced before continuing. “And there’s more. Cartlett just got word that Sera Labs is about to come out with the discovery, in detail, as though it were all their own.”

  “We were looking for the wrong person.” Van Damm sounded especially angry.

  “Right,” Jackson nodded. “Instead of trying to trace down two possible Britishers who might have been flying off to Heathrow or a couple of local thugs, we should have been looking for a lone American. Now the trail is almost a month cold.”

  “It’s not too late. We’ll muster all the help we can get at the station and start them in calling. Check flights for that day. I’m sure he must have left immediately after making that phone call.”

  “He wouldn’t have used his own passport.”

  “I know. But we do have a description of him. We can narrow lone passengers down by age and foreign passports. He wouldn’t have tried to use a forged American one. Too risky, especially these days with all the security checks.”

  “Phew! That’s a big order. Besides, he’s probably in Zanzibar by now. Oh, yes! I almost forgot. Cartlett gave me the explanation for why Lewison didn’t just walk off with the discovery and peddle it elsewhere. Lewison signed an ironclad confidentiality contract. BioGem gave him a lot of leeway in what he was doing, but he wouldn’t have profited from the discovery since all the results of his work became exclusively theirs. And he would have been in all sorts of legal trouble if he’d tried to openly sell the idea to someone else. That someone else would have been up to their ears in litigation, too. This way, BioGem can’t prove Lewison delivered the goods to Sera.”

  “Maybe we can, though.”

  “I think you’re being overly optimistic. I didn’t want to raise Cartlett’s hopes. Even though he was curious, I didn’t explain to him why I wanted to know if Lewison could have drawn his own blood. So he still doesn’t have any notion that Lewison may still be alive. And we sure can’t be positive your hunch is right.”

  Van Damm flashed a grim smile. “Just wait and see.”

  King was waiting impatiently for the officers in Van Damm’s office. The tall, thin intense man had color photos scattered across her desk and began talking even before they’d had a chance to settle down. “Perfect. Absolutely perfect. Scattering a unit of blood explains everything. Look at this wall.” He pointed at an eight-by-ten showing a wall covered with red blotches.

  “You can see what he did.” In illustration, King held is right hand out holding one of the photos and swung it around in an arc from his right side to his left. “That way he had it splashed all over the place.

  “And, remember how I said there must have been a quart of blood spilled? Well, that fits too. Half or more of the
blood from a severe arterial wound ends up on the victim and his clothes. I was assuming a murder, with most of the blood going off with the corpse. Yes, this is perfect. The amount of blood is just about a unit. And, look at this.”

  It took almost an additional half-hour of hematology lecture before the officers could politely extricate themselves and move on to convincing the chief that Lewison was still alive.

  The two of them emerged from the chief’s office, with Van Damm enraged.

  Jackson repressed a smile. He, too, had been disturbed by the chief’s reaction and amazed that Van Damm had been able to hold her temper until they’d left. “Look at it this way,” he said, “we did convince him Lewison is still alive.”

  “That’s exactly the problem. Now he just wants to close the case and forget it.”

  “You have to admit he’s under a lot of pressure, what with the Carraher shooting and then a whole string of burglaries with the same m.o. With a police attacker on the loose and operating, the chief isn’t going to be much concerned about someone we wouldn’t be able to charge with anything more than obstruction of justice—if we find him.”

  Van Damm’s lips thinned. “We’ll find him. Are you willing to help, or do I do this all on my own.”

  Jackson was tempted to salute, but decided that levity would not be well received. “I’m with you.”

  The morning passed quickly as the two lieutenants divided up the task, retreated to their separate offices and began making phone calls. The scut work produced nothing until just before noon. “What’ve you got?” Jackson asked, as Van Damm waved a piece of paper at him when he entered her office with thoughts of lunch.

  “Several possibles, but this one looks like the most possible. Croatian passport, which I’ve already checked on, and it’s fake. The Croatian consul was all pushed out of shape when I brought it to his attention. They’re cracking down on what must be the major European source of false identity papers. He said he’d get back to me with anything else he could find out.”

  Reading excerpts aloud from the note, Jackson said, “Left at one pm, same day as the burglary. Which now for sure turns out to not be a burglary,” he edited. “No description except that he was a middle-aged, white male—which comes from an airport camera. Fuzzy, from what the security officer said. He’s sending us a copy. As for the passport, there’s now an alert to confiscate it if it shows up again and to hold the bearer.”

  “Fat chance,” Jackson added as an afterthought.

  Van Damm’s phone rang. Within moments her face lit up. Jackson waited impatiently for the end of what seemed an interminable conversation. The notes she scribbled made little sense, except that she signaled a thumb’s up while the other person was talking.

  As she hung up, her first words were: “It showed up again, just two weeks ago. The bearer got off a plane from England.”

  “He’s back! But that makes no sense. Why is he taking that kind of a chance?”

  “Why not? He obviously has unlimited funds. He doesn’t have to work. A fake ID will serve him just fine for however he wants to spend his time. People can disappear for a lifetime in a witness protection program. There’s no reason why he can’t do the same. But I’m going to run him down.” Her voice reflected her determination.

  Jackson smiled at her intensity. “You’ve really made up you’re mind to get him, haven’t you?”

  There was no return smile. “You bet. We’ve put in a lot of hours and a lot of effort on this case. He’s going to pay for all the trouble he’s put us to.”

  “I’m open to suggestions on how to find him. Charge cards are out. He’ll never use them. He won’t be using his Social Security number either, or even a false one for that matter, since he won’t need to work—as you’ve already pointed out. With enough money, he won’t even have to get a driver’s license.”

  “Hobbies!”

  “If Cartlett’s right, he has none. What little information we got from his computer materials, he didn’t even check news sources. No girlie sites. He was a complete workaholic.”

  “Maybe that’s it. Put yourself in his position. He now has plenty of money, he no longer has to answer to anyone, he can do whatever he likes to do, as often as he wants, as extravagantly as it suits him. What would you do if you were him under those circumstances?”

  Jackson shrugged. “I suppose set up a lab somewhere. Somewhere isolated. Then just keep on doing what I’ve always done.”

  “Right. Now there just has to be a way to find someone living in a more or less remote area, running a science lab—probably something to do with blood.”

  “I suppose he’d hire some low level maintenance people. But I don’t see how that will help. Wait a minute! Supplies!”

  Van Damm cheered. “You’re onto something, Low. You’ve already spoken to Cartlett several times. Call him up and ask about the kind of stuff Lewison ordered and where it came from.”

  The conversation was a long one. Set on speakerphone, it provided Van Damm with three pages of notes. “We’re in luck,” were her first comments. “Since he did most of his own ordering, we should be able to contact the companies and see if there are similar orders coming through lately from someplace else.”

  “And that someplace else may be where he’s holed up at.”

  “Exactly. You game to help with these calls? It shouldn’t take long.”

  “Hey. I’m as eager to see the end of this case as you are.”

  “No you aren’t. You couldn’t be. A fake homicide is definitely my bailiwick, and I’m going to see it through—for sure—no matter what the chief says.”

  Again Van Damm’s intensity provoked a smile. “I won’t argue. Let’s get started.”

  It was actually a two day session, interrupted occasionally by necessary routine work. The final list of suppliers, and names of individuals receiving supplies provided what they felt was the location of Harmon Lewison aka Harold Larkin.”

  “He must have handkerchiefs with his initials on them,” was Jackson’s wry comment.

  “Whatever. It’s almost for sure him. The first order was just two weeks ago. And he even had the guts to buy a place not forty miles from here.”

  “I guess he didn’t expect to do much moving around, so there wasn’t too much danger of his being recognized.”

  “Right. This guy is a loner, if there ever was one. He just figures on holing up in his new home and spending all his time with his test tubes and gadgets. I just have to confront him, but the chief would never OK my doing anything more on company time for what he’d consider to be a wild goose chase. And there are a few more things to take care of, as well. I want to be thoroughly prepared when I call on him. Want to join me? Are you game to take some comp time?”

  “I’m with you. I’ve come this far and, anyway, I’m curious to meet this guy. Whatever else you might say about him, he was damn clever in almost pulling this off.”

  The house was unprepossessing, and relatively isolated by its location set back on a five-acre piece of rundown farmland.

  Prepared as they were by photographs of the fugitive, they were both still surprised at Lewison’s appearance, thought the only real difference was that he had grown a beard, which was still in its early stages. Otherwise, he was of medium height, balding, with a thoroughly unprepossessing appearance. He expressed only mild surprise at finding two police officers on his doorstep. After only a few moments hesitation, and without inquiring about the nature of their business or even glancing at their identification, he invited them in.

  After introducing themselves, Van Damm did the talking. “We know your true identity, Mr. Lewison, and I imagine you know why we’re here.”

  Lewison shrugged. “I guess I should have lit the gasoline, the way I originally intended to, but that would have destroyed all that nice blood evidence I scattered around. And I certainly didn’t want the fire spreading to the neighboring homes. So I changed my mind at the last minute. That was what tipped you off, wasn�
��t it? Or was it that I overdid it with the blood?”

  “Neither of those items, really,” Van Damm answered. “The smashed computers gave me a hint. I knew they couldn’t have occurred at the time of the 911 call. But then my fellow officer,” she nodded in Jackson’s direction, “provided the main clue.”

  Lewison now seemed completely relaxed. “First, I wish to apologize for all the trouble I know I must have caused. And I’m sure you must have a lot of questions. Perhaps it would be best if I start at the beginning, and then I’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.”

  He evidently interpreted the silence greeting his offer as acquiescence, since he immediately launched off on his story. “I received a degree in hematology over twenty years ago, and went almost immediately into research on blood enhancement at the university. While I was there, I met a nurse who had come to this country as a refugee child from Southeast Asia. We fell in love and married. The marriage was an extraordinarily happy one for me, and I’m quite sure for her, as well. But it was a very brief one.

  “Less than a year after our wedding, Charni developed strange circulatory symptoms which included excruciating pain. Within a week she was hospitalized, unconscious. She lingered for a few days longer. I was devastated. I’d consulted with specialist, did an enormous amount of research on my own, but could find nothing that either explained the symptoms or pointed to causation. It wasn’t until almost a month after her death that I found what I became sure was the answer, on an obscure Vietnamese medical web site.

  “Dinh Syndrome is what it’s called. From what we know, so far, it’s present only among a few mountain tribes in central Vietnam, one of which was where my wife came from. Even there, the disease strikes only a few individuals. Ng Van Dinh, the discoverer of the illness, was able to find only twenty-seven cases. There undoubtedly are more, but in any event, it’s an extremely rare disease.

  “That was when I decided, partly in my wife’s memory, but also because I was concerned about the suffering of what were essentially her kinsmen, to change my research goals to finding a cure for the illness. It was entirely feasible, since I soon discovered that it was essentially a blood disease, and I was convinced that it would respond to proper drug treatment. The problem was finding the right drugs or combination of drugs. Even more basic was the problem of funding.